That Scene Works: The "Are You Threatening Me?" Scene From Punch Drunk Love
So fucking fuck fuck fuck good.
Since this movie re-earns its status as sublime for me on every re-watch, and since I don’t care that it’s by now accumulated some barnacles on its hull and has become something of an Auteur-Eyeroll if mentioned as a comp in bro-meetings (depending on the bro), lemme just put the scene-before-the-scene here to start, one dap to get you in the mood, and to remind you that while the process of constructing the thing might be brainy, especially in a room full of writers, what you get on the other side (hopefully) is visceral, electric, meaningful to the story, but somehow still coated in the protective shellack of transparent writing.
This is the fight that comes just before Barry and Dean first talk in Punch Drunk Love, and that conversation— a phone conversation!— is what a reader asked me to talk about. First time it’s happened, and I felt like I couldn’t go forward without someone (I literally mean one person) being interested. Thank you, person.
One brick at a time. Let’s go:
If you’re a working writer in Hollywood for long enough, and are also fortunate enough to have earned the label of “weird, but good, seems to vape a lot, extremely annoying when we ask him to make changes” (this is what I think they think of me), or honestly even get to a place where there’s a take on who you are, you’re in good shape. But the language of the system starts to change, too; you start to hear a new phrase when people pass on projects or concepts you try to sell, replacing that universal We’re developing something pretty similar so go fuck yourself and die: this new phrase is usually along the lines of… we like it, but it’s a little too execution-based.
I’ve sometimes wished there was a low-frills, high-fidelity glossary out there for writers making their way in Hollywood, since every layer of power speaks in code. So often, writers or creators don’t care about the pass, but we do care very much about the specifics of why. This is how we learn.
Obviously, there’s a limit to how much of the internal conversation can ever be shared, but I think executives would be surprised how open writers are to getting the real truth about why it wasn’t a yes, or whether it could have been. Even if it’s as depressing as We were only allowed to buy one show for the next four quarters, and we already bought two, so we were being nice and setting the meeting, because we like you, or at least the idea of you, but also because we don’t want to create the impression in the marketplace that we can’t buy anything until 18 months from now.
(Yes it’s this bad out there.)
What, really, does execution-based mean?
And I know this question’s loaded with a whole additional layer; will there ever be such a thing as a “working writer in Hollywood” who gets to hang around enough that she or he is known amongst the buyers, or has a reputation as difficult-but-nice-but-weird-but-kinda-good? I don’t know the answer to that one. I feel like I snuck in near the end of something, and I qualify (sorta) in this other category of Established Creator, for which I will be unequally rewarded on the other side of the strike. Many just barely didn’t get shows done, or greenlit, right before the strike. Many of those people are women and POC creators I sat next to, with the same in-room rank and the same experience seven or eight years ago, but accelerated past because… because.
But I am writing this column like Succession did the pandemic dirty, by straight dismissing it and pretending it wasn’t there, betting that long-term, with an interruption that’s both painful and protracted, like this current labor action, we’re going to lean toward There is no before as we get back to work, whatever state we’re all in.
(Speaking of this, check out my TikTok of insane videos made of my children. Hi, I’m totally okay.)
Either way, I’m not trying to make a bargaining point or say anything about the strike, here, other than the general point (many others have made it) that I find the AI question to be adjacent, in ways, to the everyday work of making a television show, but simultaneously centered within the studios to the everyday work of making a television show. The hoarse voices of hundreds, if not thousands of executives again pleading, “Could you please… make it more down the middle… somehow… and have less… unanswered questions… lingering in the subtext,” however they say it, as they were told to say while being whipped by robed men since 2019, is what AI is here to do for them, without the forty-five minutes of pushback and soul-crushing experience of agreeing with your writer while arguing with your writer, because you were told to do it.
