Cockeyed Caravan

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 1: Imagine the Worst Case Scenario

2012-01-31T22:16:00.013-05:00

True story: Many years ago, four Atlanta businessmen decided to take a weekend trip to the woods of North Georgia, hoping to canoe a river one last time before it got damned up. They didn’t plan things very well, and soon found themselves hopelessly lost on the river, far away from their cars or any town. They gradually came to realize, however, that the woods around them were filled with backwoodsmen. What happened next?

I’ll tell you what happened. Some mountain folk invited them back to their cabin, fed them a great meal and then escorted them back to their cars, with a warm farewell and an offer to stop by again anytime.

As the four men were on the way home, one of them wondered aloud, “Gee, what would have happened if those mountain folk hadn’t been so nice to us?” Things might have ended there, but one of the four men was James Dickey, who wrote the novel (and later screenplay) “Deliverance” based on that supposition. Ever since, the whole world has associated the fine people of North Georgia with psychotic depravity. No good deed goes unpunished.

One can carp about the ethics of throwing one’s rescuers under the bus like that, but it’s still a good lesson to writers: if the worst thing that ever happened to you wasn’t that bad, feel free to write about the worst thing that could have happened to you.

This gives you a chance to tap into the fears you actually felt, even if they turned out to be unfounded. After all, what really fuels Deliverance isn’t the (invented) evil of the tormentors, but the (very real) feelings of feelings of masculine inadequacy and disconnectedness from nature that grip the isolated men.

Storyteller's Rulebook #121: Don’t Presume Your Premise

2012-01-30T22:22:00.011-05:00

I sometimes get to read scripts long before they’re made, and one of my favorite scripts in recent years was cheekily titled “Fuckbuddies”. Naturally they had to change the title, and they wanted to call it Friends with Benefits, but they found out there was already a competing project with that name, so they ended up with the name No Strings Attached.

“Fuckbuddies” was a very popular script, largely because the screenwriter’s “voice” was so strong: it felt fresh, real, and raw. But by the time it made it to the screen, directed on autopilot by old duffer Ivan Reitman, that bold voice had been reduced to a mutter, and the resulting movie is shockingly awful. Friends with Benefits, on the other hand, earned fewer fans as a script, but it really came alive onscreen, making for a surprisingly fun movie.

It’s tempting to blame NSA’s script/screen disconnect entirely on rewrites, and those certainly didn’t help, but it also had another problem: that bold fresh voice had been masking some fundamental construction problems, and once the voice was muted, those problems became glaringly obvious.

NSA fails, in part, because it simply presumes its premise. We start with a too-cool-for-school heroine who has never had any interest in romance. When she announces to a schlubby acquaintance that they should have a loveless romance, he hastily agrees, and the movie is off and running. It’s not that her beliefs are unmotivated—we certainly understand how her home life left her afraid of commitment, but that’s just backstory, we never get to see those scars form.

FWB, on the other hand, builds its premise in a much more straightforward way. We begin by intercutting our two future lovers as they both go through exasperating break-ups with annoying exes. We then see how satisfying their work lives are by comparison. By the time they meet, we totally understand why each would be reluctant to get seriously involved.

Most telling are the actual hook-up scenes in the two movies. NSA goes for old “jump each other’s bones when you least expect it” set-up, which always gets a laugh, but rarely makes sense. FWB, refreshingly, shows a far more believable hook-up: a guy and girl are hanging out platonically when, struck by a fleeting moment of horniness, the guy makes a half-hearted pass at the girl. They then discuss whether or not that’s a good idea. After coolly batting the idea back and forth in a sexy, witty, but utterly realistic way, they decide to go for it: provided that they don’t bring emotion into it. With that, the premise is strongly established, and they’re off.

Alas, this is why screenplays need to have rock-solid infrastructure: because that’s all that will be left by the time they make it to the screen. “Fuckbuddies”, on the other hand, had as its selling point a certain je ne sais qua, which translated onscreen to “Say what?”

If you’ve got a strong dialogue voice, you might have more luck on TV—and sure enough “Fuckbuddies” writer Liz Meriwether now has a witty, quirky hit sitcom, “The New Girl”, which has done a much better at conveying her unique voice.

Underrated Movie #147: Mickey One

2012-01-29T15:21:00.011-05:00

Title: Mickey One
Year: 1965
Director: Arthur Penn
Writer: Alan M. Surgal
Stars: Warren Beatty, Alexandra Stewart, Hurd Hatfield, Franchot Tone, Kamatari Fujiwara

The Story: An ultra-cool Detroit nightclub comic finds himself on the wrong side of his club’s mobbed-up owner. Fleeing on the lam to the seedy side of Chicago, he imagines killers are hiding in every shadow… but he has a pathological urge to return to the stage...

How it Came to be Underrated: This movie has two big problems: it’s always divided audiences, and it’s always been hard to find. After wildly mixed early reviews, it was dumped as a drive-in movie, where audiences must have been truly baffled, since it was one of the first attempts to do a dryly-surreal American art-film. The movie has never been on video, and even when it shows up in revival theaters, it continues to attract as many detractors as fans. I happen to love it.

Why It’s Great:

By 1965, there was a huge gap between the unapologetic artistry of European cinema and America’s widescreen technicolor blandness, but a few brave souls wanted to drag Hollywood into the modern age, and none moreso than Warren Beatty (of all people). He really wanted to hire Godard or Truffaut to come over the pond, but instead, he made do with ambitious American TV director Arthur Penn. This was their first attempt to import a new wave sensibility, and they succeeded onscreen, but not in theaters. Nevertheless the pair tried again two years later with Bonnie and Clyde and finally ignited an American Renaissance.
American street-level noir and European high-minded existentialism have always been incestuously entertwined: Nobody believed Camus when he said that “The Stranger” was merely his attempt to imitate James M. Cain, but he wasn’t half wrong, and noir itself never would have taken hold without the infusion of émigrés fleeing Hitler. (even then, it took the French to recognize the genre and name it). Penn’s oddball intellectual noir delicately straddles the end of one era (noir) and the beginning of another (art cinema), not belonging to either but worthy of both.
The offbeat sensibility and staccato rhythms make this movie the visual equivalent of jazz, and so it’s only fitting that it’s got a hopping jazz score by the great Stan Getz.
Beatty always seem miscast to me in movies like The Parallax View and Dick Tracy… Basically I think that he’s only really good at playing one thing: angry, half-witted loverboys whose charm masks a deeper angst, but whenever he got a role like that, he was amazing. After all, many or our greatest stars made a nice living for themselves by doing one thing well.
This kafka-esque nightmare is actually a great metaphor for the bleak life of a stand-up comic, then and now, where the goal is to “kill” onstage before the audience can do the same to you. At least these days the mob no longer runs the nightclubs, so that’s less literal, though just as figurative.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Another fun attempt to merge jazz sensibility and noir style was the short-lived 50s TV show “Johnny Staccato”, starring John Cassavetes as a bebop pianist who moonlights as a hardboiled detective. It’s now on DVD. Alice’s Restaurant is another great Penn movie and Funny Bones is another darkly comic look at stand-up.

How Available Is It?: After the floodgates broke open last week, there’s no stopping me now: This is another only-on-bit-torrent special. The print I found is good but a little small.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: The Crimson Clown!

Storyteller's Rulebook #120: Reboots Must Re-Establish the Metaphor

2012-01-26T19:32:00.006-05:00

Apes week concludes!
Relaunching a franchise has a lot of upsides:

You have old hardcore fans who are desperate to see more material, even though it might ignore previous stories.
You have semi-interested non-fans who recognize the name and will see this as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a phenomenon they originally missed out on.
Most importantly, you have years of stories to pick and choose from, allowing you to take the best elements and jettison everything that no longer works.

But it’s also a minefield. As I said yesterday, ever great genre story is a metaphor. It’s an extreme situation that’s a metaphor for a universal emotion. The reboot must either re-establish the original metaphor or re-shape the material into a whole new metaphor.

The worst way to do a reboot is to simply make a skewed twist on the original idea: that’s an abstraction of an abstraction. An example of this was Tim Burton’s horrible 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. They simply put the original movie in a blender and served it back to us in a weirder, wilder, and more twist-y format. “You thought the original movie’s ending was mind-blowing? Well, we’ve topped that: our ending is mind-boggling!”The right way to do it was shown by the new Apes reboot: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The bigotry metaphor of the original movie, as brilliant as it was, is totally discarded here, in favor of a rich new metaphor about generational displacement, the limits of science and different varieties of infantilization.And why not? The original movie was a masterpiece, so you’re not going to beat it at its own game. But the specter of an ape planet is still fear-inducing, so why not find a all-new use for that potent imagery?

Another great example is the recent version of “Doctor Who” starring Matt Smith. This was a “soft reboot” in that it kept (but de-emphasized) the original continuity, but new showrunner Stephen Moffat nevertheless felt the need to create an all-new metaphor for the basic concept. What he arrived at was this: “What if your imaginary friend came back to take you on more adventures as an adult?” Like so: Smith (the youngest to play the role) is the spirit of imagination, come to rescue you from the doldrums of adulthood. This is an entirely new conception of the doctor, never before seen in 40 years of stories. It took Moffat’s genius to somehow find new meaning in such a well-worn concept, and it paid off handsomely: instead of merely re-energizing old fans, his version has found an entirely new generation of fans, who never thought they would like “Doctor Who”.

Storyteller's Rulebook #119: Great Genre Stories Must Be Metaphors

2012-01-25T19:06:00.007-05:00

Hey, where’d the apes go? They escaped from today’s post!
So I watched the “Alcatraz”: pilot and it’s…okay. Fun idea, some good actors (not counting the too-cute lead), zippy execution… but it doesn’t add up to anything. Whenever I find myself watching something like this and wondering why it’s not as interesting as it should be, I take a step back and ask myself, “Okay, what exactly is the metaphor here?”

“Alcatraz,” I suspect, will never work because it’s not really a metaphor for anything. Compare this to the previous J.J. Abrams Jorge Garcia show about an island, “Lost”, where the “island as redemption” metaphor was quickly established.

Now let me be the first to admit: not every fan feels this way about genre shows. Some just enjoy the genre trappings and they could care less what it all means. I was a big fan of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” but quickly lost interest in its spin-off “Angel”. “Buffy” created an extremely rich and flexible metaphor for high-school, coming-of-age, sex, betrayal, empowerment… and almost any other topic the creators wanted to cover, but “Angel” never found its metaphor...At first, it seemed like it might be a metaphor for addiction and recovery, which might have worked, but “Buffy” had already given Angel an epic relapse and redemption arc, which pretty must used up that material, leaving the spinoff with nowhere to go. Ultimately, “Angel” was about a vampire private detective fighting the minions of a vampire law-firm. Huh? What does that mean?

But many fans loved “Angel” anyway. The show had some fun horror plots and charming characters. Why nitpick it? The problem, to my mind, was the law of diminishing returns. Once “Angel” de-coupled itself from the rich vein of meaning that underlay “Buffy”, it could keep pleasing old fans, but it wasn’t likely to earn any new fans.

Fans don’t need a lot of metaphorical meaning in order to keep watching, but they do need it to fall in love in the first place. “Angel” was a perfectly-acceptable continuation of the “Buffy” universe, but it never found its own metaphor, so it could only be a moon reflecting the light of Buffy’s sun.

Ultimately, “Angel” would have had to start over from scratch with a new metaphor. We’ll get to how to do that tomorrow... (Can you guess which movie will be our example?)

Storyteller's Rulebook #118: Limit Your Hero's Perspective

2012-01-24T18:41:00.008-05:00

Apes Week Continues!I’ve said before that a hero can’t succeed by doing what anybody would do. But wait-- Don’t we want our heroes to be relatable, and their actions to be logical? Yes, but you can’t take that too far. A character who is too logical becomes generic.

Don’t just ladle on the over-motivation and close off alternate routes until your character is forced to do exactly what you want them to do. Instead, give them just the right amount of motivation, and then let them choose to go the extra step, based on their specific psychology and circumstances. The trick is to allow your hero to have reactions that are surprising but still understandable.

If we understand how circumstances have limited the hero’s perspective, then it is possible to remain intensely sympathetic to them, even if we know that we would react differently.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it would have been easy to over-motivate Caesar the ape. He could have been expelled from his human home as a result of a false accusation, or an irrational prejudice, but no: he genuinely freaked out and acted overly violent. More importantly, once he’s in state custody, as bad as the conditions are (compared to the human life he used to live) it would have been easy to make his keepers more broadly villainous, instead of merely callous.

As I was watching it, I briefly misinterpreted what was happening. I thought that when the keepers showed Franco the nicely-furnished monkey playroom, and then put Caesar into his concrete cell, that this was a dastardly bait and switch. I was relieved when I realized that this wasn’t the case: Caesar did indeed get to spend a lot of time in the playroom, and Franco was in fact aware that Caesar would have to sleep in the cell at night.The decision not to overplay the villainy of the keepers is key, because it keeps the focus on the delicate Franco/Caesar relationship, rather than allowing an outside force to barge in and tip the balance.

Since Caesar’s banishment was his own fault, and Franco did everything in his power to stop it, and the keepers aren’t overly evil, then Caesar’s feeling of isolation and betrayal is all the more tragic and universal. Though he has a genius IQ, it doesn’t stop him from feeling a child’s illogical sense of betrayal when he discovers that the world is unfair and not everyone will treat him as well as his parental guardians did.We can see that Caesar’s sense of betrayal is unfounded, but we understand his limited perspective (and remember feeling the same way as children) so we intensely sympathize, far more than if Caesar had suffered a more exaggerated betrayal.

Storyteller's Rulebook #117: Create Reversible Behaviors

2012-01-23T18:27:00.009-05:00

Finally saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes and loved it! Let’s do a mini-unit of Apes rules...
In every scene, you must convey the hero’s internal state to the audience. In screenwriting, you have three ways of doing this: voiceover, dialogue or behavior:

The advantage of voiceover is that it allows the hero to honestly and directly tell us what’s going on. The disadvantages, however, are many: it’s inherently un-cinematic, in that it’s invisible, and it takes us out of the story by breaking the fourth wall.
Dialogue is also problematic: in real life, people don’t like to honestly tell other people what they’re thinking or feeling. Usually the other character has to trap the hero into revealing their thoughts.
The best way to detect the internal state of others, in movies and in real life, is through behavior. But behavior is very hard to write. Many readers, myself included, tend to breeze through scripts by reading only the dialogue, skipping over the prose paragraphs entirely, because they tend to be turgid and repetitive. Knowing this, writers are understandably loathe even to attempt to write actions that will speak louder than their words. But this is a mistake. Instead, in order to keep the reader from skipping the descriptions of behavior, every screenwriter must (against expectations) also be an excellent prose writer.

In order to convince the writer to read your prose (and get the movie’s future audience to invest in paying close attention to your characters’ actions) you need to create behaviors that, like good dialogue, are streamlined, deliberate, and packed with meaning.

Behavior, like dialogue, benefits from the old trick of ‘set up and pay-off.’ One advantage of this is that it allows you to create potential energy early on with the set-up, and then release that energy swiftly and efficiently when the pay-off hits. The audience loves to see this happen: Because they saw the set-up, they are in your secret club and know instantly what it means when they see the pay-off, even though a casual observer wouldn’t.

You can do this with physical actions as well by creating reversible behaviors. Rather than come up with new behavioral clues from scratch in every scene to convey emotional states, you can give a character a behavior that means one thing, then later have the character reverse that behavior, letting the audience know instantly that the internal state has flipped as well. This is why it’s always good to look for behaviors that can do double-duty: meaning one thing now and the opposite later on.

Several great examples are on display in the wonderful recent blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes. When we first meet John Lithgow’s character, he’s attempting to play the piano but merely banging out dischordant notes, letting us know instantly that he’s losing his mind. When his son gives him an anti-alzheimer’s medication, he awakes the next morning to find his father playing the piano beautifully. We instantly understand what this means.(Interestingly, the writers later have an opportunity to flip this again, but they don’t use it. When the drug starts to wear off and Lithgow begins to lose his mind again, rather than put him at the piano a third time, the writers craft a heartbreaking moment where the two main characters silently notice that Lithgow is trying to chop up his eggs with the wrong end of his fork. Having used reversible behavior to good effect once, they decided to start fresh with a new behavior to indicate Lithgow’s gradual return to senility)We get another powerful example of reversible behavior when Caesar, the human-like ape, is kicked out of his human home and sent to live in a concrete cell. At home in his attic loft, Caesar looked out on the world through a distinctive window.In the cell, Caesar touchingly scratches a replica of the window onto his wall, showing that he wishes to return there. Later, once he realizes that he can never trust humans, he violently erases the drawing off the wall. The audience knows all too well what that means.

Underrated Movie #146: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

2012-01-22T22:34:00.003-05:00

Title: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Year: 1970
Director: Elio Petri
Writers: Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro
Stars: Gian Maria Volonte, Florinda Bolkan, Gianni Santuccio, Orazio Orlanda

The Story: As Italy’s postwar government slowly devolves back towards becoming a police state, an unhinged chief of detectives decides to test the limits of his power by murdering his lover, then leaving a series of clues pointing towards his own guilt, desperately hoping to be caught, but knowing full well how unlikely that is.

How it Came to be Underrated: This is a special case, it was not underrated at the time: in fact it won the Best Foreign Film Oscar…But, for some reason (which I’ve never been able to determine), it has never been available on video or disc in America. Until recent advances in piracy, it could be seen only at revival houses. Inevitably, it has been forgotten here, which is a shame, since it’s a masterpiece.

