TODAY'S NUGGET: Two for the Road (1967) - Rare, Innovative Use of Flashback (Or, The Oscar Nominated Script Everyone Turned Down)

[Quick Summary: A troubled couple, married for ten years, go on a road trip in the south of France.]

TWO THOUGHTS:

1) REJECTION: When your script is the most forward thinking, seamless use of flashback that has been seen, everyone is going to turn you down.*

2) NEW USE OF FLASHBACK:Newer writers tend to use flashback to explain backstory (please avoid the lazy exposition dump).  

Wiser writers eventually realize that it can be used to show the character's past emotions are also the present ones (like here, here, here).

But the really rare writers, like Frederic Raphael (Far From the Maddening Crowd, Eyes Wide Shut) find another innovative way in. 

On the DVD commentary, director Stanley Donen stated:

I think this one of the [] major differences in the way we reorganized this movie....It wasn't simply a flash from one period back to another one and back to the present what we were trying to do was say that all sequences in this movie are the present. Everything you see in their life is carried with them from the beginning of their relationship until the end of their lives. So that every sequence would feel just as present as any other. There was no one time in the picture when we said, "This is the time period of the picture." The picture is the entire period, is the present. (bold mine)

The result is that the script slips from present to past WITHOUT any time stamp in the slugline, as if it is all present.  But how does one not confuse the reader?

 

I think it's because the clarity of writing is exceptional.  In particular, the writer understands how to transition emotions by the juxtaposition of images.

 

In the scene below:

- Notice how few words were used to indicate the shift in time.
- There are several time periods: a) When the couple when they met (past); b) When they went on a trip with Cathy and family (past); c) When they're older (present). 

- Can you spot the moment of the time shift and emotional shift?

INT. CITROEN (2 CV). DAY.  [Here, M & J begin debating.]

...JOANNA: No?

MARK: But no, but no. The nicely brought up American girl may play it cool and modern, but what she wants is what her grandmother wanted --

Joanna produces a banana and offers it to Mark.

 

EXT. ROADSIDE. DAY. [J confronts M.]

The banana skin flung into the ditch. 

MARK (over): Your head stuffed and mounted on the living-room wall!

Mark and Joanna are hitching along the roadside again.

MARK: And if you don't want it that way, take your loving self elsewhere - I'm speaking quite generally, of course.

JOANNA: Of course. Who was she?

MARK: Whaddaya mean?

He grins and hands her a peach.

INT. CAB. GIANT ARTICULATED LORRY. DAY. [M defends --> ends with transition visual]

Joanna bites the peach.

MARK: Her name was Cathy Seligman, if you must know.

Joanna offers the Driver some grapes off the bunch. He smiles at her agreeably and takes some. The lorry has eased away from us somewhat and the cab slides forward out of shot.

EXT. THE ROAD. DAY. [Completed transition to new visual, new emotional dynamic, new time period.]

The articulated lorry moves forward to clear the frame.

MARK (O.S.) Selfish, grasping, Philistine, materialistic, stubborn, opinionated - I was crazy about her.

The lorry clears the frame and we pick up the car which appears to follow it (without a cut). It is a Ford station wagon with four Adults and a Child in it. Tags hang from the luggage on the roof.

EXT. THE NAME HOWARD MAXWELL MANCHESTER IS ON THEM. [This image is an ironic contrast to his words.]

Cathy is looking out of the window.

MARK (as we hold on Cathy): Mrs. Howard Maxwell Manchester, no less, Luckily for you, you'll never be called up to spend too much time in her company.

Cathy is very pretty and doesn't look quite as vampirish as Mark's young tongue suggested. It is some three years later and the Manchesters and the Wallaces are making a joint expedition, as we shall shortly see.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED: To me, the transitions are seamless, so that the flashbacks - visually, emotionally, story wise.- feel like they're all a whole.

 

This is one of those structures that's hard to explain verbally.   Even Donen's pitch to Audrey Hepburn was met with skepticism, until she read the script.

Two for the Road (1967)

by Frederic Raphael

* On the DVD commentary, famed director Stanley Donen said that studios couldn't envision how the flashback structure would work:

 

"I suppose that is why the readers of the script couldn't grasp what was going to come over on film...

...‎...[E]very other company in town [except 20th Century Fox] turned down the script. They all felt the picture was far too complicated for anyone to possibly understand. And there was no way that people could follow what was going on the way Frederic Raphael and I had planned this scheme of time throughout the film. I wrote a little letter at the head of the script saying to everyone,"Please, when you read this script, pay particular attention to everything that is said, every word of time, and so on. But please, take my word for it, when you see it, there will be no problem at all. You'll just sit back and relax. The picture will unfold before you, and you will not have any problem not knowing which stage the events are happening." However, in spite of my plea, no one believed in the picture, except Dick Zanack and David Brown, who I am happy to say, gave me the money to make the film."