Hiding plot points

Question

I got this from The Unknown Screenwriter's blog.
He put up a list of tips from the great Billy Wilder. The one that stayed with me the most was:
'The more elegantly and subtly you hide your plot-points, the better you are as a writer.'
To me, that's beautiful. And the best example I can think of it in Wilder's work is in the Apartment. I've not seen it, but have read the script. Even so, I feel like I've seen it. That's how good the script is. Read it at once (Daily Script) if you haven't. Read everything by Wilder. He was the man.
Anyway, the story is about Bud, an office drudge who wants to be an executive in the big insurance company he works for (I think I read Fred McMurray played the part). He gets in with the execs by letting them use his mid-town apartment for their extra-marital affairs. In the first ten minutes, Bud gets home from work. He has to wait in the rain for one of the execs to finish with his girlfriend. The exec is late, leaving well after the arranged time, and you can see the set-up: Buddy-boy is getting used and abused by these guys.

Bud finally gets in, has a beer and a TV dinner, takes a sleeping pill and goes to bed. Three seconds after he puts the light out, the phone rings. It's another exec, wanting the apartment pronto to 'hook up' with a blonde he's met. Bud protests. The sleeping pill is taking effect. He can't go out now. He's exhausted. But the exec pours the pressure on, and Buddy boy gives in, and ends up falling asleep on a park bench.
Great. So the viewer assumes the point of the sleeping pill is to make fall asleep on the park bench. This is reinforced by the next scene, where Bud shows up for work next day with a horrible cold, and trying to cancel all the dodgy appointments so he can go home and collapse at the end of the day. So, sleeping pill leads to falling asleep on the park bench which leads to the cold, which leads to further compications with the pushy execs. But then, late in the second act, you find out that what Billy was doing there was establishing that there are sleeping pills in the apartment .

Absolutely brilliant. And when a certain character opens the medicine cabinet looking for something else, it's like, WHAM! You know what's in there and what she's going to do. Subtle and elegant. Every scene, every beat, every line pulls its weight and then some, often killing several birds with one stone. What a master.

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[nq:1]Anyway, the story is about Bud, an office drudge who wants to be an executive in the big insurance company he works for (I think I read Fred McMurray played the part).[/nq]
Acutally, Jack Lemon played the lead, and Fred MacMurray went against type and played the evil boss.
Tim C

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[nq:2]Anyway, the story is about Bud, an office drudge who ... for (I think I read Fred McMurray played the part).[/nq]
[nq:1]Acutally, Jack Lemon played the lead, and Fred MacMurray went against type and played the evil boss.[/nq]
Wow! Jack Lemon! How brilliant was he in that role? I have to watch that.

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[nq:1]I got this from The Unknown Screenwriter's blog. He put up a list of tips from the great Billy Wilder. ... every beat, every line pulls its weight and then some, often killing several birds with one stone. What a master.[/nq]
Dan Petrie Jr. used to rent a small office down the hall from Wilder when Petrie Jr. was first starting out as a writer. (He was an agent at ICM before that, negotiated my first deal, got me $100 for an option instead of $25). I know an agent who is still in that building, in the middle of Beverly Hills - still no air conditioning last time I checked.
So he'd see Wilder all the time and he was always fretting about the third act of whatever he was working on. That should probably tell you something. I wonder if Wilder and Izzy Diamond started off with a premise, figured out how it might end up, and worked backward. Maybe it's explained in the book that Cameron Crowe did with him.

Any script by Wilder is great. If you want to learn how to write shots without writing shots, Some Like It Hot is the best. You read the paragraphs, you see the action clearly.
The Apartment might be Jack Lemmon's best Jack Lemmon, frankly.

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[nq:1]I got this from The Unknown Screenwriter's blog. He put up a list of tips from the great Billy Wilder. ... every beat, every line pulls its weight and then some, often killing several birds with one stone. What a master.[/nq]
That is, of course, the classic means by which you conceal something that needs to be set up later on in the story.
It is the classic problem of the "hanging thread."

Viewers instinctively, if not overtly understand the principle of parsimony in movies that everything in a movie unlike in real life, is there for a reason. And so if you introduce a character who doesn't seem to have any particular reason for being there. Or if a character does something that doesn't seem to be serving any particular purpose, or even if a character says something that seems to be at odds with the natural flow of the story at that particular point it sticks out from the natural trajectory and people notice it. It's a hanging thread. Alarms go off and people thing oh, that's there because it means that something is going to happen later that has to do with that.
They sense the hand of the storyteller.
And the way that you deal with it is to knit it back into the body of the story to pay it off by giving some other story purpose at the time so that people believe that whatever it is has been paid off. Thus they don't recognize it for what it really is a thing that's really there to set something up later.
NMS

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[nq:2]I got this from The Unknown Screenwriter's blog. He put ... often killing several birds with one stone. What a master.[/nq]
[nq:1]Dan Petrie Jr. used to rent a small office down the hall from Wilder when Petrie Jr. was first starting ... best. You read the paragraphs, you see the action clearly. The Apartment might be Jack Lemmon's best Jack Lemmon, frankly.[/nq]
Here are Wilder's rules of screenwriting
[nq:1]From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5503804[/nq]
As told to Cameron Crowe:
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you're going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, thebetter you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in thefirst act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll loveyou forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audiencealready sees. Add to what they''e seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of themovie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until thelast event, and then that's it. Don't hang around.

