Podcast

Friday, December 31, 2021

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the hero use pre-established special skills to solve problems?

Why are some stories memorable but others fade in your mind a day later? Why do some heroes win your heart while others make little impression? 

David Mamet’s thriller The Spanish Prisoner is the very definition of “fun but forgettable.” Campbell Scott has invented a process that will revolutionize his industry. Steve Martin is a con man who tricks Scott into stealing his own formula and handing it over, and then frames him for murder. Once Scott realizes he’s been tricked, he does a lot of poking around, investigating, running through alleyways, etc.

Scott is the classic Everyman hero. He shows no special skills in the first act, and he doesn’t need them to get through the rest of the movie. In the end, he just needs to reach within himself and become a little smarter, a little savvier, and a little more courageous to get out of the trap. Basically, he muddles his way out. Because the movie has a good cast, a twisty plot, and Mamet’s crackling dialogue, we may not notice right away how uncompelling Scott’s character is, but the movie has no weight to it.

Compare this to Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. Like Scott, Ford is framed for murder. He’s arrested and has to escape with Tommy Lee Jones hot on his heels. How does Ford get out of it? He doesn’t transform into a generic hero. Instead, he finds a way to use his pre-established skills to solve the problem. Since he was a doctor, he spends the entire movie in and out of hospitals, using the resources of those settings at every turn.

Audiences prefer their heroes to get out of trouble in the second act using talents they already displayed in the first act. Even heroes who seem to be starting from scratch are actually adapters. They find ways to use skills from a completely different job to surmount their current problem.

What about that supposed zero-to-hero story Back to the Future? On the surface, it seems like a story about a neophyte who’s hopelessly floundering when faced with the biggest challenge of his life. Marty has not trained to be a time traveler, nor has he studied up on the fifties. He seems totally unprepared for and baffled by this situation.

But, like most heroes, Marty does have a hidden reserve of special skills, and those are what he relies on to get out of trouble, time and time again. In this case, most of his skills, like skateboarding and playing rock guitar, shouldn’t apply to 1955, because they don’t exist yet, but he figures out how to use them anyway. He actually invents skateboards and rock and roll just so he can use them to save himself. That’s how dependent heroes should be on their pre-established special skills.

Let’s look at a complex adventure story with three competing heroes: Pirates of the Caribbean. Of the three heroes, only one is in his element: Johnny Depp is using his long-honed pirate skills. But the other two, though totally out of their element, still rely on pre-established special skills. Orlando Bloom is a blacksmith by trade, and he finds all sorts of ways to use those skills, from his experience with forging swords to his knowledge of how to pry open a cell door using a makeshift lever. Keira Knightley has never prepared for any trade, but she makes use of her copious reading about pirates and knows, for example, that they can’t turn down a demand of parley. Depp is already an expert, but Bloom and Knightley adapt using their preexisting knowledge.

Relying on past knowledge gets you past the “wouldn’t the bad guys have thought of that?” problem. There’s a good reason our hero can outsmart the villains: He knows something they didn’t know he knew (but we know he knew it, because we saw it in the opening scenes). Otherwise, in a movie like The Spanish Prisoner, where the hero doesn’t reveal any special skills, you can really only credit his success to the villain’s incompetence. It turns out that “every man” could have defeated this villain.

It is, however, crucial that a special skill be established in an organic way. When it’s set up in a clunky way, and then it comes back later, the audience groans.
  • One laughable example is the girl who gets past the dinosaurs using her parallel-bars gymnastic skills in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. 
  • Even dumber is the spy-thriller Salt, in which Angelina Jolie uses her husband’s random spider-venom advice to create a special venom bullet. 
So can you ever write a successful story about a hero with no skills whatsoever? Yes, you can, but only if things get truly harrowing for the poor unskilled hero. Horror stories sometimes have unskilled heroes, as do some stories that aren’t horror but feel like horror for the protagonist: Poor Linda Hamilton never finds a use for any of her waitress skills when fighting an evil robot from the future in The Terminator, but that’s okay because she’s just trying to survive. Ultimately, she gets saved by someone else.

Audrey Hepburn’s newly blind housewife in Wait Until Dark seems like a truly unskilled heroine. When she comes under siege by thugs who want to retrieve a heroin-filled doll that ended up in her apartment, she feels that she lacks even the basic tools of the average person. Not only does she not have any assets, but she has a huge liability. But, eventually, she decides to smash all the light bulbs and use her superior ability to navigate without light to her advantage. She turns her liability into her only asset.