I’m really just trying to talk about craft, here,, and scenework, and help anyone who’s interested understand what one guy, at least, thinks about great scenes out there that were written by humans. There are so many. I don’t care if an AI Writer can pass both the Turing Test and the Bechtel Test on the first go. AI won’t get to great until it’s sentient, embodied, and stricken by what my family lovingly used to refer to as Sudden Out of Control Emotional Outbursts by Pat.
It would be delightful to me, if one day, someone fed this column into an AI writer machine, and it somehow helped with the creation of better scenes by AI writing. Why delightful? Because I will find a way to sue them for money, first off. More importantly, though, AI is just not capable of making creative choices in the framework I’m talking about when I’m talking about scenework, I don’t think, and nor will it ever be; the lateral thinking required that nonetheless follows an emotional logic demands a lifetime of feeling. At best I think it’ll be able to mimic excellence, and make it indistinguishable to the eyes of an everyday watcher. However, were you not paying attention above? I have an MFA in fiction. This is what the literary world already is.
And this is already what 90% of prestige dramas do anyway, too, imo. Aim at the feeling of profound without earning the emotion, or the meaning. Doing it new, and doing it better, and especially doing it from a conceptual position that fell into your brain that morning because you had to go to Ralph’s to buy bananas, and you saw some weird shit go down with a lady in a zoot suit in the parking lot, and she reminded you of your grandma, which made you sad in a certain way, which you ported into the scene and solved a problem in a way no one else ever could, is the goal here. The remix is where the new truth lies, as has always been the case. The remix of emotion.
Sorry, Marvin the Paranoid Android. I’ll be alarmed about your scenework when that pain’s yours, not someone else’s. (And by god, please take this clip as Exhibit A about how impossible it is to translate tone from page to screen, sometimes. I’d kill for an AI engine that could possibly make the feeling of Douglas Adams work right on the screen.)
So many incredible scenes are execution-based. Is that the writing? Maybe sometimes. Is the director the same person as the writer? Quite important. Was the showrunner present? Was a writer present? Maybe sometimes it was the actor, angry at the writing. Maybe sometimes the director, on bath salts. To be honest, it’s possible that some scenes are great because the grips can run well. (Yes I’m talking about Clark running across the Tarmac in 105, and no that’s no disrespect to Lucy, the director, whose mad vision the moment was in the first place.)
The first time I heard the phrase execution-based, it threw me, but after thinking for awhile, and hearing it a few times, I had the sadly-rare experience of realizing the phrase was just executive-speak for something I already thought, too— this could end up either really great or really awful, depending on… a shitload lot of factors. Um, yeah? Hi. This is the ancient risk of the job. If you and Aeschylus have shared common ground, gotten upset at the same thing, and felt the same feeling, it seems like we could all find a simpler and clearer way of talking about this phenomenon.
Will it change along the way, and deepen as it settles into itself? Will the showrunner be standing there off-camera and have a sudden insight that hasn’t come until seeing the scene on its feet? Who are the actors? Will they get it? Will they prevent the showrunner from fucking it up with a new idea? Will they more than get it, and make it sing? Can they sing, if singing is scripted? Whose taste will be in control? What’s the energy of the edit? I find tremendous glee in this accumulation of risk, but…
Too many things, in fact, for us to take the risk, is what the pass meant. We can’t gamble. There’s a very real limit. And the limit is: risk, right now, is too much of a risk.
And while it’s easy for writers to gripe about how the ability of execs to make the imaginative leap from script to screen, through the lens of the creative vision, was exactly the job executives were supposed to be doing as they sold for you upward, it just isn’t the job anymore. Now that’s the showrunner’s job, all the way through. Above the execs, somewhere, is someone who has no idea what the fuck they’re talking about, and who doesn’t care about passion, and who (probably!) is working on an angle to EXTRACT MONEY from our industry, not nurture it. Profit is the thing. And they—your allies— have to make the case to that person.
