Beautiful Boy – Where Does Screenplay Structure Come From?

Beautiful Boy - Where Does Screenplay Structure Come From? This week we’re going to be talking about Beautiful Boy by Luke Davis and Felix van Groeningen. This is a particularly interesting film to discuss in light of our last podcast where we talked about Destroyer and the use of flashbacks in a movie, because Beautiful Boy is also built around flashbacks, but tends to earn those flashbacks in another way. So, we’re going to be looking at Beautiful Boy to talk not just about flashbacks but also about structure, How do you make those structural decisions in your film? Where does screenplay structure actually come from?” If you have seen Beautiful Boy or read reviews of Beautiful Boy, you know that the response has ranged wildly from those who think it is the most beautiful film ever made, to others who feel like it only scratches the surface of the addiction issue, who’ve even compared it to a beautifully produced PSA. Whether you were deeply moved by the film or felt like it only scratched the surface for you, there’s no doubt that the way the structure of Beautiful Boy is constructed grows out of its theme. Beautiful Boy comes at the issue of addiction in a much different way than a movie like Half Nelson or Requiem for A Dream. It is actually adapting two different books one non-fiction memoir written by David Sheff called Beautiful Boy, and one written by his son Nic Sheff entitled Tweak. What the film is basically doing is taking these two non-fiction works and squeezing them together. But it is still primarily looking at the issue of addiction through the eyes of the father played by Steve Carell. And in looking at the father, it basically makes the assumption that we see towards the end of the film when David and his wife Karen find themselves at a 12 Step meeting for parents of addicts, where the sign proclaims, “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t fix it.” The movie comes at the character of David Sheff from that point of view. This isn't a movie about how the pitfalls of parenting lead to addiction, This isn't a movie about how that empty space in Nic that he describes in the film got created in the first place. This is a movie about a guy who is a good parent, who has a son who is a good kid, who are both fighting the same issue and both failing. Whether you agree with the psychology and the sociology of this premise or not, that’s the thematic place that this piece starts from. We aren't looking at bad fathers and bad sons. We aren't looking at ugly people addicted to ugly things. We’re looking at a loving family torn apart by addiction. This doesn’t prevent the movie from getting deep or complicated in some places. For example there’s a wonderfully complicated scene where David Sheff smokes a joint with his son Nic, not knowing that his son is addicted to a whole array of drugs, thinking that he’s creating a special moment at his son’s request. There’s a very complicated moment when David buys cocaine himself and has a one night cocaine binge--he’s trying to feel what his son is feeling-- or maybe just trying to escape. So, coming at these characters in this way isn't limiting the ability to go deep, but it does cut a lot out. This is true whenever you're using theme. Theme is a way of looking at your screenplays structure and saying, “What am I going to show and what am I going to not show?” “What am I going to dive deep into, and what am I going to skim over? Where am I going to get serious and where am I going to focus my attention?” The truth is in a two hour long movie, you can’t do everything, so you have to choose the things that you want to do. You have to choose where to point your camera and where to point your words so that you know what you're looking at and what you don’t want to look at. Some people are going to love the choices you make:  the people who’re wrestling with the same theme. In this case,