The Ultimate Story Checklist: The 40 Year Old Virgin

Updated to the sixth and final checklist!

Andy (Steve Carell), a stock-boy at a stereo store, is reluctantly asked to play poker with his coworkers Cal (Seth Rogen), David (Paul Rudd), and Jay (Romany Malco), who discover that he’s a 40 year-old virgin. They vow to get him laid, first by a club girl (Leslie Mann), then by a bookstore girl (Elizabeth Banks) but he pursues a romance with an older woman (Catherine Keener) who works across the street. They begin dating, and he wins over her daughter Marla (Kat Denning), but when she encourages him to sell off his action figure collection he flees, almost hooks up with the bookstore girl instead, but goes back to Keener and admits he’s a virgin. They get married and finally have sex.

PART #1: CONCEPT 18/19
The Pitch: Does this concept excite everyone who hears about it?
Is the one sentence description uniquely appealing?	A 40 year old virgin makes new friends who try to finally get him laid.
Does the concept contain an intriguing ironic contradiction?	A handsome 40 year old man is a virgin.
Is this a story anyone can identify with, projected onto a bigger canvas, with higher stakes?	Every man has felt like he’ll never get laid, and this is his ultimate nightmare…and ultimate fantasy, because everybody wants three perfect wingmen.
Story Fundamentals: Will this concept generate a strong story?
Is the concept simple enough to spend more time on character than plot?	Very much so.
Is there one character that the audience will choose to be their “hero”?	Andy.
Does the story follow the progress of the hero’s problem, not the hero’s daily life?	Well, his whole life is a problem, but yes.  There’s not a lot of waking up and falling asleep.
Does the story present a unique relationship?	Yes, several.
Is at least one actual human being opposed to what the hero is doing?	Not really, and that’s fine.  He’s his own antagonist.  (Almost every woman he meets is actually willing to have sex with him: Mann, his boss, the bookstore girl, Keener, the transvestite prostitute)  A little bit with Kat Denning, but even she joins team Andy quickly.
Does this challenge represent the hero’s greatest hope and/or greatest fear and/or an ironic answer to the hero’s question?	Greatest hope: get laid, greatest fear: have to hit on women. And it’s ironic that the fear leads to his hope.
Does something inside the hero have a particularly volatile reaction to the challenge?	Very much so.
Does this challenge become something that is the not just hard for the hero to do (an obstacle) but hard for the hero to want to do (a conflict)?	Very much so.
In the end, is the hero the only one who can solve the problem?	Yes and no.  Sometimes it feels like everyone wants to help him more than he wants to help himself, but he does have to work really hard.  Of course there’s sort of a shadow-story going one where he helps and supercedes everybody else (he ends up everybody’s boss)
Does the hero permanently transform the situation and vice versa?	Totally.
The Hook: Will this be marketable and generate word of mouth?
Does the story satisfy the basic human urges that get people to buy and recommend this genre?	Yes, it’s funny and raunchy.
Does this story show us at least one image we haven’t seen before (that can be used to promote the final product)?	It’s interesting: not really, but they came up with an absolutely brilliant poster image  that somehow captured the concept
Is there at least one “Holy Crap!” scene (to create word of mouth)?	Erection scenes, thrown up on, waxing, etc.
Does the story contain a surprise that is not obvious from the beginning?	He falls for a grandmother.
Is the story marketable without revealing the surprise?	Yes.
Is the conflict compelling and ironic both before and after the surprise?	Yes.  Keener is old enough to feel like a more mature choice, but hot enough to (reluctantly) satisfy bro-comedy fans.
PART #2: CHARACTER 19/22
Believe: Do we recognize the hero as a human being?
Does the hero have a moment of humanity early on? (A funny, or kind, or oddball, or out-of-character, or comically vain, or unique-but-universal “I thought I was the only one who did that!” moment?)	Unique-but-universal: erection
Is the hero defined by ongoing actions and attitudes, not by backstory?	Yes, almost entirely.
Does the hero have a well-defined public identity?	The boring creep who may be a serial killer.
Does the surface characterization ironically contrast with a hidden interior self?	He’s a painfully shy virgin
Does the hero have a consistent metaphor family (drawn from his or her job, background, or developmental state)?	Old school: “I’m a gentleman, don’t kiss and tell”, uses words like “accountrement”, inept profanity
Does the hero have a default personality trait?	A downer, lame joker, laughs at own jokes, overly specific in his descriptions
Does the hero have a default argument tactic?	Inept sarcasm
Is the hero’s primary motivation for tackling this challenge strong, simple, and revealed early on?	Yes.  Desperate horniness and loneliness.
Care: Do we feel for the hero?
Does the hero start out with a shortsighted or wrongheaded philosophy (or accept a false piece of advice early on)?	“I respect women.  I love women.  I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them!  I have a very fulfilling life!”
Does the hero have a false or shortsighted goal in the first half?	Not really. He just wants to never change.
Does the hero have an open fear or anxiety about his or her future, as well as a hidden, private fear?	That his secret will be found out. That there’s something really wrong with him.
Is the hero physically and emotionally vulnerable?	Very much so.
