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.

Underrated Movie #128: Little Murders

Title: Little Murders
Year: 1971
Director: Alan Arkin
Writers: Jules Feiffer, based on his play
Stars: Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson, Jon Korkes, John Randolph, Doris Roberts, Alan Arkin, Donald Sutherland

The Story: The blackest black comedy ever made? In the midst of a nightmarishly caricatured version of New York City, an upbeat young woman falls in love with an apathetic photographer and brings him home to meet her uptight family, but his negative view of the world proves to be all too prescient.

How it Came to be Underrated: This movie was just as big a flop onscreen as it was on Broadway (too dark, too satirical, too even-handed in its mockery) and it’s had very limited availability ever since. (Footnote: after a short failed Broadway run with Gould, the play had a more successful run off-Broadway with a young Fred Willard in the lead. Willard usually plays optimists, so I cannot imagine him in the role, but I wish dearly that I could see that.)

Why It’s Great:

1. This is a story about institutions: the danger of having them and the danger of losing them. Though Feiffer is humorously sympathetic to all sides, this is ultimately a cautionary tale from an old leftist (in spirit, at least) who is terribly afraid that the new left might be breaking down the old ways too quickly for anything new to take hold.
2. Cockeyed contributor Elliott Kalan showed this movie recently here in NYC and brought Feiffer out to talk about it. Feiffer explained that while he was writing the play, he had a creepy young outcast groupie hanging around him, asking for movie recommendations. He ditched the kid and went to a retreat to finish the play. When he came back, he found out that the kid had gone on a shooting rampage. The play had come true while he was writing it.
3. The Onion AVClub has identified and valiantly campaigned against an insidious disease of moviedom: the manic pixie dream girl movie, in which a mopey guy suddenly has a quirky-but-upbeat girl foist herself upon him and forcibly cheer him up. Of course, that could describe this movie, but if such movies are a disease, then this is the cure. With incisive honesty, Feiffer is equally skeptical of both optimism and pessimism, ultimately painting each as both valuable and dangerous.
4. This movie has three endings. Normally that’s a bad sign, but here it’s done to make a point with devastating success. There’s a very unhappy ending at 80 minutes that feels very final, but somehow the movie keeps going, then there’s a happy ending at 100 minutes and you desperately hopes the movie stops there, but it doesn’t, and so there’s an even more horrific ending 10 minutes later. Feiffer and Arkin know exactly what they’re doing: mocking our desire for justice and inability to accept injustice. When it’s all over, we realize that there’s no other way it could have ended.
5. Anyone familiar with Feiffer’s clever cartoons will not be surprised to find that the movie is filled with satirical but deeply authentic monologues. Each is a masterpiece of limited perspective: everyone is convincing, but no one is right. We judge them, but we’re still moved, because the details they observe are so beautifully specific.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Feiffer only had a short screenwriting career but his follow-up screenplay, for Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, is also well worth watching. Gould got sucked into the mire of the big bad city again in an underrated thriller called The Bank Teller.

How Available Is It?: It finally has a beautiful DVD (showing off Gordon Willis’s superb cinematography) with in-depth, intercut recent commentaries from Feiffer and Gould.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: “Stand Back! I’ve Got a Gun!”

How To Create A Compelling Character, Addendum: Why Do Their Friends Like Them?

So I’ve been building towards something for a while... A big post. The ultimate post that sums up (and links to) almost everything I’ve said… A 70 (or so) question checklist that hopes to target and eliminate any problem with any story. That’ll finally arrive next week. It’s already been pushed back a few times because, as I’ve been preparing it, a lot of new things have occurred to me that I wanted to shoehorn in first.

As I was combining, reviewing and expanding my earlier attempts at checklists, I realized a problem I’ve been having for a while with my character recipe. Generally speaking, I try to downplay the term “sympathetic” in favor of “compelling”, and for the most part that works. The nice thing about the “compelling” definition is that it’s wide enough to cover any main character, even anti-heroes like Norman Bates, Michael Corleone and David Chappellet. But I’ve discovered a problem: it makes characters seem a little extreme, especially if they’re supposed to be nice-guy regular heroes.