Why It’s Great:

Also forgotten in this country is the great Gian Maria Volonte, though you’ve probably seen him more that you realize: as the bad guys in Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More and co-star of Melville’s heist epic The Red Circle, for instance. His coiled fury is utterly hypnotic, hiding a sublimated maelstrom of clashing emotions: guilt for his murder, hatred and lust for his dead mistress, anger at his colleagues, and utter despair at the state of the world.
Volonte’s character has no confidant, so how do we know what he’s doing as he manipulates the system, much less what he’s thinking? Luckily his victim was a kinky murder-groupie and he used to explain the wickedness of the system to her during their assignations. Those flashbacks now echo through his head as a bizarre greek chorus, commenting and explaining on his actions. It’s a clever and entertaining conceit.
Though no cop would admit it in court, they know all too well that most witnesses cannot accurately describe a face they’ve just seen. Volonte’s detective has had that working against him so long that he can’t resist using it to his advantage now, delighting in the act of prolonging eye contact with witnesses to his crime and cover-up, daring them to finally get it right for once, but knowing that the system only sees what it wants to see.
This world isn’t so far away from ours: Steve Jobs refused to put license plates on his car, knowing that no cop in Cupertino dared ticket him, but all that power never made him happy. As terrible as it is to be in a situation where you know you’re being discriminated against, it’s also sickening in its own way to realize that you’re getting unfair advantages. This movie shows how you cannot have contempt for others without also having growing contempt for yourself.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Another brilliant Italian movie from the same year, also about a kinky conscience-stricken fascist, was Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Rewatching this, I also saw connections to the brilliant recent German movie The Lives of Others.

How Available Is It?: I don’t usually feature movies that are only available on bit torrent, but I was dying to see this again so I made an exception. Since it doesn’t seem likely to ever be released here, you may have to take drastic measures. For what it’s worth, there are great prints floating around out there in the ether.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Anything For Kicks!

Quick Course Correction

2012-01-22T22:26:00.004-05:00

At the beginning of the year, I mentioned that I was going to only count pages I wrote, not hours I worked when I wasn’t turning out pages, hoping that that would force me to write more pages: but I forgot that, for some reason, that never works. There are always going to be day when the pages don’t come, but I can still sit there and brainstorm, and when I stop giving myself credit for those hours, I spend too much time beating up on myself. So those of you playing along at home will note that I’ve changed the calender back to hours worked / pages written (lumping script and prose pages in together). Now back to the show.

Film School Confidential, Conclusion: Instead of Film School, Listen to the Crickets

2012-01-19T18:25:00.004-05:00

Let me tell you a little fable that also happens to be a true story... The same week I started at Columbia, an old friend from college left New York to attend a different film school in another city. A month later, he came right back. He had taken one look around and realized that film school was a terrible idea.

I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I pitied him. On the one hand, here was I: Whenever anyone asked me what I was doing with my life, I got to say “I’m getting a masters from Columbia University.” Everybody was very impressed. Nobody responded, “Gee what a waste”. Nobody said, “Holy hell, man, how are you ever going to pay that off??” Getting a Columbia degree is a “very worthwhile thing to do.”

My friend, meanwhile, had to admit to people at parties that he was a film school dropout, working as a temp and performing with improv troupes around town. I went to a lot of his shows and let me tell you something about improv: it’s painful. The troupe would do a skit and you would hear crickets. Not one real laugh. I felt terrible: Here I was, being told by famous filmmakers at an Ivy League school that my work was great. And here this guy was, begging for laughs in a basement in Brooklyn.

It wasn’t until I graduated and that I finally asked, “What do I have to show for all those years and all that money?” The truth was that I had experienced the exact same realization as my friend had, two weeks into my own film school experience. That was how long it took me to realize that Columbia had a terrible film program. I should have left, right there and then, but I didn’t, because I couldn’t face the shame.

I wanted to sound impressive at parties. I wanted lots of praise from professors. I wanted these things so badly that I was willing to spend $150k to get them. (Really far more than that. It will probably balloon to $300k by the time I finally get it paid off.)

After graduation, the truth came crashing down: the professors that I thought were my good friends stopped returning my calls, now that I was no longer paying them to like me. Then I found out that no one in the business was impressed by a Columbia degree. Worst of all, my new manager started sending out my Columbia-award-winning scripts and guess what I heard?

Crickets.

Suddenly, I noticed something about my friend that I had never realized before: All that time, he could hear the crickets too. Unlike me, he knew that his work wasn’t connecting to paying audiences. And it hurt. And so he had slowly gotten better.

Let’s cut to the chase: A few months ago, he got a call at his temp job, and then he promptly quit. He’s now a staff writer at “The Daily Show”. Every writer on staff gets an Emmy every year. Now he has no problem telling people at parties what he does.

As for me, I started this blog, re-educated myself, wrote a bunch of new scripts and now I’ve making some money, though I’m still a long way away from paying off those loans. But most graduates of Columbia tragically never even secure representation, much less make a sale.

Now I know what I was really buying with that $150,000: I was paying the crickets to stay away. I was insulating myself from any real criticism. I was paying people to like me. In short: I was paying to be coddled. And all that money and all that coddling made me a worse writer.

Film school teaches you how to please your professors, please your fellow students, and, most of all, please yourself. It doesn’t teach you how to please a paying audience. In fact, at my school, if you even said that you wanted to please a paying audience, the professors would tell you that you were making a terrible mistake.

The only reliable way to get better is to put your work before paying audiences and learn to please them through trial and error. Everyday you do that, you will get better. Otherwise, it will be almost impossible. If you go to film school, that’s four years of not getting better, for which you get a lifetime of debt.

The moral of this little fable? DO NOT GO TO FILM SCHOOL. Find yourself a basement theater, or a small newspaper, or an open mic night. Listen to the crickets. Learn to please unfriendly audiences. Slowly, painfully, get better.

Film School Confidential, Part 4: You're The Whale

2012-01-18T19:10:00.010-05:00

Don’t worry, folks, there’s only five parts, and I am going somewhere with this...

There’s a great scene in Casino that reveals the secret of Las Vegas’s success: The Whale. The Whale is the rich guy who loves to gamble, and comes to town ready to spend. Once a whale arrives, the entire casino is re-engineered to become one big happiness machine, centered around him: free rooms, free hookers, free anything. And if the whale attempts to leave while he’s ahead, they disable his plane, forcing him to spend one more night on the tables.

Everyone going to film school should watch this scene, and not just to learn about filmmaking. When you go to an expensive film school, you are the whale. Everything they do is designed to keep money shooting out of your spout. Even if that means sabotaging your education.

After I got out of college, I delivered pizzas, made movies on mini-DV and took occasional film classes at a place called Minneapolis Community and Technical College. MCTC charged $400 a class, which I paid out of pocket using my pizza tips. To my surprise, the quality of the program was excellent. The facilities and equipment were top notch. The faculty was smart, intense and dedicated. The main professor, Bruce Mamer, actually wrote one of the directing textbooks that was used at NYU. He was also brutally honest with his dirt-poor students about the economic realities of filmmaking, which we appreciated.

As part of that program, I made a short film that got me some attention. I decided to use that film to apply to a “real” film school. But when I got to Columbia, I was in for a shock. I was now paying twenty times as much, but the equipment was shoddy and rarely available, the classrooms were rotting, and the professors (with a few notable exceptions) were surly, distracted and ill-prepared. On that last point, we soon found out why: our professors were really “adjuncts” who got paid $4000 a class. If they spent any time preparing, then they’d be making less than minimum wage.

So where was our $100k in tuition going? Columbia, it turned out, had gotten addicted to buying up property in Manhattan, even though the real estate bubble had inflated prices into the stratosphere, so educational budgets had all been slashed to the bone. MCTC was a government-subsidized institution, but Columbia’s only source of money was us. And they intended to milk us for all we were worth.

But what could I do? I tried not to get upset with the people running the film program: they couldn’t help it that the university was taking our tuition and literally putting it down a hole. They had to make the best of a bad situation and try to get by on the cheap, right?

But even so, that left one thing I still couldn’t forgive them for: the program had no standards. And standards are free.

There was no curriculum. There were no grades. There were no tests. There were no criteria that we were supposed to meet. Simply put, they expected nothing of us. They cheered our output, they handed out prizes, and they told us we would soon be on easy street. Why did they have no standards? Simple: that would have interrupted the happiness machine, and that might have upset the Whales. The longer they kept us happy, the more money we spent.

Of course, if they were loaning us the money themselves, then it would all be different. They would have done everything in their power to harden us into a great filmmakers who could go out there and earn enough to pay them back. But they get paid upfront, so they could care less if their students ever get a career, or even any career skills.

Okay, things look bleak for the struggling filmmakers of the world. Is there any hope? Yes there is. Tomorrow, let’s talk about what to do instead...

Film School Confidential, Part 3: It Feeds Your Worst Instincts

2012-01-17T18:54:00.005-05:00

If I had to summarize the message of film school in two words, it would be these: “Never Compromise.” Occasionally, they would bring in indie filmmakers to show their latest films. This was during a period when the audience for indie films was plummeting, and these filmmakers should have been adapting, but instead they were determined to go down with the Titanic.

Time and time, students would stand and say, “Your movie is so uncompromising! How do you resist the pressure to give in to notes?” And the filmmaker would tell them to be strong and always remember: “Never compromise!” As I pointed out before, this is terrible advice.

Here’s a typically painful example. I was a big fan of Slums of Beverly Hills and its director, Tamara Jenkins, so I was excited when she brought her long-awaited follow-up, The Savages. This was a movie about a brother and sister who have to take care of their indigent, unloving dad in his final days. They get more and more annoyed with him, and they they realize more and more that he’s really messed them up, and then finally… they get a call from the nursing home that dad’s dead. End of movie.

As the lights went up, I thought. “Gee, that was almost great, but it had no ending. The kids never confront their dad!” Sure enough, in the Q and A, Jenkins said that most studios and even most indie producers begged her to add a scene where the kids have it out with their dad. Even the production house that actually made the movie told her that they would give her twice the budget if she added such a scene. But no! She stuck to her guns! And let that be a lesson to us! Never compromise! (aka “Never fix your movie”)

Now obviously, the school can’t be blamed for the words of one visiting director, but this was a very typical example of what classes were like as well.

As with any art school, most of the professors were somewhat disappointed about their own artistic careers, but rather than say, “Oh well, maybe I should have been more of a team player,” they took the opposite message. They concluded that: “I was denied by a system that demanded that I compromise. Now that I’m teaching film school, I can create a utopian new generation that will end the era of compromise once and for all!”

Obviously, this is crazy. But why didn’t the school feel any responsibility to teach us the skills we would need to make careers for ourselves? Because of the incentive structure behind these programs, which we’ll get to tomorrow…

Film School Confidential, Part 2: It’s Worse than Nothing

2012-01-16T18:22:00.005-05:00

Doctors frame their degrees and put them on their office walls. They want you to know where they went to school, because then you’ll assume that they know what they’re doing. Same thing with academics. They know that every time they publish their research, the reader is going to flip to the end and check out their credentials first.

But with fiction writers, it’s just the opposite. The last thing you want to do is brag about where you went to school. Writers are selling their authenticity, and a writing degree is the opposite of authenticity. Producers would much rather hear about your time in prison, or on a shrimp boat, or in the army. Anything but graduate school.

When was the last time you saw a movie poster like the one above? If you did, would that make you more likely to go? This brings us to the real truth: Not only does an MFA degree not help your career, it actually hurts your career. Producers don’t trust film schools. And with good reason.

When a producer sees that you’ve gone to film school, here’s what they think: “Uh oh. This guy’s just paid a hundred thousand dollars to be coddled for four years. He’s been told him that his shit doesn’t stink because that’s what he wanted to hear, and he foolishly believed it all.”

Even worse: They know that you’ve spent four years in a hermetically-sealed environment. You haven’t been listening to how real people actually talk. Just the opposite: you’ve been listening to other students’ fumbling attempts to write dialogue all that time. Film school is a bad dialogue echo-chamber, and nobody comes out unscathed.

So who would they rather hire? The top job in the screenwriting world is that of TV showrunner, and most showrunners started out in one of three professions: they were journalists, playwrights, or stand-up comedians. If you want to become a screenwriter, then you should be pursuing one of those three professions first, not going to film school.

What do these professions have in common? Three things:

You submit your material to a paying audience on a daily basis.
There’s low overhead, so you can pay your dues for years without going into debt.
You have to LISTEN to a lot of people.

Playwrights and stand-up comics have to listen to live audiences, and constantly revise to entertain them more. Journalists have to listen to the people they’re reporting on, transcribe every word they say, and then boil that down to a few quotable lines that convey what’s unique and interesting about this person. Film school, on the other hand, specifically encourages you not to listen to others, which we’ll get to tomorrow…

Film School Confidential, Part 1: A Confession

2012-01-15T16:01:00.007-05:00

This blog is basically one big fraud. The day I put up my first post, I had that freak-out that all bloggers have: “Why should anyone listen to me? What authority do I have to talk about anything?” And so I gave in to my moment of weakness and put a bio in the sidebar that assured my readers that I have an MFA in Screenwriting from a hoity-toity university. And I never took it down. It’s still there today.

And so, on more than one occasion, fans of the blog have said to me, “I feel like reading your blog gives me all the benefits of a Columbia education!”

[record scratch sound] Um, no.

Of the 102 rules I’ve covered on this blog, I can think of maybe two that I was taught at Columbia. Almost every other rule is the exact opposite of what they teach there. In fact, anyone trying to teach these rules there would be fired.

It’s time to admit the real reason I started this blog: because I suddenly realized that almost everything I learned at film school was dead wrong, which is why far too many of my fellow graduates have careers that are dead dead. This blog is my attempt to unlearn almost everything they taught us, and forcibly re-educate myself from scratch by re-examining the movies that made me want to make movies.

My school was run like a summer camp, rather than a professional program. We were encouraged to dabble in everything and specialize in nothing, to follow our muse wherever it led us, content in the knowledge that we were in a “safe space”, free from serious criticism. The following concepts were verboten in most of my classes:

Compelling Characters
Universal Structure
Emotion
Sympathy
Selling a Screenplay
And the most verboten concept of all: Pleasing an Audience

Instead, we were supposed to talk about:

Executing Our Own Perfect Vision
Big Ideas
Self-Awareness
Post-Modernism
Awkwardness
Ennui

Yeah, sure, okay, you say. Art school is arty. That’s no surprise. But at least it helps your career, right? We’ll pick up there tomorrow…

Underrated Movie #145: Every Little Step

2012-01-12T17:13:00.016-05:00

Title: Every Little Step
Year: 2008
Directors: Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern
Stars: Bob Avian, Marvin Hamlisch, Baayork Lee, Jay Binder

The Story: An fascinating and suspenseful documentary about the casting process for the 2005 revival of “A Chorus Line” on Broadway that, like the original show, quickly becomes about so much more: the economy, the American Dream, the creative life, and the existential dilemmas that everyone has to face.

How it Came to be Underrated: This had a brief run here in New York where it was popular with Broadway fans, but it hasn’t yet pulled off the crossover appeal of the original show, reaching a broader audience who will discover that there’s more here than meets the eye. This is one of the best documentaries of the last ten years and I cannot recommend it enough.

Why It’s Great:

When the movie begins, our sympathy is totally with the actors, and we take offense at the indignity of the whole process. But then, as so often happens in stories, our sympathies begin to creep upward towards the bosses. The turning point comes when the casting directors have to listen to thirty different Maggies blow the high note on “At the Ballet.” Suddenly, all you care about is their suffering. In the end, despite the fact that they started with 3000 wildly talented hopefuls for 20 parts, you actually begin to worry that the casting directors won’t find anybody good enough.
One thing that makes the process especially tough for both sides is that these characters all describe their own body type, so even more than usual, the actors have a fatalistic sense that they’ll be judged more on “look” than acting ability. But then we get to the most amazing moment in the movie: An unassuming Asian guy named Jason Tam gets up to read for a white role and he goes so deep into the monologue that he begins to weep, and then everybody watching this movie begins to weep, and then even the casting directors, who have been listening to this same monologue over and over all damn day (and for the last 30 years), begin to weep! Suddenly, nobody could care less that he doesn’t have the right look. That’s an audition.
The editing is breathtaking. It’s the ultimate post-modern nesting doll of a movie, with six overlaid parallel stories: the original, desperate life stories of a group of dancers, the versions of their stories that they put on tape one night in 1975, the original Broadway musical they created from those tapes, the revival being mounting in 2005, and the real stories we’re seeing onscreen of all the dancers trying out to star in that revival. And yet all of these are the same story: we see our auditioners tell the camera how badly they need this show, then we see them audition by singing songs about how badly they need the show within the show…
…It could have been a navel-gazing mess, but it works for the same reason that “A Chorus Line” works, because none of this is really about dance. It’s about the most universal dilemma or all: individuality vs. solidarity. As Frank Rich points out in the special features, the existential power of the show comes from the fact that none of these characters is even trying out for a once-of-a-lifetime role that’s going to make them a star: their goal is to be allowed to melt into an anonymous, homogenous, background chorus line. But in order to earn the right to melt away, they need to prove that they’ve become the most extraordinary individual they can be.
The ending was a little anti-climactic for Betsy and me, because we had seen the amazing revival on Broadway so we already knew who was going to get each role, but that also added another level of poignancy because we knew that, despite glowing reviews and strong sales for the first year, the show had already closed by the time the movie opened.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Another recent documentary in the same vein was “Stage Door”, about a camp for theater kids, which has one of the most heartbreaking endings of any doc I’ve seen. Another great doc from around this time about a competition with larger metaphorical meaning was “Spellbound.”

How Available Is It?: But wait, we still have one more meta-layer: the commentary, which is fun, as are the deleted scenes and various interviews on the well-made DVD.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Reflecting --And How!

