Mamet’s book, Bambi vs. Godzilla, is compulsively readable and full of opinions, which is precisely what one wants from it.
It also discloses the ancient secret of the screenwriter, which I shamelessly reveal here:
To write a successful scene, one must stringently apply and stringently answer the following three questions:
- Who wants what from whom?
- What happens if they don’t get it?
- Why now?
That’s it… These magic questions and their worth are not known to any script reader, executive or producer. They are known and used by few writers. They are, however, part of the unconscious and perpetual understanding of that group who will be judging you and by whose say-so your work will stand or fall: the audience.
Mamet’s title is, of course, from the infamous short “Bambi meets Godzilla”, a true classic that I saw on TV in the late 80s and haven’t seen since… until now. No-one should be surprised it’s on Youtube. Some of you may be surprised, however, that it has its own wikipedia page.
Huh, really?
The first one is quite good, the second I could leave (probably because to me there is no option for the character but to get what they want)and the third, well I could ask Mamet the same for the whole of his play Edmond …
I prefer (and even though I can’t stand Mamet, I think it is his): get in late, get out early.
His questions make a bit more sense when you know Mamet’s whole angle in the book is a variation on “don’t bore the audience”, and his recipe for not boring the audience is to have characters (mostly the protagonist) working hard to get what they want. Wanting something gives the audience something to invest in; having consequences for failure gives them a reason to invest in that something; and the last, I guess, is just an injunction to give these questions urgency. That’s my take on it, anyway. (“Compulsively readable” is another way of saying “slight”…)
Hmm … ok, fair point. And, I guess, it also depends on what your start point is as a writer. Writers who are also actors (like Mamet or Shepard) tend to focus in on characters first and story lines second, it works very well for Realism but not so well for other forms like Expressionism or Absurdism.