You must watch..."Marty"

TCM has been playing tons of awesome movies in their countdown to the Oscars.  Seriously, my DVR is busting.  Anyway, last week I caught the lovely film, Marty.  I saw the movie for the first time several years ago, but I think my first introduction to it was that scene in Quiz Show where Marty is the right answer to the question “What movie won Best Picture 1955?” and the guy has to throw it and say On The Waterfront, which won in 1954…yeah…now I’ll never forget what year both of those films won Best Picture.

Marty was written by the much celebrated Paddy Chayefsky…perhaps most well known for writing this famous scene/line in the movie Network:

But back to Marty, I think lots of baby writers turn away from “classic” movies thinking they’re too old/stuffy/epic and the storylines don’t connect with the types of movies they want to write (often smaller, “indie” movies).  The funny thing is that I think Marty fits in that indie film aesthetic.  The movie is beautifully simple - just two days in the life of a single working class everyman who goes on a "date" with a plain woman who he connects with emotionally.  A guy goes on a date...that’s it.  Most of it is just people talking about life and hanging out around the city...sounds pretty "indie" to me.  So yeah, don’t let the age of the film deter you…just go see it, and try to not to get invested in the lives of these characters.

Speaking of which…I think there’s so much a writer can learn from Marty (basic structure, dialogue) but I think the biggest thing I took away from it was the characters…all of the characters.  Chayefsky not only writes a protagonist who I cared deeply about, but he gives each character their due, even the small ones.  I think lots of baby writers use or throw in smaller characters to help spread out exposition or to be small foils for their protagonist, but the small characters in Marty aren’t puppets and don’t get the shaft like that.  In a movie so dominated by one character and one actor (Marty) we still get several scenes where we see smaller characters (like Marty’s cousin, his cousin’s wife, his aunt) living their own lives and having their own problems and dramas and opinions…these are all three dimensional characters.  I think having richly written small characters makes for a richer world in your script, one that feels "real" which in turn makes your audience care what happens to all of these people...I mean characters (see, Chayefsky wrote them so well, I think of them as real people).