Rulebook Casefile: Unique Relationships in “Born a Crime”

So we’ve talked about how Trevor Noah creates the classic archetype of the scampish kid, and he also taps into the universal archetype of the indomitable bad-ass single mom. Each character has lots of specifics to make them come alive, but they’re definitely characters we recognize from other stories. But that’s fine, because, as I’ve said before, readers don’t actually crave unique never-before-seen characters. We like archetypes. But while we don’t demand unique characters, we do like them to combine into unique never-before-seen relationships.

Anyone who’s seen “Gilmore Girls” or other similar stories will recognize the idea of a single mom and child who interact as almost-equals, but never quite like Trevor Noah and his mom. Here’s their conversation from the first chapter of his book (It is always dubious, of course, when a memoir recreates this much dialogue, but readers are forgiving.)

• “It’s the Devil,” she said about the stalled car. “The Devil doesn’t want us to go to church. That’s why we’ve got to catch minibuses.”
• Whenever I found myself up against my mother’s faith-based obstinacy, I would try, as respectfully as possible, to counter with an opposing point of view.
• “Or,” I said, “the Lord knows that today we shouldn’t go to church, which is why he made sure the car wouldn’t start, so that we stay at home as a family and take a day of rest, because even the Lord rested.”
• “Ah, that’s the Devil talking, Trevor.”
• “No, because Jesus is in control, and if Jesus is in control and we pray to Jesus, he would let the car start, but he hasn’t, therefore—”
• “No, Trevor! Sometimes Jesus puts obstacles in your way to see if you overcome them. Like Job. This could be a test.”
• “Ah! Yes, Mom. But the test could be to see if we’re willing to accept what has happened and stay at home and praise Jesus for his wisdom.”
• “No. That’s the Devil talking. Now go change your clothes.”
• “But, Mom!”
• “Trevor! Sun’qhela!”
• Sun’qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says “don’t undermine me,” “don’t underestimate me,” and “just try me.” It’s a command and a threat, all at once. It’s a common thing for Xhosa parents to say to their kids. Any time I heard it I knew it meant the conversation was over, and if I uttered another word I was in for a hiding—what we call a spanking.

(This is of course a trick that screenwriters don’t have, jumping in to unpack the hidden meanings behind one word.)

Both characters have unique voices and strong opinions. Together they have a complex, shifting power dynamic. Either character on their own could probably carry the story, but it’s their contentious but loving relationship that will really power the book. Compelling characters are great, but compelling relationships are even better.

Have at Least Six Painful Decisions: The Archive

Hi guys, I continue to dig through old posts looking for stuff for a new book and re-discovered this forgotten micro-series that I like a lot. The Checklist is set in stone now that it’s in a book, but I can’t figure out why this question never made it onto the list, and I wish I could add it now. Ah well.

• Storyteller’s Rulebook: Have At Least Six Painful Decisions
• Genre Structures, Addendum: Charting the Big Dilemmas
• Rulebook Casefile: Big Decisions and the Midpoint Disaster

Best of 2018 , #2: Black Panther (and Rise Above Your Genre's Limitations)

Black Panther begins with an exhilarating scene: On the verge of becoming king of Wakanda, T’Challa invites anyone who wishes to challenge his right to rule to fight him unarmed. A giant named M’Baku steps up, and the two have a thrilling fight in a waterfall. Our hero, though smaller, fights better, proves his physical superiority, and earns the right to rule.

But then, halfway through the movie, Killmonger comes along and demands his own challenge. They go back to the waterfall, where he turns out to be a better fighter and seemingly throws T’Challa to his death. Killmonger then becomes king and Black Panther.

And here’s the thing, it must have been so tempting for the filmmakers to have Killmonger cheat in that big fight. That’s how they did in the perfectly fine cartoon version, after all. That’s the way superhero movies are supposed to go: might makes right, and the heroes are going to win any fair fight.

But the filmmakers rose above that temptation. Killmonger wins fair and square. The kingdom is rightfully his.

There’s just one problem: That’s a really messed-up way to choose the leader of your country. FDR was maybe America’s greatest president, and he wouldn’t have fared very well in that waterfall. Many people have noted that superhero movies have a fascism problem. This movie tackles that head on. They get us to root for the hero to rule in a fascistic “punch your enemies into submission” way, then remind us that that’s all kind of messed up.