It’s now on writers and showrunners, more than ever before, to be the Lead Defense Attorney for all their weirdest shit accused of weird-ass crimes onscreen. It’s a losing battle, mostly, but you can get through by being kind, consistent, and persistent. At least as of 2021, rational arguments and clear-headed insights still could win the day (barely), and get you space to do your thing, so long as you were good at kissing hella rings. But I haven’t been in production for two years, and the autonomy and space I had within my realm felt cramped, to say the least, compared to what it seemed to be for all my former bosses, working throughout the previous decade.
Maybe a more helpful way to understand execution-based, though, for writers trying to find their place and find a job, is thinking of it as buyers and executives saying more like: we can’t tell what the tone is, based on the writing. I’m not sure they say that word much over in the Big Buildings, but tone, really, is what we’re talking about. The Barbie movie is absolutely death-walking-in-pink without its carriage of tone, hyper-sophisticated and altering slightly the meaning of this or that word, or moment, with sliders on every edit’s irony. I truly have no fucking clue how Greta Gerwig managed to walk what were certainly very terrified people through the upside of using Matel’s discontinued products as a means of earning trust, tonally, for the viewer along the way, but a chill goes down my spine thinking about how often she had to smile in the face of suggestions that destroyed the entire concept of her film, and then, in the same meeting, incept the business executive with the correct idea, hear him find a way to say it, then congratulate him for having the idea. This, right now, is the only move.
There is no auteur power or fuck you, I’m doing it because I’m doing it, so far as I can tell, anymore. Playing this card will get you fired at every studio or network right now, at least in TV. Don’t play it, even if you’re holding. Do better. Embed it in your writing, as much as possible. Save those 500 hours for your loved ones.
If the people you’re selling a show to can’t tell what the tone will be, based on the writing, then they can’t feel what watching it will be, after it’s shot. And if they can’t tell how it will feel to the audience, then they can’t risk their jobs by buying it, guessing wrong on the tone, and finding out their bosses don’t like the tone.
That’s how bad it is out there.
But they don’t have to know what the word tone means in a literary sense for you to embed it into your script. There are ways. Find them, or die.
[Ominous Thunder-Lightning Strike Sound]
Younger writers starting out may not quite have the momentum of a PTA career to create automatic greenlights and good-faith trust about how a scene will feel, which he certainly had earned by the time Punch-Drunk Love appeared like a feather delightfully landing on the culture, back in 2002. I saw it that year, I think in Green Bay by myself, depressed at 24 after leaving New York and the stink of 9/11, but before moving on toward San Francisco. It was a weird month in Green Bay, actually, which I remember as a very upsetting moment of realization that you could be good at writing, and have a grasp on a tone that you thought was special, and especially yours… and get rejected from the five best MFA programs in fiction in the country, nary a followup caretaking email to wish you luck along the way.
I was an entitled baby, grumping along, then. But still— this saved me— listening. Trying to learn.
Based on the Boogie Nights director’s commentary— which I had watched the summer before, in 2001, and which I highly, highly recommend for anyone anywhere trying to tell stories, and (three whiches) which taught me so much about storytelling, as a twenty-something, that it terrified me in terms of all the things Paul Thomas Anderson knew about writing that I did not understand at all at the time… about what it was like watching the film with an early audience at UCLA, and the feeling of dread he felt as everyone laughed at William H. Macy blowing his head off, and how he sank down into his chair, wondering if he’d made a fundamental error in his storytelling somewhere in the first half of the film— this director everyone (okay, lots) so dearly loves had an extremely painful experience in tone-expectation when he was working on his first movie, Hard Eight.
I blame tone, anyway.
It was early in his career and he hadn’t earned the trust, yet. Reading between the lines, now, I remember his quiet and upset way of talking about that experience as confusing to me then (I was 22, then, and even though he was only a few years older than me when Boogie Nights came out, he talked like a guy who’d been working for twenty years), I did hear real pain in his voice, and I still hear it, now. My take now, though, having been here for awhile, is that Anderson simply expected that his producers and financiers understood that whatever was in the script, a new feeling was going to emerge when they finally watched the finished movie, because that’s how good shit comes into existence. It sounded instead like they’d been set up for a certain tone via the script, or maybe projected a certain tone onto the script, to make it make sense to them in terms of business and this young director, and when the tones weren’t the same… they ate him.