Once you’ve piled your heroes (and villains) high with as many unfulfilled desires, internal contradictions and raging conflicts as you can, then stop and ask yourself a question: “Yeah, but why do their friends like them?” Sure, sometimes the answer will be, “they don’t.” Bates, Corleone and Chappelet don’t have any close friends. There are even some downright likable heroes who don’t have any friends: C. C. Baxter in The Apartment is adorable, but he’s totally friendless. 

But these should be the exception, not the rule. In real life, even lonely people have friends. Even jerks have friends. As the Mr. T. Experience memorably lamented “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend.” 

Once you’re done tensing your characters up, take a step back and remember that somebody somewhere probably likes this person, so you need to figure out why. You don’t have to agree with those friends--they could like the guy because he’s a jerk, but you have to be able to understand that point of view.

Think about how easy it is to get annoyed by the tightly-wound creep in the next cubicle over, and then one day, an old college buddy visits him at work and he’s suddenly totally relaxed, laughing and joking and ribbing the guy about his gut. If you’re going to write about that character, or any character, you should be able to see in them what that friend sees, in addition to all of their compelling faults.

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.

The Big Idea, Part 11: All Good Stories Are Ironic

My generation of Americans tend to think that we own the word “irony”, but in fact, most of us don’t really understand what it means. The first problem is that we confuse irony with sarcasm. Sarcasm is merely one type of ironic phrasing (using insincere language to convey the opposite meaning). But it would be wrong to assume that any story that acknowledges irony has to be sarcastic in tone. In fact, all stories, from the most sarcastic and nasty to the most uplifting and heartfelt, should be fundamentally ironic.

Irony refers to any difference between expectation and outcome. This difference can be comedic (expected a kiss, got a pie in the face or vice versa) or it can be dramatic (sought justice, found injustice, or vice versa). Either way, the greater the gulf between expectation and outcome, the more meaning the story will have. Likewise, the smaller the gap, the more meaningless it will be.

This brings us to my generation’s other misunderstanding about irony, which was famously exacerbated by Alanis Morrisette’s terrible song “Ironic.” Just because a situation is a bummer, doesn’t mean that it’s ironic. Rain on your wedding day is not ironic, unless you insisted on getting married in the desert so as to avoid the rain. A traffic jam when you’re already late isn’t ironic unless you left late to beat the traffic. (UPDATE: A few years after I wrote this, Rachael Hurwitz fixed the song accordingly!)

One note I give all the time is “This is a bummer, but it’s not tragic.” A story about a perennial-loser losing again is just a bummer. A story about a winner winning again is just dull. Stories about losers winning, or winners losing, are ironic. The same goes for stories about an always-bad person doing wrong, or an always-good person doing right—these stories lack irony. 

This is why you need to take time before every scene to establish that the character expects something other than what’s going to happen. If the audience shares the character’s expectation, then they will feel the impact of the reversal of fortune so much more. 

This is why heroes need tragic flaws. The heroes of thrillers and horror movies should be at least partially culpable for what happens to them, if only in a “curiosity killed the cat” kind of way. Likewise, comedic predicaments should befall the people who have tried the hardest to make sure nothing like this ever happens to them.I’ve been reading a lot of Will Eisner’s brilliant comics about “The Spirit” recently. The Sprit is a good guy doing good—which is why the stories are never actually about him. Most of the stories are either about a villain he encounters who unexpectedly does good, or a nice person who unexpectedly does bad. That’s a story. 

This is why most sequels suck. In action/adventure/thriller/horror, the first movie is about a seemingly-weak person who turns out to be strongest choice for this job. That’s ironic. The second is about a strong person remaining strong. That’s dull. In comedies, the first movie is about someone who expects sanity encountering insanity. The second is about that insanity continuing, which should be no surprise. Expecting a fun bachelor party and experiencing a blackout instead is ironic—the first time. The second time, it’s just pitiful.

Underrated Movie #127: The Fallen Idol

Title: The Fallen Idol
Year: 1948
Director: Carol Reed
Writers: Graham Greene, Lesley Storm and William Templeton, based on the story “The Basement Room” by Greene
Stars: Ralph Richardson, Bobby Henrey, Michele Morgan

The Story: At a foreign embassy in London, the child of the always-absent ambassador worships the friendly butler. As the two play, the child is unable to understand that the butler’s marriage is falling apart painfully. When the butler’s wife dies accidentally after a fight, the child falsely assumes the butler did it and starts telling lies to cover it up, which only make the problem grow larger and larger.

