Books
On Film-Making – An introduction to the craft of the director
Lessons from a master (Guardian, 20 November 2004) A generous hand (TLS, 14 January 2005) 'Any fool can see that!...' (THES, 2 July 2004) Showing us how it's done (LA Times, 10 April 2005) On Film-Making (Hollywood Reporter, 1 September 2005) On Film-Making (Film Quarterly, Summer 2007) Screenwriting is Filmmaking (Journal of Media Practice, May 2007) On Film-making (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2007)
Lessons from a master
Alexander Mackendrick spent 25 years refining On Film-MakingHis advice is worth taking, says Zoë Green
The Guardian, 20 November 2004
Those breezy "how to" books by cine-tycoons with preternaturally white teeth may be bizarre and contradictory, but they still lure us in by the Amazon cartload. Scarred by advice from the perma-tanned, I opened this volume with a studied nonchalance, awaiting censure. Was I foolish to have hurled so many screenwriting manuals away? Do I know anything yet? There's no clear rite of passage, no civil ceremony for those of us wedded to that wicked, perforated, shiny stuff.
Luckily, Alexander Mackendrick blows the theory merchants out of the picture with a blast of cool Scottish sagacity. His is no thin concept couched in 200 pages of waffle. He doesn't soft soap his audience with advice to lie back and let their inner child do the work. Instead, he offers up the accumulated wisdom of a disciplined and productive career.
Mackendrick made nine features, cutting his teeth in the script department at Ealing before directing The Man in The White Suit and The Ladykillers. Later, he crossed over to Hollywood to tackle Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success. After Ealing's demise, Mackendrick found that he disliked being dependent on deal-makers and in 1969 became dean of the new film school at the California Institute of the Arts. He taught his craft there until the end of his life.
Perhaps the book's richness stems from the fact that Mackendrick did not intend it as his definitive comment on directing. Over the 25 years he spent at Cal Arts he amassed and refined a wealth of handouts and diagrams designed to help his fledgling directors acquire a strong sense of story structure. With this foundation laid, they studied cinematic devices and learnt how to take an idea, process it, and redeliver it to an audience as an effective narrative.
Mackendrick was tough on his students, and they (eventually) appreciated it. "Student films come in three sizes, too long, much too long, and very much too long," he told them on day one. His tactics were clever. Many of his students initially railed against absorbing traditional theories of montage, coverage and three-act structure, saying that "plots are old fashioned". Mackendrick simply asked them to follow his formula as a "temporary exercise" which they would be "perfectly entitled to discard later". Immersed in his boot camp, they found that they were putting words to ideas that they held subconsciously. Mackendrick was ready for them. "As an instructor the only things I can teach are what you already know."
This may be true, but it's overly modest; Mackendrick had developed his ideas over decades of professional directing, so he'd made his mistakes the hard way. His writing style is a wonderful mixture of co-conspiratorial musing and succinct commands. In one paragraph he'll dismiss his magnificent Sweet Smell of Success - "Looking back I cannot say I am surprised at its poor reception" - and then move forward to a string of pithy observations: "Exposition is BORING unless it's in the context of some present dramatic tension or crisis." "PASSIVITY is a capital crime in drama." His students must have loved it; a directing teacher who didn't put them down, yet rapped out opinions like gunfire.
To the meat of the matter: this is an eminently readable volume, but it is something of a challenge too, which is exhilarating. It requires focus. It's like the textbook you wish you'd had earlier; but as Mackendrick says, "Work is the only real training". Whether you use this book to help you reflect on your working practice or see it as an enjoyable insight into the development and execution of a film idea, there's a great deal packed into these pages. Part one covers dramatic construction, with an enjoyable section entitled "Slogans for the Screenwriter's Wall". I am especially fond of "BEWARE OF FLASHBACKS, DREAM SEQUENCES AND VISIONS".
You can then opt to undertake the exercises Mackendrick set his students, or proceed to the comparison of two drafts of a scene from Sweet Smell of Success. After this, there's a fantastic chapter on working with actors, taking the wise and often ignored stance that the director "must have respect for his actors". If this is a given with you, consider the concept of the actor as "meat-puppet" currently at large in some California classrooms.
Part two is more taxing, and covers film grammar. You can expect to emerge from this section with a solid understanding of the development of editing, point of view, axes, eyelines and camera set-ups. It's all beautifully illustrated by Mackendrick. As a bonus there's a chapter called "Drawing Lesson". If you can write legibly, Mackendrick argues that there's no excuse for you to be "wholly inept" in your attempts to sketch the human form. You need to be able to draw your idea of a medium long shot, and he shows you how.
Having limbered up your mind, the proponent of "making a disciplined effort in the development of fertile invention" equably signs out, leaving you raring to get back to work, six figure deal or otherwise. Which, I think, is what he would have wanted.
© The Guardian
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A generous hand
by Stephen MillsTimes Literary Supplement, 14 January 2005
I still remember my first lesson in film with Sandy Mackendrick. He had asked two student actors from the theatre department to improvise a conflict. The issue between them was banal - the boy had driven the girl's car without permission and with insufficient oil in the engine - but their performance was electrifying, unforgettable. Out of thin air they hammered hot sheets of anger. Instead of being intimidated by the famous film director, they were liberated by his attention.