Ultimately, now, it doesn’t matter how the scripts sound when they’re from PTA… you know he’s going to PTA it somewhere along the way. But it did back then, before he was established, and it does for pretty much any screenwriter who’s not wearing an auteur crown. I’d even be willing to bet PTA still gets his guts ripped out on a regular basis by someone, at some level, saying to him, “What if we do it like you’re saying it, but make it simpler and have the characters say more directly how they’re feeling?”
Now, he can hand in pages, and everyone knows that however they feel, the man is going to PTA it, and it’ll come out like it comes out when he PTAs it.
The phrase execution-based took me a second to understand, I think, because—if I understand the translation from executive correctly— the term describes pretty much everything I have ever written, will ever write, and will ever want to write. It also lives inside another little blindspot that came included in the package of Patrick Writing, having spent most of my life writing fiction. In fiction, the writing is the execution; the product is there, finished, and there are no leaps of imagination required to understand what it is. In my fiction, I can sidestep laterally, tone-wise, with reassuring sentences around the sidestep to make you know that I’m not crazy. Sentences that make the reader feel safe, I guess, and understand that playing a note that usually doesn’t belong in that chord, but I’m doing it with intentionality, and I’m doing it because it’s actually the only way to get through this scene in a way that will make sense to emotionally alive human beings… well, that why you need tone.
Hollywood so, so, so does not give a fuck about what I just said. I can’t remember the last time me saying, “Trust me” ever worked, but I do know it worked wayyyyyyyy better in 2017, with Netflix, while making Maniac, than it has worked since. I ascribe this mostly to Cindy Holland, the best executive who’s worked in Hollywood in the ten years I’ve been around— yes I’m going to say it every time— but I also ascribe it to the change in that dialogue, between showrunner and studio, that has slowly settled into Hollywood as the new norm. It’s not, “Trust me”//”Okay” anymore. Now, it’s “Please trust me.”//”We don’t.”//”Okay. Please.”//”Why do you hate your partners?”//”Let me try to get it closer to what you need.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why aren’t you answering my texts anymore?”
Push back too many times, and you’re fuckin’ out. Doesn’t matter if you’re right, your cut is better, or who you are. Here’s what I’m gonna say below: don’t do what PT Anderson does in his scripts, because that lane is gone. Prove yourself in the script, because you’re not going to get to production, and elevate anything, unless you do.
I’ve depressed myself enough. Let’s watch the scene first, because it’s so much better, shot and performed, than it is on the page. And it’s fuckin’ good on the page.
If you really want to depress yourself— your wordy writer self— watch this first without the sound, then with it. Then go thank every director who ever brought your scene to life. And if you’re a white male who feels tingly feeling when you hear the word “auteur”, do yourself a favor and kill that thing inside of you, because it will kill your career. Make the script incredible, ask for help, then be the first to say that words don’t matter, even if it annoys you. They do. But you can’t make the tone right, as a visual storyteller, without the director knowing what you’re trying to say, and how to say it.
