Minimize the exposition.
No matter how good you are, you’re gonna come to the point in a script where exposition is needed.
In BELOW THE ICE they come up with “the plan” to get themselves out of their predicament. The “show, don’t tell” idea would lead me to just DOING IT. Just show them enact the plan.
But it’s not always that simple. For a lot of reasons, people HAVE TO talk to each other (in any script) in a sort of exposition-y way. This is boring.
People don’t pay $12 to watch people TALK about things on the screen. They could read a book if they wanted a bunch of people talking all the time…
Which leads me to INGLORIOUS BASTERDS where, pretty much, a good portion of the movie is groups of people sitting around tables TALKING. On and on and on. Do these look familiar?
But in IB, it’s pretty damn good because the talking is rife with SUBTEXT.
But if I just started DOING IT — showing the action, the audience would wonder what exactly it is that the people on the screen are DOING and WHY they are doing it the way they are doing it. Thus the exposition.
But, my job as the writer is to make the boring un-boring. Make the mundane exiting.
In BELOW THE ICE this occurred a few times. This was especially painful in light of the long page count (125-ish pages). So what I did was to incorporate the telling as a VOICE OVER to the action that followed.
There were two beats. In the first, our bedraggled crew gathered to talk about ESCAPING. In the next big beat, they put the plan into motion.
What I did was to combine the beats, INTERCUTTING the talkie scene with the action scenes. Only two parts of beat one remained — the beginning and the end.
So it went:
Talkie Intro
Enact the plan (SHOW) with talkie intro continuing as VOICE OVER
Talkie Outro.
By combining them, I was able to make slight trims to the dialogue as it was implied with the ACTIONS that were being shown on-screen.
In this way, I minimized exposition, combined two sequences, and took something that was BORING (talking about the plan) and putting it into motion.
M A R K