For A Fulfilling Life, Beware of “Wisdom”

— I heard the Hollywood gospel, but it didn’t save me —

Conventional wisdoms are sneaky things. Moderately useful sometimes, they often have a way of eroding confidence in one’s better instincts, even undermining the valid insights of independent thinkers.

Not long ago, while reading through a book of collected interviews with my favorite contemporary filmmaker, the late Anthony Minghella, I felt a fluttery thrill upon finding the following quote:

I think any sane person resists the idea that there is a formal and ineffable structure to films, which is what the Americans have diagnosed as the ‘three-act’ structure. They’ll talk about the problems in the second act, problems in the third act. It seems to me to be absurd that such a liquid form should be calcified into three acts.

The “Three-Act Structure” is a conventional wisdom of American film-writing. It’s referred to, sagely, as “The Form.” And while many a fine movie owes much to The Form (Robert Redford’s stellar Quiz Show comes to mind), Minghella is right. We Americans are absolutely obsessed with a screenwriting approach which is essentially, let’s admit, an industry dogma. The Form, let’s further admit, would more aptly be called The Formula.

Minghella’s words struck home because some time ago I completed my own first screenplay, and subsequently engaged with various industry people in deep and thoughtful conversations pertaining to “plot-points” and other facets of the all-holy Three-Act dogma of The Form.

These industry people had read my screenplay and liked it, but some couldn’t get around certain nagging “issues” in the script’s “structure.”

I was all ears, because I found The Form to be a new and refreshing challenge. I’d read some screenwriting guides about The Form, had analyzed some movies flawlessly structured thanks to The Form, and I was striving to get a handle on The Form myself, all in the aim of improving my script, which was, well, a quiet, quirky little comedy/drama about a father and a son, about growing up, about learning not to be one’s own worst enemy.

My script, in other words, was essentially plotless. It was about relationships. It consisted of a series of small, (hopefully) moving human moments. Characters talked to one another, had memories, felt sad, embarrassed, regretful, unsure, talked to each other some more, and finally came to feel a little bit hopeful, but no less clueless.

My movie ended there. That, in a nutshell, was it. It wasn’t a happy ending, but not a sad one either.

That’s all my movie wanted to be, and in truth that’s all it needed to be in order to live up to itself and my vision for it. Still I listened intently to my professional advisers, wholly confident in their counsel, poised all the while to “fix” the script I’d already revised about a hundred times.

For years, I had heard the gospel of The Form and believed it would be my artistic salvation.

My movie needed a plot. It needed big, unmistakable turning points. It needed a First, Second, and Third Act. That, after all, was The Form. I couldn’t expect to produce a worthy screenplay without abiding by The Form. I wanted to sell this thing, didn’t I? Absent The Form, how could I expect anybody in MovieLand to know what to do with my odd little script?

I must have been nuts—not because I should have known I’d already authored a perfect screenplay (no, though it was pretty darn good), but because I’d somehow failed to recognize that among my small handful of favorite films, the films that never ceased to inspire me (by Agnes Jaoui, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese, and others), nary a one boasted the tried-and-true Three-Act Structure, The Form.

At the top of this private pantheon was Minghella’s The English Patient. I had watched that film forty-three times.

Here’s Minghella in that book of interviews again:

The screenplay of The English Patient was always odd. I remember I sent it to a successful American actress whom I liked a lot, not to be in the film but just as a friend. She wrote back to me saying, ‘I beg you not to make this film –- it has no third act.’ I wrote back and said I didn’t think there was a second act either. It was so far away from the hegemony of the American screenplay –- Act One, Act Two, Act Three –- there’s no way to fit it into that box at all. One of those guys who goes around ‘teaching’ people how to write a screenplay actually uses The English Patient as an illustration of how not to … He’s right, of course.

I looked up from the page, newly awakened. Lordy, it’s shocking to realize the insidiousness of conventional wisdoms. If you’re looking to lead a free and fulfilling life, beware “wisdom.”

The funny thing is, I’ve never been a big fan of dogmas—religious, political, or aesthetic. I hear the resounding ring of truth in these words of John Dewey, from his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Impulsion beyond all limits that are externally set inheres in the very nature of the artist’s work. It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience.

Henry James, another favorite voice, also puts it beautifully:

It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase—a kind of revelation—of freedom. One perceives in that case—by the light of a heavenly ray—that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.

You could say I’ve done my best to go my own way, do my own thing, write my own rules. Yet despite my finely tuned B.S.-detector where artistic ideology is concerned, in this case something had scrambled my instruments, burrowed into me, undermined my self-reliance.

Something had led me to look away from the organic aesthetic demands of my screenplay in search of a formula. (Is this why dealings with Hollywood are so often equated to Faustian bargains?)

Whew. Close call.

Granted, my script may remain nothing more than words on a page. I’ll likely never sell the thing. But that’s OK.

The magnificently talented (and prolific) writer William T. Vollman put it nicely in a fascinating New York Times feature last week when asked whether he was concerned that his new, uncompromisingly long book might cost him readers:

I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.

Plot-points or no, three acts or no, I like my script just the way it is.

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“On Making Mistakes”

“How to Achieve Even While Losing”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“A Message of Improvement From Self-Help’s Founding Father”