How it Came to be Underrated: Greene and Reed re-teamed the next year to make The Third Man, which was far grander in scale and ambition. The well-earned success of that movie instantly eclipsed the success and reputation of this one, which was mostly forgotten.

Why It’s Great:

1. Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, and John Gielgud were considered the three “grand old men” of the English stage, but of the three, Richardson got the least time on the big screen, so his reputation has shrunk as those who saw his stage performances have passed on. This was a rare leading screen role that showed how great he was: beneath his proper demeanor, a war of contradictions is tearing him apart. He conveys it all with a sublime degree of subtlety.
2. So Reed had hired one of the most acclaimed actors of all time, but his co-star was a young non-actor. Watching the child’s astonishing performance, you might assume that he was a great natural, but in the documentary, Reed’s assistant Guy Hamilton assures us otherwise: Before Reed found him, “he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. Much worse was his attention span which was that of a demented flea.” There’s a reason that there are so few movies about children this age! Most actors will admit that a great performance is 90% the accomplishment of the director and only 10% the actor. The fact that these two actors give almost equally great performances proves it.
3. Greene divided his work sharply into two categories: literary works and “entertainments”. Like most authors who made such distinctions (Ed McBain, Cornell Woolrich) Greene was constantly confounded to see that both audiences and critics found more meaning in his “entertainments” than his “serious” works. Greene considered this an entertainment because it revolves around a police investigation, but according to my definition it should be considered literary. I’ll explain why tomorrow...
4. Writers, especially beginners, hate limitations. The ultimate limitation is point of view. Writers know that the best way to build identification is to limit the audience to one character’s point of view, but then they get frustrated. The writer must know everything about the world, but they cannot convey everything from one character’s point of view, only one limited perspective. The more you write, however, the more you realize that the nature of truth is inseparable from the notion of point of view, and the nature of truth is what all great fiction is about. This movie beautifully shows a very limited point of view.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Richardson had another rare movie showcase as a dictator in Things to Come, another great Reed noir was Odd Man Out.

How Available Is It?: It’s got an excellent criterion DVD with a short documentary about Reed’s directorial style, warmly recounted by his collaborators.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: The Army Even Suspects Me!

The Big Idea, Part 10: The Concept Has to Survive Past the Twist

Yesterday, we talked about how the twist (which surprises people after they’ve bought their tickets) has to be different from the concept (which got them in the theater in the first place). Now let’s turn that on its head: the twist can’t eliminate the concept either. The concept has to last the whole movie long, not just until the twist happens. 

I run into this problem all the time. I come up with what I think is a great concept for a thriller, but then I realize that my idea only provides a unique way of starting the movie, but all of the uniqueness disappears once the movie gets going. 

For instance, a friend in college told me a wild story from his past. It sounded made-up, but I later confirmed that it was all true: At his previous college, he had been arrested for creating a world-famous computer virus. Like most hackers, he could type faster than any secretary, so a judge sentenced him to community service working for the government’s little-known “Relay” service.This was a program that allowed deaf people to use a primitive version of “Chat” to communicate online with a relay center. People at the relay center then had to call whoever the deaf person wanted to call and read everything they wrote, then transcribe everything that was said on the other end of the line back to the deaf person. This enabled deaf people to use the phone like anybody else. He said that lonely deaf people would try to chat directly with the relay providers, but they were strictly forbidden from responding, or conveying anything but what was said on the other end of the line.

My mind instantly reeled: what a great beginning for a thriller! A deaf woman keeps getting threatening calls, and the our hero has to relay them. She calls the police for help, but they don’t believe her. She calls her friends but they hang up. Won’t somebody help her? At what point does our relay guy decide that it’s up to him? 

A great set-up, right? Well here’s the problem. As soon as he leaves the relay center, the whole concept disappears. He just becomes one more noir hero protecting a damsel in distress from some crooks. Relay has nothing to do with it anymore. 