You can’t become a hero by doing what anyone would do. You have to do that thing that you do.

I could go on much longer about character, but, ultimately, even if you have a wonderfully compelling hero, you still don’t have a story. These hypothetically perfect characters have to get up, get going, and test themselves.
Rulebook Casefile: Ironic Special Skills in “Get Out”

James Kennedy and I sang the praises of Total Recall on our podcast, but we didn’t mention one of my pet peeves about that movie. Arnold eventually ends up strapped to a chair: He seems to have accomplished so much, but now he discovers that everything he has done was really just bringing him into Ronny Cox’s elaborate trap. Ronny has been playing ten moves ahead this entire time, guessing everything Arnold might possibly do and effortless manipulating him into bringing in the mutant leader. Now Ronny just needs to wipe Arnold’s mind again and restore his original personality.

But then Arnold does the one thing that Ronny couldn’t possibly have predicted: he raises his arm! He then breaks the chair, and runs away.

This drives me crazy: You could predict every possible movie Arnold could make, but you couldn’t predict he would raise his arm? Arnold doesn’t use some clever trick or special weapon he’s found as a result of his journey. He just does what anyone could predict he would do, and gets away fairly easily.

Chris in Get Out faces a similar predicament. He, too, ends up 2/3 of the way into the movie strapped to a chair, outdone by a villain who has been way ahead of him and manipulating his behavior the entire movie. He is even more helpless than Arnold, because the villains only have to ding a spoon on a teacup (live or on tape) to turn him to jelly.
So how does Chris get away? Unlike Arnold, he does something clever: He plucks cotton from his chair armrests and plugs his ears. (As Peele points out in his commentary, this black man ironically picks some cotton to avoid slavery.)  Assuming that he’ll be unconscious, Jeremy then frees him to take him to surgery, but Chris springs to life and knocks out Jeremy with a bocce ball.

But couldn’t the villains have predicted that, too? Why would they put him in a place where he would have access to cotton stuffing with which to plug up his ears? And wouldn’t a previous captive have figured out the same thing?

But this brings us to another very ironic special skill: When Chris is being hypnotized, he flashes back to when he was a child, watching TV, correctly fearing his mom had been in an accident, but doing nothing. We see that he was betraying his anxiety in only one way: He was obsessively scratching at the armrest of the chair he was sitting on. As he’s being hypnotized by Missy, he starts to do the same thing, but Missy doesn’t notice. When he’s in the basement, hypnotized off and on for days, he naturally does it again, until he’s ripped open the leather and exposed the cotton.

In a thriller, it’s essential to establish early on the special skills that will allow your hero to get out of trouble later, preferably something the villain could not guess that the hero would know how to do. Total Recall failed to do this, but Get Out does it in a very ironic and odd way. Missy does not suspect Chris’s real superpower: The obsessive ability to scratch open armrests, given enough time. Sorry I'm running late, but you’ll get four posts next week!
Straying From the Party Line: The Not-Quite-Everyman Hero of The Fugitive

When I first gave my rules about not allowing your hero to be an everyman, I cited The Fugitive as an example of how to do it right, and Richard Kimble does indeed avoid that dreaded label…but just barely. At the time, I focused on Kimble most unique aspect: his special skills.

As director Andrew Davis says in the commentary, “The idea of Richard Kimble the doctor using hospitals to take care of his wounds, find the one-armed man, his intelligence is all tied into his being a doctor and knowing how to operate, literally operate, in a hospital.” In weaker thrillers, the falsely-accused schmuck simply transforms into a superhero as soon he goes on the run, but in this movie, the hero solves his problems in a way that is unique to his character.

But we should also acknowledge that there are many aspects of Kimble’s character that do make him seem generic and/or unengaging, and clearly violate our rules:
  • He’s incredibly passive at first, both in his normal life and in the aftermath of his wife’s murder.
  • He has a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment of humanity, when he mumbles that he always feels like a waiter in a tux. I had to watch the beginning twice to spot it.
  • He’s not frustrated with a social problem (until he loses everything)
  • Both in daily life and after the crime, he’s not especially curious about what’s really going on (and we later find they’re related). Even as late as the third act, he doesn’t really suspect that they’re a conspiracy out to get him until he’s already exposed it.
  • His reactions are notably less volatile than the average person. He literally refuses to take a step in the right direction until he’s about to be run over by a train!
  • This one’s always a problem in these sorts of movies: After the crime, he’s over-motivated, which means that he isn’t doing something that’s hard to want to do. It’s a tricky line, because heroes need a strong, clear and not-selfless motivation, and he certainly has that, but if you tip too far, then the hero doesn’t get to make any choices.
  • He’s inarticulate and unable to convince anybody of anything verbally.
And yet, Kimble is a wonderful hero. Why? Most obviously, it’s because of his specificity, such as with the doctor skills, metaphor family, argument tactics, etc. but there are other reasons as well:
We fully engage with and sympathize with Kimble, but, thankfully, we don’t have to fully identify with him, which would be hard to do for all of the problems listed above. We would too frustrated by Kimble’s passivity and lack of curiousity if we didn’t have Gerard, who serves as both antagonist and co-hero and has all of the likable qualities that Kimble lacks: he’s active, volatile, hyper-competent, verbally-incisive, and very curious (he lies when he says he’s not trying to solve a puzzle. It’s more accurate to say that he’s trying not to solve a puzzle, but he can’t resist.)

