PODCAST – Frozen: Do You Want To Build A Screenplay?

Frozen: Do You Want To Build A Screenplay?
By Jacob Krueger
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The structure for Disney’s Frozen begins with a piece of terrible advice. Confronted with a child with an extraordinary talent, the Grand Pabbie of the trolls tells her that until she learns to control her gift, she must hide it from the world.
If you’re a screenwriter, you probably know what that feels like.
You know what it’s like to feel like you can’t control your own gifts.  And you know what it’s like to fear how people would react if they read your raw voice in its purist form. Ultimately, our job as writers—like the job of any ruler of a fairy kingdom—is to capture that wild talent of our natural voice, and shape it into a form that other people can understand. And like most producers, screenwriting gurus, coverage readers and other experts, the goal of the Grand Pabbie’s advice is a positive one.
It’s just his execution that’s so darn problematic. 
He’s trying to get her to the end point, without ever allowing her to experience the beginning. And the results are like a shot of ice right into the heart, turning the one thing that makes Elsa truly special into a source of shame and fear, that cuts her off from everything that truly mattered to her. You can imagine that Elsa’s journey is probably similar in many ways to that of Frozen’s writer, Jennifer Lee, a writer of unique gifts, thrust into the gig of a lifetime, and a seemingly impossible challenge: to hold onto that unique voice that made her debut feature Wreck It Ralph, while adapting a nearly impossible short story (Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen), into the most formulaic model of all: a Disney Princess musical.  A form that had to please not only a bevy of powerful executives, but also a very specific audience with very specific expectations. Disney had been trying to adapt The Snow Queen into an acceptable form since 1943.  And until Jennifer Lee came around, every attempt had failed. So how did she succeed where so many writers before her had failed?  Not by playing by the rules, but by breaking them. That’s because Jennifer Lee knows a secret she shares with her character Elsa. The way you learn to control your gift is not by hiding it away.
You learn to control your gift by letting it go.
If you think of that early scene in Frozen, where Anna and Elsa are playing together, it probably reminds you of the games you used to play as a child. Most of us probably couldn’t turn air into snow, but we could imagine things that were fantastical and magical and unique to us. And playing felt free and easy. We didn’t worry about whether we had the perfect structure, whether we were playing right, whether all of our playful decisions made sense. Instead, we were dancing with our characters, we were exploring.   And yes, every once and a while we did fall and get hurt. But that was part of growing up and learning who we were as people. Unfortunately, as we get older, it gets harder and harder to play in this way.   Our ambition becomes our enemy.  And for so many of us, the well-meaning advice about how to control our gift that we’re given by our own “Grand Pabbies,” – whether they’re friends, family, teachers, coverage readers or producers – is like a shot of ice right into the heart.
We’re told to focus so strongly on all the elements of control, following the formulas and playing by the rules, that we end up dulling down all the elements that could truly allow our stories to stand out from the pack:  the unique way that we see the world, the things that are in our screenplay that are weird, that are socially unacceptable, that don’t make sense, that we might be judged for. And we end up losing that wonderful, playful experience that we have when we’re children creating and replacing it with a fear-based writing that is not only boring for producers, but isn’t even pleasing for us!