When to Establish. When to Explore.

...a small simple lesson I had to relearn through a test-screening...

If you’ve been reading this substack, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been pretty focused on my first film as a writer-director. Formerly called National Anthem, the newly-titled Americana will debut next week at SXSW. It stars Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey, Eric Dane, Zahn McClarnon, Simon Rex, Gavin Maddox Bergman, Toby Huss, Harriet Sansom Harris, Derek Hinkey, and Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, among others.

A couple weeks ago, we did a test screening for about 270 members of the general public to see how it played. The good news is that the movie went over great. But I did learn that I could streamline the opening forty minutes more than I realized going in. In fact, after the screening, I’ve trimmed about twelve minutes from the total runtime, with most of those lifts occurring in the opening sections of the film. It’s now a lean, mean 1 hour, 40 minute movie (not counting credits).

There’s nothing quite like the experience of sitting among hundreds of people who don’t know you and who are watching something you made for the first time. You can feel it when people are leaning in, engaged. You can hear it when people are connected to every moment, every line. And you can also feel it when people lose that connection. And when they get it back.

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One of my personal screenwriting principles:

“Every scene is about one thing. A scene about two equal things will come across as a scene about nothing. Other shit can happen in a scene, but it has to have one dramatic goal and drive.”

When I wrote this principle — and like all of my principles, these are simply my notes to myself — I was thinking dramatically within a story. That is, my suspicion that only one dramatic or comedic thing can be happening at a time.

The inspiration for this principle was partially from my own trial-and-error. Over and over, I’d find myself trying to cram two different emotions or dramatic moments in a scene in a chase after “complexity.” And it’d always end up unsatisfying. Inevitably, scenes and situation would play so much better if I parceled things out, giving each moment or emotion its own singular platform.

But I also remember writing this principle down after watching an episode of a prestigious HBO crime procedural. In that episode, a main investigator character received word that another main character was killed. He discussed this loss with a different main character and they were sad. Then the main investigator opened up a file of evidence and had an epiphany that solved that season’s big mystery.

All in the same scene!

It was almost bewildering. More damning, it was also emotionally inert: their reactions to the death of a main character (a friend of the investigator) felt rushed through and muted by the investigator immediately turning to the evidence file. Likewise, the epiphany that cracked open the case felt inauthentic and forced because it arrived so quickly on the heels of this sad news.

I suspect even doing something as simple as cutting away to some other scene between the “sad news” and “eureka!” halves of this mega-scene would’ve allowed each half of that mega-scene to be felt more thoroughly. But as it was, the two halves canceled each other out.

The scene was trying to do about three momentous things at once and though I was rooting for the story to work, I felt nothing but confusion.

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Okay, so that’s drama.

But I also think my little “each scene is about one thing” principle can be applied on a meta-structural level as well.

Like this: a scene can either be about establishing some key element of the story, or it can be about exploring a key element of the story that’s already been established.

Or it can be about altering it. Or (perhaps) explaining it. (Though explanations tend to be boring.) Or something else. You get it.

The point is, a scene can function in a lot of ways. But it should probably only do that specific function.

I suspect that most of the time, a scene will work best if it’s focusing on just establishing some key element, or just exploring it, or just altering it.

(That said, it’s probably exactly the opposite when it comes to explaining some story element: an explaining scene probably needs to also be doing something else.)

If you’re establishing some feature of a character’s personality or temperament, don’t also try to explore some other part of their personality.

My suspicion: emotional and dramatic complexity doesn’t arrive by mixing different emotions or dramatic beats together at the same time, but by precisely staging and juxtaposing superbly rendered singular emotions and dramatic beats.

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So, the test screening.

Americana is a pretty weird ensemble rural crime film that’s really my attempt to wrangle with the Western. It’s told in chapters from multiple points of view, with just a bit of non-linearity. So it’s a bit of an ask, especially at the start as a viewer is trying to figure out the norms of this story. Is this all one story? Are these people connected? If so, how?

Part of the opening section’s pacing issue, I think, was that I was compounding the difficulty of this orientation period by indulging in images and moments that — while thematically important — didn’t directly connect with the storytelling function of each opening scene.

For example: one of the main characters is a white kid named Cal who is growing up in a pretty abusive single-wide trailer in western South Dakota.

Western imagery is everywhere. He watches old Westerns on TV at home. But he doesn’t identify with the cowboys in these old Westerns, but rather with the Native Americans. Or more precisely, with the outdated Hollywood version of them. To the discomfort of everyone around him.

That’s a fairly complicated character to establish. Some of this establishment is done non-verbally, simply through Cal’s environment: various “cowboy & Indian” keepsakes and images, competing messages about the West, etc. Hurray cinema!