Just to call out a few impossible choices of directorial and performance incredible: 1) The double push onto PSH from outside the windows and then from inside the store to start, almost squeezing the man into a Temple Grandin horse-harness as we meet him. The phone gets picked up at the halfway point, and Dean waits there, still, absorbing the information. 2) The swinging horizontal pendulum of the intercuts during the conversation, moving at different speeds, catching the melodium (is that what it’s called?) every time on Barry’s side, and a swing that breaks down when we push in on Barry and stay medium on Dean. 3) The way that horizontal swing keeps happening on Dean’s side, even after he stops walking. 4) The fucking acting. Including but not limited to Sandler’s “WHAT’S YOUR NAME, SIR?”, or Hoffman’s quintuple staccato SHUT UP/SHUT thing Hoffman is doing, 5) The flare at the end. 6) Somewhere Jon Brion is dancing naked in a studio amidst 500 percussive instruments while watching this projected on a screen. 7) The turn, and what the scene actually comes down to— Hoffman asking Sandler if he just said, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself” to him as though he’s lived a life trapped in the same not-those-words conundrum as Marty McFly’s relationship to “chicken”, and now that it’s been said, there’s nothing he can even do. It’s almost like he’s sad the words were said. 8) Sandler’s pause at that moment, deciding whether or not to double-down, knowing exactly what the stakes are… and doubling down. Because he’s in love now. 9) “You’re in trouble honey,” possibly the saddest thing that Barry could say to a person several states away, is almost believeable at this point in the movie, with Barry’s growing power. 10) “That wasn’t good. You’re dead.”
Whew.
This scene is so good, the way the tendrils of the script embrace the meaning of the final product makes it almost impossible to even analyze. But we had to do it that way. It’s too good to do it the opposite way. Here’s the script:
There’s so much to notice, here. And maybe it wasn’t fair to put the scene in first, then go to the script, because what’s in the script is also great, but to me, the differences are so interesting that I can’t start there.
What did you see? What did you hear? It’s odd and wonderful to me, for example, that Latisha calls Barry “Sexy” in the cut but “sir” on the page… that she’s still working him at the outset of this call tells you everything you need to know about Dean’s operation. Also notable is the absence of Sandler’s probably-improvised, “You’re in trouble, Honey,” which feels like a rhyme to the “Sexy”, and which is the most Barry Egan thing to say, I can’t even…
The difference get even more incredible, the more you compare. Sandler’s, “What’s you name, sir,” which is just unbelievable acting, doesn’t exist in the script. Hoffman turned PTA’s triple “Shut shut shut” into something far weirder and varied that to me it suggested Anderson doesn’t really even know what Philip Seymour Hoffman will do in here, but he’s giving him at least the framework, and with it the freedom to play.
A difference you could miss, but one that’s so important to everything I said up above: literally nothing about the directing is in the script. Nothing. I love that Anderson doesn’t feel the need to put anything about the pushes or otherwise in there. There’s no doubt in my mind that he had a sense of what he would be doing during this scene, even if it was abstract and location-less while he wrote, but the incredible energy of this phone-call conflict could be entirely destroyed without all the things Anderson is doing. Thus the energy feels different on the page than in the movie, and therefore the tone feels different, and will feel different, for the rest of the movie.
I’m harping a lot on this point, I think, because it’s become so hard in TV, when the writer and director and not the same person, and when the length of rope given to the showrunner has become so much shorter, for the writer to publish a script so tonally different than the scene itself, and for the director to have any leeway to try as many bold things as Anderson tries and accomplishes here. You’re kinda fucked both ways, these days, in TV, in that your job protecting the show involves accurately describing and transmitting the intensity of moments like this in the script in order to get the show to production, but doing it in your writerly way dooms the director to being at risk, later, when she tries anything different. No one wants this. Everyone wants to find the best scene. But the idea of “trust me”…. the idea that “we’re going to find it once we’re there, and with the actors”… it’s just not something you can safely say anymore. I never could, anyway, down to the last day of production on Station Eleven. I was still hiding scenes and making up things on the days. Why? Not because I change my mind all the time. Because that’s how the process works best, when it’s working. There’s just little place for it, at the moment, in the production of Big TV.