The next big factor is, of course, Ford. As with Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, Ford’s performance obviates the need for many of the traditional likability tricks simple because he’s so effortlessly compelling. The producers submitted this script to Ford three times over five years, and he turned it down each time, so they simply kept rewriting it until they could win him over. They knew they needed his qualities.

The 40 Year Old Virgin

YES. Just barely: he uses his sleight-of-hand abilities to win over Trish’s daughter.  He uses his online-poker skills to make friends with the guys.

Alien

YES, she knows the ship and the rules better than anyone else, even the captain.

An Education

Sort of. She uses her knowledge of classical music and art to get into a tonier world, but that creates more problems than it solves.

The Babadook

YES. Amelie tries and fails (using the same type of medications she uses at work) Samuel does and succeeds: He’s been preparing for this fight for a while, building his own machines.

Blazing Saddles

YES. He’s an almost-magical trickster with the ability to run circles around racists.

Blue Velvet

Somewhat: he uses the bug spray to get in, etc.

The Bourne Identity

YES. very much so, even though he doesn’t remember where or how he got them.

Bridesmaids

YES. Uses baking skills to get her man.

Casablanca

YES. Both his shady associates and his history with the resistance will be useful to him.

Chinatown

YES. Yes, he’s a master detective, and he was a cop before that. 

Donnie Brasco

YES.  knows how to evaluate jewelry. We learn in the special features that the real life Donnie was sent to a six-month jewelry program, but it’s never mentioned in the movie.  That’s okay because we can guess it.

Do the Right Thing

NO. Not really.  He’s not solving a lot of problems.

The Farewell

NO. Not really.  I mean, you could say she uses her writing skills to fake the document, but not really. 

The Fighter

YES. he learned his boxing philosophy as a child.  

Frozen

NO. She’s an everywoman with few skills. 

The Fugitive

YES. Very much so.  Davis from the commentary: “The idea of Richard Kimble the doctor using hospitals to take care of his wounds, find the one-armed man, his intelligence is all tied into his being a doctor and knowing how to operate, literally operate, in a hospital.”

Get Out

YES. He finds his camera flash very useful.  Also,  even since the night his mother died, he’s had a nervous tick of scratching at the arms of chairs, and that ironically saves him.  Even more ironically, once he’s scratched open the chair, he then picks the cotton from inside it, which Peele implies in his commentary is Chris drawing on some racial memory.  

Groundhog Day

NO.  he pretty much does what anybody would do.

How to Train Your Dragon

YES. He uses his blacksmith skills to make weapons, make an appendage for the dragon, etc. Uses his ability to draw to make friends, design devices.

In a Lonely Place

YES. “It was his story against mine…Of course, I told my story better.”  “I’ve had a lot of experience in matters of this kind, I’ve killed a lot of people…in pictures.”

Iron Man

YES. Very much so. Even in the final fight, he uses his engineering skills to figure out the right part to rip out of Stane’s suit (“that looks important”)

Lady Bird

YES. To a certain extent.  Her lack of skills is part of her problem.  But she shows uncommon social ability to navigate different worlds. 

Raising Arizona

YES. Armed robbery, which he resorts to again and again.

Rushmore

YES. He attacks Blume with bees, etc.

Selma

YES. He explains that he’s learned how to antagonize southern sheriffs into violence.  

The Shining

No for Jack, who does what anyone would do.  Very much yes for Danny.

Sideways

YES. He wins Maya over with his wine knowledge and his novel.

The Silence of the Lambs

YES. Knowledge of dress-making, knowledge of how small town people think.

Star Wars

YES. Mainly just second hand (he boasts and others compliment him “I understand you’ve become quite a good pilot yourself.”), but we see his innate talent for the force when he practices his lightsaber. 