'Sandy' - Alexander - Mackendrick directed nine major features. These included several that have since become cult films: the near-perfect The Ladykillers (1955), the quirky and original The Man in the White Suit (1951), both drawing superb performances from Alec Guinness; and the startling, cynical-before-its-time Sweet Smell of Success (1957), in which the Hollywood heart-throbs Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis are both deeply unpleasant. Sandy respected actors, claiming that he learned far more from them than they ever learned from him. The main job of the director, he maintained, is to give the actor his absolute attention, because a fine performance is always tuned to feedback. When asked how you get an actor to do what you want he replied, "You don't. What you do is try to get the actor to want what you need". He spoke of them as the director's "chief collaborators". Indeed, he recognized that the whole process of film-making is a joint effort, illustrating this with a neat anecdote. A friend once told him that he had met someone who said "Sandy Mackendrick? I know him. He worked on two of my films". It turned out the speaker had been a stand-by carpenter on his sets. And Sandy's reaction? He was "a first-class carpenter because he knew the films were his as much as anyone else's".
In 1969, twenty years after his first big film, Whisky Galore, a cherished Hollywood project on Mary Queen of Scots collapsed and Sandy began a new life. He became Dean of the Film School at the California Institute of the Arts. Alexander Mackendrick's book On Film-Making, seamlessly edited by Paul Cronin, is a compilation of the teaching notes Sandy accrued over the next twenty-four years before his death in 1993. The result is a profound book about the process of directing. It is enriched by countless revealing anecdotes from his own films. For instance, the whole plot of The Ladykillers sprang fully formed as a dream from the writer Bill Rose's head and was told as a funny story around the Ealing studios for weeks before Sandy realized it could be a film. It then transmogrified, equally subconsciously, into a metaphor for the state of post-war Britain: "The tiny figure of Mrs Wilberforce... is plainly a much-diminished Britannia. Her house is in a cul-de- sac. Shabby and cluttered with memories of the days when Britain's navy ruled the world and captains gallantly stayed on the bridge as their ships went down, her house is structurally unsound. Dwarfed by the grim landscape of railway yards and screaming express trains, it is Edwardian England, an anachronism in the contemporary world... that might, against all logic, survive its enemies."
The book benefits enormously from the fact that Sandy structured his thoughts to make them palatable to unruly students. CalArts was new, avant-garde and the only degree-awarding institution in the United States concentrating solely on the '5 arts' - theatre, music, dance, graphic art and film/video. Somewhat incongruously, this inferno was funded by Walt Disney, and amid its hairy, wild-eyed students there was a small cadre of talented animators who were fast-tracked to the Disney studios. Sandy arrived at a time of widespread student riots and a fierce disrespect for authority. Even a decade later, the school was still extreme. At our graduation ceremony in 1980, several girls took their degrees stark naked, one approaching the podium on a tightrope, another leading a leopard on a string. The college Resident was spattered with 'blood' from a fake hand, luridly chopped off by its owner while he was shaking it. The unfortunate dignitary was then offered sanctuary in a hot air balloon which took off, losing him to the rest of the celebrations and marooning him for hours in the Mojave Desert.
It was not an easy place to be a teacher, but no one ever made fun of Sandy Mackendrick. For film schools were scarce and were still supplying the industry with apprenticed talent - and Sandy had professional wisdom to impart. His teaching notes were gold dust. I still have my copies. He had been a graphic designer before Ealing and his pictorial analyses of key sequences from great films - On the Waterfront, Citizen Kane, North by Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt - were delightful as well as revelatory. Many of them are reproduced here. He argued that every film begins and ends "in the mind" of a single viewer. He humorously portrayed this concept as a winged head - what he called "the invisible witness" - that could travel anywhere it needed to be on the set. This freed him from being tied too literally to stale camera moves and positions, guided as he was by what the invisible witness needed to see. The imagined audience was a "co-conspirator". "Direction", he said, "is a matter of emphasis... What a film-director really directs is his audience's attention."
Buried in these lessons are the bones of a dialectic between structure and free form. This argument may largely have exhausted itself now. Most films released in cinemas anywhere in the world avoid experimentation while today's mushroom film schools seem to be absorbed by conceptual theories that have little or no practical application. The industry and what were once its training grounds have grown far apart. This was not the case thirty years ago, when disputes about form and grammar had a certain potency. Sandy's students thought good films had to break rules. He suggested you needed to know what they were before you broke them. For him, film-making was the "craft of story-telling" in pictures, which is not only "un-modemist. It's old. Ancient in fact". He referred to "the pre-verbal language of cinema", by which he meant not a primitive code that predates speech, but an intricate visual one that exists before an idea is expressed in words. The stories themselves are often simple: "who does what with whom to whom and why". But what is unique about cinema, he explained, was that the camera can "photograph thought". Above all, therefore, a director must elicit thoughts from his actors. For the finest performers have an infinite vocabulary of eloquent fleeting glances, a quality that cannot be expected to transfer to the hyperbolic context of the stage. This is why he encouraged his pupils never to say "action" and "cut" too soon. All sorts of tiny mysteries can occur on the faces of the actors before a scene begins and after it ends.
Good films are about reaction as well as action and good screenwriting involves not only the invention of strong dialogue but knowing when words are not the best storytellers. He recounts a memorable incident when he was a trainee at Ealing. A scene had been worked over by two good writers. It involved a young wife and her ex-lover meeting again and the girl refusing the temptation to renew their affair. It was sparkling but far too long. With twenty- five pages of dialogue it had become a play within a play, entirely distracting from the main force of the storyline. He distilled it to a central moment when the lover puts 'their' record on the gramophone and moves to kiss her. She- holds him off with "mm-mm". He asks" "mm-mm?" She repeats "mm-mm", but with tenderness. He accepts gracefully and she, with a wealth of meaning, says "Thank you", the only spoken words left in the scene.
