
Podcast
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Storyteller's Rulebook #125: Let Them Sleep On It

Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Storyteller’s Rulebook #124: Outlines are Frictionless Surfaces

- Emotional fallout carried over from the previous scene.
- What the character in the room is doing (and may want to continue doing) when the other character walks in.
- Emotional fallout from the last scene these two characters had together
- Additional characters in the room who aren’t part of the main confrontation but may butt in.
- The physical challenges of the room’s layout.
- The decorum of the room, where a confrontation may be uncouth.
- When your character refuses to do what you tell them to do.
- When the encounter turns out to be far more emotional than you thought it would be, leading to unforeseen consequences.

Monday, February 27, 2012
Storyteller's Rulebook #123: There’s More Than One Type of Storytelling Irony
- Ironic Presentation: The gap between audience’s expectation of what sort of story this is and the audience’s ultimate experience.
- Dramatic Irony: The gap between what the audience knows and what the character knows.
- Ironic Characterization: The gap between a character’s hidden private self and open public identity.
- Ironic Backstory: The gap between the character’s past direction in life and their current position.
- Ironic Character Presumptions: The gap between character’s presumptions and the reality of their situation.
- Ironic Outcome: The gap between what the character intends to accomplish and the actual consequences of their efforts.
- Ironic Title: An inherently contradictory concept.

The “Seinfeld” example could also (simplistically) be called “sarcasm,” which is one type of ironic presentation, but there are others... “Camp”, for example, is a little trickier. “Low Camp”, such as the ‘60s “Batman” TV show works on two levels: straight up fun for kids, sly satire for adults. “High Camp”, such as the films of Douglas Sirk, tell a story that is so earnest that it’s absurd, forcing you to feel genuine emotion and yet, at the same time, forcing you to laugh at yourself for feeling it.

- We know the reality of the situation but the character doesn’t, such as the boy who is unwittingly carrying a bomb in Hitchcock’s Sabotage,
- Or the character knows the reality but we don’t, as in heist thrillers such as Ocean’s Eleven.


Sunday, February 26, 2012
What Should've Won (That Could've Won): 1928
- Wings
- The Racket
- Seventh Heaven
- Chang
- The Crowd
- Sunrise
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman is his final masterpiece, and it easily would have deserved the prize had it come out in 1929, but it had the misfortune to come out in 1928 instead, one of the best-ever years for American movies.
What Did Win: Picture: Wings, Unique or Artistic Picture: Sunrise
Director: King Vidor
Writers: Screenplay by Vidor and John V.A. Weaver, Titles by Joe Farnham
Stars: James Murray, Eleanor Boardman, Bert Roach, Estelle Clark
The Story: A young man, born on July 4th, 1900, is assured by his parents that he’ll be president someday, but instead he just becomes a face in the crowd in New York City, unable to support his loving family on a clerk’s pay, and torn apart by his failures.
Nominations and Wins: It was nominated for Best Unique or Artistic Picture and Best Director, but lost both.
Why It’s Great:
- American sociologists have become increasingly concerned about the so-called “Lake Woebegone” effect, named for Garrison Keilor’s fictional town in which every child is expected to be above average. What does it do to a nation when average-ness is demonized? Vidor knew way back in 1928: it destroys the soul. This is the tragedy of an average man who has been told that it is unacceptable to be average, and can’t forgive himself for his failure to excel.
- This was the last year a silent movie won best picture
until, presumably, tonight, when The
Artist is expected win the prize it richly deserves. Both movies excel at finding those
little vulnerable behaviors that we’ve all done but never seen onscreen
before, like trying to get a spot off your face and then realizing it’s on the
mirror. Sound pictures have never achieved that level of universality. If sound movies are the cousin of
prose, then silent movies are the cousin of poetry.
- But the real tragedy of the arrival of sound was the death
of the moving camera, which had just exploded into use in the ‘26-‘28
period. The camera is wonderfully
alive here, such as when it slides backwards down a Coney Island slide in front
of our heroes as they experience the exhilaration of first love. It would take thirty years for camera
operators to recapture this level of liberation.
- The anchor of this movie’s greatness is Murray’s heart-wrenching performance. He himself
was pulled from the crowd (he had been an extra) and catapulted to stardom after giving one of the most astoundingly naturalistic performances ever
captured. Unfortunately, it might
have been a little too natural.
Like his character, Murray could not live up to these expectations. He died in poverty eight years later.
- You might not have seen this, but you’ve seen its influence
everywhere. The Apartment reverently
replicated the stunning introductory shot of the hero at work in a sea of desks, Preston
Sturges’s Christmas in July is a
comedic genre-flip of the same story, and It’s
A Wonderful Life updated a similar character arc for the post-war era. Even those who did not imitate the
picture were in awe of it: When Jean Luc-Godard was asked why he never made any
films about ordinary people, he responded, “Why remake The Crowd? It’s
already been done.”
Ah, 1928: Odd Pants!
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Best of 2011, #3, #2, and #1!