Sunset Boulevard

YES. he gets both romances using his screenwriting abilities. 

Thursday, December 30, 2021

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the hero have (or claim) decision-making authority?

Every year there are a lot of TV pilots about rookie cops, medical students, and young crusaders just out of law school, but these shows almost always flop. Why? It’s because these characters are very hard to write. In the end, a hero needs decision-making power, which is one thing rookies don’t have. 

This is somewhat counterintuitive. Everybody loves an underdog, right? And if the heroes are just learning the ropes, the audience is right there with them, learning everything by their side, so that’s a great way into the story, isn’t it? Yes, following low-power heroes through their day is a great way into a new show, but then you run into trouble.

A classic example is The West Wing. When Aaron Sorkin conceived and pitched the show, he imagined it would feature only the president’s staff, but we would never see the president himself. So he wrote the pilot, in which the staff vigorously debates about how to advise the president on a difficult decision, and that worked well enough for most of the episode. But then Sorkin got to the end of the story. He suddenly realized it would be enormously unsatisfying to end the pilot (and each of the next hundred episodes) with his heroes sending their advice up the chain of command and then powerlessly waiting for the outcome. So, suddenly, in the very last scene, the president walks into the room after all and lays down the law. This show needed a decider.

Before long, it became a show that centered on the president as the main character—exactly the opposite of what Sorkin originally wanted.

And indeed every show tends to trend in this direction—away from the flunkies and toward the bosses. The 30 Rock pilot is about put-upon comedy producers Liz and Pete, with NBC boss Jack as a mere antagonist. Before long, Jack is Liz’s co-equal co-star, and Pete is rarely seen. Stories are about the consequences of decisions, so it’s much easier to write stories about people who actually have decision-making power.

There’s a reason why most kid heroes are orphans. They need the ability to commit fully to whatever they decide to do without anybody preventing them from rising too high or falling too far. They need to be on the hook for the consequences of their actions.

If you’re writing about rookies, you need to ask yourself why the audience should trust them to be the heroes instead of their boss. Is there a value to their newness that makes them more interesting heroes? You need to make the audience trust them even while you’re establishing that they don’t trust themselves yet.

Maybe the smartest pilot of all is for CSI, in which the audience follows a rookie as she (and the viewers) learn all about the squad. At the end of her first day, she takes her newfound knowledge and goes out to her first crime scene, where she is promptly shot and killed. She is a great point-of-view character, but now we need to put ourselves in the hands of the power players.

The 40 Year Old Virgin

Yes and no: He has none at the beginning, but slowly begins to claim it.  He’s the boss of all the other guys by the end of the movie.

Alien

YES. She gets it after Dallas dies, which is when she becomes our hero.

An Education

YES. She manages to be quite free-living despite her restrictive surroundings.

The Babadook

YES.

Blazing Saddles

YES. He’s granted it by Hedly.

Blue Velvet

YES. like many heroes, he just lost his father, putting him in charge of his own affairs.

The Bourne Identity

YES. he’s through taking orders.

Bridesmaids

YES. She’s in charge of the bridal party.

Casablanca

YES. very much so.

Chinatown

YES. Yes, he’s the boss.

Donnie Brasco

YES.  He’s running the show, even when others think they are.

Do the Right Thing

YES. Sort of. Despite being on the job, he still considers his time his own “My name ain’t Kunta Kinte.” He does his own business on his epic delivery trips.  He’s really his own boss.

The Farewell

YES. Just a bit, in that she chooses to fly to China against their wishes. 

The Fighter

YES. He has it, but he disclaims it. 

Frozen

YES. she’s a princess, and she’s in charge of the country once Elsa flees.

The Fugitive

YES. He’s his own boss once he’s on the run.

Get Out

NO. Absolutely none, as Dean jokingly points out. She drove.  

Groundhog Day

Yes and no. With Rita, he thinks he can ride roughshod over her, but she’s actually handling him, and once he’s repeating the day, he can do anything, but only within big limits. Ultimately, this a movie about accepting powerlessness.

How to Train Your Dragon

YES. He doesn’t naturally have it, but he claims it. 

In a Lonely Place

YES. he’s his own boss.

Iron Man

YES. Very much so. 

Lady Bird

YES. Well, she’s trying to get more of it the whole time but yes, she pretty much in charge of her life. 

Raising Arizona

YES.

Rushmore

YES. Very much so.  He gives orders to the head of the school.

Selma

YES. He’s the leader of thousands. 