Fernando Arrabal, director of the ground-breaking Viva la muerte, claimed that you could learn everything you needed to know about film-making in ten days. He was a radical, but there is one sense in which Sandy Mackendrick, a traditionalist, might have agreed with him. Ten days might indeed suffice for learning everything you could be taught about film-making. It would, however, take the rest of your life tor perfect its practice. For his epilogue, Paul Cronin has chosen a note Sandy left about the uses of film theory. In it he suggests that when a project is flowing well, technique is often instinctive and intuitive and that no director really works with a head full of grammatical regulations. Rather, grammar comes into its own as a diagnostic tool when problems arise. He always said that successful films are not produced by obeying rules, but that bad films are often the result of breaking them.
© Times Literary Supplement
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'Any fool can see that!...'
Mamoun Hassan salutes a mischievous film teacherTimes Higher Education Supplement, 2 July 2004
Is it possible to teach film-making? When one thinks of the result of spending millions in Europe on screenwriting courses, the answer must be probably not. European cinema is hardly better now than in the days before failed American hacks came to tell us how to do it. They have blocked our minds with Lego constructs and phoney jargon and filled our TV and cinema screens with Hollywood fakes. Then along comes Alexander Mackendrick's On Film-Making, and one has to think again.
The book is the result of failure - the failure of an industry that could not accommodate the talents of one of Britain's greatest directors. The man who made Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success was effectively made redundant when he was at the height of his powers. Luckily for generations of film-makers, he was offered a post as dean of film at the newly founded California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1969. He became a film teacher. He made copious work notes - some with accompanying illustrations and storyboards - and a selection of these has been made for this book by Paul Cronin, who additionally writes a short introduction.
CalArts, like the film industry before it, did not know what they were getting. Mischief-making, which is at the heart of most of Mackendrick's films, was part of his unsettling charm. At Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios, where he was nourished and where he was happiest, he was a disturber of the peace. Balcon defined Ealing self-deprecatingly as a place "where a group of middle-class people made middle-class films", and Mackendrick and fellow iconoclast Robert Hamer (Kind Hearts and Coronets) pretended to go along with the ethos but actually went their own way. Their films are about as cosy as a porcupine. But I suspect that, secretly, Balcon liked that.
CalArts, on the other hand, was a free-wheeling institution, whose culture of doing one's own thing grew out of the protest movements of 1968. Mackendrick fazed them by talking about discipline and endeavour. He was a traditionalist among radicals - just as he was a radical among traditionalists back in the UK. He was at his most comfortable when he did not quite fit in, which is not surprising when you consider that he was born in the US, educated in Scotland (where he trained to be a commercial artist) and worked in England.
When Mackendrick took over at CalArts, there were few film schools. Until then, training had been through ad hoc apprenticeship in the big studios. When that system collapsed, film schools emerged to take over.
In the Soviet bloc, training was long established in the great schools of VGIK in Moscow, FAMU in Prague and Lodz in Poland. They had a theoretical basis for their curriculum; our schools did not even have a curriculum. Mackendrick was inventing the training of directors and screenwriters from zero.
His notes are a way of thinking aloud. He examined the films he admired and looked at his own work to recall and excavate his reasons for doing what he did. The more he dug, the more convinced he was that "film-writing and directing cannot be taught, only learnt, and each man or woman has to learn it through his or her own system of self-education". So, what was he doing? Well, he was influencing their system of self-education.
The question that bedevilled him, and still bedevils us, is this: are there rules? Mackendrick cannot make up his mind. He says yes, he says no, he says absolutely not, and he says maybe there are some rules but forget them if you are doing OK without them. What he does is to raise questions that a fledgling director or film writer should consider. His notes represent the musings and thoughts of a highly intelligent man and a fine film-maker who is preparing for his next film. Realistically, there was no future in that direction, but the tone and urgency of his writing suggest that film-making is a live issue. He both looks back and forwards.
At no point is there a sense of a great man sitting on his laurels. On the contrary, years after Mackendrick had finished his last film, he was still smarting over his mistakes. For instance, when he criticises subplots and how overused they were at Ealing - "All of the characters became essentially cameo roles that couldn't be developed" - he cites his own Whisky Galore! as a bad example.
He writes copiously about Sweet Smell of Success not because "it is an important work. It isn't" but, among other things, because of "the gutter poetry of [Clifford] Odets's melodramatic lines". Mackendrick takes a swipe at himself: "In a number of ways Sweet Smell of Success does seem ludicrously hammy and theatrical."
When he berates students for avoiding problems of dramatic construction by escaping to the "easier" problems of shooting, his comments do not come from a great height but from a fellow toiler. He describes how he focused on the shooting of Sweet Smell of Success because he hoped to conceal fundamental flaws by "fancy footwork of visual effects".
Still, for Mackendrick all the problems and opportunities start and end in the script. One of the most thrilling things in the book is a comparison of the same scene, written by Ernest Lehman and then redrafted by Odets. It is worth the price of the book on its own. If you don't learn about film-writing from this, do something else - become a critic.
Mackendrick may have been essentially modest, or maybe he was a perfectionist, but he was no saint.