Storyteller's Rulebook #116: Listen to Despicable People

2012-01-11T16:06:00.008-05:00

We live in the golden age of information. It used to be that if you wanted to collect great, real dialogue, you had to leave your house. Now there’s a reality TV show about every profession, some of which actually are unscripted, and if that doesn’t get you what you need, there’s all those eavesdropping twitter feeds. My new addiction is “Goldman Sachs Elevator Gossip”

This one is especially useful because despicable dialogue is some of the hardest dialogue to write without resorting to clichés. Most of us do everything in our power to make sure that we never have to listen to evil people, but almost every story contains at least one evil character, so writers have to know how they actually talk. Sometimes such people actually get caught on tape, as with the late night energy traders in the above clip, but this twitter feed is the next best thing:

“Living my life is like playing ‘Call of Duty’ on Easy. I just go around and fuck shit up.”
“A new year. Time for a new slampiece.”
“Seriously… that idiot hedging an oddlot position with futures is like a fat chick buying a rape whistle.”
And one from the ladies: “I love it when a guy hits on me & then gives me a business card with a gmail account. Asshole, I work at Goldman Sachs.”

It’s even harder to write racism believably. Having a character say “I don’t happen to like Jews” is as dubious as it is boring. Here’s a much better version, that I’ll paraphrase from an actual email I ran across: “My father was never anti-Semitic a day in his life. And that’s especially impressive because the Jews were horrible to him.”

Nine times out of ten, racism is not a conscious attitude, it’s a set of unconscious assumptions. People reveal it most when they try to say something magnanimous. Every time I eat at my favorite neighborhood restaurant, I remember Bill O’Reilly’s infamous praise for it: “And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks […] There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘Motherfucker, I want more iced tea.’” Okee-dokee then.

A previous rule was Let Them Hang Themselves. There are two great ways to do that: let them try to be funny or let them try to be nice.

Hero Personality Profiles, Conclusion: Match The Hero to the Vaccum

2012-01-10T19:00:00.000-05:00

So what can we conclude from this breakdown? Is it useful to know the personality types of your heroes before you write them? I think a list like this is useful for a few reasons:

As we saw, several heroes were members of several groups, but nobody was a member of all of them. Simply because these are all admirable types doesn’t mean that a hero can be a shapeless agglomeration of traits. Likeable heroes come in many different shapes. You have to give heroes a certain set of heroic traits and stick to those, even if it means that they’re distinctly lacking in others. That way, when a producer says, “A hero wouldn’t do that”, you can respond, “This type of hero would”.
Even though I initially found it cynical and depressing, I now see why it’s important to surround heroes with characters that lack their qualities. The point, I think, is that nobody gets any credit for doing what everybody else is doing. This ties into another recent idea: movies aren’t about morals, they’re about ethics, and ethics are entirely relative. In the same way that actions are only heroic if they’re hard to do, personality traits are only admirable if it you have to go against the grain when you act that way.
Another reason why context is important: A hero who is likeable in one situation might be entirely unlikable if you put them in a different movie. Each situation has something lacking: a vacuum that needs to be filled, and just begging for a certain personality type to come in and fill it. Sometimes the situation calls out for a hero who will speak truth to power, but other times they just need someone to come in and start a keg party. Find the right vacuum for every hero, and the right hero for every vacuum.
Indeed, even in real life, every hero is determined solely by his context: Compared to most people, Churchill was a white supremacist genocidal maniac, but compared to Hitler, he wasn’t so bad, and in fact he turned out to be just the right hero at just the right time. (Of course, as soon as the war ended, he had to be whisked back out to the curb post haste)

Hero Personality Profiles, Part 5: Fun Lovers

2012-01-09T19:00:00.002-05:00

The Fifth and Final Group: Fun Lovers. Obviously this is a type most associated with comedies, but they can also be surprisingly effectively in dramas: after all, there’s nothing that angers some people more than positivity, so there’s lot of room for serious conflict, as movies like Prick Up Your Ears and Happy Go Lucky show.

Subtype #1: The party-starter, surrounded by duds.

Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns
Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude
Gary Oldman in Prick up Your Ears
Vince Vaughn in Swingers
Seth Rogen in Knocked Up and just about everything else he’s done

Subtype #2: The easygoing one, surrounded by agitated people. As I pointed out before, this is somewhat similar to “drolly sarcastic, surrounded by the gung ho”, the difference here is that these heroes are more at peace with themselves.

Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again
Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles
Bob Hope in Son of Paleface, and just about everything else

Subtype #3: The irrepressible optimist surrounded by cynics.

Sally Hawkins in Happy Go Lucky
Ed Helms in Cedar Rapids
Zooey Deschanel on “The New Girl”

So what do you say, people? Are there any types I missed? Can you think of likeable heroes who don’t fall into any of these categories? Do you think I’ve miscategorized anybody? Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up and I’ll draw some conclusions...

Hero Personality Profiles, Part 4: Sensitive Types

2012-01-08T09:28:00.006-05:00

Group C: Sensitive Types. These are some of the hardest characters to make sympathetic. Americans are hard-wired to hate losers. Of course, if you think about it, that’s somewhat weird… If I were to ask you, “who’s more sympathetic, a homeless guy or a CEO?”, most people would say the homeless guy. The problem, I think, is that moviegoers aren’t looking at snapshots, we’re living with someone. We’re not being asked to judge them, we’re being asked to identify with them, to share their lives, and if you asked people which of those two they’d rather share their lives with, you’d probably get a different answer.

Subtype #1: Sensitive failure, surrounded by insensitive winners: It takes a filmmaker of extraordinary sensitivity and generosity to make us sympathize with unsuccessful people, but it can certainly be done, and I wish more filmmakers would try.

Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, Modern Times, and most everything else.
Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (again, only partially: but Potter, Sam Wainwright, even his brother all qualify)
The Rabbit in Salesman
Albert Brooks in Lost in America and Defending Your Life
Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross
Michael Scott on “The Office” is an interesting case: Careerwise, he’s an insensitive winner surrounded by sensitive strugglers, but in terms of social skills he’s certainly a sensitive failure, surrounded by insensitive winners.

Subtype #2: Sensitive poor, surrounded by insensitive rich: Price and Hopkins use their class resentment to justify horrible actions. Redford, Clements and Aniston merely use it as an excuse to hold back and judge, although they come to realize they’re only hurting themselves.

Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets
Robert Redford in Downhill Racer
Edward Clements in Metropolitan
Anthony Hopkins in Nixon
Jennifer Aniston in Friends with Money

Tomorrow: the fifth and final group!

Hero Personality Profiles, Part 3: The Deserving Winners

2012-01-05T20:28:00.011-05:00

If yesterday was about the underappreciated, that would make today’s group the justly-appreciated. It’s hard to write sympathetic bosses: Everyone, after all, hates their own, but by that same token we long for the boss of our dreams: either one that’s just one of the guys, or simply one that’s super-competent.

Group C: Deserving Winners

Subtype #1: In on the joke despite high status: Audience love to meet an intimidating boss and then be surprised when the boss joins in the jokes at his expense. (Of course, most of these also belong in the next group, too, just for good measure.)

Both Tiny Fey and Alec Baldwin on “30 Rock”
William Peterson on “CSI”
Hugh Laurie on “House”
Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive

Subtype #2: The smarter one who can see the nature of the situation: If a boss won’t pal around with his underlings, then we want some proof that he deserves his job. He’s got to be ten steps ahead of everybody. But this category includes not just bosses but also rogue cops like Popeye Doyle and John McClain, ambitious underlings such as Jack Ryan, and those who rise to take control of a group of equals, such as Michael Corleone.

James Gandolfini in “The Sopranos”
Jon Hamm on “Mad Men”
Mark Harmon on “NCIS”
Ken Watanabe in Letters from Iwo Jima
And Also:
Gene Hackman in The French Connection
Al Pacino in The Godfather
Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies.
Alec Baldwin in Hunt for Red October

But where does this leave a character like Michael Scott on “The Office”? He’s the boss from hell, but he’s still sympathetic, in his own way. I wouldn’t put him here, though, because it’s not his qualities as a boss that make him sympathetic (quite the opposite). Instead he’s sympathetic because he falls into the trickiest group of all, which we’ll get to next time...

Hero Personality Profiles, Part 2: The Underappreciated

2012-01-04T22:23:00.008-05:00

Group B in our survey: The Underappreciated

Subtype #1: The unrewarded but talented worker surrounded by users: This is the most common type of hero (so broad that it includes both the Man with No Name and C.C. Baxter!), because this is one of the most common emotions in the world. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in the world who does not feel that they deserve more credit for what they do.

This is also a great way to draw sympathy to someone who is otherwise a terrible human being. For both Tony Soprano and Walter White (of “Breaking Bad”) we eventually come to find their wives to be more sympathetic than them, but that’s not true in the pilots, where both wives come off as contemptuous users: In the “Sopranos” pilot, Carmela tells Tony that he’s going to hell as he’s sucked into a CAT scan, and in the “Breaking Bad” pilot, Sky gives Walt the world’s most contemptuous handjob for his birthday.

First they have to get us on the hero’s side, so they exaggerate the negative qualities of the people around the hero. Only after we’re committed to the show do they start to allow us to sympathize with people other than the hero.

Jack Lemmon in The Apartment
Clint Eastwood in the “Man with no Name” trilogy
Zero Mostel in The Producers
Robert Redford in Downhill Racer
Dennis Christopher in Breaking Away
Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon (also showed up in “drolly sarcastic, surrounded by the gung ho)
Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter
Bryan Cranston in “Breaking Bad” (when he was a high school teacher)
Gene Hackman in The French Connection (will show up again)
Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs (will show up again)
James Gandolfini in “The Sopranos” (will show up again)
Jon Hamm in “Mad Men” (will show up again)
Steve Carrell in 40 Year Old Virgin (will show up again)
Ed Helms in Cedar Rapids (will show up again)

Subtype #2: The ethical one, surrounded by cheaters: If everybody is following the rules, then there’s nothing heroic about it, but there’s something quixotically noble about following a set of rules even though no one else is.

Robert Blake in Electra Glide in Blue
Randolph Scott in Ride Lonesome
Steve Wiebe in King of Kong
Jon Favreau in Swingers
Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (But this is an interesting case, because he’s not really surrounded by cheaters. There are really just a few cheaters and a lot of people who won’t stand up to them. This character also showed up in the “drolly sarcastic” category and will show a third time.)

Subtype #3: The innocent surrounded by cynics: This one is similar to a category we’ll see later: The Optimist Surrounded by Duds. The only difference, really, is in the the nature of the opposition they face.

Jean Arthur in Easy Living
Sandro Panseri in Il Posto
Beau Bridges in The Landlord
Gene Wilder in The Producers
Steve Carrell in 40 Year Old Virgin
Ed Helms in Cedar Rapids (could go in the above category as well)

Subtype #5: The Innovator, surrounded by regressive thinkers:

David Farrar in The Small Back Room
Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit
Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech
Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man

Come back for Group C...

Hero Personality Profiles, Part 1: The Defiant Ones

2012-01-03T22:22:00.006-05:00

I’ve broken down heroes by type before on this blog. Specifically, I sorted them out by job type into nine (and then eleven) possible categories, from “The Pro at Work” to “The Worst Possible Pick”. But there are lots of other ways to classify heroes, so let’s spend some days breaking them down by personality type.

Over the course of The 15 Minutes Project, I came to a few conclusions. First, I began to notice recurring personality types that audiences like, and jotting them down. I ended up with five general categories, broken down into fourteen sub-categories (but a lot of heroes show up in two or three different categories, as you’ll see)

Second, I came to a rather depressing conclusion: The degree to which we like a hero has less to do with how likeable the hero is and more to do with how dislikable the people around the hero are.

Unfortunately, this seems to me, on first blush, like a very cynical and manipulative way to write. After all, when I was just focused on making heroes more likable, it was doubly enlightening, because I felt that I was also gaining life-skills for myself. Perhaps, once I discovered what made Jimmy Stewart so likable, maybe I could become just as appealing myself. But if the secret is simply to make everybody around the hero look awful, then that’s not a skill that I want to transfer over to real life.

Nevertheless: the evidence is pretty undeniable. See if you agree with me as we look at our first category and first three sub-categories.

Group A: The Defiant Ones

Subtype 1: Bracingly honest, surrounded by liars or dissemblers: This is a classic example of a personality type that is only sympathetic in a certain environment. If you put a bracingly honest guy into Bedford Falls or Who-Ville to puncture everyone’s bubble, then we’d hate that character, because those people don’t have it coming. Only in a rotten town is it heroic to confront everyone with the truth.

Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story
Brian Donlevy in The Great McGinty
Toshiro Mifune in High and Low
Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns
Elliot Gould in Little Murders and M*A*S*H and lots of other stuff.
Walter Matthau in Hopscotch
James Woods in Salvador
Ulrich Thomsen in The Celebration

Subtype #2: The iconoclast, surrounded by suck-ups: Usually, people hate characters who just say no, but the exception is when things are so rotten that mere defiance becomes heroic.

James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause
Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke

Subtype #3: Drolly sarcastic, surrounded by the gung ho: This is somewhat similar to a category we’ll see in group five, “The easygoing one, surrounded by agitated people”, but the difference here is that these characters are far more barbed in their criticism.

Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (though George Bailey will show up again in other categories)
Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, almost everything he’s done.
Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies and almost everything else (will also show up again)
Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon (will show up again)
Kat Denning in The 40 Year Old Virgin, Thor, 2 Broke Girls, and just about everything

Tomorrow: Group B!

Underrated Movie #144: Ronin

2012-01-02T21:11:00.012-05:00

Title: Ronin
Year: 1998
Director: John Frankenheimer
Writers: Story by J. D. Zeik, Screenplay by Zeik and David Mamet (credited as “Richard Weisz”, because he was pissed they didn’t give him solo credit.)
Stars: Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgard, Sean Bean, Jonathan Pryce

The Story: A group of ex-cold-warriors from different countries, all thrown out of work, assemble for a straight-up mercenary job, hired by the IRA to steal a mysterious case from the Russians. Let the double-crossing and triple-crossing ensue!

How it Came to be Underrated: After the Berlin Wall fell, the spy genre seemed in danger of dying. It first started to return with movies like this in the late ‘90s, but it wasn’t until The Bourne Identity and Casino Royale came out that audiences were fully back on board. This smart adrenaline-fest is at the same level as those and deserves to be rediscovered.

Why It’s Great:

I’ve listened to hundreds of director commentaries over the years, but only a few have stayed with me. This is one of very best. Frankenheimer intensely and entertainingly explains every decision he made. He tries his best to make visible to his audience all of the invisible storytelling elements that only a great director can see.
Frankenheimer talks about wanting to avoid bright colors, so he costumed accordingly and then threw tarps over any bright colors that he saw on the practical exterior sets. Nowadays (starting just two years later, actually) they would have just digitally dyed the whole movie blue in post-production, with a few orange highlights tossed in, despite the fact that this always looks horrible. I’m always baffled that actors don’t complain about the fact that they all look like corpses or oranges these days.
Why are the movies David Mamet writes for others so much better than the movie he directs himself? First and foremost because he’s a terrible director. If you don’t believe me, read his book “On Directing Film”, which is firehose of contempt aimed at the art of acting. The second problem is that most of movies have the same twist: the woman screws everybody over. When he’s forced to collaborate, his worst instincts are tamped down. Perhaps the best situation is one like this where he simply adds his great dialogue to someone else’s story.
That said, this dialogue is Mamet at his best. Mamet’s characters are always wonderfully guarded. The dialogue is not the most bad-ass thing they could say, but the most bad-ass thing they would say: “You every kill anybody?” [knowing smirk:] “I hurt somebody’s feelings once.” Or later: “Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That's the first thing they teach you.” “Who taught you?” “I don't remember. That's the second thing they teach you.” Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have an actor as good as DeNiro saying the lines.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Frankenheimer does his best here to top Willaim Friedkin’s bravura against-traffic freeway chase in To Live and Die in L.A. Though he was the senior director, it wasn’t the first time he followed in Friedkin’s footsteps: Frankenheimer directed the little-seen The French Connection II, which is a great little thriller if you don’t hold it up to the standard of Friedkin’s more ambitious original.

How Available Is It?: It’s on Watch Instantly, but you owe it to yourself to order the DVD, both for the commentary and the superior resolution in the action sequences.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Bolder and Wilder Than James Bond...

Self-Improvement

2012-01-01T23:28:00.006-05:00

“Hey, Matt, why didn’t you write any pages last month?”

Those of you who keep an eye on the calendar to the right must have been pretty disappointed last month. After a few months of posting pretty good numbers, we got a whole December of blankness. The truth is that, according to my old standard (hours at work / pages written), I could have filled in a lot of entries with “3/0”, in that I was doing a lot of “prep”, but since I wasn’t anywhere near to turning out actual pages, I declined to give myself any credit.

What happened was this: At the end of November, I turned in a screenplay, and suddenly discovered that, for the first time in 18 months, I wasn’t on deadline to anyone. This isn’t necessarily bad: I had turned in three screenplays recently and have reasonable expectations that at least one or two of them are going forward, but in the meantime I was suddenly bereft of any outstanding obligations.

I decided to actually use this blog’s advice to chart my career path for the first time. I ruthlessly re-evaluated a lot of old ideas according to my current standards, threw most of them out, radically transformed some others, and started to generate new ideas that conformed to my new conception of what makes for a good hero and a good story.

I’m also trying to become more strategic about my career, rather than just taking whatever job lands in my lap. I want to revivify my stalled interest in TV writing, which means writing new specs, since my last spec died when “Law and Order” was finally cancelled.

So I spent the last month watching shows I could spec, reading books for research about my new ideas, and doing lots and lots of brainstorming.

But my “input” month is now over and it’s time for a volcano of “output” that will hopefully last the whole year. So here are my new year’s resolutions:

I have to write (or re-write from scratch) at least a page of prose a day, because I’ve been meaning to write a novel for forever. I may wind up just re-writing the first page 365 times, but at least I’ll find out if I can do it, one way or another. In lieu of listing my nebulous “writing time”, I’ll start listing the number of prose pages next to the number of script pages.
And I have to write at least five pages of screenplay dialogue a day. Of course, I know how hard that is, so I’m already giving myself an out: if none of my scripts is ready to generate five pages, I can transcribe five pages from another movie, or TV show, or reality TV show. The idea is that I’ll at least keep my muscle memory working. But I’ll only list the original pages on the blog’s calendar.