I recently saw a disappointing pseudo-thriller that suffered from the same problem: Red Road by Andrea Arnold. The concept is great: a depressed woman works for a private contractor that installs and monitors security cameras on every street corner in Glasgow, then reports any crimes to the police. But one day she sees a bad guy from her past show up on the monitors. She becomes obsessed with following him from camera to camera… 

It’s a great set-up, but it has the same problem as my relay story. As soon as she leaves the surveillance room, it becomes a generic “I have to stop this guy” drama-thriller. There is another twist when we find out what the guy actually did to her, but that twist has nothing to do with the concept, and feels like it comes out of another movie.I think that this is one reason that they screwed up “Time Capsule”/ Knowing. What if they had gone with my “someone’s going to blow up Washington” version? Once the teacher locates the grown-up-kid who made the predictions, would it just become a stop-the-terrorist movie? I think that they could have kept the concept alive…at every turn, the grown-up-kid’s inability/unwillingness to remember his premonitions would still have been important. But I understand why the creators felt the need to link the ultimate danger to the source of the premonitions. 

This brings us back to a comment by Christine Tyler last week: This shows why it’s good to start with an antagonist as the genesis of your concept. If the concept has nothing to do with the antagonist, then your concept runs the risk of disappearing in the third act as the conflict with the antagonist takes center stage.

The Big Idea, Part 9: The Twist is Not the Concept

Our discussion of trailers yesterday brings me to subject of twists. A good story idea should have a twist to it, but the here’s the crucial thing: the twist is not the concept. The concept is the compelling idea that sells the movie. The twist is what wakes the story up once the original concept starts to run out of steam.

Writer and directors complain bitterly about trailers that give away the twist of their movies, but usually this is an indication that the original concept isn’t as interesting as the twist. If your movie is not gripping and fascinating before the twist, then I guarantee that the twist will be revealed in the trailer.

Marketers can’t tell people, “Well, this is great, but we can’t tell you why, so just go see it.” Instead, they’d rather just give away the final twist, guaranteeing everybody an unsatisfactory movie-going experience (after the audience has bought their non-refundable tickets, of course). Sure, the audience may be pissed to realize that they saw nothing that wasn’t in the trailer—and the creator will be really pissed, but the studio will do it if that’s the only way to get people into theaters. They have to.

There was a TV show a few years ago called “The 4400”. Here was how the creators pitched it to the networks: “All of these people have been abducted over the years by lights in the sky, and one day they all return at the same time with super powers. At first, it seems like a classic X-Files-style alien abduction show, but then we get to the big twist: they weren’t abducted by aliens, they were abducted through time travel by post-apocalyptic humans, who have given them these powers to prevent the apocalypse from happening!” 

Wow, what a pitch! Every network got excited. Then the networks asked when the truth would be revealed. The writers got big grins on their faces and said: “That the great part: we don’t find this out until the end of season five!” Suddenly, all of the joy went out of the room. 

The writers hadn’t thought this through. By their own admission, it seemed like a generic “X-Files” knock-off until they revealed the twist. They knew that they’d never sell it to the network without revealing the big twist, but they somehow expected the network to be able to sell that version to America for five years? It gradually sunk in to the writers that their plan made no sense. They hastily came up with a better plan, in which the twist was now revealed at the end of the original miniseries.

They realized that “time travel” wasn’t the twist, it was the concept, so it had to be set up before the actual series began.

The Big Idea, Part 8: Won't Somebody Think of the Trailer?

There’s nothing that creative types hate more than getting notes from non-creative types, and the most despised of all are the notes that come from, ugh, marketing. How dare they be consulted? Ars gratia artis! It’s our job to make a pure, unadulterated masterpiece. It’s their job to sell it.

But “art for art’s sake” has always been an impossible dream when it comes to making movies, and it becomes more impossible every year. Yes, funders will insist on marketability throughout the making of the movie, but long before that, the screenwriters themselves will have to shape themselves into ruthless hucksters in order to set it up in the first place. 

You have to sell it an assistant, then a producer, then a director, then the stars… Remember, nobody is on contract anymore, so everybody is a free agent, deciding for themselves if they should put their own reputation and financial prospects on the line for you. Before the marketers start worrying about “Will we be able to cut a trailer for this movie”, you the screenwriter have to worry about the trailer you’re creating in the minds of the people you’re pitching it to.

So yes, right from the start, you have to ask yourself “Is there a trailer here?” And what do trailers show? Hint: not delicate character moments. Trailers show three things: a unique concept, startling imagery, and funny or bad-ass one-liners. That’s about it. 