The first time I met him he was on a short (and, it turned out, last) visit to the UK to teach at the National Film and Television School. I mentioned that the students and I had analysed some scenes from The Man in the White Suit and were surprised to discover that the film was about the atom bomb. He turned on me and shouted: "Any fool can see that!" I consulted some other fools but, no, there was no mention of the bomb. He confirms in the book that he wanted to make a film about the lack of social and political responsibility of the scientists who developed nuclear fission. He knew he would not get backing for a serious drama, so he collaborated with Roger MacDougall to adapt and transform one of the latter's plays into one of the greatest comedies in British cinema.
He knew enough about the problems of "theme" - the thing that gives unity and meaning to the whole - to tackle it head on. Most film teachers have taken their cue from imported gurus and insist on finding or, more likely, imposing a theme from the start. I agree with Mackendrick that this is destructive theory. The intention may be to focus the writer's attention, but it also hems in his imaginative world, encourages tendentiousness, reduces the scope of dialogue and leads to a rigid and mechanical structure with no give in it. Don't try too hard, he says, to find the theme - it will find you. You need to trust yourself that the theme will emerge organically.
Mackendrick explored the painful post-war period of adjustment through comedy. The audiences loved him; the critics' admiration was more muted. For some reason, comedy has a lower status than drama. But because comedy deals with exaggerated characters and stark differences where power struggles are played out in an obvious way, the choreography of the relationships within the frame is crucial. It requires greater control of mis-en-scéne. The comparative importance of the characters must be clearly defined.
And this is where Mackendrick's initial training at the Glasgow School of Art comes in handy. He uses storyboards to dissect and explain such scenes. His illustrations have a charm all of their own, and they are better than using still frames because he can concentrate two or three shots into one to make his point. It is one of the many pleasures of the book.
Cronin has done us a service in putting together Mackendrick's thoughts and ideas. The book is almost a film school. Mackendrick touches on every aspect of the craft and art of film-making.
And Mackendrick was such fun. An NFTS student saw him coming out of the preview theatre where he had viewed a rough cut of Terence Davies' Madonna and Child. "It's a gay movie, Sandy, isn't it?" Absolutely deadpan, Mackendrick replied, "Not at the moment."
In the end a fine teacher teaches more than a subject. He teaches what he is.
© Times Higher Education Supplement
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Showing us how it's done
by Richard SchickelLos Angeles Times, 10 April 2005
Alexander Mackendrick in On Film-making defines the movie director as “the Invisible Imaginary Ubiquitous Winged Witness” of a film’s creation. By this he means, putting the point less colorfully, that the director is already “a member of the audience for his as yet unmade film – feeling what the future spectators of his work might feel and reacting as they might react.”
The crucial difference between this first critical viewer of a work still in progress and the crowd that will see the finished film in a theater is, obviously, that the director is not passive. He is still capable of shaping (or reshaping) the movie. This quite remarkable book – I know of nothing in print that is quite like it – records in painstaking yet fascinating detail the options available to the director as he prepares to shoot and as he does so.
And who, you may well ask, is Mackendrick to tell us both firmly and modestly how to go about this task? Some background – especially for younger, non-cinephile readers – is in order. American born but raised in Scotland, “Sandy” Mackendrick worked in advertising, drifted into filmmaking for the British government during World War II, started writing scripts after the war and then began directing. He was a key creator of the beloved Ealing Studios comic tradition (Tight Little Island, The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers) before coming to America, where he made the immortally savage Sweet Smell of Success.
In the ‘60s, his career stalled, doubtless because he was one of those craftsmen who preferred the warmth and continuity of the studio system to the uncertainties of selling his projects on the open market. He retreated into (or perhaps one should say, embraced) teaching. He became dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts in 1969, two years before the first students arrived. He continued teaching at CalArts for 25 years. His widow (Mackendrick died in 1993, at 81) believes that in teaching he found his true métier, and On Film-making is a sampling of the handouts, often illustrated by his own sketches, that he presented to students over the years.
Using these papers, as coherently edited by Paul Cronin, the attentive student could, I think, make quite a respectable film – well-structured and technically proficient. To make a movie as good or better than Mackendrick’s best, all he would have to supply would be talent, or in a best-case scenario, genius, neither of which, as Mackendrick well knew, can be taught. One foresees that this book will have a long and useful life in film schools. As for the rest of us, members of the general audience, not much interested in technique, we too can profit from On Film-making. For the book has the salutary effect of demystifying the art of film direction.
It is, Mackendrick insists, an interpretive rather than a creative art. The job, as he refreshingly saw it, is to place a sensitive and sensible version of a script – in the creation of which the director will have participated to a large degree (whether or not he is a credited writer) – before the public. The great difference between him and, say, a concert pianist, is that in so doing he has to enlist large and often-enough recalcitrant forces in his vision. There are the actors, of course, all of whom have their needs and insecurities. Beyond them he also has a great deal of machinery and its operators to mobilize – the camera, with its infinite variety of lenses and possible placements, the best boy with his lights, the editor at his bench, the composer at his piano, the foley artists on their stage, the sound mixers at their consoles. Looking at this mess of conflicting agendas from the outside, most people assume that the director must have the heart of a lion and the soul of a lion-tamer. How else could he possibly get all those people and all that stuff marching to the beat he alone is hearing in his head?
This impression has been enhanced, over the last 40 years, by the dominance of the auteur theory in film criticism and, indeed, in film chat. Bookstores are full of biographies and book-length interviews with directors, and magazines are forever profiling them as their new pictures are released. And since it is difficult and often boring to the common reader to explain why, say, a tracking shot might serve a scene better than a pan, or why the director chose to cover a scene in a single shot rather than a series of cuts (or vice versa), these books and articles tend toward the vague – and occasionally the grandiose. Which, of course, further enhances the air of mystery surrounding the auteur.
