Tercera interpretación: experiencias de impactos climáticos

Planting & Payoff, refers to two different, carefully planned out tools employed by writer in order to give the audience an enlightening and emotionally satisfying immersion into the world of the film by providing them first with the planting of a story device, be it either a motif, a reoccurring phrase or snippit of dialogue, a character's unique behavioral quirk, costume piece, object or prop, or any combination of these in order to foreshadow an upcoming payoff. The second is the payoff itself; the sudden and unexpected revelation of some misunderstood or previously unknown significance behind whatever reoccurring motif was used.

PLANTING & PAYOFF (CONT’D)

Adding a plant and a payoff in a script can give the audience a eureka moment, or the sense of an epiphany—which is always immediately rewarding for an audience when the work has been done on the writer's part to set up a story element and pay it off correctly.

EXAMPLES:

The first moment we see Dom Cobb's (Leonardo DiCaprio) 'token', a spinning brass top, is when it's placed upon a table before the hunched, frail figure of an old man and told that it was found on Cobb's body as he was washed up onto shore—along with a gun. Cobb is brought before the old Japanese man, and we are told that he once knew a man who possessed a top just like this one. This plant pays off in a number of different ways by the end of the film—not only do we revisit this scene later, we come back to it with a better understanding of who Cobb is, how he got there, who the Japanese man is and how he got to this place, and what the significance of the spinning top is. Furthermore, the top has an even greater implications to suggest up to the very last shot of the film, where we watch the top spin—upon the verge of its tipping point—before the film ends. We are unsure of whether or not the top topples, and are left to question the

legitimacy of Cobb's 'happy ending'. This allows the top to serve multiple different payoffs, while at the same time being such an inconspicuous object that no audience would immediately suspect that it was capable of carrying such dramatic weight to the story—making it a clever and useful example of how plants & payoffs can be simple items with grand implications.

Cinema Paradiso (1988) is a film about a filmmaker's love of the cinema. It follows the life of filmmaker Salvatore 'Toto' Di Vita (Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi, Jacques Perrin) from childhood to adulthood as he frequents his local village movie theater and befriends the projectionist, Alfredo (Philippe Noiret).

During one sequence, the village Priest views a film that is to debut that night alone with Alfredo in the projectionist booth. As the scene on the screen plays out before the Priest, the two characters in the movie embrace and kiss. Offended by this carnal excess of lust, the Priest rings a bell—and Alfredo promptly marks that portion of the footage to cut and edit before it can be viewed by the village public later. We see that this is not a new habit of the Priest's, as Alfredo has reams upon reams of celluloid collected over the years—full of movie stars in black and white passionately kissing on screen. Little Salvatore is naturally curious about the mysterious (and taboo) kissing scenes, but will never see them.

That is until toward the end of the film, we see a much older and world-weary

Salvatore—successful filmmaker now far away from his little Italian village he called home—sits back to look over some stock film footage that was sent to him, only to find that it is a spliced-together collection of all the kissing scenes that Alfredo had cut out of the movies before. Kiss after kiss, a flood of memories and emotions sweeps over Salvatore as he remembers his distant childhood, and what it was about movies that made him fall in love with them in the first place. This is an example of how the plant of watching the Priest edit the film footage pays off when we see that footage edited together again once more to inspire Salvatore when he needed inspiration the most.

Plausibility

Plausibility, refers to the setting a of tone of believability within a screenplay.The writer treads a fine line when taking his audience through what is impossible and what is predictable. An audience can become turned off by a movie that asks them to take too many leaps in their imagination to go along with the story—if an audience member can't believe that a story is possible, they are less likely to respond. Likewise, if a story is too easy to believe, the audience can become bored by a film's predictability—a story that is neither exciting or enlightening and offers the audience no sense of escapism. Therefore, a writer must be sure to keep their screenplay within the realm of plausibility—to make sure that the story is neither unbelievable or predictable. The events of a story must be possible, but unlikely—the possibility of the events within a film happening make the audience empathize with the characters from personal experience, while the unlikelihood of the events make the events worthy of being made into a movie, and offer the audience some level of escape, or immersion into the world of the film.

EXAMPLES:

In Armageddon (1998), the earth is confronted with an obstacle not seen for 64 million years—an asteroid the size of Texas that is guaranteed to collide against the surface of the earth in approximately 18 days. An asteroid of it's magnitude would obliterate all life on earth, rendering the human race utterly and totally extinct for all time. Already, the film's obstacle is plausible—certainly, we know that an asteroid from space destroying a large portion of life on the planet is not only possible, but is inevitable—the audience only hopes that such a thing won't happen within their lifetimes. Yet, the film suggests that it will, and the audience is hooked in order to see how life could possibly be saved from such a

catastrophe. The film recommends destroying the asteroid before it strikes the earths surface with a nuclear warhead—blowing it to smithereens and rather than being hit by a single huge asteroid, opting to be hit by many small chunks of asteroids. This still sounds plausible to the audience. It is further explained that the warhead needs to be detonated close to the core of the asteroid in order for it to be effective, meaning that the surface of the asteroid needs to be drilled before the warhead can be buried under it's surface. The only person qualified enough to do this, with enough drilling experience to see the job done, is Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), expert oil driller. Though, initially, the concept may sound unbelievable, the writer takes care to make sure that each step in the story's logic at reaching Harry Stamper as it's only possible hero is made carefully and will be plausible in the audience's imagination. This makes Armageddon an exciting roller-coaster of a movie by bringing together a profoundly dangerous obstacle and an unlikely, oil-drilling hero, to make for an unexpected character journey.