There’s a problem I have sometimes when I’m putting together “Underrated Movie” posts for this blog. I start scanning through the movie to pull still frames out and I suddenly realize: “Man, I love this movie, but none of the still frames make it look great!” That makes it hard for me to “sell” the movie to my readers.This was true recently for Who’s That Knocking At My Door? It’s a powerful narrative, and it’s well shot, but none of the imagery is that unique. It looks like a standard boy-meets-girl story if you can’t you hear the great dialogue and the great music. After the box office failure of this movie, Scorsese quickly learned his lesson and quickly became a master of startling imagery. Of course, it’s just as bad to go the other way—these days Scorsese’s movies have too much style and not enough substance, but he found a nice middle ground for a while, didn’t he?

Marge being pregnant didn’t have a lot to do with the plot of Fargo, but it created very unique imagery that helped sell the quirkiness of the movie before anyone heard the wonderful dialogue. I hate to keep going back to “Silence of the Lambs”, but novelist Thomas Harris did something very clever. He didn’t just want a federal agent interview a prisoner on his cover because that wasn’t unique. So he tossed in references to the death’s head moth, even though it had little to do with the plot. Now that’s a great image.This is why you have to create unique “set pieces”. This is why you give characters signature wardrobe choices. This is why you give them unique injuries like nosy Jake getting his nose cut open in Chinatown. This is why you create scenes that visualizes your conflict, rather than just have everybody talk about it. What is the one still frame that sells your movie? You gotta know.

The Big Idea, Part 7: Every Main Character Must Be Volatile

I used to think that the only thing that every main character had to be was resourceful. Now, thanks to last week’s posts, I’ve come to another big piece of the puzzle. They also have to be volatile. By that, I don’t mean that they have to blow up yelling at people all the time. I mean that they have to have something unexpected inside them that gets ignited by the plot, and then that ignition turns the plot into a full-blown fire.

They have to have some secret or some quality that causes them to react different than anyone else would to this situation. That’s volatility. The hero has some internal ionic charge that’s going to set the compass of this movie spinning—something the people sitting on the hero’s right and left don’t have.

In feel-good genre movies, this can be relatively straightforward: the hero is different because they’re better than everybody else:

• Captain America, even when he’s tiny, has more valor inside him than everybody else. This is revealed when Tommy Lee Jones tosses a dummy granade into a group of soldiers. Everybody else scatters but our hero, who jumps on the grenade.
• Meanwhile, in another secret government agency applicant pool, also judged by Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith in Men in Black is more clever than all of the other applicants because he figures out to bring the table over while filling out forms.

In more complex movies, the difference is more likely to be that they have some internal contradiction inside them that causes them to react in an unexpectedly volatile way.

• In both Vertigo and Rear Window, only Jimmy Stewart’s characters would have uncovered these crimes, because they happen to ignite a spark inside them, tapping into the characters’ neuroses.
• In The French Connection, only Popeye, with his troubling “never trust anybody” ethic, could have spotted the hidden drug ring.

So far, I’m just talking about action and thrillers movies, but this applies to every damn movie. I’ll show that as I talk about this more in upcoming entries.

I had almost figured this out before when I said that “Anybody can be a hero, but not by doing what anybody would do.” Now I see that that was only half the story. The hero’s internal make-up has to cause them to interact in a uniquely volatile way with the events of the story. Only this plot could ignite this hero, and only this hero could ignite this plot.

This makes me more aware of how important a hero’s backstory is. You don’t necessarily have to show it, but you have to know what there is about your hero’s past that causes this unexpectedly volatile reaction when they come in contact with the plot.

Underrated Movie #126: Downhill Racer

Title: Downhill Racer
Year: 1969
Director: Michael Ritchie (Smile)
Writer: James Salter
Stars: Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Camilla Sparv

The Story: A handsome but angry small-town ski-bum gets elevated to the US downhill team, and quickly proves to be the best, even though he’s not a team player. The coach soon realizes that he has little choice other than to let this superstar set the rules.

How it Came to be Underrated: Redford, Hackman and Ritchie were all about to have a great decade in the ‘70s, but this movie was a little ahead of its time. America was just learning to love movies that cast a jaundiced eye on national glory. The studio dumped it, which caused Redford to start thinking about creating a better way to find an audience for anti-Hollywood movies...