Mackendrick will have none of that. There is nothing leonine about the way he discusses his craft. He came up in the day when directors were still – with a few exceptions – regarded more as construction crew foremen than as artists of high and singular vision. Moreover, he was a Scotsman, a breed known for their practical engineering skills. In our fictions, whether they be about steamships or spaceships, it is usually someone called Scotty, portly and speaking in a reassuring burr, who is in charge of the engine room, keeping his pistons polished and supplying warp speed as needed.
Such men know their blueprints so well that they are translated into instinct, and so it was with Mackendrick. His habit, he says, was to laboriously copy his scripts out by hand to gain an intimate, tactile sense of them. And something like two-thirds of this book is devoted not to advice on shooting but to advice on shaping the director's blueprint, the script. He offers a wonderful chapter on how Clifford Odets, hired to rewrite the ailing Ernest Lehman’s early draft of Sweet Smell of Success would deliberately overwrite the scenes, including everything – “the good, the bad, the indifferent” – as he searched for their brief, but enriched, essence.
This was very much to Mackendrick’s taste, for there is something slightly paradoxical about his concern for script. He was familiar with the dramatic theorists, from Aristotle to William Archer; he drew examples to buttress his arguments from a huge range of films, from North by Northwest to The Bicycle Thief; but he believed in the primacy of images. Early in his career, he made his screenwriting reputation by editing down a 12-page scene to four lines of dialogue, three of which were sub-verbal “Mm-mms.” He also took great pride in the fact that he and screenwriter William Rose were able to make the characters and setting of The Ladykillers into a metaphor for postwar England (brutalized working class, disillusioned upper class, collapsed intellectual community) without once discussing these matters on screen (or, it seems, between themselves). In short, for all his literacy, and for all film’s capacity to “reproduce reams of dialogue,” he believed cinema to be “a pre-verbal” (as opposed to a nonverbal) medium, and he gives many instructive examples of how meaning can be fully conveyed through action, not dialogue, shortening running time and enlivening our visual pleasure.
I don’t mean to imply that Mackendrick’s eye was narrowly focused on dialogue and structure. For instance, a student once asked him how a director gets an actor to do what he needs him to do. His reply: “You don’t. What you try to do is get the actor to want what you need.” And here he is on editing: “Once the audience understands what is about to happen, when the impulse to act is clear, it’s time to make your cut.”
Simple – when you say it simply. Not so easy, when ideas of your own brilliance and self-importance obscure the point. Yes, I suppose On Film-making – already available in England, due here shortly – is primarily a textbook for the aspiring auteur. But reading it will make you a more alert and intelligently responsive moviegoer – and me a better reviewer. Widely taken to heart, it might even make movies a little bit better too.
© Los Angeles Times
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On Film-Making
by Gregory McNameeHollywood Reporter, 1 September 2005
Is art a thing of nature or of nurture? That is to say, can someone without that hard-to-define thing, the soul of an artist, be taught to make art?
Alexander Mackendrick thought not, at least as applied to filmmaking. Can it be taught? "Absolutely not, no more than anything else that is an 'art' can be taught," he said. And then, as if remembering that he had signed on at CalArts to do just that, he added, "On the other hand, it may just be possible to call to the attention of the beginner the usages of the 'language' of cinema that have so far developed (and continue to evolve)."
A modest goal, that, pointing out to a green student that there are such things as visual grammar and stylistic conventions and offering useful rules of thumb to ease the way. Yet his quarter-century of teaching was anything but modest, and he had great expectations of his students. The lecture notes and other documents that film scholar Paul Cronin gathers in this readable, helpful book show that, above all else, making a film is hard work, requiring the endless refinement of skills and the labor of many hands -- and that if it is to be done well making a film benefits from the recognition that others have gone before, screenplay by screenplay, movie by movie.
Thus, much of On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director, concerns how others have wrestled words, images and ideas onto film, with some of the usual suspects - particularly Orson Welles - standing as examples. Some of the best parts of the book show Mackendrick at work dissecting such classics as Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront and The Third Man, noting camera coverage here, lighting there, an actor's movements there and, everywhere, the director's role in putting things together.
Mackendrick makes a refreshingly clear case for the adage that though there are only a few stories in the world to tell, there are an infinite number of ways to tell them. He notes that Cinderella, The Bicycle Thief and Hamlet follow much the same fairy-tale conventions, as if to point out that, despite a young filmmaker's desire to put a new spin on things, the classic techniques of storytelling work. There's no hifalutin theory in such discoveries, for Mackendrick mistrusts theory and aims for the practical lesson always: "Dramatic structure is, you might say, the craft of keeping an audience excited, of avoiding boredom in your listeners."
In his analyses, Mackendrick is unsparing of what he perceives to be mistakes, not least his own; though many critics and buffs regard his Sweet Smell of Success (1957) as a classic, he writes, "I cannot recommend the film for student study on aesthetic grounds." He does allow that the film has some virtues, especially in the scene construction. But so, too, he writes, does the 1954 science-fiction film Them! - featuring atomic mutant ants and chin-stroking scientists - from which he draws another lesson: "A rule of the genre seems to be that we are allowed only one major Incredible Thing. Given this, everything else will, surprisingly enough, seem to be logical (if wholly improbable)."