Does the hero have at least one untenable great flaw we empathize with? (but…)	He’s shy.
Invest: Can we trust the hero to tackle this challenge?
…Is that great flaw (ironically) the natural flip-side of a great strength we admire?	He’s kind.
Is the hero curious?	Somewhat.  He becomes a dedicated student of what they’re trying to teach him.
Is the hero generally resourceful?	Not really.
Does the hero have rules he or she lives by (either stated or implied)?	Keep your head down, avoid conflict, avoid women.
Is the hero surrounded by people who sorely lack his or her most valuable quality?	Yes, the other characters all seem sleazy by comparison.  Even Trish is much coarser than he.
…And is the hero willing to let them know that, subtly or directly?	Yes. “I’m tired of saying the word ‘pussy’!”
Is the hero already doing something active when we first meet him or her?	Sort of: He bicycles to work.
Does the hero have (or claim) decision-making authority?	Yes and no: He has none at the beginning, but slowly begins to claim it.  He’s the boss of all the other guys by the end of the movie.
Does the hero use pre-established special skills from his or her past to solve problems (rather than doing what anybody would do)?	Just barely: he uses his sleight-of-hand abilities to win over Trish’s daughter.  He uses his online-poker skills to make friends with the guys.
PART #3: STRUCTURE (If the story is about the solving of a large problem) 18/21
1st Quarter: Is the challenge laid out in the first quarter?
When the story begins, is the hero becoming increasingly irritated about his or her longstanding social problem (while still in denial about an internal flaw)?	Yes, he has a permanent erection.  His coworkers find him boring.  He is asked to interact with a female customer and cannot.
Does this problem become undeniable due to a social humiliation at the beginning of the story?	His coworkers find out that he’s a virgin.
Does the hero discover an intimidating opportunity to fix the problem?	They offer to help him get laid.
Does the hero hesitate until the stakes are raised?	He runs out of the store.
Does the hero commit to pursuing the opportunity by the end of the first quarter?	He agrees to go out with them.
2nd Quarter: Does the hero try the easy way in the second quarter?
Does the hero’s pursuit of the opportunity quickly lead to an unforeseen conflict with another person?	The first girl he meets is drunk, endangers him, and throws up on him.
Does the hero try the easy way throughout the second quarter?	He avoids calling Trish, takes all of the guys’ advice, even though it’s contradictory.
Does the hero have a little fun and get excited about the possibility of success?	To a certain extent. He finds that it’s easy and fun to hit on Elizabeth Banks.
Does the easy way lead to a big crash around the midpoint, resulting in the loss of a safe space and/or sheltering relationship?	It’s a very weak midpoint disaster, they set him up with a transsexual prostitute, and he decides to give up on their advice altogether.
3rd Quarter: Does the hero try the hard way in the third quarter?
Does the hero try the hard way from this point on?	Yes, he pursues a relationship with Trish.
Does the hero find out who his or her real friends and real enemies are?	Yes.  He realizes that he’s his own worst enemy
Do the stakes, pace, and motivation all escalate at this point?	To a certain extent.  The third quarter is a little limp, ironically enough.
Does the hero learn from mistakes in a painful way?	Yes.  His conversation with Marla, for example
Does a further setback lead to a spiritual crisis?	Yes, when Trish jumps his bones on the 20th date on a pile of his boxed up toys, he denounces her and flees.
4th Quarter: Does the challenge climax in the fourth quarter?
Does the hero adopt a corrected philosophy after the spiritual crisis?	No, he retreats to his previous personality flaw.
After that crisis, does the hero finally commit to pursuing a corrected goal, which still seems far away?	No, he retreats to his previous goal and tries to get laid by a drunk girl.
Before the final quarter of the story begins, (if not long before) has your hero switched to being proactive, instead of reactive?	Yes, but proactive in a negative way until the last ten minutes.
Despite these proactive steps, is the timeline unexpectedly moved up, forcing the hero to improvise for the finale?	Somewhat: Running back into Banks and getting the chance to have sex with her almost ruins his relationship with Trish.  This is a followed by another escalation that feels very false, in which Trish is bafflingly troubled to discover pornography in his house.  Surely it would make more sense if she had found out about Banks instead?? (True conflict is always better than a misunderstanding!)
Do all strands of the story and most of the characters come together for the climactic confrontation?	Somewhat.  The guys improbably show up at Elizabeth Banks’ house, and send him off to go find Trish.  So Trish never meets the guys, but it all feels like one big finale.
Does the hero’s inner struggle climax shortly after (or possible at the same time as) his or her outer struggle?	Yes, he flies through the billboard and admits the titular problem at the last possible minute.
Is there an epilogue/ aftermath/ denouement in which the challenge is finally resolved (or succumbed to), and we see how much the hero has changed (possibly through reversible behavior)	Yes, he consummates at his wedding.  There’s even a nice moment where he kicks a floor waxer out of their suite, showing his newfound assertiveness.
PART #4: SCENEWORK 19/20 (Andy goes home with a drunk woman from a Bachelorette party)
