Screenwriters are always looking for clever ways to tell a story. And none more clever than the tried, true and often employed flashback. Many of our favorite films put flashbacks to great use weaving well-told tales through different times and places. So if those scripts can do it, why shouldn’t yours? By all means! But before you begin, let’s have a little chat about story structure.
Flashback Basics
Stories told in their simplest form begin at one place in time, with a single Protagonist and progress forward in time until that protagonist’s story reaches it’s conclusion. We’ll call that starting point ‘A’, and the end point ‘Z.’ The alphabet (in order) is the order of our simple tale. This story is easy for reader/viewer to follow, and somewhat simple to tell. A leads to B, B leads to C, etc. But the wonderful thing about storytelling is no writer or story is bound to this simplistic structure. Yet with great options comes great responsibility. Once a story starts introducing characters, places, and times that don’t follow along our single protagonist, single alphabet progression – the greater chance our viewer/reader may lose track of that alphabet road.
On a basic level – think of yourself tracking any story you are told. It starts with that ‘A’ at the beginning and follows forward. Round about ‘G’, a flashback is introduced. Now, if that flashback is brief and fully relates to something in the original alphabet/timeline, we can track both. But the longer the flashback goes, the more the mind forgets all the letters A, B, C, D, F, G…of that primary story. And as the present day story continues from G to M, and then introduces another long flashback – you can probably begin to peel away your stored short-term memory. The C, I, J, K, what were those beats again? Confused yet? And this is just letters, not, times, places, fully formed characters and their dialogue.
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Where Flashbacks Go Wrong
It is job #1 of the screenwriter to direct the flow of the reader’s mental traffic, sometimes taking short detours, but always promising to get back on track in a way most can follow. When a writer starts introducing flashbacks into a story, nowhere is clarity more important. Clarity in scene headings, character names and ages, time and place, both when flashing back and returning to the original timeline. But despite these reminders, there are still a few landmines to avoid:
Too many flashbacks
This is the ‘Exhibit 1a’ of what to avoid unless your goal is confusion. There is no better example than the recent Michael Bay Netflix movie 6 Underground. (Yes, I’ve clearly had too much free time recently.) Bay’s film jumps back and forth across different times and characters in the past with the ease and grace of a monster truck. Too many flashbacks might just mean you’ve spread them over too many character’s stories, or are leaning too hard on showing backstory vs. present day happenings. There are artful ways where flashbacks can help tell the story, which I’ll get to soon. But to correct for too many flashbacks it might be as easy as turning them into a simpler ‘A to Z’ story path. What’s that you say, the Christopher Nolan film Memento told it’s entire story in a series of flashbacks and that was fantastic. Agreed, and how many other films have told a similar tale successfully in the last 20 years? I’ll wait for you to arrive at ‘zero.’ Memento is the exception, not the rule. It was about a character with no long term memory, and his brain made this unusual structure make sense. It also took an amazing filmmaker like Nolan to navigate a story like Memento, which could have easily gone off the rails at any moment – and it was the hook of the film. Is your screenplay the next Memento? Maybe. People love a good mystery or puzzle until it becomes too much work to solve.
Flashback within a flashback
Nothing is more confusing and dismissive of a viewer/reader’s short-term memory than this doozy. Forcing you to track three (or more) time-lines in reverse order starts to break the brain. And to clarify – this is when one flashback ends then goes immediately to another flashback further back in time. Once again think about your own mental capacity to track multiple times and places that are both changing. Now add in a third. This is the equivalent of skeet shooting three clay pigeons with a double barrel. Even if your brain can track three targets in air at once, you’ll have to reload while that third target disappears into the brush. That’s a flashback within a flashback. Important information gets lost due to an increasingly difficult story structure. Why make the viewer/reader work so hard when it’s easily avoidable?
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Effective Flashbacks
Fear not though, there are many a solid examples as guides to getting flashbacks right. Remember that part about multiple moving objects? What makes most flashbacks successful is the screenwriter understands that even though there’s two time-lines – past & present – one of them moves forward while the other stays somewhat static. The static time-line usually encompasses hours and days, weeks at most. While the moving time-line goes it’s ‘A to Z’ road, covering as much time and space as writer sees fit. Let’s look at a few versions of this.