Storyteller's Rulebook #115: People Lie About Their Feelings

2011-12-29T22:36:00.013-05:00

So I finally finished “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and WOW. That may or may not be the greatest TV epic ever, but it certainly had the best finale of any TV epic. (It helps that many such shows have had terrible finales.) (And boy oh boy does this one do a great job of addressing the great hypocrisy.)

Nevertheless, I want to focus on an uncharacteristically weak episode that stuck out like a sore thumb in the otherwise brilliant final season. Four of the villainous characters take a vacation at a private island… Now obviously, the fact that a kids’ show is willing to devote a whole episode to its villains, who each have their own complex and ambiguous characterization, is a sign of its greatness, but the creators still have to stick the execution and, unfortunately, they blow it. For the last third of the episode, the four characters simply sit around a campfire on a beach and, one by one, with little prodding, explain their own baggage and insecurities to the others.

This is “characterization” at its worst. Never have your characters talk perceptively about their own feelings. In real life, people do not understand their own feelings. And even when we think they understand those feelings, if we’re asked about them, we will usually lie. Do you like that boy? No! Are you still in love with your ex-wife? No! Do you feel appreciated by your grown children? Of course I do, what a silly question!

Our mouths lie about our feelings, but our bodies betray us. Make your characters reveal emotion entirely through behavior. If a character baldly states, “I want to stay a kid forever,” that’s bad dialogue. On the other hand, if the character asks, “Why won’t you treat me like a grown-up?” while wearing Spider-Man pajamas, or cutting the crusts off his sandwich, or sticking his gum under the table, then you’re on the right track.

Unity of word and action is unironic, but good storytelling should always be ironic, because life is ironic. If word and action match, then you, as author, aren’t showing any powers of observation. Your audience need not even look at the visuals you’re showing them, because the character is simply telling them what’s going on. If the audience is asked to believe them, then there’s no way to interact with your story.

Your audience wants to play sleuth. They want to make their own observations about your characters, instead of being forced to listen to and accept the characters’ observations about themselves. Stories thrive on tension, both external and internal, but the most important source of all should be the tension between what people say and what they mean.If you want to reveal a character’s baggage, then find an active and ironic way to do so. Nowhere was this done better than in the first three seasons of “Lost”. In each episode, we saw a character’s baggage flood over them through a series of flashbacks, which were ironically juxtaposed against a painful dilemma that that same character now had to face on the island. Only the audience knew how that baggage affected their ultimate decision, because they kept their conflicted feelings to themselves.

Underrated Movie #143: Be Kind Rewind

2011-12-28T18:21:00.017-05:00

Title: Be Kind Rewind
Year: 2008
Director: Michel Gondry
Writers: Michel Gondry
Stars: Mos Def, Jack Black, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz, Sigourney Weaver

The Story: Glover runs an endangered old school VHS rental store in a working class neighborhood in Passaic, New Jersey. When he leaves his store in the hands of Def and Black, they accidentally erase all the tapes, so they decide to recreate the movies from scratch, playing all the parts themselves. The “sweded” version turn out to be wildly popular—but can they save the store from developers?How it Came to be Underrated: Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was one of the best and most acclaimed movies of the ‘00s, but he failed to get much traction with his follow-ups. When I saw this opening weekend, I thought it this would be the hit that finally made him fully bankable, but instead it was greeted with general revulsion. How come no one else could see the masterpiece I saw? I think part of the problem was the casting of Black: He’s wonderful, but some smart moviegoers who don’t like him stayed away, while some of his fans were infuriated by the movie’s causal pace.

Why It’s Great:

Hugo was “a love letter to film” that was slapped together out of post-production digital special effects. (Couldn’t they just have made those drawings fly around the room on set, rather than fake that in post? For that matter, did they even set foot in Paris?) The Artist is a much better movie, which actually uses old-fashioned storytelling to re-create the early days of Hollywood. But if you really want to be filled with awe at the magic of the movies, nothing is better than Be Kind Rewind. Gondry captures the democratic essence of movie-making: a collective art form that creates collective meaning, by and for a whole community.
VHS was, in retrospect, a truly terrible technology: flimsy, blurry, easily degraded… so why do I miss wandering those aisles so much? So many parts of America have died in the last ten years, and we’ve all just started accepting that these things are gone for good. First they came for the small businesses, like all the funky little independent VHS stores and bookstores of my youth, now they’re coming for the post office, the public schools, the libraries... At what point are we going to say, hey, not everything can be bigger and more profitable every year?
I made movies on VHS (and S-VHS, and Hi-8, and Mini DV, and 8mm, and 16mm and…) and this movie captures the madness and ecstacy of amateur production better than any other. I can’t tell you how many times I had friends get exasperated from acting in my amateur productions, and storm off set, only to howl with delight when they saw their faces onscreen in the final product, after which all was forgiven.
How wonderful to see Farrow delivering a typically understated performance as one of the neighborhood eccentrics who habituate the store. The most tragic outcome of the horrible end of her relationship with Woody Allen was that it caused all of her amazing performances in his movies to seem too depressing to watch in retrospect. She’s massively talented and I hope she still has more great roles in her future.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: The two movies that Gondry made between this and Eternal Sunshine were also underrated: Science of Sleep is a sweet romantic comedy with Gael Garcia-Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg and Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is far more than just a great concert movie.

How Available Is It?: The DVD has the movie and an enjoyable 10 minute doc about shooting in Passaic, but not only is there no commentary from the always-delightful Gondry, but it doesn’t have any of the wonderful sweded videos that were on the movie’s website! What the hell??

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Nicely Suited For Hollywood!

Storyteller's Rulebook #114: Culture Abhors a Vacuum

2011-12-27T17:56:00.005-05:00

If you hear someone say, “You shouldn’t write an alien invasion movie because nobody’s making those these days…” then it’s time to write a alien invasion movie.

Culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The alien invasion movie will always come back, because audiences have fond memories of the alien invasion movies of their youth, and they come to miss them. As soon as a sense of “we had this, but now it’s gone” kicks in, then the craving kicks in, and the craving must be satiated.

Sub-genres like “alien invasion” aren’t interesting enough to remain perpetually popular, year after year, but they’re always going to cycle back around, once people have had some time away from them.Of course, sometimes the cycle is hard to time. The makers of Cutthroat Island thought it was time for pirates again, but they were ten years too early. But nevertheless pirates did come back, and it’s not surprising. Don’t ask “have they made a movie like this recently?”, ask instead, “Is this still a potent metaphor?” Obviously, Americans are still accusing each other of piracy all the time, so we continue find metaphorical meaning in that setting. The right movie just had to come along and tap into that meaning.

Of course, it’s trickier with types of movies that have never been a hit with the public. There’s never been a hit set-on-Mars movie, so there’s not really a vacuum there: there’s no sense of “now it’s gone” because we’ve never had it. The problem is that Mars is not a metaphor, it’s just a place ...for now. If you want to write the first hit movie set on Mars, you have to turn it into a meaningful metaphor for the first time, which is a tall order.

...It's a Christmas Miracle!

2011-12-26T15:53:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow: Content resumes!

...Only to Find...

2011-12-25T19:00:00.000-05:00

Can anyone save us? Come back tomorrow...

Home for Christmas...

2011-12-22T21:38:00.001-05:00

Storyteller's Rulebook #113: Characters Have No Inherent Value

2011-12-21T19:00:00.004-05:00

This one is the cumulative conclusion of yesterday’s and three previous rules, as cited below…

I pointed out before that money is too generic of a motivation unless we know what the character needs to buy. Likewise, a character’s death has no meaning to the audience unless we know something specific about them. Cheating on a spouse that the audience has gotten to know is going to seem far worse than killing a spouse that we haven’t met.

And please don’t try to replace quality with quantity! There’s nothing more annoying than the writer who says, “Nobody seems to care that my villain has killed three characters we haven’t met, so I’ll have him kill a whole stadium full of characters we haven’t met!” Nope, we still don’t care.

You’ve created your own world from scratch, which is separate and distinct from the world in which your audience actually lives. You have to invest your characters with value before you can upset us by killing them or victimizing them in any way.

In real life, each human being has inherent value, and when someone is killed, it can always be argued that they’ve been robbed of a potentially-bright future. But the characters in your story are just ephemeral phantoms until you imbue them with life. They have no inherent value, beyond what you invest in them, and no future, beyond the plans we actually see them make.

This is very hard to pull off without seeming manipulative. We all roll our eyes when a soldier talks about the big plans he has for after the war, because we know that he’s about to get killed. But it’s become a cliché for a reason: the alternative is worse. The trick, as always, is to build up your victim’s value subtly enough that we don’t see the tragedy coming.

Think about the seemingly-random drug-related killings on the local news, then compare that to the death of a certain character at the end of the first season of “The Wire”. The writers endowed that character with so much potential before they took it away that it was emotionally wrenching to watch him die. That’s writing at its most powerful.

Storyteller's Rulebook #112: Audiences Are More Interested in Ethics Than Morals

2011-12-20T21:38:00.010-05:00

Earlier this week, I talked about how Scott Z. Burns made The Informant! work by investing our interest in Damon’s character’s ethical violations, rather than the far more immoral crimes that he exposed. This leads me to two extensions of this rule…

Morals are inherently generic. We broadly apply them to every situation we come across, rather than derive them on a case by case basis. Worse, no two people have exactly the same moral compass. Just because I meet someone I get along with, that doesn’t mean that we’ll feel the same way about bit torrent, or drone attacks, or Roman Polanski. And neither of us is going to have much luck winning the other over on any of these topics, because everybody’s own moral compass simply seems self-evident to them. You don’t prove that something is immoral, you just know it.

But we’re always willing to ignore our morals when we go to the movies. Stealing money is immoral, but we root for the heroes in heist thrillers anyway because the immorality of their actions is too abstract for us to care about. The audience is only going to care about is the people onscreen and how they treat each other. Characters can be as immoral as they want, as long as they’re not unethical.

Unlike morals, ethics are specific to each situation, which is why they’re more dramatically interesting. You create an expectation of behavior, then you show one character who meets that expectation, and another one that breaks it. Everybody gets that. You’re making and breaking your own rules, instead of tapping into pre-existing rules that may or may not be in the audience’s head.

I’m working on a spec pilot right now, and I was going to end it with a shocking revelation of a moral breach on the part of my anti-hero, but then I realized that no one would really care. If I want to shock and agitate my audience, I have to end on the reveal of an ethical breach. When I look at similar shows, such as “The Shield” or “Damages”, the reveal at the end of both pilots is not that our anti-hero has harmed an outside victim, but a trusted ally. Not that’s rotten.

More tomorrow…

Storyteller's Rulebook #112: Throw in a Left Turn

2011-12-19T18:57:00.002-05:00

Yet another rule complaining about a recent movie! (106, 110) I’ve been a curmudgeonly moviegoer recently!
Young Adult is a very funny movie. Charlize Theron gives a great performance as a failed children’s author slinking back home to pick up where she left off*. Writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman both know how to twist the knife expertly, skewering shallow city-dwellers and banal exurbanites with equal relish.

There’s just one big problem with this movie: if you were to stop the projector a half-hour in and poll the audience about what’s going to happen next, most of them would guess correctly. By a half-hour in, once all the major characters are introduced, this whole movie rolls downhill. It’s painfully obvious what’s going to happen, every step of the way.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few road bumps along the way, but bumps aren’t enough: you need at least one left turn. It doesn’t have to be a huge twist… You don’t need to reveal that everything the audience knows is wrong., but have the characters surprise us. (I think that Cody and Reitman thought there was a twist, in that Theron isn’t really redeemed at the end, but these days in independent movies that’s started to become the rule, not the exception. It’s not a daring choice anymore.)

Compare this to, for instance, The Color of Money. If you turned off the projector halfway through, most of the audience would guess that Tom Cruise was going to eventually reject the corrupt ways of Paul Newman and find a way to succeed without compromising his integrity. Instead it’s Newman, not Cruise, who discovers his conscience. When this plot turn happens, we’re shocked, but not baffled. In retrospect, the signs were there, but we didn’t notice them before.

The ending of Young Adult, certainly seemed inevitable, but not at all surprising. I think that Cody wanted to condemn her own main character, and so she didn’t allow the character to surprise her, or surprise us. If you set out to “nail” your main character, then you’ll probably have to use a hammer, and they’re going to end up flattened.

* Despite being totally miscast: We’re supposed to believe that this woman dejectedly eats fried chicken and Ben and Jerry’s?? Look at her!

Underrated Movie #142: The Informant!

2011-12-18T16:32:00.015-05:00

Title: The Informant!
Year: 2009
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Scott Z. Burns, based on the non-fiction book by Kurt Eichenwald
Stars: Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Tony Hale

The Story: Matt Damon is the real-life whistleblower Mark Whitacre who exposed the insidious agribusiness giant Archers Daniels Midland to the FBI. He does an amazing job as their inside man, but they soon discover that their informant hasn’t been telling them (or anybody) the whole truth.

How it Came to be Underrated: (I’ll go a little more in depth than usual)

This movie has no one to blame for its own failure but itself. A great true story, a brilliant screenplay, brisk direction and an Oscar-worthy lead performance were all sabotaged by terrible titles, the worst score in movie history, and a rogue exclamation point. In short, this was a great movie that was totally ruined in post-production.
What went wrong?? I have two theories: the simple one is that the original movie didn’t “test” well enough, and the studio made the inane decision to belated repackage it as an all-out comedy.
But here’s the more elaborate theory: Soderbergh rightly saw this a chance to do a ‘70s-style conspiracy thriller, but then he made the maddening decision to actually add a “‘70s style” to the movie, right down to a “groovy” font and a godawful Marvin Hamlisch score that sounds like the hold music at a clown college.
One of the many reasons that this was terrible decision is that we’ve had very few “early ‘90s” era period pieces and this could have been an excellent opportunity to actually talk about the meaning of that era and its corruption, rather than pretend that these events only make sense in some sort of Nixonian context, as the titles and music imply.

Why It’s Nevertheless Great:

Eichenwald’s astounding journalism (and storytelling instincts) produced an all-too-believable portrait of what real whistleblowers are like. The impulse that causes these people to transgress society’s boundaries and tell uncomfortable truths soon starts to run away from them. If society is telling you that right is wrong, it becomes hard to remind yourself that wrong isn’t therefore right.
I first heard Eichenwald’s book dramatized as a thrilling hour-long “This American Life” story, and my first thought was: “This has to become a movie!” But then I thought again and realized how hard that would be. Luckily, Burns was up to the challenge and then some. The first trick was to focus on Whitacre, and not his target. Audiences find it hard to care about white-collar crime, but everybody loves to watch a weasel get caught by his own lies.
Of course, for better or worse, Burns’s choice here ironically mirrors Whitacre’s own real-life predicament: He exposed his company’s theft of hundreds of millions of dollars, but then the FBI discovered that, along the way, he had stolen more than a few millions for himself. Inevitably, the FBI decided that it’d be much easier to go after their own whistleblower, who was, after all, cooperating with them, than it was to take down a stonewalling corporation with a bottomless legal budget.
Burns’s second trick was to write one of my all time favorite voice-overs, (albeit one that only an actor of Damon’s caliber could have pulled off) Long before the audience (or Whitacre himself) is willing to admit that he’s crazy, the evidence is there for us to hear, in the form of an out-of-control stream of consciousness voiceover, in which Whitacre pieces together a pseudo-reality patchwork of fact and fiction from a million different sources, including the novels of Michael Crichton and John Grisham.
This all culminates in an absolutely stunning scene where Whitacre’s mouth finally catches up with his now-exhausted brain, and the voice-over slowly begins to overlap with what he’s actually saying out loud. It’s a crime that Damon didn’t get an Oscar, or even a nomination, for his riveting performance.
I was happy that Heavenly Creatures made Kate Winslet a star, but disappointed that her great co-star Melanie Lynskey seemed to totally disappear. But lo and behold, Lynskey has very slowly re-emerged (purged of her NZ accent) in a steady stream of quietly powerful character roles. Check out her credits, you’ve probably seen her (and liked her) more often then you realize. She’s does a typically great job as Damon’s weary wife.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: A similar movie from around the same time that did a better job maintaining the right tricky tone was Burn After Reading. The show “Homeland” has a very similar hero, whose bipolar disorder both helps and harms a government investigation.

How Available Is It?: Netflix only has a bare-bones, but nice-looking DVD.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Those Who Plan!

Storyteller's Rulebook #111: You Can Skip Over Unsurprising Scenes

2011-12-15T18:23:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned before, I’m in love with “Homeland”, which is one of the most perpetually shocking shows I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen a show about a genuinely crazy wrecking ball of a heroine before, and it’s utterly thrilling.

This show has lots of shocks for the audience, and they keep them coming at a brisk pace. How do they keep it up? They simply skip over every scene that goes down the way that you would expect it to go, even if those scenes have lots of dramatic potential.

At the beginning of episode seven, we find out that two huge developments have happened off camera since the end of episode six. The co-protagonist and his wife have agreed to take some time off, and the CIA has discovered that the suspect they’ve been desperately tracking has been killed by his own people, revealing a wider problem than they suspected.

Both of these scenes might seem like slam dunks with potential for high drama and great acting, but nothing surprising happens in either one. We already guessed that Brody and his wife would need some time apart, and we’d already seen the suspect get killed.

The two scenes that got skipped were “fallout” scenes, and actors love fallout, but it doesn’t move the story forward. These scenes come right out. If we hear Brody say that he and his wife agreed to spend some time apart, we can imagine how that conversation went. If we see that the CIA is now looking for who might have killed their suspect, then we obviously understand that they found the suspect’s body and freaked out.