The Set-Up: Does this scene begin with the essential elements it needs?
Were tense and/or hopeful (and usually false) expectations for this interaction established beforehand?	She grabbed his pants and kissed him.  Then she made him blow into her breathalizer.
Does the scene eliminate small talk and repeated beats by cutting out the beginning (or possibly even the middle)?	Yes, both the beginning and parts of the middle.
Is this an intimidating setting that keeps characters active?	Yes, he’s in a car with a drunk driver.
Is one of the scene partners not planning to have this conversation (and quite possibly has something better to do)?	No, they’re both planning on having this conversation.
Is there at least one non-plot element complicating the scene?	The song she’s singing, her dancing, the contents of her vomit.  Really her whole drama, actually.
Does the scene establish its own mini-ticking-clock (if only through subconscious anticipation)?	Surely she’s going to hit someone eventually.  Also she keeps almost throwing up.
The Conflict: Do the conflicts play out in a lively manner?
Does this scene both advance the plot and reveal character through emotional reactions?	Just slightly on both.  It tells him that he’s doable, but it also confirms all of his other fears about picking up women. He’s humiliated.
Does the audience have (or develop) a rooting interest in this scene (which may sometimes shift)?	At first we want him to have sex no matter what, but we gradually decide, along with him, that it’s not worth it.
Are two agendas genuinely clashing (rather than merely two personalities)?	He wants to get laid, and so does she, but she really just wants to work out her anger at her friend and the guy she’s marrying.
Does the scene have both a surface conflict and a suppressed conflict (one of which is the primary conflict in this scene)?	Surface conflict: Drive better / don’t tell me how to drive. Suppressed conflict: Are all women like you? Why are men all jerks?
Is the suppressed conflict (which may or may not come to the surface) implied through subtext (and/or called out by the other character)?	”Let me tell you something, Andy, don’t ever be named Dan.”
Are the characters cagy (or in denial) about their own feelings?	He’s pretending to be comfortable, she’s pretending that she’s not furious at her friend and ex.
Do characters use verbal tricks and traps to get what they want, not just direct confrontation?	He just tries to grab the wheel, but she tries to trap him into complimenting her.
Is there re-blocking, including literal push and pull between the scene partners (often resulting in just one touch)?	Just one touch: she kisses him.
Are objects given or taken, representing larger values?	He blows into her breathalyzer, she throws up on him.
The Outcome: Does this scene change the story going forward?
As a result of this scene, does at least one of the scene partners end up doing something that he or she didn’t intend to do when the scene began?	He turns her down.
Does the outcome of the scene ironically reverse (and/or ironically fulfill) the original intention?	Yes, he turns her down.
Are previously-asked questions answered and new questions posed?	Previously: Will he seal the deal? New: What will he tell the guys?
Does the scene cut out early, on a question (possibly to be answered instantly by the circumstances of the next scene)?	It cuts out early, but on an answer, not a question.
Is the audience left with a growing hope and/or fear for what might happen next? (Not just in the next scene, but generally)	We are increasingly fearful that he will never have sex.
PART #5: DIALOGUE 16/16
Empathetic: Is the dialogue true to human nature?
Does the writing demonstrate empathy for all of the characters?	Yes.
Does each of the characters, including the hero, have a limited perspective?	Very much so.
Do the characters consciously and unconsciously prioritize their own wants, rather than the wants of others?	Very much so.  Each man’s advice is hopelessly tainted by his own failings.
Are the characters resistant to openly admitting their feelings (to others and even to themselves)?	Very much so.
Do the characters avoid saying things they wouldn’t say and doing things they wouldn’t do?	Very much so.  The way in which his secret comes out is painful and realistic each time.
Do the characters interrupt each other often?	Yes.
Specific: Is the dialogue specific to this world and each personality?
Does the dialogue capture the jargon and tradecraft of the profession and/or setting?	Yes.
Are there additional characters with distinct metaphor families, default personality traits, and default argument strategies from the hero’s?	Metaphor families: Jay: Street “Listen, you don’t want no baby-mama-drama.”  Cal and David, not so much.  One problem with the improvised dialogue is that these friends just talk like they do in real life, and sound very similar. Personality traits: Cal: laid back, David: friendly, lovelorn, Jay: salacious, oversharing, Argument strategies: Cal: defers but rolls his eyes and speaks up later, David: self-deprecating honest, Jay: Gets philosophical and emphatic (You’re putting the pussy on a pedestal) doesn’t take no for an answer.
Heightened: Is the dialogue more pointed and dynamic than real talk?
Is the dialogue more concise than real talk?	Yes.
Does the dialogue have more personality than real talk?	Yes.
Are there minimal commas in the dialogue (the lines are not prefaced with Yes, No, Well, Look, or the other character’s name)?	Yes.
Do non-professor characters speak without dependent clauses, conditionals, or parallel construction?	Yes.  Apatow’s reliance on improv gives the dialogue an astonishing degree of verisimilitude.