In the end, T’Challa never goes back to that waterfall. There is no third unarmed fight. He doesn’t contest that the first fight wasn’t fair. He takes his country back by using every trick in his book. And once he’s back in charge, he starts making some changes in how things are done. This movie confronts the genre’s fascism problem, and the result is the biggest-grossing and most acclaimed superhero movie of all time.

People go to genre movies to experience familiar genre pleasures, and they come prepared to forgive your genre’s inherent flaws.  But sometimes, if you’re sure that your movie is wildly entertaining, then you can try to confront those flaws and rise above the limitations that have held back your genre from Best Picture status.

Best of 2018, #3: Vice (and Who Has the Right to Tell a Story?)

A lot of people were shocked this was nominated for Best Picture, because the reviews weren’t great, but if you look at my previous Best Of lists, you’ll see a lot of McKay, Bale, Adams and Carrell, so you can’t be too surprised to see this here, can you? I don’t know what those bad reviews were talking about because I loved it.

And there was nothing I loved more about the movie than the opening title card:

• The following is a true story.
• Or as true as it can be given that Dick Cheney is one of the most secretive leaders in history.
• But we did our fucking best.

One of my problems with BlacKkKlansman is that it falls into a trap I’ve talked about before. In order to make a movie about the Klan in the ‘70s, the filmmakers just waited until someone walked in the door with a self-aggrandizing memoir. Then they had to turn an “I prank called David Duke” anecdote into a whole movie.

But movies should tell true stories that need to be told, not just tales on the periphery of history that a self-promoter wants to push. This is much harder to do, but the makers of Vice did their fucking best. Neither Dick nor Lynne Cheney were pushing McKay and company to tell this story, but enough of the facts were out there that they could get the job done.

I did a whole series many years ago on the question of who has the right to tell a story. Do you have the right to make a biopic about someone who doesn’t want their story told? For that matter, do liberals have the right to make movies about conservative protagonists? I think that one way you earn that right is to show empathy for your enemies, even the very worst of them, and this movie does that well. My heart leapt when Cheney almost-instantly told his daughter he didn’t have a problem with her being gay. That was the moment of actual heroism that McKay was able to find in Cheney’s life, and the movie would never have worked without it. That was the moment that McKay earned the right to tell this story: He found humanity within his anti-hero, and celebrated it.

You don’t have the right to tell a story about any protagonist, fictional or otherwise, if you can’t empathize with them at any point. If McKay took the attitude that Cheney was simply inhuman, the movie wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have been convincing, it wouldn’t have been tragic, and it wouldn’t have been ironic. That’s the difference between an anti-hero and a villain: A good anti-hero must have the potential of redemption, and fail to achieve it.

The Ten Urges That Stories Can Satisfy

Hi guys! Sorry, I’d meant to do another book before Christmas but time has gotten away from me. Instead, let’s just have one big blow-out December post. I’ve talked about urges in the past, but recently, in giving someone notes, I had to get more specific about what I was talking about, so I came up with a possibly-complete list of the ten urges that stories can satisfy. Most stories should satisfy 3-6 of these (though Rushmore seems to only do two).

• To Laugh (Comedy, everything else)

Almost every story can benefit from a dose of humor. It’s easier to identify with funny heroes. Funny sidekicks, love interests, and even villains can also increase our enjoyment of a story. On the flip side, laughing at a hero or side kick’s foibles, bad luck, or cluelessness can also bond us to them, since it gives us permission to laugh at our own failings.

• To Gasp (Thriller, Horror, Action)

We gasp when things are shocking or horrific. This can also be referred to the “edge of your seat” quality.

• To Swoon (Romance, everything else)

We want to share a hero’s romantic hopes and fears. We want to share their yearning, to have that yearning thwarted painfully, perversely punished, and finally gratified (or tragically thwarted once and for all, which brings us to our next urge…)

• To Cry (Romance, Tragedy, Drama)

We cry when things are tragic. Things are most tragic when they’re bitterly ironic. When the hero simply fails despite their best efforts, that’s just a bummer, not tragic. When they fail because of their best efforts, or realize they must choose to fail, the tears come.

• To Dread (Thriller, Drama, Tragedy)

The deepening sinking sensation that something awful is going to happen is perversely pleasurable for an audience, all the better if we’re not exactly sure what form the disaster will take.

• To Speculate (Science Fiction, Fantasy)

Sci-fi and fantasy are very different, but most fans of one are also fans of the other, albeit less so. They both offer the thrill of escapism: to imagine a world wildly different from our own and to wonder at possibilities we’ve never considered (which gives us the hope that maybe more things are possible here.)