In the one journalism class I took, from Alex Blumberg of “This American Life” fame, he explained the difference between dramatic and newsworthy: Usually, if you’re covering the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to your subject, that’s a good thing, but there are exceptions, like, for instance somebody’s wedding day…

A wedding day has high drama and life-altering stakes for the families involved, but they’re rarely newsworthy, because they’re rarely surprising. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. If you attend your friend’s wedding, you’ll probably cry a bit and laugh a bit, but if you can’t make it, you’re not even going to ask what you missed. You’ll just assume that everything went the way these things always go.

“Homeland” is a ripped-from-the-headlines show, and it holds itself to the same standards as a good newspaper: Keep it riveting and only tell people what they don’t already know.

Storyteller's Rulebook #110: Conflicts Are Better Than Obstacles

2011-12-14T21:34:00.009-05:00

Hugo got great reviews, which baffled me. The story is all obstacle and no conflict. An obstacle is anything that makes a task physically difficult to do. A conflict is anything that makes a character not want to do that task.

Genuine conflict occurs when a character doesn’t want to do something, for reasons such as these:

It would require them to question their assumptions
It would require them to overcome an inner weakness.
They promised someone they wouldn’t do it.
It would reveal their secrets to others.
It would get their love interest or a family member in trouble.

Obstacles, on the other hand, are external problems that the hero can tackle without facing any internal doubts. Hugo encounters lots of obstacles: a train station guard he has to avoid, an old man who won’t give him what he wants, a living situation he has to hide... But he’s not reluctant to deal with any of them.

He does have a “want”, but it’s very vague: For some reason, he thinks that if he repairs an automaton, it will write out a message from his dad, but why does he think this? His dad told him outright that he just found the old automaton somewhere and he has no idea what it will say if they get it working. What part of that did Hugo not understand?Not only does this make Hugo’s quest nonsensical, it makes his inability to spot other clues exasperating: every piece of evidence indicates that the automaton is the lost property of the man who runs the gadget shop, but it takes Hugo forever to accept that this might be true.

If I may slip into Meddler mode, the fix for Hugo seems fairly obvious to me: combine two flat characters, Hugo’s beloved dad and his rotten uncle (who both die mysterious deaths), into one complex character.

In this version, Hugo’s loving but ne’erdowell dad, who maintains the clocks in the railway station with his son, would discover the automaton and bring it home to Hugo, claiming he made it himself. When Hugo realizes what the gears used to do and asks what it writes, the dad quickly covers for his lie by saying that it’s a mystery he wants Hugo to solve.

This way, after the dad disappears (drunk in the river, we eventually find out) Hugo has every reason to assume that the automaton will contain a message from his dad, and every reason to get upset when the evidence starts to indicate that the automaton must actually belong to the old man.

Also, this way, Hugo’s surrendering of the automaton to the old man is a painful decision, and it requires him to admit the truth about his father. By recognizing and alleviating the old man’s bitterness, he gains insight into his father’s own failures, ironically fulfilling his original goal of understanding his father.

This change would not only strengthen Hugo’s motivation, it would turn external obstacles into internal conflicts. Hugo’s tasks would not only be hard to do, but hard to want to do.

Mackendrick's Rules, Part 4: Rules 32-41

2011-12-13T19:03:00.008-05:00

A final round-up of Alexander Mackendrick’s fantastic rules for writing. For more of his wisdom, buy his book “On Film-Making”.

32. A SHOOTING SCRIPT IS NOT A SCREENPLAY. The beginning screenwriter should be discouraged from trying to invent stories in screenplay format.

This one is, for the most part, no longer true. Most screenwriters compose their screenplay in a format that is close to a shooting script. Unlike most screenwriters, I usually develop my stories first as an outline, then as a prose treatment, and only then as a screenplay. The prose treatment step is crucial because it forces me to turn it into a continuous narrative. It’s easier to turn it into one big story if you don’t have all those “CUT TO:”s to fall back on.

33. A FOIL CHARACTER is a figure invented to ask the questions to which the audience want answers (asking the question may be more important than having the answer).

As I point out here, it can be very powerful to let an unanswered question hang over the story. Sometimes it can be a foil character who actually states the hero’s false statement of philosophy.

34. NEGATIVE ACTION (something not happening) needs to be dramatised in positive action terms. You show something starting to happen which then is stopped.

Unhappy endings only work if we see the possibility of a happy ending yanked out of their hands at the last possible moment. I’ve been getting caught up with Showtime’s “Homeland”, which is utterly fantastic, and they do this very well. If you consider the show’s premise, and take a step back, it should be very obvious that the general arc of the show will keep going from bad to worse, but astoundingly, week after week, they keep tricking us into thinking that things will go well for our heroes, only to yank the possibility of a happy ending away at the last moment. The penultimate episode’s ending last week was emotionally devastating to watch, despite the fact that we really should have seen it coming. I’ll have more to say about this show soon.

35. TWO ELEMENTS OF SUSPENSE ARE HALF AS SUSPENSEFUL AS ONE. Aristotle's principle of unity means that one dramatic tension should dominate. All others are subordinate to it.

Most movies are about one person’s problem. A book is a friend, with which we can discuss a lot of different topics, but a movie is a stranger with a problem, and we expect it to stick to the point.

36. CONFRONTATION SCENE is the obligatory scene that the audience feel they have been promised and the absence of which may reasonably be disappointing.

With very few exceptions, movies must climax.

37. What you leave out is as important as what you leave in.

Depth is found in holes.

38. Screenplays are STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE.

This is Hollywood gospel but I feel that it isn’t universally true. If you’re naturally gifted at character creation, but you have to learn structure, then it can seem that way, but I have the opposite problem. I’ve always had a strong inherent understanding of structure, but bad instincts on character creation, so for me, screenplays are CHARACTER, CHARACTER, CHARACTER. As I put it elsewhere, we teach what we most need to learn.

39. Never cast for physical attributes.

So true! I’ve done this while directing and always regretted it. In my review of Caught, I talked about the need to cast according to how the character feels, rather than how they would actually look.

40. ACTION speaks louder than words.

Just as in real life, characters can tell us what’s going on, but they can’t tell us about the content of their character. Character must be demonstrated.

41. Every character is important.

This is one reason to polarize your protagonists: Every member of the team must represent a different point of view, or you should get rid of them. In Mackendrick’s Man in the White Suit, the characters are not merely defined according to rich and poor, each new person Guinness meets reacts in a unique way when they find out about his discovery.In the underrated heist thriller Hard Rain, we quickly establish expectations about the behavior of fourteen deftly-sketched characters, allowing the writer to upset those expectations when push comes to shove. Rather than have your plot lead your characters around by the nose, allow your characters to jerk your story in new directions.

Mackendrick's Rules, Part 3: Rules 22-31

2011-12-12T19:15:00.004-05:00

More of the rock-solid wisdom of Alexander Mackendrick...

22. DRAMATIC IRONY: a situation where one or more of the characters on the screen is ignorant of the circumstances known to us in the audience.

This actually differs from my definition of dramatic irony, which I apply to the ironic qualities of the overall story. The concept he’s describing is what I would call an “information-superior position,” which is always very tricky to pull off... Hitchcock’s great but little-loved Frenzy is one of his only movies in which he shows us who the killer is long before the hero finds out. Hitch knew full well that this would make the movie feel colder and alienate us from the hero. Rather than lure us into another breakneck romp, he wanted to force us to confront the horror of the situation, pitying the hero instead of identifying with him. Hitch was making a brilliant, chilling point, but the movie’s box office failure shows the danger of going “information superior.”

23. If you have a Beginning but you don't yet have an end, then you're mistaken. You don't have the right Beginning.

Screenwriters often advise each other, “All third act problems are really first act problems.” If you’ve got a problem, it’s generally because you have either a plot hole, a motivation hole, or a sympathy hole. Once one of these problems has arisen, it’s too late to fix it retroactively. You can only go back and fix the problem before it happens.

24. In movies, what is SAID may make little impression - unless it comes as a comment or explanation of what we have seen happening.

In moves, seeing is believing, and there is no try: there is only do.

25. What is happening NOW is apt to be less dramatically interesting than what may or may not HAPPEN NEXT.

This was how I discovered this list: When I wrote these two rules about the importance of anticipation, commenter “J.S.” pointed out that Mackendrick had already said it better.

26. What happens just before the END of your story defines the CENTRAL THEME, the SPINE of the plot, the POINT OF VIEW and the best POINT OF ATTACK.

You can’t establish the movie’s philosophy right away. The events should gradually create a painful dilemma that takes the form of “good vs. good”. The finale should make a definitive statement on that dilemma, without totally resolving it.

27. Make sure you've chosen the correct point of attack. Common flaw: tension begins to grip too late. Perhaps the story has to start at a later point and earlier action should be 'fed in' during later sequences.

As I discussed here, The Apartment could have begun at the moment when Baxter is first extorted into loaning out his apartment, which would have been very dramatic, but instead, it drops us in much later, at the moment when Baxter is almost ready to stand up for himself, which is far more satisfying.

28. What happens at the end may often be both a surprise to the audience and the author and at the same time, in retrospect, absolutely inevitable.

Creating a finale that is surprising but inevitable is widely acknowledged as the hardest part of writing.

29. Character progression: when you've thought out what kind of character your protagonist will be at the end, start him or her as the opposite kind of person at the beginning, e.g. Oedipus who starts out arrogant and ends up humiliated, Hamlet who is indecisive at the start and ends up heroic.

I’ve never entirely agreed with this wisdom. Is it believable to have characters change so much? Sometimes, I prefer stories that don’t drag characters all the way from A to Z, but instead go from Y to Z, showing us only the last, most painful stage of a journey.

30. Most stories with a strong plot are built on the tension of CAUSE AND EFFECT. Each incident is like a domino that topples forward to collide with the next in a sequence which holds the audience in a grip of anticipation. 'So, what happens next?' Each scene presents a small crisis that as it is revolved produces a new uncertainty.

Heroes should expect to resolve the plot in every scene—they only fail to do so because of a constant stream of reversals.

31. DRAMA IS EXPECTATION MINGLED WITH UNCERTAINTY.

You have to establish the rules of your script so that the audience can play along. Defying expectations is easy, but creating expectation is hard.

Tomorrow: the final ten!

Mackendrick's Rules, Part 2: Rules 11-21

2011-12-11T23:22:00.010-05:00

Eleven more bits of wisdom from the great Alexander Mackendrick...

11. Exposition is BORING unless it is in the context of some present dramatic tension or crisis. So start with an action that creates tension, then provide the exposition in terms of the present developments.

Exposition should be withheld until the hero and the viewer are demanding to know it. In my re-write of The Town, I tried to find more organic ways for the backstory to be revealed by putting it on a need-to-know basis.

12. The start of your story is usually the consequence of some BACKSTORY, i.e. the impetus for progression in your narrative is likely to be rooted in previous events - often rehearsals of what will happen in your plot.

Starting a problem from scratch may work for movies like Jaws, but it generally works better for the hero to pursue an intimidating opportunity to solve a longstanding problem, then encounter unexpected conflict.

13. Coincidence may mean exposition is in the wrong place, i.e. if you establish the too-convenient circumstances before they become dramatically necessary, then we feel no sense of coincidence. Use coincidence to put characters into trouble, not out of trouble.

Audiences can be tricked into accepting overly convenient plot turns if they pay off previous foreshadowing. In my meddling with the book Harry Potter book 5, I tried to replace the convenient coincidences (timely peeks into Voldemort’s mind) with intentional action.

14. PASSIVITY is a capital crime in drama.

I desperately tried to drain all of the passivity out of Harry Potter books 4 and 6, and make Harry proactive instead. Passive protagonists can be infuriating. We must cheer for heroes as well as fear for them.

15. A character who is dramatically interesting is intelligent enough to THINK AHEAD. He or she has not only thought out present intentions but has foreseen reactions and possible obstacles. Intelligent characters anticipate and have counter moves prepared.

The one baseline requirement for every hero is that they must be clever and resourceful, even if they are just being idiotic in a clever way. Like real people, they should go after what they want by lacing their dialogue with tricks and traps.

16. NARRATIVE DRIVE: the end of a scene should include a clear pointer as to what the next scene is going to be.

This can be as simple as ending on “What else could go wrong?” and cutting to the bad guys. You must rewrite your outlines until the list of events no longer go: “and then, and then”, but rather go: “and so, and so.” Or, as Aristotle would say, until “post hoc” becomes “propter hoc”

17. Ambiguity does not mean lack of clarity. Ambiguity may be intriguing when it consists of alternative meanings, each of them clear.

If you’ve created a world where anything can happen, you’ve messed up. You should create a world in which one of five things might happen.

18. 'Comedy is hard.' (Last words of Edmund Kean.) Comedy plays best in the mastershot. Comic structure is simply dramatic structure but MORE SO: neater, shorter, faster. Don't attempt comedy until you are really expert in structuring dramatic material.

The desire to get laughs can’t override the needs of story and character. You can’t just ask “What’s the funniest thing that could happen?” You have to ask “What’s the funniest thing that would happen?”

19. The role of the ANTAGONIST may have more to do with the structure of the plot than the character of the PROTAGONIST. When you are stuck for a third act, think through your situations from the point of view of whichever characters OPPOSE the protagonist's will.

The opening credits of “Battlestar Galactica” made it very clear that the villains’ plan was the prime mover of the story, and the goals of the heroes came second.It’s always better to have a hero be the villain’s worst nightmare, rather than vice versa.

20. PROTAGONIST: the central figure in the story, the character 'through whose eyes' we see the events.

In books, those two definitions don’t have to apply to the same character: Gatsby is the central figure in “The Great Gatsby”, but Nick is the one through whose eyes we see the events. In movies, this doesn’t work. We can only invest ourselves in the actions of the main character, not their perceptions of another character. It’s always seemed me that the only way to make a movie of Gatsby would be to eliminate Nick entirely. Simply make Gatsby the hero (or anti-hero). You would lose a lot of the mystique, and it would be a very different story, but it would have the immediacy that movies demand. (The same problem plagues the adaptations of “All the King’s Men”)

21. ANTAGONIST: the character or group of figures who represent opposition to the goals of the protagonist.

That one’s fairly self-explanatory. Tomorrow, 22-31…

Mackendrick's Rules, Part 1: Rules 1-10

2011-12-08T18:08:00.015-05:00

On Sunday, we discussed The Man in the White Suit, by writer-director Alexander Mackendrick. He later became a revered film professor, and published a great book called “On Filmmaking.” Commenter J.S. found a list of 41 Mackendrick truisms online, so I
’
ll spend a few days discussing how these rules line up to what I
’ve said here before...

1. Movies SHOW ... and then TELL. A true movie is likely to be 60% to 80% comprehensible if the dialogue is in a foreign language.

One of my cheesy guilty-pleasure TV shows was “Jericho”, about a town in Kansas after an unexplained nuclear strike, but it had its problems…The townspeople eventually found out that they had a pivotal place in postwar America because the town had a salt mine.They spent two seasons defending the mine from attackers, but we never saw a situation in which the townspeople or anyone else needed salt.The writers had clearly read in a book somewhere that salt would be vital after an apocalypse, so they had the characters tell this fact to they audience, but they never bothered to show us why.

2. PROPS are the director's key to the design of 'incidental business': unspoken suggestions for behavior that can prevent 'theatricality'.

I’ve talked about this how characters need token objects and how you need situations or character traits that put objects in their hands, and how every scene needs literal give and take of objects. Also see my piece here on The Apartment talks about the how the passing of the handmirror from person to person allows us to understand how they’re feeling without saying it out loud.
In The Man in the White Suit, imagine if they had just talked about the new textile process? The titular suit gives us a far more powerful representation of what it can do (never get dirty), what it means for Guinness (makes him stand out) and what it actually does to him (makes him a target, with people literally trying to rip his invention off his back).

3. A character in isolation is hard to make dramatic. Drama usually involves CONFLICT. If the conflict is internal, then the dramatist needs to personify it through the clash with other individuals.

Opposition creates meaning. It’s essential that one actual human being be opposed to what your hero is trying to do. Imagine Jaws without the mayor...A decision only becomes heroic in comparison to a less heroic action—even moreso if that less-heroic action is also somewhat justified. Sheriff Brody’s rejection of the mayor’s legitimate concern in favor of a greater good makes him seem all the more heroic. If the whole town shared the desire to kill the shark, then killing it wouldn’t be especially heroic, just necessary.

4. Self pity in a character does not evoke sympathy.

As I discussed here, Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything is pursuing a ridiculous goal (to be kickboxing champion) but that’s more sympathetic than if he had no goal at all. For that matter Alec Guiness's character in Mackendrick’s Man in the White Suit epitomizes this: he gets discouraged, but keeps plunging relentlessly forward regardless.

5. BEWARE OF SYMPATHY between characters. That is the END of drama.

Characters should never apologize to each other, as in this example from The Black Swan. Movies must always escalate.

6. BEWARE OF FLASHBACKS, DREAM SEQUENCES and VISIONS. In narrative/dramatic material these tend to weaken the dramatic tension. They are more suited to 'lyric' material.

This one I don’t always agree with, because sometimes these things are necessary to dramatize internal states, but it’s still a good general rule: Movies are always in present tense.

7. Screenplays are not written; they are RE-WRITTEN and RE-WRITTEN and RE-WRITTEN.

I touched on this in How to Write a Screenplay, but I’ll come back at some point with a series specifically on How to Revise.

8. Screenplays come in three sizes: LONG, TOO LONG and MUCH TOO LONG.

One way to avoid over-length screenplays to remember that a two hour movie should have one hour ’s worth of plot. In this scene I analyzed from “Breaking Bad”, they cut down on time by combining four big melodramatic beats into one small understated scene.

