…as goes the musical parody in the movie Team America (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQvNu8LoTo0).
When you think of the word “Montage”, what comes to mind? For me, and I’m sure 95% of people, Rocky comes to mind. How can you NOT think of Rocky running through the streets of Philly, punching slabs of beef in a packing plant and ultimately running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to thrust his hands toward the sky in triumph? Add the Rocky Theme (“Gonna Fly Now”) to it, and now you’ve got a classic montage…and movie as well. Anyways, before I get off topic…
In all the books I’ve read about screenwriting, none of them properly instruct on how to write a montage into a screenplay. Though they usually mention it, we’re told that a montage in a screenplay is cliche and that you run the risk of coming off as an amateur if your masterpiece contains one. Your script will undoubtedly be tossed in the trash. Of course, I never cared about the lack of information available on writing a montage in any of my books. After all, I don’t want to peg myself as an amateur, and it’s not really my style, so why even bother knowing about a montage anyway?
Naturally, I am in the process of writing a short and am having trouble putting the story down on paper without having it go on for far too long. The best solution, I’ve concluded, is to add a montage. Yes! It’s that easy! But wait…now I see why adding a montage is considered to be “amateur-ish”. It’s too damn easy and it’s pure laziness. You condense a whole lot of information into a small snippet of the script. In most cases it just comes off as cheesy, but in Rocky’s case it actually works. Who wants to actually watch Rocky train in “real time”? That would be the worst movie ever, and I can guarantee it would have not been a hit and that you would have never had the chance to wait in line to see “Rocky in Space”. Um….that was one of them, right? The point is, a montage is lame if put in a feature length film. Where do you see these sequences now? Mainly in comedies, because they have the potential to be really corny, and sometimes (rarely) that’s a good thing.
So, what did I learn? Do not write a montage into your feature length screenplay. A short film however, is a different beast, and I will tackle mine how I wish. Plus, I plan to direct and edit my film, so ultimately I will have the final say. But who knows? Maybe I’ll bring the montage back into pop culture again someday!
The rest of this blog post is devoted to how I went about writing my montage after a 10 minute Google search on the topic. People have many different methods of writing montages, so I went through a bunch of them and picked the best one, in my opinion. It comes from John August, who wrote Go, Big Fish and also co-wrote Charlie’s Angels, among others. The format is as follows:
EXT/INT. VARIOUS LOCATIONS – DAY/NIGHT
(MONTAGE)
Rocky runs down the streets of Philly while bystanders hurl insults at him, along with rotten eggs.
Not really knowing how the process works, Rocky tries to tenderize frozen beef with his fists in a meat locker.
Rocky runs up some stairs and celebrates a major victory, having just successfully completed the p90x program.
(END MONTAGE)
There are a few main points here that I’ve gathered. The scene heading needs to let us know where the shots are going to be filmed and when. If this were to all happen in Rocky’s kitchen, through the hall and up the stairs to the bedroom the scene heading might look something like this:
INT. ROCKY’S HOUSE/VARIOUS ROOMS – NIGHT
Putting the words MONTAGE, and END MONTAGE, just lets the reader know simply when it begins and ends. (Maybe it’s also so they know when to stop whistling the Rocky theme.) Also, each scene within the montage should be written a line down from the last. This way the reader knows, in this instance, that Rocky is not beating the meat on top of some stairs with a bunch of onlookers cheering him on.
On that note, that is all I have to say about montages…for now. Time for me to jump on Netflix and see if I can stream “Rocky XXVII: The War On Terror”. You know…the one where Rocky fights bin Laden.
leoarsenault 