Surprise—Part One

Recently in the New York Times, writer Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame, interviewed Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter who has had a 60-year career astounding us with successes from West Side Story to Company to Sunday in the Park with George to Sweeney Todd to Follies, and on and on—and all of them have one thing in common: surprise. You can read the article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/t-magazine/lin-manuel-miranda-stephen-sondheim.html?_r=0

The Hamilton writer says:

I sent him early drafts of songs over the seven-year development of “Hamilton,” and his email response was always the same. “Variety, variety, variety, Lin. Don’t let up for a second. Surprise us.”

This is a theme Sondheim comes back to over and over—how important it is for the writer to surprise the audience. This is, I think, true in every art form, whether it’s creating sculpture or writing a poem or crafting a screenplay—the goal of the artist is the new, the surprising, the creation of the moment that the audience/reader/viewer didn’t see coming.

What actually happens when you’re surprised? You might smile at the genius of it, laugh or cry if the surprise warrants that response, or you might be so caught up in the moment of the surprise that you’re kind of stunned. I think that when you’re truly surprised, it literally takes your breath away. The physiological response to surprise is often a sharp intake of breath, and you hold that breath—as if you’re frozen in that moment of surprise, as if the surprise so overwhelmed you that you stop breathing for an instant while you let that surprise resonate.

Surprise in screenwriting begins with the idea. Ideas. There’s a book that says there are only seven original ideas. That’s it, just the seven. And sometimes when we look at the movies out these days,it kind of feels like they’re right—because the same ideas seem to be made over and over again. As my husband and I watched the previews of coming attractions at the movies recently he turned to me, incredulous: “It’s all the same movie!” And he wasn’t far from being right. Geostorm, Cloverfield 3, Thor—Ragnarok and this summer’s Transformer’s The Last Knight, The Dark Tower and on and on. These films are a succession of destruction, disaster and mayhem. The world is coming to an end, civilization is going to die out, all is lost…

Seriously? We really WANT to see this idea reenacted over and over again? Well, I guess so or the studios wouldn’t be making these gems. And in the past decade, the trend has been—and continues to be—comic book movies. Studios fall all over themselves to buy up nearly any comic book series that has a following, and the result is all those heroes of the comics coming to life.

So when I talk about coming up with original ideas, I’m NOT talking about coming up with an idea for the next post-apocalyptic film or comic book film—I’m talking about coming up with something new, something different, something that will surprise us.

More next week…

Copyright © Diane Lake

05Nov17

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com