Hey, why am I rushing through this? Because my #3 and #2 favorite Hollywood movies of last year are both movies I’ve already covered extensively. #3: Cedar Rapids was an underrated movie, and #2: Rise of the Planet of the Apes was the topic of a whole week of Storyteller’s Rulebook posts:
- Create Reversible Behaviors
- Limit Your Hero’s Perspective
- Great Genre Stories Must Be Metaphors
- Reboots Must Re-Establish the Metaphor
The Story: When a disappointed wife (Julianne Moore) requests a divorce from her listsless husband (Steve Carrell), he seeks out the help of a local lothario (Ryan Gosling) to re-awaken his manhood, but just as Carell discovers his wild side, Gosling suddenly feels an urge to settle down with a straight-laced young lawyer (Emma Stone).
Why This One: Was this my favorite movie of the year? No, that was probably The Artist, but it was my favorite home-grown movie because, on a nuts-and-bolts level –-the scenework, the dialogue, the characterization–- it was so elegantly put together. It’s a master class in heartfelt writing, which is something Hollywood doesn’t know how to do anymore. Co-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa knew a good thing when they saw it, so they shot Dan Fogelberg’s screenplay exactly as it was on the page
Rules It Drove Home:
- People only want what they want: This rule could have been the title of the movie, in which every character (the couple, their kids, their babysitter, their kid’s teachers, everybody) keeps getting walloped by their own unrequited, irrational desires, which they are helpless to ignore. Carrell and Moore have whole (beautifully-written) conversations where each one literally doesn’t listen to a thing that the other says. Yes, there are times when characters try to give each other advice, but every time, it’s hopelessly tainted by the advice-giver’s own frustrated desires and limited perspective.
- Build up false expectations beforehand: Let’s start with the first line of the movie: Carrell can’t decide on what desert they should have, so he asks his wife what she wants, and she replies, “I want a divorce.” From that point on, characters are constantly convincing themselves (and the audience) that something good is about to happen, only to encounter shocking reversals. Stone doesn’t get the proposal she expects, a PTA-meeting reconciliation that seems to be going great for Carrell suddenly turns hellish, an elaborate backyard romantic gesture ends in disaster… This movie toys with our emotions expertly.
- The twist must make sense immediately: This movie has a clever twist ¾ of the way in that forces us to re-interpret a lot of what we’ve seen, but we make that left turn very quickly (two quick questions are asked, along the lines of “Wait, but then how…”), then the movie charges forward. Fogelberg has very slyly been setting it up the whole time with little odd moments we don’t really notice… until it all suddenly clicks into place.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Best Hollywood Movies of 2011, #4: Bridesmaids