9. Student films come in three sizes: TOO LONG, MUCH TOO LONG and VERY MUCH TOO LONG.

So very true. As I mentioned here, sitting through a fifteen-minute short film is just as hard as sitting through a four-hour feature. If you want to see terrible short films, go to any film school’s year-end festival. If you want to see great short films, watch any commercial break in primetime. Those guys can make you cry with a 30 second diamond commercial. Even better yet, watch this one-second film festival. That’s how long it takes to move somebody, if you know what you’re doing:

10. If it can be cut out, then CUT IT OUT. Everything non-essential that you can eliminate strengthens what's left.

The only reason you need to cut something is “It comes right out.” And directors cuts are rarely better.

Up next: Rules 11-20...

Always Be Closing, Addendum: Three Final Warnings

2011-12-07T19:14:00.007-05:00

Nobody Ever Really Re-Brands:

Often, a company will insist that they’re meeting with you in order to re-brand themselves and branch out in a new direction. You probably shouldn’t believe them. They may genuinely believe that they’re trying to change, but, as hard as it is for people to change, it’s much, much harder for corporations to change. They are hard-wired to think a certain way. It’s their culture. It’s the air they breathe.

Something that seems like a radical departure to them would seem tiny to you. If Disney tells you they want edgy, don’t sell them Funny Games, sell them a new version of Escape to Witch Mountain that replaces Eddie Albert with The Rock. If Michael Bay says he wants “smart”, don’t sell him My Dinner with Andre, sell him Knowing.

Understand the Time Difference:

Be early for every meeting, even if you’re certain that they’ll show up twenty minutes late. Why? Because producers (and agents, and anybody with power in Hollywood) all have the same hardwired equation in their heads: twenty minutes of your time equals one minute of their time. Remember that ratio: 20:1.

So if they show up forty minutes late, you’re supposed to act like you’ve only been waiting two minutes, which is no big deal. But if, on the other hand, you make them wait three minutes, they’ll act like you made them wait an hour, which is tremendously rude. You forgot the ratio, you doofus!

This equation actually makes sense, in its own twisted way: Time is money, and they’re paying themselves twenty times as much as they’re paying you. Therefore one of your minutes is literally “worth” twenty of their minutes.

Keep a Log:

At the time, every meeting seems like a game changer that you’ll never forget: “Thing are finally looking up for Old Gil!” But most meetings lead nowhere, and they start to pile up quickly, so you MUST keep a detailed log of who all you met with and when, what you pitched to them, and what they expressed interest in, even if it wasn’t something you could give them.

You never know when this information may come in handy later. Maybe you’ll meet someone later who’s selling exactly what they wanted to buy, and they’ll both appreciate the referral.

Always Be Closing, Part 6: They Don’t Want To Be The Money

2011-12-06T19:16:00.008-05:00

It’s time to share the most valuable piece of screenwriting career advice I’ve ever gotten. Screenwriter Chris Kelly had just gotten back from a bruising round of meetings in Hollywood and he shared with his class the bitter truth: “Always remember: they would write it themselves if they could spare the time.”

Writers and directors tend to think of producers as simply “the money”, but nobody goes into producing for financial reasons. (It’s actually a terrible way to make a good living.) Producers may have gone to law school or business school, but while there were there, they were always thought of as “the creative one,” so they entered the movie business.

And producing is creative. It’s their job to pick the right material, hire the right people, give great notes, and make sure that everybody sees the same larger vision. But like most bosses, they start to think that they’re doing all the brainwork, and any task they don’t handle directly is simply a part of their job that they’ve delegated out for time reasons. They forget that they hired you to do something they’ve never done (write a screenplay) and couldn’t do, even if you put a gun to their head.

So what can a writer do? As Tina Fey points out in her great book “Bossypants”, one rule of improv also applies to most everything in life: Answer every question with, “Yes, and…”

In improv, two or more people are writing a scene together out loud in front of an audience. Eventually, one of them is going to say something that threatens to derail the scene, but you never say no to any idea once it’s out there. You say, “Yes, and...” then you build on it. If you think their idea was bad, then you try to steer the skit back on track, but you have to do so with an “onwards and upwards” attitude.

This is a great attitude to have when the studio is giving you notes, but you’ll need it before that, too, even when you’re pitching. If they like your idea, they’ll start throwing notes at you before they even buy it. This is good. This is called “buy-in”.

No one is ever going to buy your version of your idea, they’ll only buy their version of your idea. The sooner they start making your idea their own, the more likely is that they’re going to buy it. Of course, the off-the-cuff notes they’re throwing out might sound terrible, but you have to respond immediately with “Yes! And…” Give them their buy-in, then steer it back in a better direction.

Always Be Closing, Part 5: Seller Beware

2011-12-05T18:03:00.003-05:00

Meetings are very exciting, especially if you’re just starting out. This is it! You’ve made it! You’re going to be rich and famous! And everybody is so nice! Why do producers have such a bad reputation?? They’re all smothering you in compliments! Everybody is excited to work with you and telling you how much money you’re going to make together!

Then you go home and wait for the phone to ring. And wait. And wait. Guess what? You’ve just met the other kind of asshole: the ones who kill you with kindness. Other creative businesses aren’t like this. If you sell a novel or play, everybody quickly reminds you not to get too excited because you’re never going to get rich. So why is Hollywood run on false praise and pie-in-the-sky promises?

I think one reason is simply that it’s based in California, where being too sunny comes with the territory. You read “Grapes of Wrath” in high school—what happens there? Think back...

California orchard-owners scatter the entire country with flyers telling everybody to come west where they’ll live a life of ease and fortune, but when they arrive they find troops at the border to keep them out. So why were they invited? Simply because the orchard-owners wanted to depress wages by threatening their current workers with a horde of replacements on the border.

Does this sound like any other California industry you can think of? New players, same old trick. Promise everybody riches so that they’ll give up everything they have in hopes of work, then string them along with no payoff, ensuring a perpetually deep and desperate labor pool. It’s a very cynical, very nasty trick, and it doesn’t stop when you actually get “in the door”.

Whenever you leave a meeting and say to yourself, “Wow, they told me everything I wanted to hear!,” it always means that you’ll never hear from those people again. A good meeting is actually one where they pick your idea apart.

“We love it, don’t change a thing!” is Hollywood-speak for “We hate it and we want you out of our office.” What you actually want to hear is, “There might be something there, but…” You don’t want praise—you want feedback. As for how you handle that feedback, come back tomorrow…

Underrated Movie #141: The Man in the White Suit

2011-12-04T21:51:00.008-05:00

Title: The Man in the White Suit
Year: 1951
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Writers: Roger MacDougall, John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick, based on a play by MacDougall
Stars: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Michael Gough, Vida Hope

The Story: A clever inventor in a dreary mill town creates the world’s most perfect fabric, which never wears out or gets dirty, but soon the bosses and labor are united in an attempt to squelch the invention before it can ruin their livelihoods. He goes on the run, but the sample suit he’s made stands out like a light bulb.

How it Came to be Underrated: This movie, The Ladykillers, and especially Sweet Smell of Success should have made Mackendrick a permanent house-hold name, but his movies remain cult-hits, known mostly to film buffs.

Why It’s Great:

Guinness’s brilliant and wholly believable performance is the polar opposite of the “coldly logical scientist” stereotype. Instead, he’s touchingly sensitive, desperate for society’s approval, but only on his own naïve terms. The moment when he finally realizes how much unintentional suffering his invention would cause is subtly devastating.
It’s a funny movie, but there aren’t actually any jokes, per se. It’s certainly satirical, and it’s structured like a zippy screwball farce, but everybody plays it straight, and the movie has a lot of serious things to say about the ironic dual-edged sword of “progress”. When Guinness goes on the run, only children help him. They’re the only ones to whom the future is worth more than the past.
But the fable plays differently today. At the time, opposition to the labor-saving properties of synthetic materials seemed backward and misguided, but today we would ask, “what chemicals are in it? Are they carcinogenic? Are these resources as renewable as old fashioned wool and cotton?” In retrospect, the faith-in-science ‘50s seem like a strange mini-enlightenment, and our new distrust-of-science era (on both sides of the political divide, albeit for different reasons) is in some ways a romantic revival.
After his American career trailed off, Mackendrick became a legendary filmmaking instructor, and I’ll spend some time later this week working through the list of rules that commenter “J.S.” unearthed in the comments last week, so stay tuned for that. Many of his rules are about how to trim down and speed up a story. This 85-minute-wonder is a beautiful example

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Guinness triggered another manhunt in The Lavender Hill Mob. He got to play another unrecognized genius (at least in his own mind) in The Horse’s Mouth.

How Available Is It?: Netflix has it on Watch Instantly but not on DVD. Luckily the Watch Instantly print is beautiful.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Test Tube Frankenstein!

Always Be Closing, Part 4: The Pitch Pyramid

2011-12-01T22:02:00.004-05:00

Too many writers over-prepare one big pitch, sure that it’s going to blow the town away. It’s fine to focus on one idea, practice it in front of the mirror, try it out on friends, etc… But remember, as soon as the producers give any indication that they aren’t interested, you have to drop it immediately and move on to another pitch.

The question then becomes: How many pitches can you prepare? After all, you can’t have an infinite number of equally good pitches…

I was first warned about this problem by Simon Kinberg. He told a story about being called in by Universal, who wanted to hear horror pitches. He had two weeks to prepare, so he carefully crafted a sure-fire million dollar horror idea, complete with a 30 minute pitch detailing every beat of the story. Just in case it that somehow didn’t sell, he also worked up five minute pitches for two other ideas.

On the day of the meeting, Universal quickly dismissed the million-dollar idea, then waved away the two five minute pitches. At this point, all he had left was a list of seven more titles with no stories attached, but he started listing them off and coyly implying that he couldn’t say too much about them. Finally he got down to the last one: all he could tell them was that it would be a movie about a ghost town called Ghost Town.

The executives said: “Stop right there! We love it! Sold!” Once the check was safely deposited, he asked what it was exactly they liked about it. They said that they were just looking for any horror movie that could launch a new attraction at the Universal Studios Theme Park. Ghost Town fit that bill. (Alas, it never got made.)

In your mind, have an imaginary pitch pyramid:Every time they look bored, slyly make your way down the pyramid. Guess what always piques their interest? Something from the bottom tier. You’ll be glad that you reviewed your master list of projects.

And don’t be afraid to literally bring in a cheat sheet. There’s a myth that says that writers can’t ever consult notes in a pitch, but that’s not true at all. Don’t read your pitch, of course, but don’t force them to watch you racking your brain either.

Next week: Don’t let them kill you with kindness.

Always Be Closing, Part 3: Sell Yourself, The Old-Fashioned Way

2011-11-30T19:21:00.007-05:00

The worst thing you can do in a meeting is think like an artist. Instead, you have to constantly remind yourself that you’re now a salesman. Selling your own talent is not that different from selling plungers, and the sooner you learn basic sales techniques, the more success you’ll have.

Everybody in this business overpraises each other, so when you first get “launched” you’re in real danger of concluding that you really are a red-hot property, and production companies are lucky to get a chance to meet with you. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth:

By the time you walk in the door, the producers’ day has gone to hell and they’re sorry they ever scheduled this meeting. They just want to nod dumbly as you rattle off your pitches, offer glowing assurances that they’ll get back to you, and get you out the door. I had meetings just like that and I left feeling like the king of the world, sure that I’d blown them away. They never called.

You may have carefully prepared beforehand what you want to pitch (more on this tomorrow), but you need to be prepared to throw it all away on a moment’s notice. You are not there to sell them whatever you’ve brought to sell, you are there to sell them whatever they want to buy.

They will not want to tell you what they’re looking for. They want to stay close-lipped, force you lay out your wares, and then summarily judge you. But your job is to force them to reveal what they want to buy, and then immediately say, “What a coincidence, that’s just what I love to write!”

This is the age-old dance of sales, and one rule usually determines the winner: Whoever speaks first, loses. Get them to talk about themselves more than you talk about yourself. Get them to talk about their upcoming projects before you tell them about your own. Find out what they want, then offer that to them.

When you do have to talk about what you’re working on, be hyper-alert to any verbal or physical sign that they’re losing interest, then immediately and seamlessly move on to something that might interest them more.

This is especially true when you’re competing with other writers for adaptations. The producers have an idea in their mind of how they want this material adapted, and they’re waiting for someone to come in who had that same idea independently. But you can beat the guessing game and tease the truth out of them using old-fashioned techniques:

Here’s a fiendish pitch: “This is such a fantastic book, and it needs to be made into a movie, but it would be so easy to screw it up! There are so many different ways to go with it. On the one hand, you could play up this element, but on the other hand, you could go in the opposite direction and play up this other element…”

What do you say next? Nothing. You pause. You create an uncomfortable silence, until they jump in and tell you what they want to hear! Once they’ve confessed what they’re looking for, then you say, “Oh, it’s so good to hear you say that! That’s exactly what I was thinking. So many producers would ruin this by taking it the other way!” Ruthless, but effective.

But wait, doesn’t this mean that you have to have multiple pitches prepared? Yes it does: tomorrow, we tackle the Pitch Pyramid.

Always Be Closing, Part 2: Prepare Yourself

2011-11-29T23:09:00.006-05:00

Taking a meeting is literally dizzying. They spin you around the office quickly, surrounding you with impressive looking souvenirs of their movies, introduce you quickly to six different people, and then, just before the sit-down, three of those people disappear and get replaced by three more people who they never introduce.

Your reps should help you deal with this, but far too often, they will fail to prepare adequately you for a meeting, which is dumb because this is your opportunity to make them money. But there are certain things you must demand that your reps tell you beforehand:

What material of yours was sent to these people, who specifically in the company read it, and what they had to say about it.
Who exactly is going to be in the room. Hopefully with a physical description of each one.
Who the decision maker in the room is.
See if your rep can find out what open assignments might be pitched to you.

Once you have this info, do a massive amount of internet prep on your own:

Get an IMDb Pro membership and learn everyone’s credits. Be ready to compliment each one on a project of theirs that you liked. Also, make sure to compliment the whole company if they had a hit movie that month. Sound like you’re already one of the team.
While you’re on their IMDb Pro page, check out the company’s upcoming slate, and look for links to recent articles about their company philosophy and what they’re looking to acquire.
You’ll really hit the jackpot if you can actually find an interview where they come right out and say what they’ve always wanted to hear in a pitch. Believe it or not, I’ve found this info more than once. People in this business love to talk about their process.
If you know (or can guess) which project they might throw at you, then research the hell out of it, but don’t tell them that in the meeting. If they’ve optioned a book, read it quickly before the meeting, then pretend like you just happened to have read it a while back. Producer feel a zing of kismet when you say, “What a coincidence, I love that book, too!”

Now you’re ready for the big day. Get dressed up in jeans and a blazer (the unofficial screenwriter uniform). Get there an hour early, but linger across the street until 10 minutes before. (If it’s in a hard-to-find corner of L.A., you might want to drive out there to scout the place the day before.) Be steely and professional on the inside, casual and breezy on the outside.

Tomorrow: How to sell yourself, the old-fashioned way...

Always Be Closing, Part 1: A Meeting is a Consolation Prize

2011-11-28T23:07:00.015-05:00

When I got signed, I was so proud of the fact that I had bluffed my reps into thinking that I was a big shot, that I didn’t realize the problem: If they think you already are a big-shot, they’re not going to tell you what you need to know to become one.

In particular, I was totally unprepared for the “general meetings” I was sent out on. I didn’t realize that these are tightrope acts dominated by unspoken rules. For instance, if a production company is meeting with you, that means three things:

They have read a screenplay you wrote.
They liked it a lot.
THEY HAVE ALREADY DECIDED NOT TO BUY IT.

The third one was the one that nobody told me. They didn’t invite you there to close a sale. If they wanted to buy your material, they would have simply called your rep and made an offer. The general meeting is what happens when they don’t do that. It’s the consolation prize.

So if you’re not there to sell them what they read, why are you there? I eventually figured out that there are three phases to a general meeting:

First, you discuss the project that they liked but decided not to buy. This is an excuse to tell them about your process and your passion. It’s also a very-long-shot opportunity to try to change their mind and get them to buy it after all, but you still can’t come on like a salesman. Instead you have to adopt a “Gee it’s a shame we can’t just do that one together” tone.
Second, you ask them about open assignments. These might be properties (novels, comic books, board games, etc.) they bought the rights to but haven’t hired anybody to adapt yet. Most production companies have a few of these sitting around. Also: screenplays that they paid other writers for, only to kill the project because they cooled on it. They might bounce that idea off you to see if you can instantly propose a new take that will reinvigorate their interest.
Third, you ask them if they’re willing to hear a pitch. This can be an original spec screenplay that you want to sell to them, or a concept that you want to be paid to write, or a property that you want to propose that they option for you to adapt.

One time, I seemingly hit the trifecta. I was pitching to a top guy at HBO. First we discussed the screenplay he’d read: hearing my passion for it, he suddenly announced that he’d changed his mind and he would pitch it to his colleagues after all! Then he mentioned an old project: I sparked to it and he said he’d send me their material on it! Then I pitched him a similar idea of my own, and he asked me to write up a treatment! Huzzah!

What was the result? The usual: nothing came of any of it. But it sure was fun at the time, and at least I had figured out what was supposed to happen. Come back tomorrow for more stuff I wish I’d known sooner…

Underrated Movie #140: Dark Days

2011-11-27T12:14:00.008-05:00

Title: Dark Days
Year: 2000
Director: Marc Singer (Not the Beastmaster, a different guy)
Stars: Ralph, Dee, Henry, Brian, Clarence, Julio, Lee, Jose, etc…

The Story: A haunting, funny and eerie visit with the “mole people”: A group of surprisingly upbeat homeless people who have found a sustainable life for themselves in abandoned train tunnels beneath the streets of Manhattan. They tap into the electrical grid for power and the pipes for showers, scavenge together houses for themselves complete with working kitchens, and try to survive.

How it Came to be Underrated: This was Singer’s first and only association with any film of any kind, and so it’s in danger of being forgotten as a great one-off.