Are the non-3-dimensional characters impartially polarized into head, heart and gut?	Yes, Cal: head (he’s a novelist), David: heart, Jay: Gut
Strategic: Are certain dialogue scenes withheld until necessary?
Does the hero have at least one big “I understand you” moment with a love interest or primary emotional partner?	Trish proposes waiting on sex.
Is exposition withheld until the hero and the audience are both demanding to know it?	Yes. Info about Trish comes out slowly, for instance.
Is there one gutpunch scene, where the subtext falls away and the characters really lay into each other?	Yes, a few.
Part #6: Tone 9/10
Genre: Does the story tap into pre-established expectations?
Is the story limited to one genre (or multiple genres that are merged from the beginning?)	Yes, the romantic comedy / sex-comedy
Is the story limited to sub-genres that are compatible with each other, without mixing metaphors?	Yes, it combines a very atypical coming-of-age story (in that the man coming of age is 40) with the rising genre of “bro-comedy”
Does the ending satisfy most of the expectations of the genre, and defy a few others?	Yes, he gets laid, but in a very non-bro way: after marrying a grandma.
Separate from the genre, is a consistent mood (goofy, grim, ‘fairy tale’, etc.) established early and maintained throughout?	Yes, good humor. Apatow is plenty dirty, but he distinguishes himself from Phillips and McCay by having a laid-back benevolent vibe.  My favorite example of this is the way the waxer winces and laughs in sympathy.  She neither ignores nor enjoys the pain.  Everybody feels real and gets to be as sympathetic as possible.
Framing: Does the story set, reset, upset and ultimately exceed its own expectations?
Is there a dramatic question posed early on, which will establish in the audience’s mind which moment will mark the end of the story?	Very much so: When will he finally have sex.
Does the story use framing devices to establish genre, mood and expectations?	No.
Are there characters whose situations prefigure various fates that might await the hero?	Yes. The three guys all represent various fates.
Does foreshadowing create anticipation and suspense (and refocus the audience’s attention on what’s important)?	Not at all.  One problem with the improvisatory process is that they have no good idea where it’s going, so they can’t hint at it.  (No hint of her kids before they’re revealed, no hint of Jay’s girlfriend’s pregnancy, etc.)  On the DVD, they point out that the crew was baffled that the movie cut together, because they shot literally 1 million feet of film without much of a plan.
Are reversible behaviors used to foreshadow and then confirm change?	Very much so: He watches “Survivor” with his neighbors every week and then misses it for the date, etc.
Is the dramatic question answered at the very end of the story?	Yes.  The movie ends one minute after it’s answered.
PART 7: THEME 14/14
Difficult: Is the meaning of the story derived from a fundamental moral dilemma?
Can the overall theme be stated in the form of an irreconcilable good vs. good (or evil vs. evil) dilemma?	Respect for women vs. need for sex, self-sufficiency vs. co-dependent love.
Is a thematic question asked out loud (or clearly implied) in the first half, and left open?	“I respect women.  I love women.  I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them! I have a very fulfilling life!” Later, about his action figures: “They lose their value when you take them out of the box!”
Do the characters consistently have to choose between goods, or between evils, instead of choosing between good and evil?	Yes: Accept a drunk ride or lose out on chance to have sex, cover for a cheating friend, etc.
Grounded: Do the stakes ring true to the world of the audience?
Does the story reflect the way the world works?	Very much so.  It’s so rare to see a movie about people who actually have jobs!
Does the story have something authentic to say about this type of setting (Is it based more on observations of this type of setting than ideas about it)?	Yes.  This feels like a very real stereo store, including petty sales commission battles, etc.
Does the story include twinges of real life national pain?	Just a little bit.  Their south Asian coworkers mention 9/11, etc.  Jay says “That’s my third strike!”  (They cut out that Cal was writing an Iraq war novel)
Are these issues and the overall dilemma addressed in a way that avoids moral hypocrisy?	Yes.
Do all of the actions have real consequences?	Yes, once you take gentle physics into account.
Subtle: Is the theme interwoven throughout so that it need not be discussed often?
Do many small details throughout subtly and/or ironically tie into the thematic dilemma?	Yes: the action figures still in the boxes represent virginity, the bike represents immaturity, etc.
Are one or more objects representing larger ideas exchanged throughout the story, growing in meaning each time?	Just a little bit: the action figures, the box of porn, though I don’t know if they grow in meaning
Untidy: Is the dilemma ultimately irresolvable?
Does the ending tip towards one side of the thematic dilemma without resolving it entirely?	Respect for women and need for sex remain equally important, self-sufficiency is not as good as co-dependent love.
Does the story’s outcome ironically contrast with the initial goal?	Yes, he finds sex but only by marrying a grandmother.
In the end, is the plot not entirely tidy (some small plot threads left unresolved, some answers left vague)?	Yes, the other guys’ relationships remain vague.
Do the characters refuse (or fail) to synthesize the meaning of the story, forcing the audience to do that?	Yes.  He never says what he learned.