Why This One: I haven’t watched SNL in years, but after I saw Wiig in two scenes in Knocked Up, I thought, “Wow, she could go far.” How nice that things actually worked out that way! Co-writing with Annie Mumolo under the direction of Paul Feig, Wiig created a shockingly authentic character in the middle of a broadly farcical plot.
Rules it Drove Home:
- Begin With A Self-Contained Interaction That Encapsulates the Theme: We meet Wiig and Rudolph as they do sit-ups in the park while hiding behind a tree, in an attempt to take advantage of a hardcore personal trainer’s class without paying him. We like them right away: they’re clever, resourceful, and engaged in physical exertion! But after he catches them and chases them away, a funny thing happens: he gets the most pitiful look on his face and whimpers: “It’s only five bucks!” Surprisingly, our sympathy shifts to him! This pre-figures the arc of the movie, as we go from rooting for Wiig to “win” to rooting for her to take responsibility for her life.
- Know Why Their Friends Like Them: Now let’s go to the second scene, as our heroines flee to a diner. This is one of the most likeably-goofy friendship scenes I’ve ever seen. Too many rom-coms sacrifice the friend on the altar of the lead’s likability. The friend is usually shrill, or air-headed, or super-slutty, in order to make the lead seem better by comparison. Wiig knows better, since the friendship is the heart of this movie, and this scene really sells that.
- Screw-Ups Don’t Screw Up All Day Long: In the comments sections recently, we’ve talked about how hard it is to make an audience care about self-loathing heroes, but Wiig’s character is an example of how to do it right. She hapless, but not hopeless: She’s sleeping with Jon Hamm, fer chissakes! That makes it clear that yes, she has pretty-good options in life, but she’s just hit a ceiling that she can’t get past. We want her to have more self-respect, because we think she deserves more self-respect.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Best Hollywood Movies of 2011, #5: Margin Call

Why This One: When I read this script I thought it would be too talky and uneventful to work as a movie. What I wasn’t taking into account was debut writer/director J.C. Chandor’s ability to impart all that talk with a compellingly eerie sense of gravity, making this the best straight-up drama of the year.
The Rules it Drove Home:
- Every Main Character Must be Volatile: Quinto and Badgley go to say good-bye to Tucci, but they’re really just checking that their own jobs are secure. After an awkward moment, they let him get on the elevator and Penn excuses himself… …but then Quinto decides to try again with a more sincere farewell. Only at this point does Tucci takes pity on him and leave him a copy of the new risk model. This story doesn’t just land in our hero’s lap, it happens because he takes a stop that his colleague wouldn’t take.
- Hey, look, it’s yesterday’s rule, Make the Backstory Ironic: I fell in love with this movie when big boss Jeremy Irons quizzed Quinto about where he came from. We find out that, rather than being a trained stock analyst, Quinto started out as an actual rocket scientist, then jumped into finance because the money was so much better. Not only does this give Quinto an ironic backstory, it reveals the theme of the movie: that our cleverest minds have been set to work cannibalizing America’s wealth, rather than building it up. (Irons’s backstory, on the other hand, is never revealed, because we can basically guess where he came from.)
- Be Incomprehensible: This is a dizzying maelstrom of unexplained jargon, so why doesn’t that ruin the movie? Doesn’t the audience have to understand the options the heroes are juggling, so that we can play along? To a certain extent, yes, but something delightful happens here: We don’t understand the fine print, no, but that allows us to step back and see the broader picture. This is just as well: If they had held our hands and forced the characters to explain themselves every step of the way, then we still wouldn’t have understood any of it, and we have rolled our eyes at how unrealistic that dialogue was. Instead, Chandor relies of the performances of his stellar cast to sell the emotion, even when we don’t understand a word they’re saying.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Best of 2011, Runners-Up / Storyteller’s Rulebook # 122: Only Reveal Ironic Backstories

