Three Acts Are Three Too Many

Published on April 20, 2020 in Aristotle, Sequences and Story Structure. 0 Comments

THREE ACTS ARE THREE TOO MANY.
There are several problems with the Three-Act Structure of dramatic writing. First, it is used almost exclusively by writers and development people. Most other filmmakers, especially once the filming begins, either ignore it, or are blissfully unaware of it. Second, it does not take into consideration the very important element of Character. Third, film is a temporal art; with a definite beginning and ending. This means that a film can be busted up into as many pieces as you like. During the presentation of a film, there is nothing to inform the audience that an act is over and a new one is beginning. The audience experiences the film as a whole. So the Three-Act structure has no overt impact on the audience. If all of this is true, then why is it used? Because it is better than nothing. And because some people have misinterpreted Aristotle. (Aristotle and his Poetics will be discussed later in detail.)

How many times have you heard a film director say, “Cut, print. That’s the end of Act One, let’s set up for Act Two,” or an editor wringing his hands over a cup of cold coffee exclaiming, “I just can’t find the right pacing for the second act?” You’ve probably never heard anything of the sort. These professionals work in scenes and sequences. With nothing but little bits of time, captured at 24 frames per second, they piece together a cohesive story. They only use what works, and the amorphous admonition that you must have a beginning, middle and end offers little solace and no direction when you’re waist deep in celluloid, or staring at thousands of media files in your editing software. Some directors are cognizant of the Three-Act system, but they rarely take it to the set and/or the editing room because in the workaday world of cinematic storytelling it has no relevance.

At the other end of the process writers and development executives are well aware of the Three-Act structure. Studios have even started including it as a condition of employment in writers’ contracts. They state that a writer must turn in a story that is based on the Three-Act system. Why is this system so popular? Mainly because there isn’t anything else. When new writers start searching around for guidance in the difficult arena of dramatic writing, they are faced with two choices: 1) A book that promises to teach them the “Secrets” of the craft, or 2) A workshop, usually taught by someone who has written a book, which brings them together with similar people striving towards the same goal. Anything is better than nothing, and many new writers do both. The problem is that the books offer up the Three-Act structure or something equally arcane, and the workshops are only as good as the people in them, and everyone in the workshop is new to the process.

To the neophyte, the daunting task of coming up with 100-120 pages can be overwhelming. But by busting up the process into three parts, the writer is faced with a mere 30-40 pages multiplied by three. This is far less imposing than a single block of 100-120 pages. The problem is that those three 30-40 page blocks of drama must be a connected and integrated whole, not three separate blocks of drama which have the same characters. This is one of the main problems with the Three-Act structure; it treats the plot as a series of separate units when it should be a cohesive whole. The other main problem is that the Three-Act system ignores Character. In most screenwriting how-to books a dozen or so chapters are devoted to the plot, and a single chapter about character is wedged in somewhere with passing references about making characters multi-dimensional.

The Three-Act system’s preoccupation with plot has had a deleterious impact on the characters in recent films. The Characters don’t run the story. They run through the story; they are so busy tagging the bases of the plot that there is no time to get to know them. The Three-Act system doesn’t allow for sections of the story to be about the characters. Everything is geared toward the plot. Again Aristotle rears his ancient head. He states, on more than one occasion in the Poetics, “The most important element of Tragedy is the Plot,” and we have listened uncritically to this advice and wandered dangerously far from character.

The 3-Act Structure Sucks

Published on January 4, 2015 in Aristotle, Movies, Sequences and Story Structure. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

When talking to other writers, especially novices, the question often comes up, “If you don’t like the 3-Act structure, then who’s theory do you use?”  I’ve studied quite a few:  Aristotle’s Poetics, Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, Truby’s 22 Steps, McKee, Campbell, Lajos Egri, and others.  The main problem that I found with most of these theories is that they are too linear.

My dissatisfaction with the 3-Act paradigm built up over time and culminated in an aha moment while analyzing my ten favorite films.  That analysis binge happened after having a script universally rejected around town after it drew a bit of heat for its concept and the interest of a couple of producers.  After the initial disappointment, I called my agent and asked what the general consensus was about the script.  She told me that almost everyone had the same note: Character problems.  It was a criticism I’d heard before.

I went searching for a better theory than the 3-Act system or the others that I had studied.  I was looking for a structure or design principle that was more character centered, a subject barely touched on in most screenwriting books.   I deconstructed scripts and movies, and eventually uncovered an organizing principal that feels more organic.  The best analogy I have found is Object Oriented Programming, which I will explain in a forthcoming post.

As I deconstructed these films trying to crack their character beats, I was also looking for sequences.  Howard Suber, one of my favorite professors and a legend at UCLA, always said that he didn’t believe there was an overall structural theory that applied to all films, but if there was one it probably had something to do with sequences.

I had also noticed that popular films tend to be comprised of at lest two stories woven together.  Most of the popular books and theories espouse a single story paradigm that doesn’t fit the mold of Hollyood films as I see them.

My method for breaking down these films for analysis was very simple and straightforward.  I would create an outline while watching the film, and identify the dramatic beats in each scene.  Then I would analyze the beats to determine their function in the overall narrative.

