Spine and form

Years ago I videotaped Sidney Pollack on Inside the Actors Studio, because I wanted to remember his stories about spine and form. Spine is what a production is about. For example, Sidney told us, the spine of Out of Africa was possession -- possessing the land, possessing the African continent, possessing a personal relationship. "And once we realized that," he said, "every scene could become a dramatization of possession." 

When the idea for Tootsie came along, Sidney said he resisted making the movie until he could find a spine that would be more than a recurring cross-dressing joke. In his words:

What was a breakthrough for me was, finding something to make it about that wasn't just about dressing up like a woman. What happened was there was a line in it in which a guy said to him, "being a woman has made you weird, Michael." And what occurred to me was if we changed the line and then we never said it, "being a woman has made you a man," it became the spine. So now you can take every scene and say, "in what way does this scene dramatize this idea that a man becomes a better man by being a woman?" And that gave us a shape. It gave us a kind of a form and a shape...

Here he breaks into a story about a dance class, and how it led him to the ABA form, in which a theme is stated, then you move to variations of that theme, and eventually you bring it all back home with a restatement at the end. Again, in his words:

Most of the films I've done are ABA films. They almost always end where they begin. Literally. They come back in a circle. But it's different. It's like T. S. Eliot's line, 

We shall not cease from exploration 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know it for the first time. 

Because you learn it by going away from it and then you come back. And it was always a very appealing form, in a certain way. It's such a nice feeling when you sing a song and you go away during the middle section and now you come back again and sing what is familiar, but informed by the bridge. 

When you read a piece of corporate writing that doesn't work, it's often because someone told you everything they knew about a subject without giving it a spine or form. When it does work, you'll most likely find that it's clearly about something, and there's a form, of which ABA is a good one.