But between screeners and normal DVD releases, I’ve now caught up on most of the movies I wanted to see (Still not seen: Tree of Life, Moneyball, Mission: Impossible 4, a few others) So I figured, as long as we haven’t gotten to the Oscars yet, there’s still time to talk about last year’s movies, right? So let’s get to it!
Today we’re going to start with three runners-up, Thor, Captain America, and X-Men: First Class, all co-produced by Marvel Studios, which, like its Disney teammate Pixar, has shown a remarkable amount of brand-wide quality control. None of these movies was anywhere close to perfect, and each had at lest one moment that drove me crazy (I mention one here), but ultimately they were all very entertaining.
Rather than do what I normally do in these pieces and point out how they display pre-established Storyteller Rules, let’s mint a new rule from scratch that all three of these movies exemplify: Find an Ironic Backstory.
Lots of gurus such as Syd Field insist that you know everything about your characters right down to where their parents went to school. That’s okay, I guess, but usually, you’re never going to use that stuff. Before you come up with all that, you first need to ask yourself: When, if ever, am I going to reveal this backstory, and why?
If your hero became a cop because he came from a long line of Irish cops, or became a preacher because he was always the most pious kid on his block, you don’t need to tell us that. We can guess. The best reason to reveal a backstory is if it’s an ironic backstory: if your cop comes form a long line of college professors, or your preacher used to a gang member, for example.
Marvel Comics’ superheroes always did a great job at this. As opposed to a DC hero like Green Lantern, who took a small step from hotshot flying pilot to hotshot flying superhero, Marvel heroes tended to take much wider leaps into greatness. Let’s look at these three examples:
- Captain America is the most typical example. The strongest and boldest man in the army has a surprise backstory: he was the weakest and sickliest kid in the country, but then some smart generals saw his potential and gave him a sci-fi whammy that turned his life around.
- The original Thor comics had a similar dynamic, with Thor’s secret identity being a crippled doctor named Don Blake. The movie eliminated that secret identity, but it still made use of ironic backstories: This is ultimately the story of two brothers competing for their father’s love, so how does it begin? Thor is the cocky asshole who has contempt for all of his father’s rules, while Loki is humble and lovable.
- X-Men: First Class pushed a similar dynamic to the extreme. In this case, we’ve already seen the original trilogy, where Professor Xavier was a saintly father figure and Magneto was a marauding terrorist. So now we get their backstories: Xavier is a swinging ’60s cad who uses his powers to get laid, while Magneto is a righteous Holocaust survivor on a quest for justice.
In each case, these ironic backstories give these heroes an embarrassing secret that affects everything they do. There’s a hidden gap between their private self and their public self. That irony adds subtext to every scene, which adds fuel to the whole story. In tomorrow’s pick, we’ll look at a great use of an ironic backstory in a non-superhero setting.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Underrated Movie #148: Peeping Tom

Year: 1960
Director: Cockeyed Caravan favorite Michael Powell
Writer: Leo Marks
Stars: Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley The Story: A psychopathic cameraman gives women screentests, then murders them with the sharpened end of one leg of his tripod, while capturing the horror on their faces. Can the love of his neighbor keep him from killing again, or will it take the police? How it Came to be Underrated: This is a bit of a stretch. It was certainly unfairly ignored and/or condemned at the time of its release, but it has long-since been discovered and lauded by Scorsese and others. But it’s still not a household name, and it deserves to be ranked alongside its close cousin, Psycho. Why It’s Great:
- Powell’s career consistently paralleled Hitchcock’s, except for the fact that when Hitch left for America and became a broadly popular master filmmaker, Powell stayed home in England and became an increasingly strange and unique artist. Then, in 1960, both geniuses had the same idea: Throw propriety to the wind and make a lurid little serial killer movie that broke every taboo. Amazing, Hitchcock succeeded in bringing his audience along with him down this dark hole, but Powell didn’t. Audiences were revolted by this movie and Powell’s career was ruined. But for fans of both, it’s hard to imagine one without the other. (One big difference, though, is the presence of color. No director has ever made a more poetic and bold use of color than Powell.)
- This is the movie that launched a thousand film theorists. In the ‘80s and ’90s, “gaze theory” was all the rage. It explored the viewer’s fetishistic craving for horrific images, especially of violence towards women. Boehm’s killer tripod became the ultimate expression of this theory, but it also showed the problem: these theorists sought to condemn both viewers and filmmakers as un-self-aware partners in victimization, but Powell was all too aware of his own culpability, and he forced his viewers to accept theirs as well. All too often, these theorists claimed that they were revealing accidental subtext when they were really just re-stating the text.
- The backstory is that our killer was raised by a B.F. Skinner-like psychiatrist who filmed his son’s entire childhood, subjecting him to terrible things and capturing his reactions on film. So how does Marks reveal this horrific backstory? Does Boehm tell someone about it? No, that’s not visual. Does he watch the films over and over by himself? Slightly better, but too bleak. Here’s the best version: His flirtatious neighbor barges into his apartment and asks to see a movie in his home theater. He can’t resist showing these “home movies,” though it may ruin the budding relationship. This way, our hope and despair are intertwined.
- Here’s the ultimate example of the ticking clock for a scene. Boehm is in the middle of developing the film of his last victim’s death when his crush stops by again. The conversation is pleasant, but if he keeps talking to her too long, he will ruin the film of his previous kill. Powell literally intercuts the timer in the darkroom with their flirtatious conversation, until Boehm is ultimately forced to decide between the two.