So, as I was breaking down Lethal Weapon, the seventh in my analysis binge, a pattern emerged.  I saw the two stories and I recognized a type of sequence that I had seen before and had labeled it as a character sequence, but nothing more.  The two stories were the detective story about finding the killer of Amanda Hunsacker and the story of this suicidal widower cop partnered with a veteran and family man.

I saw the beats that comprised the sequences.  It was suddenly obvious that questions controlled and focused the sequences and beats.  Sub-plots and their function became apparent.  Character beats that handled introductions and development stuck out like sore thumbs once I had identified the different story sequences and beats.  I went back over my notes from the previous analyses, and the sequence structures were there.  How did I not see them before.  I didn’t have to shoehorn certain films to fit my theory, or come up with exceptions for certain films.  Every beat of a film could be labeled.  It was all so obvious.

Next:  Object oriented programing, or OOP.

Aristotle was not a Screenwriting Guru

Published on January 2, 2015 in Aristotle and Playwriting. 0 Comments

Some people believe that Aristotle set down in stone the mandate that a story should have Three-Acts. However, a careful study of the Poetics shows that Aristotle was speaking about the scope, or magnitude of the Plot, not the desired structure of the entire play when he states in Chapter VII, “A whole is that which has a beginning, middle, and end.” Nowhere in the Poetics is there any mention of the number of Acts which make up a play, or any mention of Acts at all, because plays in Aristotle’s day were not written in Acts.

ACT I
The Poetics was written nearly 2500 years ago as a larger work covering all aspects of poetry. It exists today only in fragments, and scholars are uncertain whether it is a text intended for reading, or merely a series of lecture notes. It is, at best, incomplete. The sections on Epic Poetry, Comedy, Dithyrambic Poetry, and possibly others, no longer exist except in passing references in the extent section on Tragedy. So right off the bat we have a problem with the Poetics. How can a system of laws about all dramatic stories be established from a work which purports to only discuss one genre of drama? Logically, not a particularly defensible position.

Aristotle labeled six elements of drama: Spectacle, Song, Diction, Plot, Character, and Thought. From there he argued that in regards to Tragedy, plot was the most important of the six elements. Plot he defines in Chapter VI as, “…for by Plot, I mean the arrangement of the Incidents.” An Incident refers to a spoken scene with two or three characters. Unlike the vast majority of our own drama, Greek Tragedy contained songs, sung by a Chorus, between each Incident (also called an Episode, or in our vernacular, a scene). The songs were used to explore the feelings and motivations of the characters. The choral song was an integral part of the Tragedy. It was the primary vehicle for establishing and developing setting and characters within the play.

ACT II
From his definition in Chapter VI of the parts of a Tragedy, he moves on to a discussion of the proper Magnitude of the Plot in Chapter VII. It is this discussion of Magnitude that has been misinterpreted by some modern critics. What is Aristotle getting at in this discussion? In Chapter IV there is a passage regarding the history of Drama, “It was not until late that the short plot was discarded for one of greater compass, …” Aristotle’s audience, at the time of the Poetics, was well aware of recent trends in their theater. They knew that choral competitions, which had been around for several hundred years at that point, gave rise to drama when singers stepped forward from the chorus and started to “act out” parts of the narrative they were singing. This lead to speeches; thusly parts of the narrative were dramatized in monologues. At first only the most dramatic moments at the end of the story were dramatized with everything else being handled in narrative song by the chorus. Over time more and more of the story was dramatized. Actors were beginning to take precedence over the chorus. The convention for nearly a century was to have only one actor on stage at a time. Then Aeschylus added a second actor to some scenes, thus creating what we would know as a true scene, but still using the convention of the chorus and songs. It was another ten or twenty years before Sophocles added a third actor to some scenes. This was the convention of Tragedy at the time of the Poetics.

Why was Aristotle so concerned with the compass of tragedies? Theater in Aristotle’s day was presented at festivals and competitions, and was largely an amateur undertaking. There were some professionals, but they were the exceptions. This abundance of amateur work probably made for some dreadful theater. Combine that with most writers still using the older convention of relying on choral song for the bulk of the narrative and just dramatizing the last couple of scenes in the story, and it is easy to see why Sophocles won so many drama competitions. Chapter VII is a discussion of how much of the story to dramatize in the incidents, or scenes. It was meant as a directive for the lesser playwrights of Aristotle’s time to stop merely dramatizing the one or two juicy scenes at the end of the story.

ACT III
From the second paragraph of Chapter VII, the notion of 3-Act structure was born. Modern critics have taken the admonition that the compass and arrangement of the incidents should have a beginning, middle, and end, relabeled them Act One, Act Two, and Act Three, and dumped the bulk of the rest of Aristotle’s ruminations. The most important thing to remember when reading Chapter VII of the Poetics is that Aristotle is only discussing the Plot, one of six elements comprising a tragedy. And Chapter VI tells us that “Plot” is merely the arrangement of the incidents.

CONCLUSION
The Poetics is well worth reading, but it is not the primer on dramatic structure that many screenwriting gurus would have you believe. Aristotle loved Tragedy, and his words have been tragically taken out of context. This has been my attempt to provide the proper context for chapter VII of the Poetics. All Aristotle was trying to do with his discussion of beginning, middle and end was to prod lesser playwrights into dramatizing more of the story as opposed to having the story presented as a narrative by the chorus.