Final Score: 113 out of 122

Sunday, I promise!

All is well, still running behind...

Delayed!

Sorry, folks, but family illness has delayed this week’s checklist.  Hopefully up tomorrow...

Rulebook Casefile: Big Decisions and the Midpoint Disaster

We’ve spent the week discussing the rule that every story should have six painful decisions, spaced out fairly evenly throughout the story. (I’ve decided that it should definitely be “decisions” and not “dilemmas”, because dilemmas don’t imply action, and the story is stronger if the hero is forced to act in these situations.)

Yesterday, a commenter asked about how these painful decisions mapped onto the midpoint disasters that most stories have. (Of the 17 checklist movies we’ve done, only two, Do the Right Thing and How to Train Your Dragon, don’t really have midpoint disasters) The answer is that it varies. Usually the disaster is not the result of a poor decision, and even when it is, it tends to be a decision that the hero did not see as painful when he or she made it.

In many, the disaster is the consequence of a correct-but-poorly-executed decision:

• Alien: The captain is killed while trying to kill the alien.
• Casablanca: Rick’s club is trashed because he helped Victor
• In Raising Arizona, the disaster comes after one of Hi’s only right decisions: the rejection of his brother-in-law’s wife-swapping plan.
• The Shining: Danny and then Jack investigate Room 237
• Donnie Brasco: Donnie’s wife changes her number because he’s too far in to call her.
• Sunset Boulevard: Joe arrives home from going out with Betty to find that Norma has attempted suicide.
• Star Wars: The Millennium Falcon gets sucked into the Death Star while trying to reach Alderaan.

In some, it’s the consequence of a weak decision that was casually made, rather than painfully fretted over:

• Iron Man: Tony finds out he was wrong to blindly trust Stane
• Bridesmaids: Annie’s attempts to please everybody lead to a series of personal disasters.

In some it takes the form of an early-but-unheeded spiritual crisis:

• An Education: Jenny finds out that they’re all crooks, but accepts that.
• Blue Velvet: Jeffrey hits Dorothy.
• Another from Donnie Brasco: Donny beats up the maître/d.

In one, it’s an external betrayal:

• Silence of the Lambs: Clarice and her boss are taken off the case because Chilton tells Lecter that she’s been lying to him.

In another, a wrong track comes to its bitter end:

• Groundhog Day: Phil’s attempts to seduce Rita fail over and over.

In another, a hero wisely abandons an unsafe space:

• The Bourne Identity: Jason decides to abandon his investigation and leave Paris with Marie in.

Only Sideways has what I would consider to be a clear case of a hero who faces a painful dilemma (Move on from his wife or close the deal with Maya), clearly chooses wrong, and finds out that the results are even more disastrous than he had counted on.

Next week: A new checklist!

Genre Structures, Addendum: Charting the Big Dilemmas

As I searched for the six toughest decisions in the Checklist movies, I played around with rating each one as (in retrospect) either (R)ight, (W)rong, or (U)nclear. The results say some interesting things about genre structures:

Coming-of-age stories tend to be about making bad decisions until the very end:

An Education:

1. W: Accept the come-on? Yes.
2. W: Lie to her parents and go to Oxford with him? Yes.
3. W: Agree to ignore his crimes? Yes.
4. W: Have sex with him? Yes.
5. W: Accept the marriage proposal? Yes.
6. R: Humiliate herself to get back into school? Yes.

In some action films, on the other hand, the hero can make nothing but right decisions:

The Bourne Identity:

1. R: Speak to the lady at the Embassy? No.
2. R: Climb down the wall? Yes.
3. R: Trust Marie? Yes.
4. R: Continue investigating his past after they discover bad things? No.
5. R: Leave Marie and return to Paris? Yes.
6. R: Kill Conklin? No.

Horror movies tend to have a series of wrong decisions followed by a series of right decisions:

Alien:

1. W: Answer the distress signal? Yes.
2. W: Break quarantine? Yes.
3. W: Remove the face-hugger or not? No. (To be fair, they can’t figure out how)
4. R: Kill the alien or try to preserve it for the company? Kill it.
5. R: Blow up the whole ship to kill it? Yes.
6. R: Go back for the cat? Yes.

But other action movies are less clear. We’re never sure in Blue Velvet if Jeffrey’s investigation did anybody any good or not, so we get a lot of ‘U’s:

1. R: Come home to help with the store? Yes.
2. U: Pick up the ear? Yes.
3. U: Investigate it outside the law? Yes.
4. W: What to do when Dorothy finds him there? Have sex with her.
5. W: Hit her when she asks him to? Yes.
6. R: Finally tell Sandy everything when Dorothy shows up? Yes.
7. U: Go confront Frank? Yes.

