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06/11/2008: The Ages of Man


Amy in Colorado writes in with two questions. Here is one of them.

How does this happen? I recently watched a movie [...] where the time-line/histories of the main characters made no sense at all. Early in the film, the main character explains that her mother never liked her husband because they met when she was 19 [...] Then, 3 weeks after the husband dies, she has a 40th birthday. [...] Later, she's all upset and yells that her husband was only 35 when he died. [...] Then, there is a flashback scene from their first meeting... [and]... there's no way he's 15. So, am I to believe that not a single person involved with the movie noticed the obvious contradictions???

Yes, it's possible that they didn't notice. Or, more likely, when they noticed after the fact, they felt that making some kind of fix would lead to some worse consequence -- if they made the husband older when he died, for example, the poignancy of his loss would be lessened, perhaps, and that would be worse than a logic flaw that most viewers won't catch.

This kind of thing happens all the time, more often on tv shows -- in which the backstory evolves over years -- than features, and there's good reason for it. The problem is that scripts aren't imagined, written and then shot. They're imagined, then re-imagined, written, then rewritten by others, then reconceptualized during preproduction, tinkered with on-set without the writer present, then totally re-imagined one more time in the editing room -- again, usually without the writer being there. I don't know the movie in question, but I wonder if it's possible that the flashback scene was added late in the process, after the rest of the material was filmed and hard to change. Or, perhaps, the woman's birthday was originally a 30th birthday, but the casting of the female lead made that implausible? They may have decided that the funky math was better than trying to age down their actress. Or maybe they originally were going to delete the birthday reference, then added the "met when I was 19" line, then later realized they needed the birthday for some other reason... Or who knows what. In the chaos of making a movie, the logic of the script is often -- not ignored, but rather, jettisoned in favor of more immediate crises.

There are lots and lots of things like this that can happen between page and screen. Actors get haircuts or boob jobs during a shoot, or some location is suddenly unavailable or the writer forgets some choice they made weeks earlier and writes something that contradicts it.

Remember that big fight between Buffy and Spike in which the whole point of the scene was that Spike could suddenly survive (and fight) in sunlight, but the whole scene was shot in the deep shade? Well, the day grew late and the shadows grew long. Everyone noticed it, but there was little that could be done.

After you've seen this happen to a few of your scripts, you may start to try to make them production-proof. I remember on one sitcom early in my career I was told, "never write a scene that requires a specific prop unless you have one in your garage." Now, I've never had any problem, ever, with the prop people failing to supply what I needed, but clearly the guy who gave me that advice had. The problem with trying to write protectively is that trying to prevent problems leads to overwriting in which everything is laid out too clearly, or to boring writing in which everything is on an easy-to-control interior set without crowds or too much action.

In a way, those of you at the "aspiring" stage of your tv writing careers are lucky in that you're writing to be read, not produced. You have no other writer and no panic-pressed writing of your own that will introduce contradictions, and, like a novelist, you have the imaginations of your readers to deal with, not the vagaries of nature and a crew. Of course, part of the assignment is to write a script that appears producible, so you can't go nuts with a chariot-race in every act, but you can at least keep your characters' ages straight, and rely on sunshine when you need it!

Lunch: That strange strawberry-spinach salad again. Get the strawberries on the side and avoid the pink dressing.

Addendum: I keep thinking of new ways this could've happened. Maybe the birthday was originally supposed to be years after the husband's death, not weeks, but in the moment they decided that it would really only play with fresh grief. This feels quite likely to me.