World

What exactly does “world” mean when we talk about scripts? Well, world means the environment, physically, tonally, logically and otherwise, that holds the events in your story. PLEASANTVILLE, for example, is a script in which we are to believe you could possibly walk right through the television and enter a fictional, black and white town. We buy it because the tone and trimmings of the script make it something we can be comfortable with. How about BIG? Zoltar literally spits out the fortune that will enable the little boy to wake up looking like Tom Hanks the next day. How are we to buy that a carnival fortune telling machine could do this? Because Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg set up the world of that carnival such that we bought that brief moment of illogical magic. We not only bought it, we loved it.

In JURRASSIC PARK we are in a world in which DNA can be used to recreate prehistoric creatures. Sure, it was a lot of blah blah Ginger science but Spielberg set it up so beautifully that we bought it hook, line and sinker. Because, Rouge Wavers, audiences want to buy your world. That suspension of disbelief kicks in almost immediately when the lights go down. Going to the movies is wish-fulfillment; audiences are begging you to take them on an entertaining journey – in fact, they’re paying for it like an E ticket ride. We only need to give the audience one convincing poke and they’re off – fallen over the edge of suspended disbelief, believing that animals can talk, that cars and buildings can explode and Tom Cruise won’t get hurt, that there are Oompa Loompas behind those factory walls!

However, if the backdrop, dialogue, characters and tone of a script is say, very RESEVOIR DOGS in nature, then you give the audience chocolate rivers and Oompa Loompas – you run the risk of creating a schism in expectations and putting a major crack in your world through which the audience can see the parking lot which leads them to think about what’s for dinner.

It’s psychology, really. The reason we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the carpet and not into a pool of hot lava is that we expect the floor to be there. If we woke up to strobe lights and carnival music, we really wouldn’t be sure what our feet would land in but the environment would give us a strong sense that it wouldn’t be the carpet.

So what writers need to do is prime the reader (and ultimately audience) to buy what you are going to throw at them. To prepare your audience, on some level, for the magic or illogic, violence, passion or whatever will follow. I have a dear friend who has a lovely family comedy set in a quirky, slightly surreal world. Not totally surreal, just ever so slightly Tim Burton-esque. She made sure that from page one on, evidence of that quirkiness was there so that when we see on page six that champagne flows from the town’s city park fountain, we buy it.

In BLUE VELVET, David Lynch sets up the tone and world immediately with the uncomfortable close up of the human ear in the lawn. But not before he showed us the white picket fence and cute neighborhood. The tone shifts artfully and quickly. Lynch set up his world so that we know when we watch BLUE VELVET that very very bad things are going to happen – human ear bad. Had Lynch made that shift on page twenty-three he would have left us on the side of the road.

Normally a reader won’t really say anything about how well you set up your world unless you blow it. Blowing it takes the reader right out of the moment.
Contextualize your story within the environment you create, don’t shift gears on us suddenly because you’ll leave us behind. Make sure to imbue your world with the tone, images and sense of what’s to come. If one of your characters has a face which is a bunch of writhing tentacles and he simply goes to work at his law office and grabs a doughnut in the breakroom before he argues a case, I’m completely thrown – how do I contextualize Tentacle-Face? The entire time I'm watching your movie or reading your script my mind is racing - why does he have tentacles? Will other characters have tentacles? And I'm not listening to his court case and I don't care because I am irritated that I don't get the tentacle thing until or unless you contextualize it for me. And STAT. The Neanderthal in the Geico commercials makes sense and very quickly because it's a context I can grasp quickly - irony.

Setting up your world enables us to flip the switch that says: in this 2 hours, talking elephants, flying pigs or chocolate rivers are normal. World, in essence, is one big buy for the audience. If you don’t set up the world, then the audience won’t buy a thing in the store.

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