The Parallel Lives

Jeffrey W. Kitchen has taught an intense course on screenwriting to a series of small groups of just six people over the past 35 years. In recent weeks, I came across Kitchen on YouTube, and I was impressed by his skill, that of a classical dramatist.

Kitchen says, “What I teach is plot construction and dramatic principle—the craft of the dramatist, the ancient art of adapting a story for a theatrical presentation, whether in film, on TV, or onstage. It’s about making a story actable so that it will grip an audience.”

He dares to say that Hollywood producers reject 90 to 95% of all screenplays submitted, as unreadable or un-actable. Others say that the percentage of rejects is closer to 98%.

I would suggest that those movies that Hollywood produces, the 2% that make the cut, most are poor to fair. It is rare to see a good movie. I wonder, What makes a good movie?

Kitchen answers by pointing his students back to Aristotle, who lived 2400 years ago in ancient Athens. In Aristotle’s book “Poetics,” he noticed that the better plays, those that thrilled audiences, included at least five elements: Dilemma, Crisis, Decision, Action, and Resolution.

A complication arises, a knot of events occurs that reaches a crisis and then unravels toward a resolution. The play is a unified whole, a series of interconnected actions, not random events.

In addition, Kitchen rediscovered William Thompson Price, a pioneer in American drama, an early authority on play construction. Price wrote at least two books, “The Technique of the Drama,” (1892), and “The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle,” (1908).

It was Aristotle, “who searched out the first group of basic principles” but it was “Mr. Price two thousand years and more afterward who was to enlarge, correlate, and define them.”

For years Price taught playwriting in New York City, and edited scripts for producers. “He defined drama as a cohesive, coherent, and compelling series of events that engage an audience’s interest and engenders feelings of suspense throughout the performance.”

Kitchen teaches both Aristotle and Price’s classical techniques. Above all else, he emphasizes the first of Aristotle’s five elements: dilemma.

Dilemma is a Greek word, meaning “a situation requiring a choice between two equally undesirable alternatives,” or a “double premise,” or a “horned argument.” Often both of the dilemma’s two horns conflict with moral principles, and neither option is acceptable.

For example, consider individual rights vs. those of a community, national security vs. men and women’s freedoms, speaking truth to a king who insists upon loyalty, choosing adventure rather than security, or leaving a bad marriage to suffer in a void of loneliness.

In “Training Day,” Denzil Washington plays the role of Detective Alonzo Harris of the LAPD, who introduces Officer Jake Hoyt, played by Ethan Hawke, to the unpolished methods needed, as an undercover cop, to nab criminals in the worst parts of the city, over a single day.

Hoyt is appalled to learn of Harris’s outrageous corruption, his criminality, his use of raw force, his unchecked ambition, and yet Hoyt needs this job. He cannot quit. Harris forces Hoyt to become a criminal to catch criminals. Hoyt choses adventure over security, but should he?

Kitchen writes, “The more powerful the dilemma is, the more powerful the script will be. There is no hiding from a compelling dilemma, no pretending that it is not happening.”

I agree that dilemma within a script is required, but often scriptwriters drench their scripts with unnecessary violence that make them, for me, unwatchable. Scriptwriting is a complex literary exercise, but the final product is entertainment, not as profound as a history or an essay.