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DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD by Tom McCurrie
You know those signs warning about FALLING ROCKS AHEAD? Here's a warning sign of my own -- FLASHBACK AHEAD! Pull over, save yourselves!
Okay, maybe flashbacks aren't that bad. But they are very tricky to use, and more often than not hurt your script rather than help it.
A case in point is DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD, written by Callie Khouri and Mark Andrus. This film charts the life and times of the tempestuous Vivi Walker (Ellen Burstyn), a woman who makes Scarlett O'Hara seem positively sedate by comparison. Sounds like a nifty character piece, right? Wrong. That's because the script has way too many flashbacks, making the story both narratively incoherent and emotionally unappealing.
(Warning: Spoilers Ahead!)
Let's look at the incoherent part first. Though DIVINE SECRETS begins with Vivi as the AARP-version of a Southern Belle, it soon flashes back to her days as a precocious tyke, a hot-to-trot teenager and finally a young mother battling the double whammy of alcohol and drug abuse. Since different actors play Vivi at different ages, these younger versions of the protagonist in effect become separate characters. Add to that a large supporting cast also played by different actors at different ages and you have a script that is stuffed with more dramatis personae than Shakespeare's entire oeuvre. Trying to keep track of everyone in this picture is like trying to keep track of the Greater New York Yellow Pages.
To be fair, Khouri and Andrus didn't just slap DIVINE SECRETS together over a long weekend. They actually based their script on two novels by Rebecca Wells. But Wells' readers had the advantage of stopping in mid-page and skipping back a few chapters if they became confused. Filmgoers don't have that luxury -- once they get perplexed over who is who, they usually stay that way. This is a recipe for disaster in any screenplay.
DIVINE SECRETS finally settles into a discernable narrative rhythm, moving back and forth between Vivi as a senior citizen and Vivi as a young mom (Ashley Judd). But if coherence isn't an issue anymore, emotional engagement is. As I mentioned before, Old Vivi and Young Vivi should be considered separate characters. This means we have to emotionally engage with each one of them for the script to work. But because of the preponderance of flashbacks, every time we're ready to connect with Old Vivi we break off to hang out with Young Vivi. And every time we're ready to get behind Young Vivi we zip back to the present and her older self. This constant stop and go structure not only stalls out narrative momentum, it fails to engross us in the travails of either woman.
So if you want to see the right way to use a flashback, check out SUNSET BOULEVARD by Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman, Jr. and Billy Wilder. Wilder & Co. tell the story of Joe Gillis in a single flashback, nipping the problems of narrative coherence and emotional engagement in the bud. And since we know Gillis is six feet under from the beginning, the flashback takes on an added poignancy as we watch him make the series of fateful decisions that will ultimately lead to his demise. In this case, the flashback actually ratchets up the emotional engagement instead of dissipating it.
So use flashbacks with caution -- after all, flashbacks don't kill screenplays...writers do.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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