But then a seemingly straightforward movie like Iron Man gets a lot of ‘U’s, too:

1. R: Agree to build the weapons for the terrorists or let himself be shot? He pretends to agree under false pretense.
2. U: Let Shinzen sacrifice himself so he can escape? Yes.
3. R: Get back into the arms business? No.
4. W: Trust his partner? Yes.
5. U: Take the next step with Pepper she makes herself vulnerable at the fundraiser? Not yet.
6. U: Lie to the press about Iron Man? No.

So does Iron Man feel like an art film?  No, not at all, but Tony is harder to trust than Jason Bourne. We’ve had four Iron Man movies now, and in each one his ethics have turned out to be right for the situation, but we’re never sure if that will always be true.  It looks like Tony’s next two appearances (The Avengers 2 and Captain America 3) will finally pay off the possibility that he might be capable of doing more harm than good.  Once again, Marvel plays the long game.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Have At Least Six Painful Decisions

My new big-deal manager gushed about how much he loved my horror-thriller in order to keep me from signing with another guy, but then as soon as he had locked me down, he told me that he wouldn’t actually send it out because, “Eh, at some point, the story all runs downhill.” Huh? What does that mean? But no clarification was forthcoming. I’ve tried to grasp his point ever since.

Here’s my best interpretation: the hero is fighting the villain, but neither one is really surprising us anymore. The story is locked onto a certain trajectory: there are still lots of exciting things going on, and near-death scrapes, and clever escapes, but these are all obstacles, they aren’t really conflicts. They’re hard to do, but not hard to want to do.

I’ve never stopped struggling with this. Surely, at some point, the hero can finally figure out what to do, right? I realize that the whole story can’t be a straightforward struggle of good vs. evil and still be interesting, but can’t we at least have the players sorted our properly in the final act?

As I’ve redone the 17 stand-alone-story checklists, I’ve focused in on one of the new questions: Does the hero have to face several smaller good-vs.-good or bad-vs.-bad decisions throughout your story. As I’ve been adding these up, I’ve thought about changing to the wording to “Does the hero face at least six tough good-vs.-good or bad-vs.-bad dilemmas spaced out throughout the story” (In screenplay terms, that would be about 15-20 pages.)

The audience wants to play along at home. To a certain extent, watching a hero overcome obstacles is like watching someone else play a videogame, which can be a dreadful experience. When you watch a hero overcome a physical challenge, you might think, “Ooh, I know what I what I would do in that situation,”, but there’s never a satisfying pay-off to that: Either they do what you would have done, and you’re mildly gratified, or they don’t, and you just get frustrated.

What the audience really wants to say is “Ooh, I don’t know what I what I would do in that situation!” Even better is when they follow that up with, “…and I don’t want to know.” That’s when they really start playing along at home.

Let’s look at Alien:

1. Answer the distress signal? (Risk our lives to help people we haven’t met?)
2. Break quarantine? (Risk all of our lives for one friend’s life?)
3. Remove the face-hugger or not? (Risk killing our friend in order to save him?)
4. Kill the alien or try to preserve it for the company? (Risk our ability to make a living for personal safety?)
5. Blow up the whole ship to kill it? (Destroy everything we’ve done for personal safety)
6. Go back for the cat? (Risk my life to save a small creature?)

The dilemmas just keep on coming, and they’re all questions that we wouldn’t want to answer ourselves. And they keep going right up to the end. What if we didn’t have that tough last-minute decision? What if the final act had all been a gung-ho woman-vs.-alien struggle without any more painful dilemmas? It would be inert.

I briefly posted and then postponed a version of this post a few days ago, but a commenter had already said that saving the cat always annoyed him, because it seemed to contribute to the deaths in future films. To me, that only shows the value of the dilemma: you can never be sure if it was worth it, even years later. 

Next time, let’s look at what we can learn about genre structure from looking at the six impossible dilemmas.

The Rest of the Checklists Are Up

UPDATE! So I posted this late last night followed by a discussion of difficult decisions, but awoke up this morning this morning seized by the conviction that I should have delayed and expanded that section, so I’ve deleted it now and I’ll run it next week instead.  Sorry to Ted Cross, who commented on it already, as I had to delete that comment (because it wouldn't make any sense now)  I am re-examining the point you questioned, Ted!

UPDATE #2: Actually, I should throw my question about Ted’s comment to the group: Ted was under the impression that Parker and Lambert died in Alien because Ripley decided to go back for the cat, whereas the way I remember it is that they were already dead when she made that decision.  Which is it?
So the rest of the redone checklists are all posted now, all updated to v5 and better formatted for modern devices:

• An Education
• Alien
• Blue Velvet
• The Bourne Identity
• Bridesmaids
• Casablanca
• Do the Right Thing
• Donnie Brasco
• Groundhog Day
• How to Train Your Dragon
• In a Lonely Place
• Raising Arizona
• Sideways
• Star Wars
• The Shining

As I posted them, I was taking a closer look at the checklist item about having lots of dilemmas, so I’ll discuss that more next week!