The bookending flashback story
This is a story structure told almost entirely in the past (the moving time-line), while bookended by a Narrator / Voice-Over in present day (whenever time that is in the story). This is not to be confused with ‘Too many flashbacks,’ since the first flashback is really just a re-setting of the story in the past – with the present day acting as a framing device and a present day character narrating the story. Two of the many many examples of this type of flashback are Forest Gump and Titanic. In Forest Gump, it’s Forest on the park bench (present day), flashing back to narrate his life’s story. The ‘A to Z’ (or in this case ‘A to roughly T’) is Forest as a child, high school, in college, off to war in Vietnam, post war life as a fisherman, and on until this moving story catches up with present day. All through the telling, we see different bench sitters hearing his story, but the narrator’s time remains largely static. And once we reach present day the story continues from the park bench forward until it reaches it’s conclusion (the ‘U to Z’). Titanic follows a similar pattern as we meet an elderly Rose on a ship in present day. The crew is seeking her help at the ocean site of the sunken Titanic. Rose narrates the story in the moving ‘A to Z’ story of the past. Like Forest on that park bench, present day Rose is static covering hours and days. When her tale of the past is complete, the present day story reveals she has the ‘Heart of the Ocean’, tosses it back into the water and she passes away peacefully. Both these formats have the advantage of having a character tell their own story, and then bringing it to completion in present day. The one point to be aware of with this approach is that narration (by it’s presence) gives away any question of said narrator surviving a near death ordeal. AKA, we know Rose survives Titanic because she’s alive to tell the tale.
A creative bookending flashback/forward comes in the original Terminator movie. The opening scene is in the future (L.A. 2029) with the machines at war with humans. After story-explaining title card and credits, the film picks up in 1984 L.A. The Sarah Connor story moves forward ‘A to Z’, but occasionally flashes forward returning to ‘static’ scenes in 2029 to show the fate that awaits and Reese’s place there. This grounds the reality of Reese and the Terminator characters and shows what’s at stake. Another bookending flash forward example of success is The Social Network. This film starts in the past (Mark Zuckerberg in college, moving forward through Facebook’s success) and flashes ahead to two separate lawsuits years later. This is another unique bookending as the past eventually catches up with present day lawsuits and the story comes to conclusion. Why this works so well is the lawsuits, depositions, and witnesses, act as a narrator/framing device to different parts of the story. But equally important – the two lawsuits are clearly differentiated by the distinct locations and characters present. The lawsuits also remain largely static, existing over the course of days. That leaves one moving storyline, and two static ones. Easy to track but interesting in the many sides of the story.
Traditional flashback successes
One of the greatest films of all time, Casablanca, uses flashback in the traditional sense. An ‘A to Z’ story interrupted by an 8 minute flashback, which fills in Rick and Ilsa’s past love story, then returns to present day. Simple, effective, clear. The first act of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins is filled with flashbacks to Bruce Wayne’s youth – introducing important characters like Alfred, Gordon, Rachel – and important backstory. The flashbacks take on the ‘moving story’ while adult Bruce’s training in Asia stays relatively static in time. When Bruce returns to America to become Batman and reclaim the Wayne company, the flashbacks are largely complete (except a few very brief flashes), and present day takes over. Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive uses flashbacks effectively throughout the 2nd and 3rd acts of this ‘A to Z’ story, as Dr. Richard Kimbal desperately investigates his wife’s murder and the answers come to light. The Fugitive succeeds by connecting the well-timed and perfectly brief flashbacks to Kimbal’s immediate memory – helping both protagonist and audience solve the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of the murder mystery together.
What is the The Godfather: Part II then?
Another notable exception to the rule and fairly considered a classic, The Godfather: Part II employs a flashback second storyline. The film begins in the past (1901), since we know ‘present day’ from the first film to represent the 1950’s. The film will cut back and forth between Young Vito Corleone (1901-1920’s) and Michael Corleone (1958-1959) as their rise to power share similarities, and each story enriches the other. Brilliant move by Francis Ford Coppola of putting a prequel and sequel in the same movie. Normally this would run foul of the rules of two ‘moving’ storylines. But only because we have an entire first Godfather film, can we track the two stories with relative ease. In a non-sequel situation, I doubt this could be done successfully without confusing an audience or struggling to make compelling dual protagonists.
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In closing, it’s hard enough to write a great screenplay. Keeping things as simple as possible along the way, and being aware of moving vs. static timelines, can help your chances of success. If you want to play with time and flashbacks, find examples to model your story on. Then ask yourself, do flashbacks enhance your story in a clear and interesting way or are there other solutions that work better.