Mackendrick, who also directed such films as The Man in the White Suit (1951) and A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), prided himself on one skill in particular: an ability to get to the essential. He recounts how, early in his career, he distilled 25 pages of dialogue into "three non-verbal noises and a single word," and he urges his students to be similarly devoted to economy, grumbling that "screenplays come in three sizes: long, too long and much too long."
As, a crusty sort might complain, they continue to do today. Mackendrick's book holds ample lessons for students, practitioners and filmgoers alike, and it's a pleasingly thorough education.
© The Hollywood Reporter
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On Film-Making
By Vincent LoBruttoFilm Quarterly, Summer 2007
It is a rare volume that attempts to address film directing as a profession. There are how-to guides such as Directing Film Techniques and Aesthetics by Michael Rabiger and Directing for Film and Television: A Guide to the Craft by Christopher Lukas, which are general texts written by little-known practitioners. When the writer is an acclaimed film director, as in the case of King Vidor: On Film Making, Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, or On Filmmaking by Edward Dmytryk, they draw on experience culled from a body of work known to, and respected by, the reader. The Film-Maker's Art by Haig P. Manoogian is of great interest because the legendary NYU professor taught so many now prominent filmmakers, notably Martin Scorsese.
Both teacher and practitioner, Alexander Mackendrick directed The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Ladykillers (1955) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), subsequently becoming the Dean of the film department at the California Institute of the Arts after his retirement, in 1969, as a filmmaker. At CalArts, Mackendrick wrote hundreds of pages of class notes and sketches that formed his curriculum and encapsulated his philosophy on the practical teaching of his craft. Those texts are adroitly compiled here by Paul Cronin, himself a film scholar and maker. The collection begins with a foreword from Scorsese, who explains that after only one hundred years there is little consensus concerning a syllabus for the training of a film director. After Scorsese applauds Mackendrick’s pioneering work in the field, Cronin provides a lengthy introduction which covers background and the essential tenets of teachings that stress practice over theory. Cronin pored over all the handouts and notes Mackendrick produced during his academic career before condensing them into a single volume divided into two categories: dramatic construction (the creation of a screen story) and film grammar (the rules and properties behind motion-picture production). Cronin proves himself as meticulous as his subject: his annotations, which are printed in the margins, are excellent and, at the beginning of the book, veritably encyclopedic. Mackendrick is especially vigorous on the topic of cinematic dramatic construction. He believed a film story should utilize limited dialogue to create meaning between the words. He judged storytelling by the highest standards, often citing the Ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, or Ibsen. Presenting himself as a classicist, Mackendrick challenged his students to learn the fundamentals of their art and craft and to discover their own future form. This position would be admirable at any point of time but was critical during the essential cinematic decades of the 1960s and 70s when filmmakers were fueled with passionate ideas but often lacked formal categories for their visions. Before the wave of script gurus (Syd Field, Robert McKee, and Linda Seeger), Mackendrick was exploring the writing process by suggesting the student create index cards indicating a simple account of the principal action, outlines as short as four pages or as long as fifty pages, charts of the chain of narrative events, step outlines of an existing film to deconstruct its architecture. And all this planning needed to be bolstered by constant rewriting.
In a series of lectures, the tenets of narrative writing are explored: activity versus action, exposition, dramatic irony, plausibility, structure, suspension of disbelief, creation of subplots, and poetics. A deconstruction of the screenplay for The Third Man (1949) includes a character relationship map that analyzes motivation, state of mind, emotions, and personal agendas. A lengthy section is dedicated to the story construction of Sweet Smell of Success in which Mackendrick explains his working process including the contributions of Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, character breakdowns, and an in-depth dissection of several key scenes following pages from the original screenplay.
The second section is a practical examination of film grammar that connects content with form. Mackendrick presents the rules of film direction with respect for dramatic interpretation, communication with the viewer, and self expression. Continuing his high-ground approach, Mackendrick references the teachings of Lev Kuleshov, Karel Reisz and the application of the moving camera of Alfred Hitchcock. Pacing is examined with a sample script page, a step-by-step list of the actions, analysis of the dramatic rhythm, then an annotated storyboard that solves the problem of narrative compression by application of proper shot size, angle, blocking, and camera movement. Directorial point of view and maintaining continuity through understanding the geometry of camera placement and framing is taught with detailed line drawings and intricate notation. Several overhead schematic illustrations clearly demonstrate the relationship of the camera to its subject in several different two-character scene circumstances. Much attention is given to the art and mechanics of covering a scene during production so it can be properly edited. The iconic and deeply emotional taxi scene between Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger from On the Waterfront (1954) is a valuable example accompanied by
Mackendrick’s insights, drawings, and charts. Mackendrick’s high regard for Citizen Kane (1941) is evident at the conclusion of On Film-making in which he uses Susan Alexander Kane’s attempted suicide scene to bring together all his lessons on cinematic techniques and concepts emphasizing the director- cinematographer relationship of Orson Welles and Gregg Toland which produced it. This is followed by a short epilogue concerning Mackendrick’s on-the-job training and the hope his instruction contained within On Film-making will empower the reader with the basics of film directing. The rest, he states, is down to talent and hard work.
The lessons in On Film-making are both dated and timeless. The book’s strength is in Mackendrick’s ability to demystify. The guiding principles of filmmaking don’t really change but it must be said that Mackendrick’s literary and movie examples are of their time. But readers looking to make Fight Club (1999) or Memento (2000) might remember that students of drawing in Europe once had to spend hours making meticulous pencil renderings of a white napkin dropped in front of their drawing-table by their teacher. On Film-making is imbued with the same ethos of dedication and craftsmanship. Those who study Mackendrick’s old-school approach could, with time and practice, become the next David Fincher or Christopher Nolan.