• To Puzzle (Mystery, everything else)

Almost every story can benefit from adding a big mystery and/or a series of satisfying mini-mysteries to solve along the way. Sometimes we’re solving the mysteries alongside the hero, sometimes they’re only mysteries to the audience.

• To Burn (Historical Fiction, Drama)

Can one “enjoy” a movie like 12 Years a Slave? On some odd level, yes, because it’s pleasurable to burn with righteous indignation at the sight of injustice. 

• To Lust (Romance, everything else)

This frequently but not always overlaps with swooning. We like to be turned on. In books, we mostly just lust in sex and seduction scenes, but in movies we can have the visual pleasure of sexiness onscreen in every scene.

• To Cheer (Action, some Horror)

Once we’ve gasped, we want to release that tension by cheering. In horror, this only comes at the end, but in action stories we get lots of chances to cheer throughout. Any genre can have “stand up and cheer” moments.

And now here are two massive charts. Above, you’ll find one for the books we’ve looked at (It’s good that I have enough data to start some crunching!) and below you’ll find one for the movies we’ve looked at:

What do you guys think? Are there any urges I’ve missed? Do you disagree about the urges these stories fulfill?

Best of 2017, #1: Lady Bird

What a wonderful film.  Our top two movies are so similar: Both were created by performers who weren’t known as writers or directors but both turned out to be geniuses in disguise.  It makes you wonder who else is sitting on hidden talents.  Some old rules this reminded me of:

Begin When the Problem Becomes Undeniable, End When It’s Resolved: What is the story of this movie? If I was describing it to someone, I would probably say “It’s the story of a girl’s senior year of high school,” so the most obvious structure would be to begin with an aerial shot of the kids entering school on the first day and end on another aerial shot of her flying off for college, but the movie is smarter than that.

This is a movie with several plotlines, but Gerwig knows she has to choose one storyline to predominate, begin the movie when that problem becomes undeniable, and end when it resolves. Gerwig probably could have structured the movie around Lady Bird’s relationship with her best friend, or her attempts to lose her virginity, but she ultimately decided that the conflict with the mom was the emotional heart of the movie, so she begins a little bit before the school year (iirc) with the moment that relationship becomes open warfare, and then she actually keeps the story going a little bit into college to find the moment when that storyline resolves itself, because Lady Bird has to go away to get some perspective on their relationship.

The Trailer Scene: So let’s talk about the opening scene, because it’s a great example of a “Holy Crap” moment that’s necessary to make a trailer work. The movie is a low-key coming of age story, and those are notoriously hard to sell. The trailer does include the best moment in the movie, when Lady Bird asks her mom, “What if this is the best version [of myself]?” and her mom gives her that wonderful look, but that’s not really a great trailer moment. Even if your movie is very realistic, it’s good to have one moment that strains that realism to the breaking point to put a moment of outrageousness in the trailer, and jumping out of the car while her mom is driving is a perfect example. It’s not so extreme that it would make the news, but it’s definitely nothing the characters will ever forget.

I know that for me, jumping out got a big laugh when I saw the trailer and made me want to see the movie. It assured me that this wouldn’t be that kind of movie (which is to say, the kind of movie Gerwig usually stars in), too low key to care about, or too cool for school. It assured me: This is going to be a comedy, and you’ll be allowed to laugh.

Reversible reversible behavior. But this is a realistic movie, and it’s going to also score points by undermining our traditional narrative expectations in favor of greater realism. One great little moment: Whenever a character, especially a teen character, insists on an alias, we also await the moment when they drop the façade and admit their real name, because that’s classic reversible behavior, and sure enough this movie delivers that moment when Lady Bird is at her first college party, but then it wonderfully undercuts that breakthrough. She admits her name, but then the boy asks her where she’s from and she panics and lies. One step forward, one step back. This is what we want out of realistic movies: clever subversion of tropes in a way that makes us think, “Finally a movie that’s willing to show how it really is!”

How to Evaluate a Story Idea: The Archive

These posts formed a lot of the backbone of the book, but it’s interesting to check out their original form, and there’s a lot here that didn’t make it into the book’s slimmed-down narrative.