But after the test screening, I realized that I was cramming in too many shots and moments and images into Cal’s introduction.

I was exploring his world in these opening minutes when I should have been merely establishing it and then moving on with the story.

The key things to establish right away for Cal’s part of the story were:

1) Cal’s unhappy home existence,
2) his cultural landscape, dominated by Western imagery,
3) his uncomfortable and naive identification with the underdog half of the old “Cowboys vs Indians” Western trope.

In my original cut, I established these elements in the opening five minutes, but I also showed:

1) Cal finding an arrow in a dead deer in a field,
2) Cal washing off the arrow under a cool graffiti image of a Native American warrior that our location scout found on the side of an abandoned gas station,
3) Cal finding a discarded bow in a rural dumpsite.

These were all pretty cool thematic images, buttressing a never-verbalized idea that I still want to hover over the film: all of these characters have inherited debris from prior Western stories and are trying to figure out what to do with it in the new West.

These three moments (deer & arrow, washing arrow under graffiti, finding bow) all also play into the plot: Cal will end up using this discarded bow as a weapon.

But these moments ultimately still had to go.

The imagery that I did keep — Cal in the trailer watching Westerns as the adults argue & act violently, Cal walking to a gas station to buy a Native American headband, Cal identifying with the outdated American Indian character types on his TV — clearly established the key storytelling elements.

While thematically cool and plot related, finding the arrow in the deer and washing it off under the graffiti and finding the bow in the dump site didn’t establish anything new.

Just taking this extraneous imagery out — maybe a minute and a half of screentime —I could feel the opening of the film move with more confidence and assurance. We got into the story quicker. The moments that remained landed with more precision and weight.

I believe it’s Martin Scorsese who said something akin to “directing is a matter of deciding what to keep in the frame and what to keep out of the frame.”

Screenwriting is the exact same thing, except it’s a matter of deciding what to keep in the scene and what to keep out of the scene. More is rarely better.

A shot usually doesn’t get better by cramming more and more information into it. Likewise with scenes and moments.

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In less than two weeks, I’ll be sitting with strangers once again watching this strange film I wrote and directed. I’m excited to see what they feel.

I’ll also be venturing into somewhat uncharted territory: talking publicly about this film. (Perhaps naively, I consider this substack as a sort of sharing amongst friends and acquaintances.)

For SXSW, I was asked to write a director’s statement. Here’s what I managed:

Americana is a rural crime film that’s actually a modern day Western. Or maybe it’s just my attempt to wrangle with the legacy of the Western. Either way, it’s a fairly autobiographical movie, though nothing that occurs in the picture actually happened to me.

People who grow up in small town trailer parks like I did usually don’t end up directing movies. But after a few decades of working my way through the worlds of academia, poetry, and TV writing, this is my first film. In it, I’m trying to fashion the blue collar Americana I grew up on — Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds movies, classic country music, pro wrestling, old Westerns, Yo! MTV Raps, and so forth — into something that might still feel relevant in 2023.

My main reference point in directing this was Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express. The storyline in Americana is very different, but Sugarland has the kind of vibe I’m aiming at: vivid rural characters, bordering on types, drawn just a bit bigger than life, all caught up in their own private arias in a wide open landscape that most respectable coastal types would rather fly over than step foot in. Irreverent humor and a constant threat of violence, but hopefully some bittersweet soulfulness too.

Everyone’s invited to this film, but my ideal viewer isn’t an industry professional in an air conditioned office. My ideal viewer is the individual — no matter their age, no matter their gender or color or creed— who cleans up that office each night. Or that repairs that professional’s car. Or that bags or delivers that professional’s groceries. That’s the kind of jobs my parents did when I was growing up. It’s the kind of jobs I did throughout my teens and twenties as I was paying my way through college.

And that’s who I’m most hoping to entertain. There are a lot of personal elements from my own past in this movie — Cal’s trailer and his confusion about his own lineage, Penny Jo’s stammer and small town artistic dreams, and so forth. But I don’t want to talk too much about personal shit. I know I don’t go to the movies to see some director navel gaze about their personal demons. We all have them. Big deal.

I go to the movies to be entertained. Whatever a director’s personal demons are, they’re only interesting if they give that entertainment some specificity and emotional charge. If there is specificity and an emotional charge in Americana, it comes from this: in lieu of normal family connections and community, I was essentially raised by American culture. And I don’t mean respectable, professional class, NPR-approved American culture. I mean problematic westerns and sappy country songs and too-violent movies. This stuff not only raised me, it probably helped keep me alive when I most needed the help.

And I still love this stuff, warts and all. Americana is my attempt to add a new entry to the rural blue collar canon while adding a few wrinkles and perspectives that some previous entries may have overlooked along the way.