PicoBlog

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by Bret Pippen, whom I formally met a few years ago when we competed in the Sidewalk Cinema’s inaugural Bad Movie Marathon fundraiser. He instantly became my top enemy during this event, but when he lasted longer than I did (which would’ve been somewhere north of my 27 hours), I had no choice but to become his ally for life. Now he’s a kind, friendly face that I often see at film events and also trivia nights at the members-only club that I am not a member of. And if you’ve ever attended the Sidewalk Film Festival, you’ve probably seen him introduce the opening night film, which is pretty neat. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

If you’ve ever read a book about screenwriting, taken a screenwriting class, or simply done Google research on how to write a screenplay, you’ll know that there are a handful of universal rules that are espoused across the board.

One of them is “the 10 page rule.” As young screenwriters are often told, most people who work for any sort of film company parse through many, many screenplays every year searching for something worthwhile, and they’re typically willing to go merely 10 pages deep if it’s not working for them. Then they toss the script in the trash. (Or the recycling bin, I hope. Which would be environmentally conscious but also kinda poetic.)

This means that screenwriters have a lot of work to do in the first 10 pages—which, if you’re familiar with the process, typically equates to about the first 10 minutes of the film itself.* The hero’s quest must be ascertained, the protagonist(s) must be established, the theme(s) must be summoned. It’s a lot! But it’s the bar that writers are compelled to clear.

Now, I’m not here to tell you that these screenwriting rules are for chumps. On the contrary, I think it’s important to learn and ascribe to rules like this so you can know how to effectively break them later on. But you know who’s good at breaking the 10 page rule? Wes Anderson, that’s who.

The Royal Tenenbaums probably isn’t his most idiosyncratic screenplay, but given that it was only his third film and he was just 32 when it was released, it’s an admirable piece of rule-breaking. It’s even more impressive that he does it right out of the gate.

Anderson doesn’t reveal the themes of the film in the first 10 minutes. He doesn’t really tell us how the hero’s quest is going to go in the first 10 minutes.** Hell, he doesn’t even do these things in the first 15 minutes.

That’s because he goes full auteur and spends no fewer than 15 minutes setting up his wide slate of characters. He pulls out all the stops—there’s a voiceover narrator, there are title cards for each major character, there’s a swirling orchestral rendition of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” behind it all. He even brings in child actors to play the younger versions of Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, and Owen Wilson just for those first eight minutes. And even when the child versions of those characters cede to their adult selves, Anderson simply skips to a “where are they now?” sequence for the second half of the extended prologue.

Now just imagine all of this on paper. Imagine it wasn’t written by someone with two widely acclaimed features already under his belt. And imagine you work for a production company and it’s your job to read screenplays. 15 pages of nothing but intricate character detail before the actual story starts to kick in? You’d probably fling this script out the window.

But it’s one of those things that makes Anderson who he is. He asks the viewer to be patient with him up front, and it pays off down the stretch. Because of the rich character foundation built in the first 15 minutes, the emotional stakes are higher throughout the rest of the film, and every moment counts for more because we feel well acquainted with these people.

In fact, Anderson brings the voiceover narrator and the montage sequences back for the closing of the film, bookending the story and letting us know that what we witnessed in between was the most important part of Royal’s life—and possibly each character’s life. Pretty neat the sort of tricks you can pull off when you don’t follow the rules, right?

*Final Draft, the screenwriting software that most professionals use (and also me), published a pretty good summary of why these first 10 pages are so important.

**Or “quests,” I should say. One of the great things about this film is that at least five characters are given full, compelling character arcs. (Most of them are men, and you could argue that the female characters have the weakest arcs, but we can’t fault 32-year-old Wes too much.)

The Royal Tenenbaums is now streaming on Apple TV+, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

ncG1vNJzZmicpajBsLrToZyvm6JjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oq6GdoqTGorjTnqWeppKWwq6%2F