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Screenwriting is Filmmaking
by Brian Dunnigan
Journal of Media Practice, May 2007
How do you teach filmmaking and writing? What traditions do you draw on? Which methodologies do you apply? Which books are useful guides? These are constant questions for all those involved in film education with a clear consensus gathered around the importance of practice and process. Any good course will recognize the importance of developing a critical dialogue with the person as well as the project: and that this is best done through practical work, the encouragement of self-reflection and a theoretical clarity that inspires both. You have to have something to say, a story to tell – then you can discover how to shape the material in a cinematic way that attracts an audience.
Good teachers offer hints, clues, insights that inspire this imaginative self-discovery rather than imposing a set of rules or paradigms. Visiting practitioners can illuminate their differing approaches to work-in-progress and the numerous individuals and decisions involved in the outcome. While there are principles of characterisation and dramatic construction that can be usefully studied – reading different drafts of screenplays, analysing films made from these screenplays and discovering for yourself through practice are more useful ways of developing screenwriting skills than reading books about how to write. As Mark Twain explained, ‘Writing is the application of the seat of the pants to the chair.’ And perhaps if he were alive today he might add that screenwriting is not writing but filmmaking. The screenplay is not a literary artefact but the dream of a film on the page, on the borderline of directing and performance, rediscovered in the cutting room. It follows that screenwriting should be seen as part of a filmmaking process and the best books on screenwriting should reflect both the dramatic tradition and the distinctive way that film creates meaning. This is precisely the approach taken by a recently published book appropriately titled On Filmmaking by the director Alexander Mackendrick.
Mackendrick was a Scottish/American filmmaker who worked at Ealing during its heyday and later on in Hollywood. Among the many outstanding films he worked on were The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success. He retired in 1969 and for the next twenty-five years taught his craft at the California Institute of the Arts. The book is a clear and comprehensive account of his teachings at CalArts based on his experience as a practicing filmmaker at the highest level and his wide-ranging knowledge of the literary, theatrical and intellectual tradition he worked within. He has an old story to telll, of exposition and turning points, beginnings and endings, reversals and discoveries, but the writing is always lucid, intelligent and laced with an insider knowledge of film technique backed up by illuminating case studies and useful exercises.
The important point is that screenwriting is assumed to be part of the process of filmmaking and the writer as an important part of that process whose more skilful practitioners understand the language of image and sound, action and gesture, the juxtaposition of shots. There are no secret formulae or reductive models on offer but instead suggestions for study and practice, analysis of scene structure, discussions of elliptical film grammar: highlighting narrative and visual devices specific to cinema that can be learned and applied in the writing of screenplays. Mackendrick believes a screenwriter should understand the technical aspects of filmmaking and especially the work of the actor, director and editor: how they translate the writer’s subtext to the screen. He is very good on the language and the expressive power of cinema: how it differs from theatrical and literary ways of storytelling: the importance of image and action, the use of sound and light, framing and point of view, the subtext of looks and glances where the real action is.
The modest tone throughout suggests a teacher more interested in educare (to draw out) rather than inculcare (to tread down) and provides a healthy antidote to the books written by the self-appointed screenwriting gurus of step plans and structural paradigms whose hectoring prose and engineering diagrams suggests a new revelation is at hand or that science has finally broken the code of story. Mackendrick for his part emphasises the importance of working from the inside out, beginning with the writer rather than the guru: character and dramatic situation over plot. He shows how developing characterisation through non-verbal behaviour is the key to good cinematic storytelling. The writer should work closely with the director, and when developing the story the need to have some plan or structure should be balanced by improvisation. Planning and improvisation rely on each other and are equally important: ‘a writer should be both conscious and unconscious of structure when at work.’
If there is a limitation to the book it is in Mackendrick’s conservative insistence on the storytelling tradition and his lack of interest in alternative approaches to dramatic construction and filmmaking. The references to films are of classic work from forty or fifty years ago and he has a self-confessed resistance to modernist experiments with film form. But that’s a minor caveat in a book that offers clear lessons for future iconoclasts and includes Martin Scorsese and David Mamet amongst its admirers.
An indispensable addition to any screenwriting or filmmaker’s library, this is a book designed to make you think and argue and explore further, full of useful, practical insights. As a character in a recent novel by Philip Roth comments, ‘Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.’
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On Film-making
by David Ehrenstein
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2007
“It is a film I have mixed feelings about today, and I am writing about it here to illustrate some of the problems in the structure of a screenplay, not because I mean to claim that it is an important work. It isn’t.” The film under discussion is Sweet Smell of Success, a ferocious dissection of show business ruthlessness and fourth estate mendacity, written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, and directed by the author of the above caveat, Alexander Mackendrick. When Sweet Smell of Success was first released, its iconoclastic attitude toward the entertainment industry, and harshly anti-romantic style toward life in general, exemplified by a title dripping with bitter irony, coupled with the fact that its unsavory leading characters were played by two of Hollywood’s biggest commercial stars – Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis – confused ‘mainstream’ critics and repelled ‘popular’ audiences. Yet in the wake of this manifest failure, success rose phoenix-like in the form of a quirky acquire ‘cult’ status – sharply underscored in Barry Levinson’s 1982 comedy-drama Diner set in 1959 Baltimore, where I Vitelloni-like youths quote lines from the film as if it were a sacred text. That was just the beginning of Mackendrick’s renaissance as a film-maker of note. For since then, Sweet Smell of Success has gone from mere ‘cult’ to absolute ‘classic’ status – memorialized by being turned into a Broadway musical in 2004. So what, then, was Alexander Mackendrick’s problem?