• The Big Idea, Part 1: Are Ideas Cheap or Valuable?
• The Big Idea, Part 2: Does It Matter What Else Is Out There?
• The Big Idea, Part 3: What is "High Concept" Anyway?
• The Big Idea, Part 4: Are There Too Few Good Ideas or Too Many?
• The Big Idea, Part 5: Do You Start With Plot or Character?
• The Big Idea, Part 6: Story Happens When Character Collides With Plot
• The Big Idea, Part 7: Every Main Character Must Be Volatile
• The Big Idea, Part 8: Won't Somebody Think of the Trailer?
• The Big Idea, Part 9: The Twist is Not the Concept
• The Big Idea, Part 10: The Concept Has to Survive Past the Twist
• The Big Idea, Part 11: All Good Stories Are Ironic
• The Big Idea, Part 12: Keep the Dilemma Alive
• The Big Idea, Finale: Unique Characters are Overrated, Unique Relationships are Better
• Rulebook Casefile: Milking the Unique Relationship in The Apartment
• Storyteller's Rulebook #110: Conflicts Are Better Than Obstacles
• Storyteller's Rulebook #112: Throw in a Left Turn
• Storyteller's Rulebook #121: Don’t Presume Your Premise
• Storyteller's Rulebook #131: Write Down Your Bad Ideas
• The Big Idea, Addendum: What Urges Are You Satisfying?

Best of 2016, #9: Arrival (Tease Your Twist)

Once again, I’ll start with what didn’t work:

The Problem: Most of the conflict in this movie is false conflict. We start with a very familiar sci-fi situation: Aliens have landed and the scientists want to communicate while the military doesn’t trust them. We’ve seen this a million times before, but this time the situation is tilted too far in the scientists’ direction. It’s way to obvious to us, and it should be obvious to them, that these aliens are super nice guys, but we still get scene after scene of the military freaking out needlessly. Meanwhile, we get a very cool story of watching a linguist decode this language, but the film doesn’t trust this story enough to carry the movie (and they may be right about that). (The most obvious example of false conflict is the fact that the military doesn’t warn Adams or Renner that gravity is about to realign itself. Why not give them a heads up on that? Just to give us and them a little false shock.)

The Meddler: The aliens needed to be even more alien, to the extent that they’re accidentally killing people, either by simply crushing them, or by emitting sounds that split eardrums, or by frying them with force fields, etc. This would up the stakes considerably. Now Adams would be putting her life at risk by entering this ship belonging to these aliens that can’t stop killing people, maybe accidentally, maybe not. Now the military would have a good reason to just wipe these people off the map and the scientists would have a much harder job to do convincing the military that no, these deaths were accidental and we just need to learn to communicate. Then the communication breakthrough would be far more consequential.

What I Liked About It: The performances, the tone, the science, and especially the whopper of a twist.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Tease your twist. A great twist can’t just land like a rock on the head of your audience. As with a murder mystery, you need to “play fair”, laying in a series of clues: Not that your audience wants to necessarily guess the twist before the reveal, but they want to feel like they could have and maybe should have. The beauty of this twist is that it’s teased out and revealed so gradually that you’re on the cusp of figuring it out about a half-hour before it finally hits you, which feels so gratifying. As soon as I heard Adams say “Your father’s the scientist”, I began to figure it out somewhere in the back of my brain, but that only meant it hit with more force, not less, when it was finally revealed.

New Video on Exposition!

Hey guys, it seems impossible to go on, but we must go on. Let’s all pretend that my silly little story advice has any meaning in post-apocalyptic America! That said, here’s a new video on exposition: This one is the shortest yet, barely squeaking in over three minutes. Is it too short? Let me know!

The Big Idea, Addendum: The Ironic Conclusion

Yesterday we looked at the need for an Ironic Concept. When identifying your ironic concept, it’s tempting to look to the ending and show how the story is ultimately ironic in the end, but you can’t wait that long to tap into the power of irony. The ironic concept should be evident by the halfway point, and then the finale needs to be ironic in a fresh way. Let’s data-mine our checklists:

• Casablanca: He shows his love by sending her away.
• Sunset Boulevard: He gets that pool he always wanted
• In a Lonely Place: He didn’t do it, but loses her anyway.
• Alien: She blows up the ship only to discover that he’s on the escape pod.
• The Shining: The son must kill his father to save his family.
• Blue Velvet: He defeats evil by absorbing it.
• Silence of the Lambs: One killer is stopped but the worse one gets away in the process.
• Groundhog Day: He finally figures out how to get out of there: by wanting to stay.
• Donnie Brasco: He finally gets to go home but feels like he’s more lost than ever.
• The Bourne Identity: He discovers that he was home the whole time: with Marie. (In his commentary, Liman says that he saw the movie as having a Wizard of Oz structure)
• Sideways: Miles finds that the way to get the girl is the have the courage to do nothing, waiting for her to re-approach instead of drunk dialing her.
• How to Train Your Dragon: The village is once again overrun with dragons, but in a good way.
• Iron Man: His partner turns out to be the villain.
• An Education: She realizes that was she feared was exactly what she needed.
• Bridesmaids: Her archenemy helps her get her guy.