The Shining

YES. they have the run of the place, with no police available.

Sideways

YES. Although he’s powerless to stop Jack from getting anything he wants.

The Silence of the Lambs

Not really, she’s just a rookie, so the plot keeps contriving ways to keep her on the case, and that’s fine.

Star Wars

YES. He ignores his guardians (even before they’re killed off.)

Sunset Boulevard

Somewhat.  He can go at any time.  

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is the hero already doing something active when we first meet him or her?

The audience must know that this hero is the sort of person who actively pursues things. Heroes are often literally active in the first scene: jogging, swimming, bicycling, playing tennis, etc. Assure your audience as quickly as possible that the character is going to be active, both literally and figuratively. 

Sometimes the hero will begin by doing something cool or admirable, but it can also work well to have a character pursuing something active that makes him look bad. Amiable goof Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything wants to be a kickboxing champion until he unexpectedly gets a date with the girl of his dreams and changes all of his goals. Even though his kickboxing spiel sounds very loserish, it’s actually far more appealing than if he simply said, “Eh, I don’t know what I want to do yet.” We like him because he wants something, even if we think what he wants is dumb.

You might assume the audience will more easily root for a smart hero who can see all the angles and who would therefore rather do nothing than act rashly, but they actually hate heroes like that. Nobody wants to watch somebody do nothing. The audience wants to be reassured right away that heroes aren’t passive sticks-in-the-mud. Many weak heroes never take the initiative. Nothing is ever their idea, good or bad.

In a lot of stories, and especially in comedies, you have heroes who are plunged into over-the-top situations where everybody wants them to do something wild and stupid. Stupid isn’t sympathetic, right? So you show how smart your hero is by having him tell everybody else that they should be sensible, right? Nope.

For instance, Ted Mosby is the titular hero of How I Met Your Mother, but he’s by far the least likable character because he’s a scold, and audiences get irritated with scolds. We like heroes who dive in enthusiastically and then make plans on the fly.

Defiance is usually good, but one problem with Ted is that he says no to his friends’ schemes even though he has nothing more interesting to propose. He doesn’t want to play laser tag with Barney, but he wants to sit around his apartment? Playing laser tag certainly is a dumb way for grown men to spend an evening, but it’s better than nothing, so we’re always going to be on Barney’s side. The writers failed to give Ted his own alternate set of enthusiasms.

The 40 Year Old Virgin

Sort of: He bicycles to work.

Alien

YES. She’s trying to figure out where they are.

An Education

YES. she’s studying hard, lugging her cello around, etc.

The Babadook

YES. She’s trying to sleep.

Blazing Saddles

YES. He’s laying track. 

Blue Velvet

NO. He’s aimless.

The Bourne Identity

YES.  Follow the information on the implant to find out who he is.

Bridesmaids

YES. having sex, then working out in the park. 

Casablanca

NO. He seems half-awake.  Of course, we gradually realize that he doing a tense and skillful juggling act any time his club is open.

Chinatown

YES. He’s in a meeting with a client

Donnie Brasco

YES.  he’s trying to get in good with Lefty.

Do the Right Thing

YES. He’s counting his money.

The Farewell

YES. Sort of, she’s walking through the streets talking on the cell phone with her grandma. 

The Fighter

YES. He’s paving and sparring.

Frozen

YES. She’s waking up her sister and then playing in the snow. We know Anna is the hero because it’s her waking Elsa up and not vice versa.  

The Fugitive

NO. He’s very passive for as long as possible.  He refuses to engage 

Get Out

YES. Sort of: He’s shaving. 

Groundhog Day

Somewhat. He’s on his feet doing the weather report. 

How to Train Your Dragon

YES. he’s running around trying to join a dragon fight. 

In a Lonely Place

YES. he’s on his way to meeting about a job.

Iron Man

YES. Yeah, he gives a great presentation.

Lady Bird

YES. She jumps out of a car. 

Raising Arizona

YES. he’s pursuing Ed as much as he can during their brief encounters.

Rushmore

YES. He’s head of a dozen clubs.  He producing his play.

Selma

YES. Just slightly active: He’s trying to tie an ascot.  

The Shining

YES. Jack: yes, trying to get the job.  Danny: no.

Sideways

NO. He shows up late. He’s a lazy guy.

The Silence of the Lambs

YES. She’s literally running, jumping and climbing trees!

Star Wars

YES. He’s always angling to get off the planet.  Even getting and fixing the droids is part of his plan to replace himself so he can leave. 

Sunset Boulevard

YES. he’s trying to keep his car.