Why It’s Great:

1. We’ve all seen movies in which impossibly handsome actors inexplicably play lovelorn everyman underdogs. Redford was never interested in all that. He knew that he looked like a golden god, and he preferred to play characters who knew it too. Since his looks were so appealing, he figured he could be more hard-edged than other actors without losing the audience. From this point on in his career, he stopped asking to be liked (but he didn’t look down on his characters either).
2. Redford had the original idea for the movie, then hired Salter and Ritchie, whose styles matched his vision. He had gotten sick of hearing that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose but only how you play the game. He had seen his whole life that it wasn’t true and he wanted to make a movie that showed the truth about winners.
3. It’s the tragic paradox of all competition: who becomes the best? Those for whom nothing is ever good enough. Of course this means that being the best can’t make them happy either. The only way to get the big brass ring is lose all of your appreciation for it.
4. As with Kind Hearts and Coronets and “The Sopranos” they get us to sympathize with a bad man by giving him an infuriatingly disapproving parent. His father asks “What do you do it for?” Redford responds, “To be a champion”. His father sneers, “The world’s full of them”. Still, given how heartless Redford is, you have to wonder is he’s a jerk because his father hates him or if his father just hates him because he’s a jerk.
5. These days “realism” in movies is a synonym for “dreariness”. But in 1969, after years of bland technicolor epics, it meant the opposite: fast, raw, and thrilling, freed from heavy cameras, heavy make-up, and heavy-handed dramatics. They understood you could be brutally honest and still be fast-paced. Redford’s first descent, shot from his point of view, is absolutely breath-taking.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Redford and Ritchie reteamed for an equally good follow up about the price of winning, The Candidate. Another great underrated Hackman film from around this time is Scarecrow, if you can find it.

How Available Is It?: There’s an excellent Critierion DVD with long interviews with Redford, Ritchie and Salter.

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The Big Idea, Part 6: Story Happens When Character Collides With Plot

So we got lots of interesting answers to yesterday’s inquiry about whether to start with plot or character. Nobody said that they always started with one or the other. Most said that they sometimes start with character, sometimes plot, but then quickly try to supply the other so that it can become “real”, which makes sense. So it seems that there are two options…

Option 1: Come up with an interesting character, and let them simmer a brief while, but then rather than let them simply stew in their own juices, you have to yank them our of the frying pan and into the fire, or else they’re never going to amount to anything more than their raw ingredients. The simmering makes them spicy, but the fire forges them into what they must become. (Have I extended this metaphor enough?)

Option 2: Come up with the beginnings of a plot, some images, some twists, but before you let yourself get to the end, stop and ask yourself “So who’s the most volatile character who could encounter this problem and make it their own? What is the relationship of their goals to what they encounter: Is it their dream, their nightmare, or something more ironic than that? In the end, how is this going to change them?

The key is to let Hegel be your guide. Thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis. Your hero’s personality is the thesis. The dangerous opportunity that arrives has to be the antithesis to that. When the unstoppable force meets the immovable object, a story is born.

The hero must affect the events and the events must affect the hero. That’s the first test of a great story idea. Clooney in Up in the Air is a thesis that never meets his antithesis. He is a character who is not transformed by the plot. The alien invasion in War of the Worlds simply collapses on its own. It is a plot unaffected by the characters.

Or, put another way: the best stories are not studies of inherently meaningful characters or sequences of inherently meaningful events. The best stories are about the meaning that is suddenly created by the collision of a volatile character with a transformative series of events. You can start with a character or a plot, but you don’t have a story until you figure out the nexus of the two.

Okay, when we come back to this, I think I have the 9 elements of a good idea...

Storyteller’s Rulebook #95: Money Is Too Generic. Be Specific.

Too much to think about from yesterday! I’ll get back to The Big Idea tomorrow... (and feel free to chime in with more answers!)

Re-watching High and Low this week made something clear to me that I’d never really caught on to before: You can’t create a compelling movie character who wants “money”. High and Low was about a man trying to keep his fortune. But in order to make that problem compelling, Kurosawa had to make it clear that there was something specific he needed to spend his money on. Likewise, if you’re writing a script about someone who wants to get a lot of money, it will only be compelling if it’s for a specific need.