There are, of course, many more ironies in between as well. In the next three posts, we’ll look at the pros and cons of Ironic Dialogue...

The Big Idea, Addendum: More Thoughts on the Ironic Concept

As I organized the book, one thing that become clear was how often I came back to the subject of irony. “Oh, by the way, this element has to be ironic. And that one. And this other one.” I soon realized that I had to figure out how many separate ironies I was dealing with and how they interacted. Let’s spend the next several posts doing that.

I first addressed the need to have an ironic concept here and then followed it up here but both concern themselves more with things that aren’t ironic, rather than things that are. One problem I have with ironies, and with all advice that’s practically universal, is that it’s hard to pick out specific examples, and they wouldn’t be very useful anyway, because exemplary cases aren’t the point: I’m talking about how this should be everywhere, but without being the center of attention.

In many such cases where I wanted to prove that something was true across all types of movies, I’ve found myself, more and more, data-mining the 15 checklists. So let’s see how each of the movies we’ve looked at has an Ironic Concept:

• Casablanca: The least patriotic American has to save the Allied cause.
• Sunset Boulevard: The nation’s most glamorous people are psychotic lowlifes.
• In a Lonely Place: A writer adapting a crime book finds himself living it.
• Alien: They go to answer a distress signal sent by a creature that wants to kill them.
• The Shining: A recovering alcoholic rededicates himself to his family, then finds that himself compelled to kill them.
• Blue Velvet: An idealistic amateur detective discovers he’s just as creepy as those he investigates.
• Silence of the Lambs: The only way to catch one serial killer is to work with another.
• Groundhog Day: A man who just wants to get his least favorite day over has to live it again and again.
• Donnie Brasco: An undercover FBI agent finds his pitiful targets more sympathetic than his bosses.
• The Bourne Identity: A spy with a conscience becomes the latest target of his own agency.
• Sideways: A man celebrates his upcoming wedding by looking for love.
• How to Train Your Dragon: A dragon killer in training succeeds by befriending a dragon.
• Iron Man: Arms dealer is targeted by his own clients, declares war on arms dealing.
• An Education: A bored girl rejects the idea of getting “an education”, but learns another meaning of that phrase in the process.
• Bridesmaids: A group of friends planning a happy day go to war against each other.

So, yeah, all of them. But this is not to be confused with an Ironic Finale, which we’ll look at next time…

Storyteller's Rulebook #190: Limit Yourself

PIXAR had a problem. They had pioneered the idea of computer animation and made some very appealing short films featuring a jumping desk lamp, so they were eager to move into features ...but their technology seemed to have huge limitations.  

There was a reason that they had been anthropomorphizing lamps: they just couldn’t get the hang of creating hair or warm-looking skin, which seemed to mean that they would never be able to feature human characters.

They parleyed their short Tin Toy into a first feature called Toy Story. While that was in production, they sat down for a now-legendary lunch in where they tried to figure out the future of the company: they couldn’t make movies about toys forever, but how many movies they could make about heroes without hair or warm skin?

In addition to more Toy movies, they wound up brainstorming a list of five more ideas, all of which eventually got made:

• Ants: A Bug’s Life 
• Monsters: Monsters Inc. (They didn’t know at the time that by the time they got to this movie, they would finally master hair, and be eager to show it off) 
• Fish: Finding Nemo 
• Cars: Cars 
• Robots: WALL-E

Once they had their list, they realized that had a really hard job ahead of them. The problem was that all of these potential heroes would be hard for audiences to identify with…in large part because they lacked hair and warm skin!

So was it worth doing? Was there any point in making movies about such unlikely subjects? Yes, but they’d have to make up for the inherent liabilities with extra assets: they would have to create heroes that were extra-lovable, extra-compelling, extra-human.

Faced with such a daunting task, they had to admit something that no one else in town was willing to say out loud: the Hollywood way of crafting stories was broken.

In the heyday of the studio system, as historian Thomas Schatz famously described in his book “The Genius of the System”, the studios managed to closely manage their artists in a way that unleashed creativity instead of stifling it. During the system’s peak, from the mid-‘30s to the mid-‘40s, they somehow created something unprecedented and never again replicated: quality and quality control at the same time.