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Let it Write Itself

The checklist for Silence of the Lambs has been rewritten for version 5 and reposted in the new format, so let’s look at another rule hidden in this movie...

The scene where Clarice meets Lecter in Silence of the Lambs is a masterpiece of tense and compelling scenework. To understand how great it is, we must remind ourselves of just how weird it is.

Let’s imagine some of the more traditional ways this scene could have gone. An FBI rookie is searching for a serial killer on the loose, so she interviews an imprisoned serial killer to see if he has any tips. The scene needs to be tense and compelling, with a ticking clock, right? Here are the obvious ways to do that…

• The killer is angry, resentful and threatening.
• He refuses to participate, forcing her to push and push to get through to him.
• He doesn’t want her there and keeps demanding that the guards take her away, but she keeps pleading with the guards for more time with him.

That makes for a pretty tense scene right? It writes itself! And it’s probably pretty realistic, too, so that’s even better. But what if we skip over all the obvious sources of tension, ignore the most likely real-life scenario, and instead imagine something totally unexpected?

• This killer is calm, witty and sophisticated.
• He’s happy to have someone to talk to, provided that she’s smart enough to verbally spar with him
• We get an entirely different type of ticking clock: She’s told in advance that he’ll talk as long as possible …until he gets bored. This might seem to be less of a problem than open belligerence, but it turns out to be far more threatening, because she has no choice but to play his games and submit to his interrogations in order to maintain his interest long enough to get some tips.

This is totally counterintuitive, but it works much better. The result may be less realistic, but it’s far more entertaining, fresh, and creepy.

In the DVD extras, Hopkins arrogantly says that no American actor could have played Lecter, because Americans are trained to make their characters organic and understandable, whereas British actors are willing to create characters externally, concerned more with the audience’s psychology than their own. His Lecter is essentially an inhuman devil: we’re not getting inside his head, he’s getting in ours.

To write this sort of scene, you can start with the question, “How would I feel if I’d been locked up for so long?”, which is fine, but it can also work to simply approach the scene externally, asking, “What sort of human monster have we never seen before? How can I create a scene that’s scary in an entirely different way from what the audience would suspect?”

Crucially, Lecter remains three-dimensional and believable, because (novelist) Harris, (screenwriter) Tally, and (actor) Hopkins have given him a clear (albeit demonic) internal logic, but he’s not a character that you would arrive at by putting yourself in this situation, or even by reading the literature on typical serial killers. This story doesn’t “write itself”, because Lecter is an entirely original creation.

Rulebook Casefile: One Power-Packed Scene in Sunset Boulevard

I’m in the process of reposting the Checklist Roadtests with better formatting and rewritten for Checklist v5, along with new thoughts on the movies. The new Sunset Boulevard Checklist is up, so let’s look at  one amazing scene from the beginning which establishes six different necessary elements of a great story, all at once.

Down-and-out screenwriter Joe Gillis is begging a Hollywood producer for work, so the producer (Mr. Sheldrake, a name that Wilder re-used later in The Apartment) calls in his assistant Betty to get the coverage on Joe’s latest script. She comes in to deliver it, not realizing that Joe himself is the other man in the room:

• BETTY: Hello, Mr. Sheldrake. On that Bases Loaded. I covered it with a 2-page synopsis. (She holds it out) But I wouldn't bother.
• SHELDRAKE: What's wrong with it?
• BETTY: It's from hunger.
• SHELDRAKE: Nothing for Ladd?
• BETTY: Just a rehash of something that wasn't very good to begin with.
• SHELDRAKE: I'm sure you’ll be glad to meet Mr. Gillis. He wrote it.
• Betty turns towards Gillis, embarrassed.
• SHELDRAKE: This is Miss Kramer.
• BETTY: Schaefer. Betty Schaefer. And right now I wish I could crawl into a hole and pull it in after me.
• GILLIS: If I could be of any help...
• BETTY: I'm sorry, Mr. Gillis, but I just don't think it's any good. I found it flat and banal.
• GILLIS: Exactly what kind of material do you recommend? James Joyce? Dostoesvsky?
• SHELDRAKE: Name dropper.
• BETTY: I just think pictures should say a little something.
• GILLIS: Oh, you're one of the message kids. Just a story won't do. You'd have turned down Gone With the Wind.
• SHELDRAKE: No, that was me. I said, Who wants to see a Civil War picture?
• BETTY: Perhaps the reason I hated Bases Loaded is that I knew your name. I'd always heard you had some talent.
• GILLIS: That was last year. This year I'm trying to earn a living.