It’s no accident that the most common stand-by in these situations is medical bills. In Glengarry Glen Ross, if Jack Lemmon had stolen the leads just to get “money”, we wouldn’t care if he got caught or not. But he steals the money to pay for his sick daughter’s care, so we want him to succeed. In “Breaking Bad”, Walt starts his meth business to spare his family the crushing burden of his medical bills, and we’re somewhat on his side. It’s only when he beats cancer that that he, and we, are “left without excuses for the evils and abuses,” as Johnny Cash would say.

But wait, you say, why should movies be different from real life? In real life, money, in and of itself, seems to be the motivation for most of our actions. Why excuse greed onscreen by giving it medical justifications? Well, I would say that in this case real life is the illusion and movies are telling the truth.

In recent years, the white house tried to deal with a health care crisis and a mortgage crisis, but failed at both tasks, because they refused to admit that they were one and the same crisis. They acted as if people were borrowing on their homes out of selfish greed, and they set out to penalize that greed. But greed usually had nothing to do with it. The most common reason for going underwater on a mortgage was unpaid medical bills.

Likewise, the administration assumed that the solution to the medical crisis was to sell more health insurance. But the only way that anyone had been able to afford skyrocketing insurance premiums in the first place was by using their homes as ATMs. Now that the home-price bubble had burst, the insurance model was no longer tenable, but the administration refused to admit that.

This is actually an example of movies doing what they do best: making clear the connections that get obscured in real life. In real America, we fail to see that our economic desperation is largely caused by our medical/insurance industry, but onscreen, screenwriters quickly realize that they have to make that connection clear, because otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. If only we could carry that clarity back over to real life.

The Big Idea, Part 5: Do You Start With Plot or Character?

Anyone reading the trades would get the impression that “a movie” is synonymous with “a plot”. Anyone reading a screenwriting book would think that a “a movie” really just means “a character.” So which is it? Well, you can’t have one without the other, of course, but that leaves us with a huge conundrum: which comes first? Do you create an interesting character and then craft a situation around them, or do you create an interesting situation and then figure out who might be dealing with it.

The short answer: I just don’t know. This is a question I agonize about. Either way is dangerous. If you start with a character, even if they’re fascinating—especially if they’re fascinating— then they’re going to be resistant to change and unwilling to put themselves in danger. Beware of the “character piece”, where we watch someone drift from scene to scene, encountering characters who define them, but don’t challenge them.

Up in the Air is a good example of a movie that was defined by the character, not the plot. It was about a rootless efficiency expert who is only happy when he’s on an airplane. That’s an interesting character. But the challenges he runs into (having to compete with a young colleague, falling for a married woman) never seriously challenge that core characterization. The movie is more about defining the character than re-defining him, and that’s a problem. Clooney’s character is an unstoppable force (of rootlessness) that never meets an immovable object, so the movie never kicks into gear.

In movies, as in life, what we feel and believe is ephemeral. We see ourselves one way, the world sees us another way, and who’s to say who is right—until the rubber meets the road. We don’t know who we really are until we hit an obstacle. Trying to define yourself, or your characters, outside of a major challenge is a slippery business.So let’s start with a plot instead. This is more common. Situation: an alien invasion. Great. But who deals with it? Who’s the character? What is the character’s relationship to the plot? If you spend a lot of time coming up with a cool situation before you pair it to one character’s journey, then you could end up in big trouble all over again.

H. G. Wells’s novella “War of the Worlds” is about a hell of an interesting situation, and it’s lived on as a successful radio drama, a pretty-good 1957 movie and a so-so 2005 movie. Each version coasted on the value of the very-cool concept: Martians shoot pellets at the Earth, from which vehicles emerge that shoot death rays, but they are defeated by their lack of immunity to earth viruses. But there was one thing that all of these versions lacked: memorable characters.

In the 2005 version, Tom Cruise was an aimless divorced dad trying to redeem himself and protect his kids. Okay, but what does that have to do with aliens getting defeated by a virus? Nothing. The character arc and the plot never intersect. War of the Worlds is a plot that doesn’t have room for any characters.Great movies have characters and plots that can’t live without each other. In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice isn’t interesting enough for us to just follow her around at FBI camp, generating her own conflict and getting to know herself. If the opportunity to interview Lecter hadn’t come along, there would have been no movie. By the same token, there would have been no movie if another, less conflicted agent had been sent to interview Hannibal Lecter. He only agrees to help solve the case because he finds Clarice so compelling. This plot was necessary to re-define this character and this character was necessary to instigate this plot.