PIXAR realized that, if they were going to create five very expensive movies about five different types of hard-to-like creatures, they were going to have bring back that studio spirit. This meant that they had to bring back the idea of the “story department”. Egos had to go out the window, replaced with rigorous group critiques. Everything was constantly second-guessed by their “braintrust” and whole movies were sometimes sent back to the digital-drawing-board.

The results, as you probably know, were stunning. They were creating characters that were so lovable, even people who disliked computer animation were flocking to the theater every year. More than any other studio name in town, “PIXAR” came to mean quality.

And then a funny thing happened: they ran out of limitations. Now that they can tell any type of story, the PIXAR name has started diminish in the public’s eyes. They aren’t bending over backwards to make us fall in love anymore, because they seem to feel like their new human characters should be inherently likable.

But no character is inherently likeable. Even if you’re making a live-action movie, your character are just cold constructs until you hook them up to a lightning bolt and jolt them to life. Every character starts off as a bug, a fish, a car, a robot… they only have as much life as you give them. I wish that every studio would take PIXAR’s lead and bring back story departments, but unfortunately, it seems PIXAR is joining their competitors instead of beating them.

Meanwhile, if you don’t run a studio, what lesson can be learned from this? Limit yourself. Put yourself in a box and try to figure out how to do great work inside of it. Can you write a great thriller set entirely in two apartments, like Bound? Can you make people cheer for a love affair between a teenage boy and an eighty-year-old woman, like Harold and Maude? Can you make an entire super-hero movie out of found footage, like Chronicle? Can you write a silent movie, like The Artist?

Hold your own feet over the fire. Create a situation where you find yourself saying “This will only work if I do everything right.” Because guess what? That’s always true.

The Big Idea, Addendum: What Urges Are You Satisfying?

Usually, when I get an idea, it gets me excited for a very short time, and then it falls apart: I realize that it doesn’t make sense, or it doesn’t mean anything, or the character arc and the plot have nothing to do with each other… Somehow the whole thing fails to coalesce. 

Then there are other times when everything magically clicks into place.  A compelling character believably finds himself plunged into an exciting plot that builds to a satisfying conclusion!  Even better, the whole things is a powerful metaphor for our modern condition! Victory!  But then… something happens: I pitch the idea to a friend, or maybe my management, and they hit me with a devastating response: “Well, okay, sure, but why would anybody want to see it?”  Often, I have no answer. 

Let’s say that your co-worker corners you at the water cooler on Monday morning to tell you about the great movie they just saw.  What are the odds that they’ll say…

• “It had a great structure!”
• “It really seemed true to life!”
• “It had a very satisfying theme!”
• “It was a devastating metaphor!”

Not very likely. You have to push people’s buttons.  You have to give them something they crave.  Here’s a list of things you co-worker is more likely to say:

• “It was so funny!”  aka LAUGHTER (comedies, dramadies)
• “It was hot!” aka LUST (sex comedies, some thrillers, some horror, some indie movies)
• “It rocked!” aka ADRENLINE RUSH (action movies, kids’ movies)
• “It was wild!” aka THE THRILL OF TRANSGRESSION (thrillers, some comedies)
• “It was gruesome!” aka DEATHWISH FULFILLMENT (horror, some thrillers, disaster movies)
• “It kicked ass!” aka POWER FANTASY (superheroes, spies, sports)
• “It was so sweet” and/or “It got me laid!” aka ROMANTIC FANTASY (romances, romantic comedies, coming of age)
• “It was devastating!” aka EMPATHY (melodramas, documentaries, indie movies)
• “It was gorgeous!” aka BEAUTY (spectacles, some documentaries, animated movies)
• “It blew my mind!” aka COGNITIVE DISSONANCE (art films, some high-concept blockbusters)

(Some of these are self-explanatory, but some of the others I’ll delve into in more detail over the next few days.)  Now, obviously, no movie is going to hit all these, but every movie should try to hit more than one.  If your movie is pulse-pounding, then it’s okay for it to be ugly (most recent action movies), but if it’s about ennui, then you probably want some beauty onscreen (every Catherine Deneuve movie from the 1960s).

What are they going to say about your movie at the water-cooler tomorrow morning?  It’s good to know.

Storyteller's Rulebook #131: Write Down Your Bad Ideas

Yesterday, we were talking about the benefits of being highly critical of your own work.  But how do you keep writing if you’re no longer confident that you’re spinning gold?  Well that’s the million-dollar-spec-sale question.  The answer is: learn to love revising.  You have to get to the point where the whole point of the first draft is to anticipate the fun you’ll have revising it later.

