Books&writers Takeaways from Talking Pictures

In the course of a career working with writers, I generally haven’t recommended books on writing: like many others I simply recommend good books in general. But there is one book on writing – targeted towards the screen rather than the bound page – I have recommended more than once to prose stylists both aspiring and thriving: Joel Engel’s Screenwriters on Screenwriting, and in particular its interview with Michael Mann.

Published in 1995, this is Mann after Manhunter and The Last of the Mohicans, but before Heat, The Insider and Collateral. And, of course, between Miami Vice the television show (Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas) and Miami Vice the film (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx).

Something that always stuck with me from Engel’s interview with Mann is the latter’s respect for the savviness of his audience. “I don’t want anything that the audience already knows are suspense-generating devices,” he says. “They see forty-four hours of story per week. They don’t know it consciously, unless they’re students of it, but they really understand storytelling; they have all kinds of archetypal plotting and plot mechanisms already in their brain. That’s their environment. You can’t ignore it, so you have to deal with it.”

It’s not that everyone is a critic; they just see through you when you fool yourself into thinking that you’ve actually fooled them. “The second you start imagining the accolades – you’ve just at that moment had it,” Mann says to Engel. “You cease to be in a channel. You’ve actually blown your concentration, and you don’t know it yet.”

He goes on to describe a hypothetical movie to Engel: a biopic about a retired bootlegger who gets pulled back into a historical conflict. A story that, despite its action, is boring because of its linear “this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened.” But what if you frame it as an investigation? Mann suggests. That way you can zoom in, zoom out, at any point in the story. “I’ve liberated myself from the tyranny of chronology by inventing the narrative.”

Mann is suggesting a freedom through economy, and through fidelity to structure. Because you can be creative with the structure. “There are no rules. That’s rule one. It’s context,” he says. “Because the whole of a screenplay, the whole of a motion picture, if it works, is a consensual dream.”

The same is true for a novel, or any good story you tell, or an ad campaign. There was a reason Bowden if movies were an influence on his zoomed-in perspective as a writer.

“I’ve no doubt seen three movies for every book I’ve ever read – maybe ten movies for every book I’ve read,” Bowden replied. “But the thing I take from film is the discipline of structuring a story around scenes, action, character, dialogue – and that’s true of anything that you read, for the most part. You are drawn into stories if there are compelling characters and there’s action and there’s dialogue, and I think if you’re reading any book, those are the pages that turn the fastest. And then you run into a big block of explanatory copy, what Ridley Scott calls ‘Irving’ – Irving the Explainer – and you learn to try to keep that to a minimum, because you don’t want to lose the impetus of the story, and you don’t want to lose the attention of the reader.”

In Mann’s interview, he theorizes that you can entertain an audience with things other than real content development for about seven minutes at the beginning. While the one-page-per-minute rule of thumb in screenplays is by no means universal, the Black Hawk choppers in Bowden’s book are airborne by page six – and the paratroopers are taking fire by page 16.

Last year Mann struck a deal with HarperCollins for his own book imprint. Under its banner he’ll co-write a mob book with Don Winslow (The Cartel) and a sequel to Heat with crime writer Reed Farrel Coleman. It’ll be interesting to see if he takes his own advice, or if he breaks his own rules – the ones we agree on, anyway.

The person who originally recommended Screenwriters on Screenwriting to me: he was a screenwriter himself, and a Michael Mann fan. I remember him being really excited to see the film version of Miami Vice, but for a simpler, though equally famous, hallmark of the writer-director.

“His guns just sound so good.”