So… the big question… if you wanted to write the new Silence of the Lambs, would you start with the plot or the character?? I invite comments…

Time to Get to Work, Part 2!

Funny story: I wrote today’s post during my lunch break at work, then forgot to bring it home with me, so I’ll have to post it first thing tomorrow morning. And hey, while I’m talking about me, what about that calendar over there in the sidebar? I’ve been using my newborn daughter as an excuse not to work, but that’s backwards: Baby’s gotta eat! So let’s move the calendar back up top. And no more counting hours, now I’m counting pages! Five a day! No exceptions! Or else I’m betraying my little girl (who is, after all, rather cute). (And of course, as with all such declarations, this one starts tomorrow.)

Underrated Movie #125: High and Low

Title: High and Low
Year:1963
Director:Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Hideo Oguni, Ryûzô Kikushima, Eijirô Hisaita, Akira Kurosawa
Stars: Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyôko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Isao Kimura, Kenjiro Ishiyama

The Story: A Tokyo shoe company executive, in the middle of a takeover deal, gets a phone call that his son has been kidnapped—then his son walks into the room. It turns out that the kidnappers have accidentally grabbed his chauffeur’s son instead, but they insist that the executive pay up anyway. After the fateful decision is made, the movie becomes a gritty thriller as the police swing into action to do their part.

How it Came to be Underrated: Kurosawa is universally adored for his samurai pictures, but his modern-day crime movies are far less well-known. I would say that this challenges even Seven Samurai and Ran as a contender for the title of Kurosawa’s masterpiece.

Why It’s Great:

1. This is one of the most conceptually audacious movies ever made: it is all about dualities of high and low in every possible way: rich vs. poor, a mansion on a hill vs. a slum in a pit, high-quality shoes vs. low-cost knock-offs, high-minded moral decisions vs. lowly police work. Kurosawa’s brilliant idea was to mirror these dualities by splitting his movie, right down the center, into two different styles: the first half (the moral conumdrum) is very “high-art”: all on a tripod, very still, much like the classical Japanese cinema that Kurosawa had always resisted. Then, once the decision is made, we are abruptly slammed down into the chaotic “low-art” of Kurosawa at his gritty best.
2. Only in the justly-famous final scene do the two worlds finally come together, as the high-minded businessman and the lowly criminal finally come face to face, but each can only see the other as a reflection of himself. Money may have changed hands, but the line between high and low (or Heaven and Hell, as the title could also be translated) can never truly be crossed.
3. I was such a fan of this movie that I tried to track down the source material, an American pulp novel called “King’s Ransom” by Ed McBain, one of his “87th Precinct” police procedurals. It was long out of print and I couldn’t find it, but I did find other “87th” novels and started reading those. They quickly became great favorites of mine, so I’m eternally grateful. When I finally did land a copy of “King’s Ransom” years later, I was surprised to see that the first half was more loyally adapted than the second half. I shouldn’t have been surprised: moral condundrums are more universal than the particulars of police work.
4. Moral dilemmas that revolve around money are very compelling in real life, but it’s almost impossible to portray them onscreen. We all have a vague sense that it would be a bummer to lose a lot of money, but if you’re going to show someone agonizing over giving up their fortune for a human life, the audience is going to be disgusted—unless you create a very specific, very compelling need for that money on that day. First Kurosawa gets us to strongly root for Mifune to use his money for a one-time-only opportunity to pull off a daring takeover of his shoe company, saving it from greedy opportunists who want to drive it into the ground, then he gets hit with the dilemma. Amazingly, we agonize along with him.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Stray Dog was an even grittier Kurosawa cop drama, with Mifune equally great on the other side of the badge. The most wildly entertaining ‘60s Japanese crime movie is probably Branded to Kill.

How Available Is It?: My single-disc Criterion DVD from 1998 is very disappointing: it has no features, the titles are pixilated, the credits aren’t subtitled, it’s non-anamorphic, etc… Still well worth watching, but not up to Criterion standards. Apparently they put out a much better remastered 2-disc version in 2008 with features, so make sure to get that.

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