I’ve saved the biggest change for last, and I don’t need to have been a fly on the wall to get a feeling, basically, of what happened. Lost in all the screaming is the locus of the scene’s magic, and it’s just not in the script at all:
Nowhere in here is the scene’s turn, as it exists in the final product. Nowhere in these written words is Dean asking Barry if he just told him to shut the fuck up. Instead, on the page, Dean tells him, “You just told me to fuck off. That wasn’t good. You’re dead.” Why is that important? With Dean just stating the threat at the end, we don’t really get to the heart of the matter. This scene isn’t about two dudes yelling at one another. It’s about Barry, again and again, escalating. Yes, he escalates on the page as well, but turning, “You just told me to fuck off” into “Did you just tell me to fuck off?” earns Sandler the moment that is the moment in the scene. A choice. A last one, and a big one. A slowdown after a lot of manic energy, and a close look at Sandler’s face as he sizes up the situation, and decides to go back harder. Hoffman’s final FUCK, in the scene, is directed at himself, because now it’s out of his hands, and Dean’s character, who gets virtually no time on the screen in the movie, comes alive as a three-dimensional human with his hands-up, “Did you just say… Go fuck myself?” Sandler’s quiet, “Yes, I did” is not here at all. Not the pause, not the moment, not the choice. He’s not afraid of anything, anymore, and this is the movie’s core and heart. Besides Sandler’s run through the halls of the hotel a few scenes from now, searching for his love, there isn’t another moment of angerless, intentional insurrection. The moment is the movie’s center, and it’s not here, on the page.
Who knows if it was a note, an alt, a moment of inspiration from someone on the day, or a fluke. They found it. Does the movie work without that change? Sure, of course. You wouldn’t miss it if it wasn’t there. But the movie’s one step closer to its perfect self, with the change.
Maybe most interesting: I don’t think the scene works without it.
“Trust me.” We don’t have much of that right now, and if we’re being honest, it’s usually impossible to see where your very best moments will come from until you’re standing there, on the day. It’s usually an actor who has the idea. I don’t care who had this one, really, or how it came to be, but this scene, to me, is the perfect indictment of the hyperfocus the streamers have put onto not just “locking scripts” (that is not a thing), but on controlling the process from the past, and demanding to know what it is before it becomes itself.
This script is awesome, but the shot scene is much, much more. Maybe that’s because the writers in TV have pissed away hundreds of millions of dollars on “Trust me”. Maybe it’s because those hundreds of millions need to by a part of the hyper-profit, and can’t be a part of the risk. But whatever the reason, this example is the good “trust me” and I wish the ones like this got remembered more often than forgotten.
The script always—always— can get better. Even when you’re standing in the middle of set, looking at the cast and crew as they wait for you to have an idea. The real “trust me”, for writers, is to trust themselves that they’ll have it. Not safe, six months away, with the backing of the network. But there, when it’s an emergency. That’s where all the best stuff gets born.
No one’s on strike for anything I just said, and yet everyone’s on strike for exactly what I just said. Execution-based has crept toward being a de facto reason to pass on a project. Specific tones could be alienating! Meanwhile, in the marketplace, the two specific tones of Barbie and Oppenheimer raked in $200 million plus.
If you’re worried that the WGA and SAG strikes are the problem, I understand, I really do. Seems like lately our employers operate on a formula that takes too many resources from the makers (the cost-suppression of productions), but at the same time, spends a tremendous amount of its development resources to buff away what’s not vanilla. Both things at once. But it’s easy to criticize. I’ve given myself over to the bigger forces of capitalism, which I ultimately don’t understand, and yet have agreed to go to prom with, over and over again. Business risk is not my specialty, and corporations don’t have courage, anyway. Not because they’re cowardly, but because they’re not humans.
Artistic risk, though, courage to take risks… well, you can’t survive without it. Do your best to make it clear, though, in your work, just what risks you’re taking. Help people understand it in the tone; lean forward, like Adam Sandler, with a slightly open mouth and the phone pressed so hard against your ear that you might hurt yourself, and say, “What’s your name, Sir?” Right on the page.
Give me execution-based every time. I’ll take the lost jobs and the passes. It’s the only way to give everyone what they want.
Problem is, right now… no one’s got the courage— or maybe just the wiggle room— to want anything that might crash and burn.
Amazing read. Thanks for all your writing, Patrick!
Wow. Really great read!!!