You’ve been changed by it. Dramatically. You’ve felt its force and it has molded you. It has moved mountains and created oceans. It has allowed relationships to form, lovers to connect and chasms to form. It is invisible, yet always present. It is harsh and unforgiving. It stands still. “It” is Time. As a writer, time is an element of the stories you tell. Stories advance according to compelling timeframes. Characters grow and develop over time. Plots unfold. You get the picture.
As a screenwriter, you have at your command Story Time–the order in which the plot unfolds through the passage of time (toward the future) and through flashback (reverting to the past). You have the power to write backwards and show what happened before. You have the power to fast-forward back to the present, or even through to the distant future. These treatments of time occur in your screenplay on the backdrop of the Running Time of the movie. The confluence of Story Time and Running Time creates a complex fabric on which your characters change and your action develops. These two planes of time co-mingle in a way that can be powerfully compelling, or dastardly confusing.
To better understand how these two planes of time–Story Time and Running Time–can compel your story (or damn it to failure), an analysis of the treatment of time as a story-telling element will provide a platform from which to use the element of time to your script’s advantage. Let’s dig in.
Crash
2004
Written and directed by Paul Haggis
This project started because I felt I didn’t write flashback well. I didn’t have a handle on the components that were necessary to keep the story intact as time moved from the present to the past. In an attempt to learn how other writers handled this complexity in storytelling, I began watching movies and analyzing the points in the script at which time changed direction. Specifically, when the story began, I deemed that moment in time The Starting Point of Now. The next moment would inevitably be a movement into the future, advancing positively beyond The Starting Point of Now.
In movies that use flashback as an element of story structure, there is a moment in the Running Time of the movie when time changes direction, changing from a forward progression of time to a point in time that is in the past. I deemed this The Flashback Point. From the Flashback Point, time again began traveling toward the future we had just left. Some movies repeat this sequence; some don’t.
I began to play with these data (The Starting Point of Now, time moving into the future, The Flashback Point, and then what happens with time after that) and found that I could represent these changes in the treatment of time on a simple line graph. I watched Crash (2004, written by Paul Haggis) and graphed the treatment of time.
The time signature graph for Crash illustrates how the X-Y graph works. The movie starts at the Starting Point of Now, the zero value on the Y-axis (story time) and the zero minute on the X-axis (running time). The story advances into the future for seven minutes then a flashback draws the plot back in time. By normalizing the story time increments (the plot advanced approximately ninety minutes into the future then flashed-back an entire day, so these elements are normalized to indicate appropriate time ratios). Next, the story begins traveling through time back to the Starting Point, crosses that line, then crosses the Flashback Point and finishes a few moments after the Flashback Point.
Time signature chart © 2015 Jen Whiting
Michael Clayton
2007
by Tony Gilroy
As in the Paul Haggis films Crash and The Next Three Days, this film's graph shows a brief introduction of the story moving into the future followed by a deep flashback that begins the storytelling again from some significant point in the past. The bulk of the movie is set in the past, moving through time to get back to–and cross–the Starting Point and then the Flashback Point, with the film eventually ending a brief time beyond where the story was suspended when the flashback occurred.
This method of storytelling in the past for the majority of a film’s running time, with a set-up and a wrap-up above the Starting Point on the graph is distinct, and more than merely the use of flashback. It is a form of story, a structure that I saw emerging on the graphs each night as I was watching for patterns.
Admission
2013
by Karen Croner
As I watched more movies with an eye toward time signatures, another pattern of flashback began to emerge. Yes, flashback was used as the story form itself, as in the Haggis and Gilroy films mentioned above. Flashback was also used to depict and explain character background, as in Admission (2013, written by Karen Croner). This form of flashback typically happens in Act Two, and is used in place of exposition to explain events that have happened in a character’s past that are contributing to the troubles he is facing. This supports Robert McKee’s explanation of traditional flashback as “another form of exposition” in his book, Story. Notice how the flashback is used in Act Two. It explains the presence of the protagonist’s son, from a previous chapter of her life.
The King's Speech
2010
by David Seidler
In The King’s Speech (2010, written by David Seidler) flashback again references the protagonist in an earlier chapter of his life, as he is being formed by his father.
Ordinary People
1980
by Alvin Sargent
Alvin Sargent’s Ordinary People uses eight flashback points, spread throughout the movie, with each set of flashback scenes lasting no more than a handful of seconds. The entire story relies upon the audience following the linear progression of time and understanding that the present-day story is actually only a reaction to the past. The flashback points are the true plot, and the story could nearly stand on the flashbacks alone. Although this flashback is explanatory in nature, it acts as another character–one that holds the key to the family’s development–and cannot be ignored.
This recognition of the two distinct forms of flashback, one which is a referential, character-explaining scene that interrupts the story progression in place of exposition; the other form is a true alternate story structure that replaces the progression of the story in a linear-time telling. Ordinary People, however, uses flashback as a necessary agent in the script and, even though it is ten distinct flashback points, it could be viewed as a cousin of the form of flashback that brings the audience into the past and then returns them to the starting point, deftly.
Could this be the first instance of the style of flashback where the bulk of the story occurs below the "Starting Point of Now" line?
© 2015 Jen Whiting.
