jilted Fran dying of a drug overdose in a suicide
attempt. As he nurses Fran back to health, C. C.’s
need for love progressively complicates his pursuit
of corporate power. Ultimately, Sheldrake rewards
C. C.’s discretion with the long-coveted job promo-
tion, and our hero must choose between his goal
and his need.
For the purposes of clarity, we’ve focused our
discussion of character on the protagonist. But, of
course, most stories require a number of players,
and many of these secondary characters, including
those who support or share the protagonist’s objec-
tive, as well as those who oppose it, may have their
own goals and needs. Typically, the traits and sto-
rylines of these characters are not as developed as
that of our protagonist. These characters’ primary
function is to serve the narrative by helping to
move the story forward or flesh out the motivations
of the protagonist.
Narrative Structure
The narrative structure employed by the movies is
very similar to the way that events are organized
by novelists, short-story writers, playwrights,
comedians, and other storytellers. In all these
cases, the basic formula that has evolved is calcu-
lated to engage and satisfy the receiver of the story.
The use of the word formulacan be misleading.
Just because most stories follow the same general
progression, narrative is not a single simple recipe.
Like pizza, one of the many beauties of narrative
structure is its very malleability. We all know a pizza
when we see it, but very few pies look or taste
exactly the same. Once the chef knows the basic for-
mula and the purpose of each individual ingredient,
she has a certain amount of creative freedom when
creating her own personal concoction—as long as it
still tastes good when it comes out of the oven. Just
as good cooks know when and how to bend the
rules, so do the most effective cinematic storytellers
recognize how to adjust narrative structure to serve
their own particular style and story.
In order to organize story events into a recogniz-
able progression, some screenwriters break the
narrative into three acts, or sections; others prefer
to divide the action into five acts; others—particu-
larly television writers—employ a seven-act struc-
ture. Not that it really matters to the audience. Our
experience of the story as a continuous sequence of
events is not affected by any particular screen-
writer’s organizational approach to partitioning
the narrative development.^2
For our purposes, we might as well keep it sim-
ple. Most narratives can be broken into three basic
pieces that essentially function as the beginning,
middle, and end of the story. Each section performs
a fundamental narrative task. The first act sets up
the story; the second (and longest) act develops
it; the third act resolves it. Of course, nothing as
expressive and engaging as cinematic storytelling
can be quite thatsimple. Each of these narrative
components involves a few moving parts.
To begin with, the setup in the first act has to tell
us what kind of a story we’re about to experience
by establishing the normal world.A movie’s first
few minutes lay out the rules of the universe that
we will inhabit (or at least witness) for the nextGoals and needsThe intersection of narrative and
character provides for a wide range of narrative structures
and outcomes. Not every movie must have a happy ending,
and the stories that do provide a happy ending are not
always dependent on the protagonist achieving his or her
goal. In Rocky, the ending is satisfying even though the
underdog boxer loses the heavyweight match, because his
gutsy performance gives him back the self-respect he was
missing at the beginning of the story. Ultimately, the
audience identifies with Rocky’s psychological need even
more than his goal of defeating the mighty Apollo Creed.
(^2) David Howard and Edward Mabley, The Tools of Screenwriting
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1981), p. 24.
WHAT IS NARRATIVE? 131