Thread by @tonytost

Right now, planning out the camera angles and edits for a very talky exposition scene is really helping me pinpoint exactly where the drama is lacking in the script.

In the current version of my script, a rich dude is hosting a dinner party and giving the interesting back story of a very valuable artifact that he owns -- an artifact that functions as the McGuffin of the entire script.

It's an interesting history. And I think the character has a pretty interesting voice. So it reads pretty well on the page. But it wasn't until I got into the nitty gritty of shot listing how I'd want to shoot the scene that I realized that the scene isn't dramatic.

But now I realize that the scene will probably drag on the screen simply because: there's not much more to the scene than the words themselves. The words don't present a dramatic situation, but rather necessary backstory. And being necessary doesn't excuse being boring.

A couple of recent rewatches for me this week: NASHVILLE and SHAMPOO, both from 1975. Both have killer scenes where all of the drama is in glances and reaction shots: From NASHVILLE, Keith Carradine performing "I'm Easy" w/ four different women thinking it could be about them.

And from SHAMPOO, where Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Jack Warden, & Lee Grant are all at the same election night party, trying to suss out the romantic entanglements of the various couples.

Anyway, I'm working on revising this scene with these two precedents in mind: staging the dinner party as a kind of jockeying-for-romantic-pole-position between the various participants. That's the drama of the scene. The info simply rides on top of it, & perhaps glosses it.

So far, I don't have to change any dialogue. I'm simply staging the drama through actions & reactions & looks, which I think will work: none of the characters will openly acknowledge the drama going on, but all are participating in it while pretending to talk about the artifact.

So, the necessary info still gets across, but the scene isn't actually about that info, but the dynamics between the characters. Anyway, we'll see. But it took actually detailing how boring the shots were going to be to realize the prior undramatic state of affairs.