The purpose of the first draft is just to create raw material.  You’re just mixing together a big bowl of sculptor’s clay.  Your second draft is a pile of lumps you’ve shaped out of that clay.  Your third draft is the first one that anyone but you would recognize.  Your fourth draft is where it begins to get beautiful.

And how do you keep making those drafts better?  Not by shutting out the world and dwelling on your inner muse.  By getting feedback!  You can only see one side of your own work.  In order to figure out the shape of it, you have to ask other people with different perspectives what they see.

The biggest mistake a writer can make is to think, “I’ve got a bad (or half-formed) idea in my head, so I’ll wait until it gets better before I start writing.”  The best possible advice for any writer is this: WRITE DOWN THE BAD IDEA!

This is what people mean when they say that writing is re-writing.  Perfect writing almost never begins with a perfect idea.  Even if you do have a perfect idea, you’ll probably blow it, because you’ll be paralyzed by fear of ruining perfection as you stumble through the actual writing process.  It’s much safer to start with a so-so idea and perfect it as you go along. 

When I’m stuck, I’ve been known to create documents with names like “ “THE DUMBEST VERSION” or “EVERYTHING THAT DOESN’T WORK ABOUT THIS IDEA”.  These titles liberate me to dump all the crap out of my head and into list form. Inevitably, as I savage myself, picking the flaws apart, I wind up pruning away most of the bad parts and leaving something good behind.

Bad scripts become good scripts all the time.  Good Will Hunting started out as a techno-thriller.  Can you imagine how terrible that would have been?  Whether you love or hate the final product of Titanic, you should check out Cameron’s published script.  

I love the movie (I know, I know, how tacky of me!) but the original script was terrible!  There’s twice as much Billy Zane Snidely Whiplash over-the-top villainy.  By the time you’re done reading, no matter how you felt beforehand, you’ll see the final product as a masterpiece of restraint.  

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

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 the 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 job at conveying her unique voice.

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

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!

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

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.

Rulebook Casefile: Milking the Unique Relationship in The Apartment

In the finale of The Big Idea, I concluded that unique characters are overrated, when it’s more interesting to simply write about a unique relationship. 

In The Apartment, C.C. Baxter and Miss Kubelik are both familiar types: the shnook and the strung-along other woman. But their relationship is utterly unique: She is having an affair with Baxter’s boss in his own apartment. The entire story is fueled by the uniqueness of this relationship. 

At first neither is aware of their unique relationship. Rather than reveal the true nature of their relationship all at once, Wilder and Diamond parcel out this reveal very gradually over the course of the movie, milking this unique relationship for all it’s worth.

What if neither Baxter nor the audience had been aware of the situation until Baxter came home one day to find Kubelik and Sheldrake, in flagrante, covering themselves up in embarrassment? That would have delivered the maximum amount of shock, but so many emotions would have come flooding out at once (for the audience, for Baxter, for Kubelick, and for Sheldrake) that the moment would have been overwhelming. Instead, screenwriters Wilder and Diamond proceed slowly and deliberately:

1. First, when we in the audience see Kubelik at the Chinese restaurant, we feel the shock of realizing that Baxter’s crush has been sleeping with another man in his own apartment, No one onscreen is experiencing this revelation at the same time we are, so we get this moment to ourselves. Now that we know more than any of the characters do, we can fully appreciate the irony of this situation...
2. Later, Baxter recognizes Kubelik’s broken mirror at the Christmas party, and realizing that she is his boss’s mistress. Because she does not know what the mirror means to him, he gets this painful moment all to himself.
3. Later, when Baxter finds her “asleep” in his bed, his anger flares up. Because he does not yet know she has taken too many sleeping pills, he gets to have this much-needed cathartic release, before he has to suddenly shift back to feeling sympathy for her as he tries to save her.
4. Later, the doctor slowly wakes Kubelik up. With Baxter out of the room, she gets a moment to experience the shame of her failed suicide attempt. After that passes, she sees Baxter there and experiences an entirely different sort of shame as the final revelation finally falls into place: she realizes that she been carrying on her affair in the apartment of the man who really loves her.

What is the result of stringing out this series of revelations so deliberately? Let’s try another “what if?”: What Baxter had discovered Kubelik trying to hang herself instead of taking pills? His anger and his instinct to save her would have kicked in at the same time and gotten mixed up with each other, plus we’d also be dealing with her shame at being discovered and her shock at realizing that this was Baxter’s apartment. The mirror and the pills allow each of these four sets of feelings to hit separately, one after another. 