Thursday, February 16, 2012
How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 11: Raid the Public Imagination


Wednesday, February 15, 2012
How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 10: Raid the Public Domain
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 9: Show Us the Other Side

Monday, February 13, 2012
How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 8: Flip Another Movie’s Genre

This has been done a lot over the years: Throw Momma From the Train is explicitly the comedy version of Strangers on a Train. The recent spec sale From Mia With Love is basically the comedic version of the dreadful Nicole Kidman thriller Birthday Girl. A movie I mentioned yesterday, Chronicle, could be called the thriller version of Zapped.Here’s the zany action-comedy version of Taken:


These things write themselves!
Sunday, February 12, 2012
How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 7: Pull a Genre Element Out Of Its Genre



Thursday, February 09, 2012
Storyteller's Rulebook #121: Sympathy Isn’t Necessary, But Empathy Is

The screenwriters are right: if they know exactly what they’re doing, then writers need not generate sympathy for their heroes. But there is one hard and fast rule: they must generate empathy…and to generate that empathy, they must feel it themselves.
No matter how unsympathetic characters’ actions are, there’s still a chance that we'll have empathy for their inner turmoil, but only if the authors genuinely feel that empathy themselves. On the other hand, if authors just want to condemn their own characters, we won’t care.
On Wednesday, I cited the examples of Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Notes on a Scandal. In each case, the writers asked us to have empathy without asking us to have any sympathy, and they pulled it off because they themselves felt empathy with no sympathy.
But far more common are movies like Young Adult: writer Diablo Cody was complimented by some critics for having the “daring” to make a movie with an unsympathetic heroine, but it would have been daring only if Cody had found a way to empathize with her unsympathetic heroine. Instead, she merely condemned the character, and it’s not hard to do that when you're the one who created her and her world.
One thing that the previous three movies do that Young Adult doesn’t is create the sense of an impossible situation. The characters all (irrationally) feel totally trapped by their life circumstances. (Of course, this is especially ironic with Welles’s Kane, who can go anywhere in the world except the one place he wants to go: back home)
But Theron’s character never feels trapped at all: the audience (along with every other character in the movie) spends the whole movie yelling at her: “Just go back to Minneapolis!” She spends the whole movie going after what she wants and ignoring what she needs, which is exasperating for the audience. (The Aviator had the same problem.)
The three characters cited above, on the other hand, are honestly trying to fill the hole in their lives, but they’re going about it the wrong way. We empathize with their honest need, but refuse to sympathize with their despicable attempts to satiate it.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 6: Start with an Image

A man waiting at a lonely crossroads suddenly realizes that a cropduster pilot is plunging down towards him with death in his eyes. Why? A house lifts up out of the city, carried aloft by thousands of helium balloons. Who’s in it? Where’s it going?This is one of the most exciting but dangerous ways to generate an idea. You’re essentially starting with the poster: an arresting image that would make anybody want to see more. All that you’re missing is characters and a plot and a theme. The danger, of course, is that once your hero comes to life, he’ll think of easier ways to get down to the Amazon. If you start in the middle, there’s no guarantee that your hero will want to get there.
I’ve had an image in my head for a while: a horde of Tyrannosauruses rampaging down the streets of modern day New York. How did they get there? And who will discover the cause of the problem? And why will the audience love that character? And what does any of this have to do with any genuine emotion of mine? Most importantly, what is the metaphor here? The image gives me none of this. It’s just a great poster.
Ultimately, it’s much more organic to start with a universal emotion and extrapolate an extreme situation from it, rather than starting with an extreme situation and reducing it back down to the emotion at its core. But it can work either way, if you’re very careful.
Pixar is especially good at this. I would imagine that most of their movies began with an image (toys coming to life, a mouse-chef in a human kitchen, a ruined planet covered in trash), but they don’t move forward until they’ve connected those concepts to very universal emotions.