Well, one might say ‘problems.’ For while Sweet Smell of Success ranks as one of that very special group of films such as Whiskey Galore!, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers that made Mackendrick’s fame, earning him a very particular place of honor in the history of the cinema, the man himself had no use for accepted standards of achievement, be they ‘cult’ or ‘mainstream.’ He had his own ideas, and he stuck to them with more than mere resolve in the course of ‘three’ careers – the first with Britain’s fabled Ealing studios, the second in Hollywood in the wake of the studio era, and the third as a teacher of the director’s craft at CalArts in Valencia, California. It’s from that third career that On Film-making, an exemplary selection of Mackendrick’s lectures and notes, has been culled. And its beating heart is an examination of the film towards which Mackendrick felt so ambivalent.
“[Sweet Smell of Success] was much too costly,” Mackendrick recalls, “chiefly because it was made under rather chaotic circumstances: Odets had so badly underestimated the time he would need for revisions of Lehman’s script that I had to start shooting while he was still working on scenes to come, and on a couple of occasions filming had to be halted.” In other words, Mackendrick not only disdains the notion of ultimate directorial power promulgated by the ‘politique des auteurs,’ but he isn’t about to accept credit for himself where he feels it isn’t due. This becoming modesty sits oddly amidst a form of artistic expression legendarily dominated by raging egos (coupled with widely varying degrees of talent), as exemplified by such diverse artists as Erich von Stroheim, Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles and Michael Cimino.
‘Sandy’ Mackendrick (1912-1993) was American-born but Scotland raised. A student of the Glasgow School of Fine Arts, he got his start in commercial advertising before beginning work in film as an animator, then a director of documentary short subjects, and finally a screenwriter. In a sense this was his principle craft, as he consistently underscores in his lectures the notion that screenplays must be rewritten and rewritten until they finally achieve their ultimate brilliance. Clearly, Mackendrick saw his job as a director as one of an organizer, bringing together the efforts of many. This was undoubtedly the reason for his success at Ealing Studios, a cooperative enterprise if there ever was one, in which producers, directors, actors and screenwriters contributed to the creation of works that bear an overall ‘stamp’ and attitude, yet at the same time can be broken down in terms of very individual contributions.
Theoretically, this would have made him an ideal Hollywood craftsman like George Cukor or Charles Walters. Unfortunately, he arrived on the American scene just as the studio system was breaking up. One the one hand this resulted in the sort of newfound freedom that made Sweet Smell of Success possible. On the other the new Hollywood lacked the organizational solidity he’d grown accustomed to at Ealing. Moreover, there was no career follow-through. Mackendrick’s subsequent projects, just as Sammy Going South and A High Wind in Jamaica were far from routine, yet neither captured press or public fire. His last film, the California surfer-culture comedy Don’t Make Waves reunited him with Tony Curtis, but wasn’t equipped to prove the sort of quasi-allegorical incisiveness found in The Ladykillers – though it did inspire ‘Malibu Barbie,’ named after the character played by Curtis’ soon-to-be-doomed co-star in the film, Sharon Tate. After trying and failing to get his interpretation of the story of Mary Queen of Scots off the ground, Mackendrick threw in the towel on Hollywood. Yet as this volume shows, at a certain level he never stopped being a film-maker, bringing to his students everything he’d learned – not simply as theory, but as actual practice.
Anyone looking for tips on focal length, camera technique, special effects, or even editing nuts and bolts won’t find them in this volume. Rather it’s a work of literature that’s largely ‘about’ literature – principally the stuff of drama. Mackendrick makes this clear in his examination of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, arguing that it’s not simply a great piece of film-making, but that the film’s success is a result of the fact that Graham Greene wrote its script first in story form, before reconceiveing it in terms of dialogue and specified scenes. This, for Mackendrick, is the essence of the film-making process. And that’s because film-making for Mackendrick is centered on a dramatic narrative. One is almost tempted to say conventional dramatic narrative, were it not for the fact that this concept has been largely abandoned in recent years in favor of special effects – chiefly explosions. No characters are necessary with works that consist of blowing things up.
Mackendrick, by contrast, is fascinated by character and incident, examining in one passage how the familiar tale of the judgment of King Solomon can be dramatized effectively through selection and emphasis, and in another how the otherwise very different stories of Cinderella, Hamlet and Vittoria De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief share complimentary character and dramatic needs. This is part and parcel of what Mackendrick means when he says of Sweet Smell of Success, “what Clifford Odets did was dismantle” the script that Ernest Lehman wrote – which largely consisted of dialogue that could have been performed on a stage.
Framing it within a real work of dark city streets, glamorous nightclubs and seedy offices, Odets helped Mackendrick create a work that was far more than the sum of its otherwise disparate parts. In recasting a series of exchanges between the film’s principle characters and a trio of minor ones utilized in one key nightclub scene, where the brutal Hunsecker advises a corrupt politician to drop both his girlfriend and his press agent, Mackendrick declares “marvelous screen writing” is the way Odets brought to vivid life what was only of “potential” interest in Lehman. And it is why, Mackendrick’s misgivings to the contrary, that the film and the dedication of its director, has and will continue to be a film directing touchstone. On Film-making only serves to emphasize that fact, putting practice back into theory at the service of practice yet to come.
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