Why It’s Great:

This movie is all the more remarkable if you know the backstory: A British would-be male model comes to America, crashes on the couches of other fashion world orbiters, finds out about the tunnel-dwellers for the first time and casually decides to make a documentary about them despite having no idea what he’s doing. His artsy friends convince him that he must shoot on film despite the fact that the light conditions are going to be non-existent and huge amounts of footage would be necessary on no budget. This should all add up to a disastrous, pretentious incompetent mess. But, amazingly, the final product is a profound, luminous work of art.
The level of access is astounding. Singer eventually moved down there with them and built his own home, not to make himself a character in the movie, but just to get to know them. When one of the “houses” burns down. creating a homeless problem even amongst the homeless, what Singer doesn’t tell you onscreen is that he then surrendered his own house to the person whose house burned.
The ironies pile up thick and fast. Most of them are defiantly proud to be homeless, but life underground becomes all about cooking, cleaning, security, and pressuring each other to give up drugs. Starting from scratch, they re-create everything they left behind (See the hair-cutting salon below). At one point a can-recycler talks about trying to make more money during the week so that he can take Saturday or Sunday off, as if that were a great new idea.
Singer’s also coy about the fact that the footage he shot helps contribute to the movie’s shockingly happy ending. Instead, he rightly gives the credit to the resourceful mole people who, for the most part, saved themselves. When one of them dismantles his home so that he can move to the surface at the end, he casually reminds his friend, “Don’t mix the dirty clothes with the clean ones.” It’s a cathartic moment for the audience.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: The most harrowingly realistic fictional movie about homelessness was Leos Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge. Chaplin’s The Kid, one of the first ever feature films, is also surprising honest about the subject.

How Available Is It?: It’s on DVD and Watch Instantly.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: What Happened in 2,000 A.D.?

Oh That Treacherous Little Scamp!

2011-11-24T14:54:00.003-05:00

Storyteller’s Rulebook #109: Create Subconscious Anticipation

2011-11-23T18:08:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, we left off on the idea that the best way to keep a reader reading is if they’re anticipating something that’s about to happen. This can be something dangerous, or it can be something minor that only has a subconscious effect on the reader and/or viewer.

If you don’t have an excuse to yank one character away at the end, there are all sorts of subtle ways to create a minor climax within a scene: Begin a kitchen scene with the toaster lever being forced down... The audience will subconsciously sense that the scene will end with the toast popping up.

Or in a comedic scene, simply have a character unable to think of a word at the beginning, which is driving them crazy. Just when the audience has forgotten about that, the scene ends with their exclamation of the word.

There are lots of ways to add a little element that tells a complete story in every long-ish scene:

Add a dog that’s trying to get fed the whole time, from each character, and then finally comes up with a clever solution at the end. Think Asta in the Thin Man movies, or Momo on “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
If two characters are loudly arguing, add a meek person who keeps trying to get the attention of one of the two arguers the whole time, then comes up with a clever solution to get what he needs.
Have a character hastily cover up the evidence of some mistake they’ve made at the beginning of the scene, then let the audience forget about it, then have it pop up again and get revealed at the end of the scene, causing much embarrassment.

There’s no better example of this than the beloved Nazi monkey from Raiders of the Lost Ark, who gets hoist on his own poison petard. What could have been a dull exposition scene comes to life, only to end tragically for one poor monkey. Who is a Nazi.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #108: Give Each Scene Its Own Ticking Clock

2011-11-22T18:54:00.000-05:00

This should be obvious, but I’ve just figured it out. We all know that the overall plot needs a ticking time clock to ramp up motivation, but you can also add a time limit countdown to almost every scene. Now that I’ve started doing it, I find that it’s surprisingly easy-- At the beginning of every scene, toss in a line like one of these:

“I have to go, so I can only talk for a second.”
“Let me ask you something before he comes back in the room.”
“We have to do this quick before anybody notices we’re gone.”

If one spouse wants to discuss something in the kitchen in the morning, the other spouse should be running late. If they’re in bed at night, one of them should have taken a sleeping pill. The one with the problem now has a limited time to get the answer they need.

This has additional benefits: Writers always try to build events towards a climax, but that’s not how life naturally works. In real life, when people kiss, or say I love you for the first time, or get in a fight, they tend to talk about it afterwards, which is inherently anticlimactic. If you have a pre-established excuse to cut the scene short, you can go out on a bang by yanking one character away.

This way, the characters don’t get to resolve all of their issues too early in your script. If someone says “I love you” right before someone shows up to arrest their love interest (or freeze him in carbonite), the writer is allowed to let it dangle for a while. Also, this is a good way to get non-emotional characters to say emotional things. When the pressure’s on, our defenses get dropped.

This can also take the heat off your villain. The more you allow minor, incidental pressures to provide the conflict, the less you have to write overheated rhetoric about good vs. evil. Instead of forcing the characters to endlessly fret about one big conflict, remember that the pressure they’re under can complicate their life in a dozen smaller ways, keeping them on edge even when they’re not under attack.

The best way to keep a reader reading is if they’re anticipating that something is about to happen, in the story as a whole and within each scene. Tomorrow we’ll look at some subtler ways to do that...

Storyteller's Rulebook #107: In Praise of Firing the Writer

2011-11-21T18:53:00.005-05:00

When a super-bomb like The A-Team comes out, screenwriters love to take potshots: “No wonder it bombed, I hear that they had ten different writers working on it! When will they learn to just stick with the first writer?” But let’s be honest. It doesn’t always work that way.

Whenever a movie has been in development too long, it starts to develop a stink. Insiders confidently dismiss the whole project as a mess for years before it even comes out. So it’s always a big surprise when one of those long-in-development messes turns out to be a genuinely enjoyable movie.Let’s look at Pirates of the Caribbean, Charlie’s Angels, and Iron Man. None of these movies had any right to be good. They were adaptations of, respectively, a theme park ride, a terrible TV show and a third-tier comic book. Even worse, each had worn a long and torturous path to the screen. This was especially dangerous because all three movies were aiming for the most elusive tone of all: light-hearted action. How could all those cooks keep a light soufflé from falling by sticking their meddling thumbs into it?

And yet, for my money, these are three of the most unexpectedly delightful popcorn movies of the last decade. Were they hits despite hiring all those screenwriters or, dare I say it, because of it? To answer that question, we need to look no further than the sequels. In each case, the producers took the last writer/team standing from the previous movie and kept them on through the whole process the second time around.

That would seem to make sense: The initial writers on the first movie had failed, and the final writer/team had succeeded, so they should have just hired that writer/team in the first place, right? Wrong. All three sequels sucked.

If you want to know why, look no further than the excellent writers’ commentary on the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, to their credit, clearly and carefully document the contributions of each credited writer, and they make it very clear why that movie was so good. If I may vastly over-simplify: Jay Wolpert had a great concept, Stuart Beattie added great characters, and Elliott and Rossio shaped those elements into a great plot. Now look at the POTC sequels, which were written solely by the team of Elliot and Rossio: They’re all plot! Endless mounds of plot! The characterization, so strong in the first movie, was totally gone.Sometimes, you have to fire the writer and bring in other voices with different strengths. It doesn’t always work—Movies like The A-Team are probably unsalvageable, but let’s not pretend that multiple writers always harm a project. Sometimes a succession of writers creates a better project than any one writer could have imagined.

Storyteller's Rulebook #106: In Praise of Notes

2011-11-20T17:43:00.004-05:00

We all know that producers can ruin a movie with too many notes, and the biggest problem in Hollywood right now is that movies take way too long to get made. Clint Eastwood, to his credit, doesn’t have either of these problems. In fact, he’s gained a reputation as the only director in Hollywood, who always shoots the first draft he’s given, then comes back on time and under-budget with a beautiful-looking movie. Great, so he’s the solution, right? Well, not quite.

I love some of Eastwood’s later work, but not all of it, and I’m sorry to report that J. Edgar is pretty much a stinkbomb. This is especially disappointing because the screenwriter is Dustin Lance Black, whose only previous movie was one of my favorites of the recent years: Milk.

If you put a great screenwriter together with a respectful director, you should get magic, but often the opposite happens. Here’s Black talking about his sheer terror he felt when he found out that Eastwood was going to shoot his first draft:

“When I found out Clint was interested it was both a blessing and bit of ‘Oh, boy… There are some things I’d like to change still.’ I’d heard Peter Morgan say that on [Eastwood’s previous movie] Hereafter, he’d had that feeling …but they were already shooting! …But it is funny because I went to Rob Lorenz and I said, ‘Hey, we should probably cut a good chunk out of the first act. That’s kind of everything and the kitchen sink.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, we’ll shoot it all and we’ll see what turns out well.’”

As loathe as I am to admit it, J. Edgar was made too quickly and with too few notes. We screenwriters love to complain about how directors and producers mess up our work. And more often than not, that’s true. 90% of everything is crap, so therefore 90% of notes are crap. And if you get a hidebound producer or director who insists that you stick to them, they’ll ruin a good script, no question.

But 10% of notes are great. And great notes are an essential component of a great movie. That’s what a great director and a great producer do: they give great notes. They shape screenplays, which are inherently abstract, into full-bodied stories. Given how wobbly the screenplay for J. Edgar is, I now suspect that Gus Van Sant buried Black in notes for Milk. Which isn’t to say that Black isn’t a great screenwriter: he is, and even J. Edgar has brief flashes of genius, but every writer needs notes. Look what happened to J. K. Rowling when they stopped giving her notes.

Film is a collaborative medium, where a collective of artists creates collective meaning for a collective audience. J. Edgar is a claustrophobic movie with no sense of perspective. It doesn’t breathe. It was made to make a point, not to make us identify with a human being, as all great bio-pics do, and as Milk did. Eastwood just transcribed Black’s script onto the screen, when he should have brought it to life.

But hey, as long as I’m being heretical, let’s go even farther… Tomorrow: In Praise of Firing the Writer!

Storyteller's Rulebook #105: Explaining the Plot is Not Your Characters’ Job

2011-11-17T18:01:00.002-05:00

Let’s talk about one of the biggest plot holes in cinema. When Jimmy Stewart is following Kim Novak around in Vertigo, many spooky things seem to happen, but in the last half-hour of the movie, we find out this was all an elaborate con job, with no supernatural element.

And for the most part, that works: Once we know what was really going on, we see everything in a new light and it all makes sense… except one scene: What about that time that Stewart followed Novak into the hotel, only to discover that she’d vanished into thin air? The explanation doesn’t cover that.

As I pointed out before, this particular plot hole isn’t really a problem, because depth is found in holes. A little messiness can make a movie more mysterious and encourages long-term contemplation. That’s good, because, if Hitchcock had tried to explain this away, he would have run into a bigger problem…

It’s not hard to imagine an explanation: What if the villain had paid off the landlady of the hotel to lie to Stewart? Or what if Novak had rigged up a way to escape from the hotel room without being seen? We can guess, but we’ll never know for sure. This brings up the question: why not tidy up the movie by having Stewart ask Novak (an hour of screentime later) how she pulled that off?

Because plotting is the job of the writer, not the characters. This is why it’s so hard to write thrillers. You don’t want to reveal the twist too soon, so you play your cards close to the vest. Then, after the twist goes down, It’s very tempting to toss in a lot of “backfill” where the characters belatedly explain why everything happened the way it did.

Don’t do this. Once the plot twists, it should be instantly obvious how everything now fits together. If anything is still unclear, just leave it. Producers sometimes ask writers to “hang an explainer on it,” which is always a terrible idea. Your characters, and your audience, should be way too caught up in what’s happening next. If the plot doesn’t quite make sense, that’s your problem, not theirs.

The First 15 Minutes Project #12: Richard Boyle

2011-11-16T18:36:00.001-05:00

Richard Boyle in Salvador

Rapid-fire montage of newsreel-style footage of a massacre in El Salvador. Thriller music plays.
A news report tells us about what’s going on in El Salvador.
Boyle is woken up by three things: this news report, this baby crying, and the landlord knocking on the door. His baby’s mother cries and says she can’t live like this anymore.
Later, using the payphone in the hall while others wait for the phone, Boyle begs various news agencies for a press pass to go drum up some news in El Salvador before it blows up. He brags about the various heroic newsgathering jobs he’s done in the past: the last American journalist out of Cambodia, etc. A friend is heading for the airport but agrees to loan him $500 if he can get there in time.
Boyle speeds across San Francisco, gets pulled over. He has not license or registration and several tickets have gone to warrant. He’s arrested.
In jail, Boyle is bailed out by his DJ friend Doctor Rock, who spends a lot to get Boyle and his car released, on the condition that Boyle take him to get his dog out of a pound.
Boyle and Dr. Rock drive across town. They complain about yuppied women. Boyle prefers Latin women, who are kind and understanding. It turns out that they’ve both been kicked out and planned on crashing with the other. They complain about the yuppie cars on the road.
They show up at the pound. They explain that they put Dr. Rock’s dog to sleep. “That was my only relationship! My best friend! Seven years! My marriage only lasted five!”
They go to Boyle’s place. His wife has gone back to Italy to her parents, leaving only the TV and a dirty diaper in the crib. “It was a marriage made in hell. I sure am gonna miss my boy. (shrugs) Maybe she’ll be back.” Dr. Rock jokes: “Sure. Who could leave all this?”
Back on the highway, Boyle suggests that they roadtrip down to Guatemala. “Why?” “Why not? No cops. No laws. Sun. It’s cheap. No yuppies. Great dope.” They toss an empty beer can on the highway.
As they drive through Mexico: “Look at you. You’re a walking museum of the ‘60s.” “What the fuck are you?” “I am a forward thinking human being! I know about life because I explore things. Being a journalist, you’re in touch with reality.” “You come off with this journalist bullshit all the time. I haven’t seen one goddamn thing that you’ve written.” “I wrote a book” “That was ten years ago!”
They enter El Salvador. “You said Guatemala! You never said anything about El Salvador! They kill people here, Boyle!” “You believe everything you read in the papers? You’ll love it! C’mon doc, this is my last chance, man. I’m serious, if I get some good combat shots for AP I can make some money. Pay you back!” “You’d better pay me back!” (Boyle is smoking a joint as he drive, Dr. Rock is washing down pills with alcohol.) “We could go to Los Libertas, best surfing beach in the world. You can drive drunk! Get anyone killed for 50 bucks!” “I don’t want to get anybody killed” “Where else can you get a virgin to sit on your face for seven bucks??” That finally convinces Dr. Rock to stay.
They come across soldiers who have just killed some people. “Who are these clowns” “Traffic accident.” Then Rock sees a burning corpse on the side of the road. “Shit, Boyle!” The death squad realizes that Boyle is a journalist and takes them both into custody. They watch the soldiers kill somebody on the side of the road. Boyle insists that he’s friends with their boss and asks to be taken to him…

This is a classic example of triangulation: no matter how extreme a character is, you can always make him look moderate by putting him in the middle of a spectrum, in which he contrasts favorably with people who are even worse. In order to make Boyle’s reckless journalism seem acceptable, Stone contrasts him with journalists who play it way too safe. In order to get us to accept Boyle’s hedonism, Stone gives him a best friend who is even more reckless.

The First 15 Minutes Project #11: Tom Ripley

2011-11-15T18:48:00.002-05:00

Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley

Flashforward: Tom, looking distraught but handsome, staring blankly ahead, sits in a rolling boat cabin while the titles chop up his face. VO: “If I could just go back. If I could rub everything out, starting with myself. Starting with borrowing a jacket…”
Flashback: a rooftop garden in NYC overlooking Central Park. Tom, looking much geekier, wears a crested Yale blazer, plays classical piano while a vocalist sings. Mr. Greenleaf comes over with his wife and asks if they knew his son at Yale. He says “How is Dickey?” They complain to him “Dickey’s idea of music is jazz.” They say good-bye: I’ll see you at the shipyard.
He runs to return the jacket to the singer’s boyfriend, who has a broken wrist.
Tom works in the bathroom in the basement of an opera building brushing dandruff off people’s shoulders for spare change, wearing a uniform.
He sneaks a peek at the performance by peeking through the curtains of an opera box, but the box patron turns and scowls, so he closes the curtain.
After the theater is closed, Tom plays the grand piano on the stage, but the electrician shuts off the lights. Tom apologizes.
At Mr. Greenleaf’s shipyard, Mr. Greenleaf says “You’ve probably heard that Dickey’s been living in Italy. Mongibello. South of Naples. No kind of place at all. Marge his young lady is supposedly writing some kind of book. God know what he does. His talent is spending his allowance.” He offers to pay Tom a thousand dollars to go to Europe and reclaim Dickey.
In his basement apartment, Tom learns jazz by blindfolding himself, pulling records off a pile and playing them until he can guess who’s singing each one. He listens to Chet Baker singing My Funny Valentine and says “I don’t even know if this is a man or a woman.” He hears domestic violence upstairs. He looks at a Yale yearbook he’s acquired and the picture of Dickey.
He climbs up out of his apartment to the limo picking him up. Opens his ticket for the Cunard line.
In Italy, he meets an heiress named Meredith who flirts with him in the customs line. He introduces himself as Dickey Greenleaf. “One of the shipping Greenleafs?” “Trying not to be”. She points out that his luggage was under R. He says he travels under his mother’s name. She says that so is she. She’s really a Loag. “Of the…” “Yes, the shipping Loags. We’re partners in disguise.” She’s pulled away.
Tom arrives in Mongibello, a picturesque shipping town.
Tom reads from an Italian phrase book while he watches Dickey and Marge with binoculars. They dive off their boat, named Bird and swim to the beach. While he looks at Dickey, he says “This is my face”, then checks the book and learns how to say that in Italian.
He puts on day-glo swim trunks and runs past them into the sea, then walks back past them. He turns to them and says “Dickey Greenleaf. It’s Tom. Tom Ripley.” “Did we know each other?” “Well, I knew you, so you must have known me.” “Princeton’s like a fog. America’s like a fog.” Dickey introduces him to Marge. “You’re so white!” “It’s just an undercoat.” Marge gets the joke but Dickey doesn’t. Marge says you should come and have lunch with us, anytime. Tom leaves. Dickey repeats that he doesn’t remember him.
Tom walks down the street, Dickey drives past him on his vespa, picks up a local on the street.
Marge is in her backyard. Dickey shows up, apologizes for being late. Tells a lie about fishing. She says “We ate everything without you. Tom Ripley’s here.” Marge says “Tom was telling me about his journey over. Made me laugh so hard I almost got a nosebleed.” Dickey asks if Tom makes martinis. He hesitates. Marge says she’ll make them. Dickey says her martinis are great. Everybody should have one great talent. He asks what Tom’s is. Tom says “forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody.” Dickey tells him to do an impression. Tom imitates Dickey’s father, which amazes Dickey. How do you know him? “I met him in New York.” “Could you ever conceive of going to Italy, Tom, and bringing him back?” Dickey is shocked.
They walk through the street, pass a wedding, Dickey touches the cheep of the girl he was flirting with. Dickey says that he’ll never go back.

