C'est Beau

More socialist rooftop music from Air France.

air france - no excuses songs
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Into The Dish Room

And back at the Racine Comfort Inn lounge, Dawn Of The Dead push back from their table...



And stroll -- all bass lines and synthesizer -- into the steam of the dish room to bum a smoke from ...



And a light from...

What A New Day Looks Like

I know this isn't politically correct, but I think the visual disparity is both historic and poignant.





Wow.   Jawlines.

Holy, Er, Loveliness

I know all the words to Holy Fuck's "Lovely Allen" and, no, I don't know why the first twenty seconds are blank.

Goddamn Right

Three years ago I would have given you even money that Cheney would find a way to impose martial law and November 4, 2008 wouldn't happen.

So, given that...

A Nice Piece of Set

Back to the screenwriting stuff. Remember that? More precisely, back to set pieces. Remember those? And I apologize in advance, because apparently most people have an inherent understanding of set pieces, where as I think (now at least) the term is often misused.

So, I want to refine what I talked about before. In short, I said there are organic set pieces which serve the characters and the story, and there are moronic ones which are simply noise and commotion intended to be trailer moments.

But now my feeling is this: I was accepting a flawed definition of "set piece". Even more, I think it's an undernourished definition that a lot of people accept without really thinking about it.

Here's why (at least for comedies and character driven pieces): While most set pieces do make for trailer moments, trailer moments are by no means set pieces. It's not a tidy, reciprocal exchange. My mistake was looking at all the bright, shiny, noisy, orchestrated moments in trailers and assuming they were set pieces simply because... they were in trailers.

Because for comedies and character driven pieces, the set piece is something an actor is going to pull off, rather than the CGI designer or the stunt team.

And the reason I think the distinction is important is because -- while I'm never going to tell a studio exec they're mistakenly conflating the two -- it's probably valuable to keep an awareness of the dynamic in my back pocket.

So, let's tear it all down and go back to the origination of the term. Originally, a "set piece" was a physical component of a play that was so crucial to the story that it was/is articulated in the initial description of the set. All other props can be mentioned as they occur in the play, but set pieces were/are the critical pieces that a set designer and reader need to know about up front.

I'm not saying that's how the term is used in screenplays, but it's useful to understand how the original term applies to screenplays: When done right, set pieces are moments crucial to the telling of the story. Whether they are moments that change a character's worldview, or moments that change the course of the story, or moments that surprise the characters, they are the moments the actor is going to pull off.

And to take it a step further, I'd say they are the moments you are writing towards. The moments that -- when you first sit down to tackle a screenplay -- they're the ones you can't wait to get to, because all of what goes before or comes after hangs on these set pieces.

Identify those moments (character transition, change of worldview, audience reveal, etc.), buff them out so you aren't underselling them, and you'll have memorable (and legitimate) character based set pieces.