Watching the movie, American Beauty, while trying to read
the script at the same time was a lot like teaching myself how to drive a stick-shift
car: jerky with frequent stopping. However, I’m proud to say that I was able to
get through one hundred and twenty-one minutes of film without going
cross-eyed.
Reading the script felt like looking
under the hood of a car, or like watching a drunken frat boy streak across the
lawn. It was revealing, to say the least. From afar, a movie script looks like
something written in Morse Code. But when I got up close and personal with the
script, I decoded acronyms that are as essential to screenwriters as LOL is
essential to a thirteen-year-old girl on Facebook.
EXT., which is an abbreviation for
exterior, is used each time you start a new scene that needs to be described
from the outside. Similarly, INT., or interior, tells the reader when you are
describing a scene that takes place in doors. P.O.V., short for “point of
view”, directs the cameraman, telling him to film the perspective of a certain
character in three simple letters. Although these formalities seemed a bit
repetitive, I understood their purpose throughout the script.
In American Beauty, written by Alan Ball, the actors and actresses
seemed to follow the script pretty closely. This reiterated Christopher Keane’s
point about the importance of a good script in his book, How to Write a
Selling Screenplay. In the few scenes in which the actors strayed from
script, they only did so by mere baby steps that supported what the screenwriter
had already written. No major changes seemed to be imposed by either the actors
or director.
The movie is introduced with a
bird’s-eye view of “suburbia” and a voice-over narration by the main character,
Lester. While the introduction of a film through narration can be considered a
cliché, American Beauty is able to
make it completely original due to the narrator’s sardonic voice. With the
line, “In less than a year, I’ll be dead”, Ball immediately grabs the viewer’s
attention and wipes away any trace of cliché. I thought that this was brilliant
in that it spoiled the ending but made me want to learn how the story came to
that final conclusion.
I also felt that American Beauty particularly excelled at
constantly showing the viewer different perspectives. Character Ricky Fitts’
use of a hand-held camera, or “DIGICAM”, for more intimate scenes created a
unique, creepy contrast to the rest of the film. By starting the movie with the
view from behind the DIGICAM, Ball quickly establishes an eeriness that speaks
to the plot of the film.
Similarly, plot developments are
introduced to the viewer in unprecedented new ways throughout the movie. One of
my favorite scenes is when Lester, played by Kevin Spacey, learns that his wife
is cheating on him through the drive-thru intercom at a fast food restaurant.
Here, Ball is able to relay important information to his main character in a
way that is also entertaining to watch. By slowly unraveling the story in
moments like this, Ball builds up the suspense and anxiety as we get closer and
closer to the climax of the movie.
As the audience creeps closer to the
truth, the scenes in the movie also get shorter and quicker. Right before Lester
is killed, we see “snapshot images” of Angela in the bathroom, wiping away
tears, Carolyn walking towards the house, a gun in her purse, and Jane and
Ricky sitting in a bedroom. Then, a gunshot goes off and we know Lester has
been killed. This series of images was successful in that it kept me wondering
who the murderer was going to be until the very end.
Of the many things that I learned from American Beauty, what I enjoyed
the most was seeing how movie mechanics, such as overhead views, voice overs,
and camera angles, could portray something that a book simply wouldn’t be able
to do.
MOVIES
WATCHED: 1
SCREENPLAY
PAGES WRITTEN: 0
NOVEL
PAGES WRITTEN: 38
PAGES
LEFT IN ATONEMENT: 215
PAGES
LEFT IN HOW TO WRITE A SELLING SCREENPLAY:
271
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