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On Screenwriting

Editor's Note: Authorlink welcomes Los Angeles screenwriter and teacher Neil Flowers and his new monthly column on the subject of writing for film and television. Neil's columns appears on the first of every month.
From Zero to Hero

The movie, Collateral is the best contemporary studio thriller—a drama of ideas coupled with a love story. It is not mostly a shoot-'em-up, blow-em-up like Die Hard, which is a film with too much action, not enough brain. A close examination of the characters reveals the setup for a life-changing series of events for our hero.

Collateral's success begins with Stuart Beattie's script, a model for the integration of action and character. The protagonist is Max the cabbie (Jamie Foxx), a smart guy, a dreamer, a nice guy. Also a mama's boy and a self-deluding liar (protagonists must have flaws!).

Max keeps his cab perfect, just like his dream—never tested by reality—which is to open a limousine business. On the flip side of Max's sun visor is a tropical island photograph that he peruses for spiritual sustenance. But it's only an image, just like his mental image of his perfect business (Island Limo, of course). Meanwhile, for twelve years he has been circling L.A. on the night shift. He has a boss, Lenny the dispatcher, who demeans him, just like his mother does. And Max eats it all without reproach. He is, in fact, a species of neurotic whose failure to act channels itself into fantasy and a cleanliness obsession.

"So Max, like Sarah in The Terminator and Stanley in The Mask, begins as a loser."
—Flowers

So life will change him.

Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith), prosecuting attorney, flags him down, and because Max won't be browbeaten by her on one thing he really knows—cab routes—she gives him her business card. Aha! The love interest.

Next passenger: Vincent (Tom Cruise). Slick Vincent in his sharp metallic-gray suit-the same color as the Mercedes limo Max dreams of. Vincent: A man seemingly perfect, a man with no last name; a man who knows jazz; a highly intelligent man, well read. Vincent: The villain, a man almost without a soul, who, like the Terminator, is a nearly invincible killer and who drops out of the sky into LA, come to work his trade five times.

In dealing with Vincent, Max will reluctantly transform from zero to a hero in a few hours. But along the way, from the physical to the spiritual he'll be sorely tested.

The beginning of that transformation occurs in a back alley. Max sits in his cab eating his sandwich, reading his Mercedes brochure, waiting for Vincent to visit a "friend". Then, a terrific edit: a cut from the Mercedes brochure to the POV of a dead body falling and crashing on Max's roof.

This is Max's turning point, or the point of attack as they say in play analysis. In film analysis this marks the moment from Act I (setup) to Act II (conflicts and complications). This structural transition from setup to complications is organically connected to character by a sharply defined change in the interior, i.e., emotional, life of the protagonist. In Max's case the change is one from ennui and fantasy to great fear and confusion as he scrambles from the taxi and back-peddles across the alley.

Next month: Feature film structure in a nutshell. Suggested viewing: Collateral, Red-Eye, The Terminator, High Noon, Far From Heaven.