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[nq:2]I got this from The Unknown Screenwriter's blog. He put ... often killing several birds with one stone. What a master.[/nq]
[nq:1]That is, of course, the classic means by which you conceal something that needs to be set up later on ... they don't recognize it for what it really is a thing that's really there to set something up later.[/nq]
Another example from the same film:
Fran checks her makeup, and in the script, there's a description of her compact. It has a distinctive fleurs-de-lis design. I'm thinking 'why are Wilder and Diamond describing her compact?' Presumably, the film will show a close-up of the compact. So, to tie it in, the mirror is also cracked. Again hiding the hanging thread show the compact to the audience without making them think, 'Watch that compact...' Fran looks at herself in the cracked mirror and has a bit of dialogue about how she's broken, like the mirror. So again, they kill two birds with one stone and weave in the hanging thread.

I like that, by the way 'hanging thread.' It's a useful way to think about it.
Another thing about that script even the 'inciting incident' is hidden. The story just sort of gathers pace seamlessly. No big 'call to adventure' with bells on. You just ease into it. That's also 'subtle and elegant.'

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And a great movie.
The lesson learned: make sure your plot points & plants have two* purposes: now and later. The one I use in classes is ALIENS when Ripley has broken down in front of the Space Marines... so, to show she's tough, she offers to help load the drop ship. Of course, they think she might ***** up. But she is an *expert in operating that loader and impresses Sgt. Apone and the Space Marines. It's a good scene..
And you would never guess that it's setting up the final battle where she uses the loader against the Queen Alien.
You always want this stuff to be invisible, and the way to do that is to have the plant be required by the story for a different reason. For its own reason. You can't tell the story without this scene or bit of information.
The bad plants are the ones that have no reason to be in the story at all.. except to set up a later pay off.
- Bill

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[nq:1]And a great movie. The lesson learned: make sure your plot points & plants have two purposes: now and later. ... have no reason to be in the story at all.. except to set up a later pay off. - Bill[/nq]
Gee, this is fun, talking about craft. I'm waiting for the other s... er, plot point to drop here...

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[nq:1]And a great movie. The lesson learned: make sure your plot points & plants have two purposes: now and later.[/nq]
That's it. That's a very good way to think of it.
I'm not giving anything stealable away if I partly describe a bit from one of my radio plays.
Two teenage boys go out on a boat without permission, but make it back late: the mooring is dried out at low-tide. This means they have leave the boat beached, then come back at midnight and watch and wait for the tide to come in and float the boat. Then they can put it back on the mooring and hopefully not get into trouble. But while they're waiting for the tide, they witness something happening which triggers the story. So, waiting for the tide to get the boat back on the mooring puts them on the spot to see something they shouldn't have. And it also sets up the tide and the mooring, both featured at the story climax.
Incidentally, it's helpful to have something like the cycles of the tides to give your story a time-frame.
The one I use in classes is ALIENS when
[nq:1]Ripley has broken down in front of the Space Marines... so, to show she's tough, she offers to help load ... you would never guess that it's setting up the final battle where she uses the loader against the Queen Alien.[/nq]
That's the stuff! I love it. I absolutely love clever plotting.

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[nq:2]"Jackson Pillock" wrote (snips) Will someone expand on this ... else? Joe Myers "And they lived happily ever... uh oh."[/nq]
[nq:1]Well, obviously, I can't exactly read Billy Wilder's mind but I'm assuming that what he means, in classic structural ... act break taking it up to that "insoluble" moment, which often comes very, very late in the story. NMS[/nq]
It works with every good movie.
There's an old Hollywood advice to get your hero up a tree and throw rocks at him.
At some point he's got to get down from the tree and devastate the rock-throwers unless he learns to fly.
I call the end of Act Two the "deepest dilemma" - it's a "how the heck is he gonna get out of this" situation.
I like stories where the hero - having solved his own inner problem in Act Two - is now able to solve the outer problem because he's won the inner battle and is no longer distracted by it.
I've seen that happen with screenwriters. They shut off the inner chatter and feedback they get from others and just go for something they want to see onscreen, ***** anyone else. For example, Dave Ayer turned down writing Tupac's biopic (he was on the way to sign the contract) and ended up writing Training Day, which changed his career.
[nq:1]From what I can tell (I haven't spoken to him in years), Paul Haggisput his **** on the line to ... funded but just kept going. He had certainly laid the groundwork earlier in his career to make those projects work.[/nq]
"The event that triggers" to me forces a focus on the ultimate theme of the story, which is why Wilder said if your third act isn't working it started in the first act.
Now if I could just write scripts like he did...

Hiding plot points

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