The unique relationship between this shnook and this other woman is slowly revealed over the course of the movie, and Wilder and Diamond milk this painful situation for all it’s worth.

Well, that’s it for The Apartment, but I could go on. I was all prepared to write a piece about token objects (the apartment key, the mirror, the bottle of champagne...) and how they advance the plot and enhance the subtext every time they change hands, but I think you all get the point. Suffice it to say: Skip film school and just watch this movie a hundred times. I wish I had.

The Big Idea, Finale: Unique Characters are Overrated, Unique Relationships are Better

Okay folks, one last piece of back fill and then tomorrow… the big list!

Unique characters are overrated. Does your character feel familiar? Good! Audiences want characters to feel familiar, so that they can identify with them. But they also want to see something new they’ve never seen before—so what to do? Of course, you can search for a character that will feel familiar and yet be unlike anything that audience have seen before, but you’re probably going to look in vain. There have been a lot of characters before yours. 

You’re going to have much better luck if you take two familiar characters and give them a believable but never-seen-on-screen-before relationship. The high school outcast is a familiar archetype, but there are always new directions to take it: My Bodyguard is about a kid who pays a scary bully to protect him from the other kids, Rushmore is about a kid who strikes up a friendship with one of his private schools funders who is equally alienated, Election is about a kid who infuriates her teacher so much that he tries to sabotage her student government election... These were never-seen-onscreen-before relationships, but they rang true.Okay, Max Fischer and Tracy Flick were pretty unique characters as well, but if those movies had been about watching either of those outcasts try to get a date with the popular kid, then they still would have fallen into overly familiar territory. It’s the unique relationship, not the unique character, that makes the movie.

I’ve known a lot of strange people, but none so strange that I can’t think of a movie character just like them. On the other hand, I’ve had a dozen oddball relationships in my life that I’ve never seen replicated onscreen before: unlikely friendships, oversharing bosses, bizarre dates, murderous tontines... …I’ve said too much. 

This gets back to volatility. Don’t force the characters to generate their own conflict. Allow two seemingly functional characters to collide in an unexpectedly dysfunctional way. Such things have happened to you, and if it’s happened to you, then it’s happened to others in the audience. They’ll happily yelp in identification when they see it onscreen.

The Big Idea, Part 12: Keep the Dilemma Alive

My manager, like many Hollywood types, doesn’t communicate very clearly. Once he was quickly summing up the problems he had with one of my scripts. When we got to the third act, he said “It’s very exciting, but after a certain point it all runs downhill.” I asked him to explain but he couldn’t, since he considered the point self-evident. I thought he was crazy. Was he saying that I didn’t have enough conflict? There’s no way: it was an over-the-top one-man-against-an-army-of-crazies finale. How does that roll downhill? 

I think that now, years later, I’ve finally figured out what he was saying. My hero didn’t run out of exterior conflict (or motivation, for that matter, which also sometimes happens). My hero had run out of dilemma. There were still a lot of bad guys to be defeated, but there were no more internal tension caused by those actions.

Once I figured this out, it was an easy fix: I had to send my good guy into the final confrontation still seeking the temptation the bad guy had offered. I had to push the good guy’s final rejection of that temptation as late as possible, right at the heart of the climax. The hero’s dilemma should be exacerbated by the conflict, and vice versa, until the last moment, when the resolution of the dilemma and the resolution of the conflict should happen at about the same time.

 

This means that the dilemma can’t be “should I fight back or not?” That’s the dilemma in Bruce Lee’s first movie The Big Boss (Originally released in the west at Fists of Fury) Lee’s fans have to sit there and suffer the whole time while Lee refuses to fight. Then he finally caves and the final half hour is spectacular, but it’s also inert because the dilemma is over. This movie gets it exactly wrong: its dilemma and conflict are mutually exclusive.Die Hard is very tidy: Willis wins his wife back by shooting the bad guy dead, but not every concept lends itself towards wrapping up the dilemma and the conflict at the same moment. Many comedies, like Date Night wrap up the dilemma (the marriage problems, in this instance) in a quiet scene after the climax. In movies like Rear Window, we see that the underlying dilemma (the different interests of Kelly and Stewart) has not been resolved at all, though the climax brought about a temporary truce. These are both fine.

The dilemma can continue past the climax, but it can’t end very far before it, or else everything will roll downhill.