One of the story elements that makes the fantastical Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) possible is the conceit of memory erasing, a procedure that will eliminate anything, or anyone, from your past memories if the pain of the memory is too deep to bare. This is where Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) come in—Clementine had erased Joel after their torrid and tempestuous love affair came to an end, and not to be outdone, Joel decides to erase Clementine as well. Despite the fact that literal memory erasing is probably not possible, the writer takes a chance with it anyway hoping that the audience can at least believe in it's plausibility; or that it could be a procedure that seems like it could be possible. It's a conceit just close enough to being beyond the realm of believability that it works—the audience buys it, regardless of all it's impossibilities, and runs with it—because the storyteller told it with conviction and honesty (within the world of the film), especially in relation to how the characters react to it—from trying to understand the procedure (“Is there any risk of brain damage?” “Technically speaking the procedure is brain damage...”) to enduring the procedure (“I want to call it off.”) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film that takes an impossible medical procedure and makes it believable by making it seem apparently plausible to the audience so that the plot can continue.

Plot

Plot, refers to the major events that happen within a story, each dependent upon the event that proceeds and succeeds it—also known as the five plot points, which are connected by eight main sequences. Each of these plot points are structured under the frame-work of three acts—colloquially referred to as beginning, middle, and end. The plot is what propels the character into the story, puts him/

her upon a quest or journey of some kind, and challenges them to achieve their end. Without plot, a character would just be simply existing within the world of the film; nothing noteworthy would occur to the character, nothing eventful would incite them to begin a journey that will force them to undergo a character change.

EXAMPLES:

In Little Miss Sunshine (2006), seven year old Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin) gets accepted to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Now the whole family, Mother Sheryl (Toni Collette), Father Richard (Greg Kinnear), Brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) and Uncle Frank (Steve Carrell) must all travel together from Albuquerque New Mexico to Redondo Beach, California for Olive to compete. However, the trek there will be an arduous one that will test the unity of this chaotic family individually and as a whole, ranging from overcoming car troubles, to dealing with the death of Grandpa, to sudden realizations that Dwayne is color blind. When finally the family does arrive at the beauty pageant, it becomes self-evident that Olive is certainly cut from a different cloth than some of the other young girls competing, and the family discusses the ethics of allowing Olive to participate, when finally it's decided that Olive will attempt to become the new Little Miss Sunshine, especially since it was the late Grandpa Edwin that helped Olive prepare her talent. In Little Miss Sunshine, the plot is the beauty pageant—the story vehicle that propels the characters into a situation they cannot escape from, and must overcome only by accepting the challenge and undergoing personal changes in their character attitudes. Plot is merely the circumstance; the story is the relationship the characters have with the plot.

Quiz Show (1994) – Herbie Stempel (John Tuturro) is the reigning champion of a night-time television quiz show called 'Twenty One'; a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire type game show where two contestants compete to reach a point total of twenty one by answering trivia questions. However, it quickly becomes obvious that the game is rigged—the winner is decided before the end of the

PLOT (CONT’D)

show. Eventually, it's decided that Herbie Stempel isn't a likeable enough winner for the American audience, so he is replaced by Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a university instructor and son of author, poet and Professor Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield). Ultimately, Herbie agrees to take a dive and Charles agrees to answer questions that he already knows the answers to, for money. This continues, seemingly without a hitch despite the animosities of Herbie who feels slighted and bitter after the fact but is unable to get anyone to pay attention to his claims that the show was a fraud, until Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a Harvard graduate lawyer arrives to dig up some dirt on the situation. What results is a tempestuous fallout of deceit, corporate fraud and greed. Ultimately, it falls upon Charles to confess once the pressure and the guilt of deceiving American

viewers, and his family, is too great for him to bare. Charles is the man who receives the greatest criticism for his participation in the scam, but the film begs the question of who, ultimately, was to blame? The corporate millionaires and network presidents? The producers of Twenty One? The contestants? Or even perhaps the American viewers at home. The plot alone—the bare bones of the story that outlines the beginning, middle, and end, allows for the fascinating character dynamics to play out between the triangle set up between Herbie Stempel, Charles Van Doren, and Dick Goodwin.