If Boyle in Salvador is the asshole-truth teller, then Ripley is the flip side: the sociopathic liar. Each character type has its appeal. There’s something very thrilling about watching a character juggle lies: Every other character is fooled but we in the audience see all and know all, making us the liar’s intimate co-conspirator. We can’t help but admire the liar’s dexterity, and we develop a gleeful anticipation every time it he has to wriggle out of another trap.

And yet, the audacious moment we admire most is when he dares to unexpectedly tell the truth: He suddenly admits to Tom the real reason that he’s there. They now feel the same intimacy we do: a liar has chosen to trust them, which is deeply flattering, at first...

The 15 Minutes Project #10: Dave Chappellet in Downhill Racer

2011-11-14T20:39:00.003-05:00

Any hero can win our sympathy by saving cats, but what if the writer wants us to like a jerk? This week, we’ll try to figure out why we care about certain heroes, even through they’re jerks...

Dave Chappellet in Downhill Racer:

Opening montage: ski lift cable, shots of snowy mountain, scared skiers above, anxious fans below. A cameraman who looks like a sniper. Tense action movie music kicks in.
Coach Claire (Gene Hackman) waits halfway down the course with a stopwatch, looking intense…
An American skier makes an amazing run down the mountain as the credits roll, but near the bottom, the skier wipes out spectacularly.
Claire looks sick at the news. Helicopter comes in and takes the skier away.
Claire sees his skier in the hospital, looks worried.
Dave Chappellet (Robert Redford) arrives at a European airport, but there’s no one there to meet him. He clearly doesn’t understand Europe.
Chappellet and another new recruit, D. K. take the train. Chappellet is awkward getting through the train with his skis. He roughly takes a sandwich and a drink from porter.
They arrive outside his hostel. D. K. heads in immediately, but Chappellet pauses to look up at each mountain, takes a deep breath and smiles…
Chappellet arrives at the front desk, where Claire is on the phone, arguing about a reservation. Claire sees Chappellet and D. K., says he’s glad they got together, but they haven’t, really. Guy goes over to shake the hand of the other skiers, ignores Chappellet. Claire finally shakes Chappellet’s hand but has no time for him.
Chappellet checks into his room with D. K. He’s baffled by the bidet. D. K., trying to friendly, chuckles and asks, “You know what that is?” Chappellet sullenly lies, “Yeah,” and leaves.
Chappellet gets in bed, asks where he knows the other skiers from. D. K. says “Dartmouth. I was one of the Olympic hopefuls. I was hopeful, not them.” Chappellet mutters “Dartmouth” to himself, in disgust.
The next day, they all put their skis on the the van. The big guy introduces himself, “Chappelet, I’m Johnny Creach.” Chappellet responds, “Yeah, I know.”
Claire and his assistant time the skiers. One goes through and the assistant says “Not bad”. Claire grunts, “Too much style” The assistant says “Who’s next, Chappellet?” Chappellet skis.
Claire, shocked, asks what time his assistant has. The assistant says 28:08. Claire smiles, “That’s what I have.”
The next day Claire hands out the bibs that tell the skiers what order they’re going to race. He gives Chappellet a starting number of 88, and apologizes that he’s so far back. Chappellet says that he’ll be in ruts up to his knees. “What’s the point of even racing?” “Same as always, try to win,” Claire says.
Cut to back at the room, Chappellet refused to race. D. K. asks why, Chappellet explains that he was seeded too far back. D. K. says he should have raced. Chappellet expresses annoyance that he has to call him “D. K.” which sounds too preppy-ish for his tastes.
They take a train to the next meet. Chappellet watches the press gather around the star and looks jealous.
Everybody gets their bibs. Claire gives Chappellet a similar number and teases him about it.
Chappellet races and does great. Claire is pleased, despite himself.

Chappellet is a surly jerk, a bad sport, and a guy who expects acclaim before he proves himself. We should hate him, but we don’t, entirely. Why? Americans are never supposed to mention class resentments, but we all feel them, so we certainly identify with that, as well as the universal feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. And it helps that he’s really quite handsome, of course. And that he keeps winning.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a daring movie that pushes our sympathy to its limits, and forces us to admit that what we actually admire doesn’t always match was we should admire. Still, it’s worth noting that the movie does use subtle tricks to ensure that we’ll feel some genuine sympathy.

Underrated Movie #139: Love Me Tonight

2011-11-13T18:09:00.005-05:00

Title: Love Me Tonight
Year: 1932
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Writers: Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young and George Marion, Jr, based on a play by Leopold Marchand and Paul Armont, with delightful songs by Rodgers and Hart
Stars: Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Charlie Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, Myrna Loy, C. Aubrey Smith

The Story: A poor but happy-go-lucky Paris tailor decides that he must track down a deadbeat client at a grand country estate. While there, the tailor falls in love with his client’s royal sister.

How it Came to be Underrated: MacDonald and Chevalier were wildly popular for a short time, but their light-operetta style started to seem very old-fashioned and their fame faded quickly, which is ironic, since the movie seems so startlingly modern today.

Why It’s Great:

If you were to poll the general public about the greatest musicals of all time, this wouldn’t crack the Top 50, simply because many haven’t heard of it, but a good number of film historians would put this all the way up near number one, making this one of the most underrated movies ever. No other musical has done such a great job capturing the infectious joy of song. Chevalier the tailor cheerily bounces through Paris singing, “Isn’t It Romantic.” Soon, a passing taxi driver starts singing the same tune… The tune then passes to his fare, who passes it to an army troupe, who march through the countryside singing it, where it finally makes its way to the ear of a lonely princess looking wistfully out her window... Inevitably, of course, this bond of song will bring these two together. It’s one of the joyous sequences ever shot.
Experimental filmmakers at the time were having some success making feature-length montages of city life called “City Symphonies” Mamoulian takes this concept and makes it literal: In the opening shot, a long workman with a pickaxe emerges onto the streets of Paris in the morning and begins a rhythmic clanking, then he’s joined by shopowners sweeping the streets, maids beating carpets, cobblers nailing on heels, cascading car horns, babies wailing, laundry whipping in the wind, etc. Each sound is transformed from a nuisance into something beautiful as they all blend together. Every moment in this movie is a pure unadulterated delight.
Why did musicals becomes so artificial after this? Once musical production units split off from the rest of the studio system, they prided themselves on attracting the best dancers and choreographers from Broadway, who expected indoor work, elaborate lighting, and a proscenium arch. Mamoulian will have none of that. Rather than cut away to “musical sequences” this whole movie hums to life.
The movie is wonderfully naughty. Mamoulian was one of those directors that enjoyed the lawless pre-code days so much that he never was never quite able to reach the same heights under the puritan strictures of the Hays Code. He was most often compared to Lubitsch, who did a better job adjusting his level of subtlety to fit the new system that came in from 1934 on.
But as indebted as he is to Lubitsch, Mamoulian also looks ahead to the mapcap post-modern absurdity of Frank Tashlin: Chevalier slows down the film stock when it suits him. Angry sculptures of ancestors sing about how disappointed they are by their descendants. There are no rules here, and it’s thrilling.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Besides this and Queen Christina, Mamoulian’s other pre-code triumphs Applause, and Jekyll and Hyde. One of his best post-code movies was The Mark of Zorro.

How Available Is It?: There’s an excellent Kino DVD with an in-depth commentary by Mamoulian protege Miles Kreuger.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Cross Country Girl Hunt!

Rulebook Casefile: The Structure of Problem Solving

2011-11-10T20:16:00.001-05:00

So, funny story: I’m coming up on a deadline soon. Everything was going well, but now, about halfway through, the whole story has suddenly fallen apart. I can’t keep going because the characters’ actions don’t make any sense to me anymore. Naturally, I’m starting to freak out. Why is this happening?? Even worse: I’ve started to notice that this always happens to me halfway through writing a script. Why does everything fall apart at the midpoint??

Then I take a step back, and I start to laugh.

I’m sure you’re way ahead of me at this point, but let’s examine what ALWAYS happens when I get a writing assignment:

At first, I find myself with no upcoming projects. I try to blame the economy but then I hear that a peer has just gotten a fat paycheck, or ever worse, an onscreen credit. I feel humiliated.
Then the phone rings. My manager has an offer from a producer—but the project seems really sketchy… Maybe three writers have quit already, or the book seems unfilmable, or the producer’s take on the material seems bizarre… I’m dubious.
But my baby plaintively cries from the other room, and the student loan bills pile up. I realize I must seize this opportunity…
I write a fun, breezy outline for the story. The producer loves it. I commit.
Almost immediately, I start to run into conflict. The characters resist doing what I want them to do, and the plot details play out awkwardly on paper, but I breeze past these difficulties, doing spot fixes here and there to paper over the problems.
Soon, I’m having fun! This is easy! This is why I became a screenwriter! I’m writing my requisite five pages a day, every day! Clearly I’ve turned my life around. I begin to dream up all the future projects I’ll write with this newfound ability to pound pages out.
And then, all of a sudden, the pages stop! I hit a brick wall! Everything falls apart! I’ve torqued my characters’ motivations a little bit too far, until they shatter like glass! Nobody will do what I want them to do anymore. Now that I’m approaching the second half where I have to apply some pressure to my characters, all of those little spot fixes erupt again, and gaskets are blowing everywhere. All is lost!
What do I do? I face the unthinkable: that beautiful outline, the one that the producer signed off on… is the problem. It was a false goal. I have to throw away the map, which was based on false assumptions. I have to deal with every aspect of the story that I was afraid to face before… Is it worth it?
Then I notice the date! The deadline is in one week! There’s no time to despair, I’ve got to fix this!
And maybe, just maybe, it’s not so bad... Now that I’ve written a bunch of dialogue and gotten to know my characters, I can take a step back and figure out the theme. I slowly realize what this story is really all about...
I fix the first half and then write a better outline for the second half. I’m finally pursuing the correct goal…
Now I’m ready to start writing pages again… But can I possibly do it in time? I’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there!
I pull all-nighters. I open my veins and pour real emotion onto the page. I feel exhausted but cleansed.
I turn it in one minute before the deadline! But is it good enough to feed my starving baby?? The next day, my family and my reps all come together to gather around the phone, waiting for the verdict from the producer…

The point is that we’ve seen this structure before, haven’t we? As I said before, this isn’t just the structure of a screenplay, it’s the basic structure for solving any big problem, including… writing a screenplay! I’ve proven to myself that my structure is universal, in the most ironic way possible.

The 15 Minutes Project #9: Jake Gittes in Chinatown

2011-11-09T20:21:00.004-05:00

Actually, Jerk Week is next week, but here’s a one-day preview...

Jake Gittes in Chinatown

Old fashioned art deco opening credits, muted trumpet plays...
Working class husband looks at photos Gittes took of his wife having an affair. Gittes looks somewhat sympathetic, but eventually rolls his eyes: “Alright, Curly, enough’s enough. You can’t eat the Venetian blinds, I just had them installed on Wednesday.
[Missing lines about how you can’t kill a guy unless you’re rich.]
Meets the fake Mrs. Mulwray, who says her husband is having an affair. Gittes says, as deadpan as possible, “No. Really.” He insists that she’s better off not knowing.
He asks her husband’s first name. “Hollis.” Gittes immediately responds, “Water and Power??” He tries more powerfully to get her to drop it, but she won’t.
Gittes attends a hearing about a new dam, sees Hollis Mulwray speak: He explains that he signed off on a dam that gave way. He sees the same problem here, and he won’t okay it this time. Ranchers bring their sheep into the hall to complain about how their water was stolen, accuse Mulwray of stealing their water.
Gittes watches Mulwray drive out into a dry riverbed and look around.
He then watches Mulwray drive out to the ocean where a metal pipe is pointing off a cliff. Gittes climbs into the pipe to hide.
After the sun sets, Gittes suddenly has to jump out of the pipe as water pours out!
Gittes sees that Mulwray isn’t going anywhere, so he goes back to his car, finds a flyer under the windshield: Los Angeles is dying of thirst, vote Yes!
He opens his glove compartment, revealing a dozen stopwatches. He sets one to the current time. He sets it behind a back wheel of Mulwray’s car and leaves.
In the morning, his operative brings him the watch, smashed and frozen at the time Mulwray pulled away. The op explains that Mulwray was there all night. Then he followed Mulwray around all day, arguing with people about the dam. He hands Gittes a fixer tray where he’s just printed photos of Mulwray arguing with someone (John Huston).
Gittes, nattily dressed as always, shakes the fixer chemicals off his hands in disgust. “This is what you spent your day doing?? Let me explain something to you, this job requires a certain finesse.” The other op calls: “I got it, he’s found himself some cutie. They’re in Echo Park.” Gittes hangs up: “Echo Park. Water again.”
Gittes’s op rows him around the park’s lake. Mulwray rows by with a teenage girl in a pretty dress.
Gittes climbs the roof of Gittes’s house and gets photos of the Mulwray and the girl: She tries on a dress for him and he kisses her gently. He slips and almost gets caught, but gets away…
Unexpectedly, the photos are on the front page of the paper the next day. As Gittes gets shaved, the barber congratulates him for being so famous. A car overheats out on the street for lack of water. A mortgage banker in the next chair is disgusted at how Gittes makes his living. Gittes responds: “Listen, pal, I make an honest living. People only come to me when they’re in a desperate situation. I help ‘em out. I don’t kick families out of their houses like you bums down at the bank do!” The barber tries to distract him with a dirty joke about how the Chinese screw their wives.
It apparently worked because Gittes comes back to his office and insists on telling the joke to his operatives. First he ushers his secretary to the restroom so she won’t hear it, then tells the dirty joke. His operatives, with embarrassment, point out that Faye Dunaway is standing behind him waiting for him. She reveals that she is the real Evelyn Mulwray.

Thoughts:

In re-watching this, I realized that Gittes isn’t actually that much of a jerk if you just look at his words and actions, but Nicholson chooses to play him with an apathetic sneer—a daring choice for an actor to make. (Actors usually try to make characters more appealing than they are on the page.)
One thing that I’ve noticed in my own scripts is that it’s hard to write stalking scenes well. Spying on someone in real life is terrifying and tense, but onscreen it’s hard to capture that tension. To solve this problem, Towne keeps endangering Gittes. Gittes is in the pipe that the water comes out of. Later, he almost falls off the room while taking photos of Mulwray.
This is one of those rare scripts where theme is more important than character. Few of these scenes move the character of Gittes forward, but they almost all move the theme forward. The theme revolves around a bad vs. bad dilemma: drought vs. stealing water. Every scene hits this theme hard, which is rare for a first act. Even the barbershop has a car running out of water outside.

Rulebook Casefile: Withholding the True Statement of Philosophy in Chinatown

2011-11-08T16:57:00.015-05:00

In Step 9 of my Compelling Character series, I talked about the popular misconception that a hero should offer an overriding statement of philosophy on page 5 or so. I think it works better when the actions of a movie force a hero to arrive at a true statement of philosophy on page 90 or so. If you they offer an such a statement on page 5, it should be false, something like, “I stick my neck out for no one.”

An interesting example of this is in Chinatown. In the first scene, detective Jake Gittes has just shown a working class client named Curly pictures of his wife having an affair, then told Curly he should probably forget about it. In the finished movie, we cut away from the scene to the office outside, where the secretary waits, then Gittes and Curly emerge with Curly explaining that he can’t pay right away. Gittes says he understands, but he was just trying to make a point.

Huh? What point? Did we miss something? Yes we did. The missing chunk of dialogue from Robert Towne’s original screenplay reveals all:

Why was this cut? I think it was because the filmmakers belatedly realized that Gittes couldn’t say this yet because it’s a correct statement of philosophy. If Gittes already understands this, then he has no arc.

The whole point of the movie is for Gittes and the audience to learn this. The movie will show this to us, so they don’t need to tell us as well. Like many screenwriters, Towne was giving the game away too soon by giving Gittes a correct statement of philosophy in the very first scene.

If they had caught this problem in the script phase, they could have re-written it so that Gittes offers an incorrect statement of philosophy instead, but they didn’t, so they just chopped the middle out of the scene out in the editing room. As you’ll see in tomorrow’s First 15 Minutes round-up of the movie, Gittes doesn’t get a false statement of philosophy until much later in the movie.

The Ultimate Checklist: UPDATED

2011-11-07T16:53:00.007-05:00

Hey gang, follow this link to discover an expanded and updated version of the Ultimate Movie Checklist. There are many more items on the list, most of which link to recent entries, and more of the older list items have had links added as well. Plus, I’ve added a download link at the bottom, so that you can get the checklist in MS Word doc format, if that’s useful to you. I won’t always announce it, but I’ll keep updating the checklist as needed. Enjoy.

(And I am slowly preparing to try and pitch it as a book, so if that sounds like something you’d like to buy, feel free to mention that in the comments, as said testimonials would be useful to me in that effort.)