So just in this one small exchange we get:

• The hero’s longstanding personal problem (which he’s aware of): He’s broke and disrespected.
• The hero’s internal flaw (which he’s not fully aware of yet): He’s lost his soul and sold out his talent.
• The hero’s social humiliation: This scene shows the value of the unintentional humiliation. It’s always good to have less open antagonism in a story, so it’s great to have the hero find out what people really think about him accidentally without anybody having to directly confront him. (This is also a way to include the dreaded “Do you know what your problem is” scene in a non-grating way. She doesn’t want to tell him and he doesn’t want to hear, but it simply happens accidentally.)
• An assurance that, even though he’s got big flaws, he still has enough skills to root for. He’s not just a loser. He’s got potential to live up to.
• An early “I understand you” moment with the love interest: Usually this comes much later in the story, but sometimes it comes early and also serves as the social humiliation.
• We even end on a false goal and false statement of philosophy! It’s tempting in these scenes to have the hero be humbled, admit to his flaws, and vow to change over the course of the story, but it’s always better if he tries to reject the criticism and double down on his flaws until much later in the story.

And the fact that all six of these are established in one scene demonstrates another rule: It would be so easy to have six different scenes to establish these six elements. The result would be a screenplay that was clearly too long, but hard to cut down because every element felt essential. The trick is always to hit multiple beats at the same time in one small scene and still feel effortless. As in so many other things, Wilder is the master.

How to Generate an Idea, Addendum: Tweak the Right and Left Simultaneously

As I’ve discussed, I’ve always been a big fan of “24”, despite the nasty assumptions that fuel many of its storylines. I know a lot of people who just can’t stomach this element and they demand to know how I put up with it. I tell them that I like it for the same reason I like Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables”.

Hugo’s novel has an audacious and somewhat cheeky premise: let’s take the ultimate liberal hypothetical and the ultimate conservative hypothetical and combine them into one man.

When liberals advocate humane treatment of poor criminals, they frequently cite the possibility that the accused was just a poor man desperately taking bread to feed his family, but this drives conservatives crazy. “Sure that could happen in theory,” they say, “but it’s never actually the case in real life.”

Conservatives, on the other hand, defend misbehaving members of the upper class in much the same way: They paint the accused as a bold “maker” who probably rose from nothing, had a great business idea, built a factory from scratch and magnanimously took care of its workers, all of whom would be thrown out of work if we peevishly insist on convicting him of some minor infraction. To this, liberals say, “Sure, that’s possible in theory, but it’s never actually happened that way, so let’s not indulge that fantasy.”

If a writer were to simply dramatize one or the other of these powerful myths, the result would be a partisan polemic, acceptable to only one side of the other, and that’s fine, but Hugo’s puckish genius was to smash the thesis and antithesis together, uniting them in a single hero. Jean Valjean is both the man stealing bread to feed his family and the unjustly persecuted factory owner all at once.

The result is both deeply ironic and wildly entertaining, as we watch poor Jean swim his way across an epic sea of troubles, encountering lots of ironic reversals, none of which fully confirm our political prejudices.

And so this brings us back to “24” and another hero known for his seemingly endless struggles. Why do I put up with the ultra-right narratives that so frequently infect the show? Because there are 24 hours in a day, and this plot never stops twisting, so those troubling narratives are constantly colliding head on with equally compelling counter narratives.

In the most recent season of the show, we had the standard right-wing narratives: British Muslim sleeper-agents plot the destruction of London, exploiting foolish Western tolerance, and an Assange-like character denounces imperialism while secretly selling the secrets he hacks to the Chinese. Yes, that’s all offensive to me, but we also had lots of left-wing red-meat tossed in: the terrorists are motivated by wrongful drone deaths, and they hack into those drones to rain death upon London, proving that they’re a terrible idea. We even get an American president forced to submit himself the humiliation of British question time, a longtime fantasy of the left!

So on the one hand I do worry about the effect of dramatizing and affirming various bigoted fantasies, but I love that they’re countered with the sort of left-wing narratives you wouldn’t normally see on TV, and I especially love that the advocates of the other side have my side thrown in their face as part of a program they deeply love and trust.

In other words, as is so often the case, irony makes it all work. Slamming these two counter-narratives against each other creates more narrative power (and fun) than either would have on its own.

Let’s look at one last example: If we combine the last story-starter (Ask “What if It’s All True?”) with this one, we get one of my favorite movies, The Manchurian Candidate.

Once again, this movie takes its premise from a then-current ultra-right conspiracy theory that was deeply offensive to most Americans (the fear that Korean War vets had been brainwashed by the Red Chinese before they were sent home) and yokes it to a far-left narrative (Posh Republican matrons and their McCarthy-ite stooges hate this country even more than the Soviets) Amazingly, the result offended no one and entertained everyone.

So now we have a rule and its two corollaries: One way to tap into the public imagination is to start with a current crazy theory and ask, “What if it’s all true?”, and one way to maximum the irony and fun of that exercise is to slam right and left-wing narratives up against each other.

How to Generate an Idea, Addendum: Ask “What If It’s All True?”

We’ve already covered the topic of tapping into the public imagination. In the original post, I mentioned movies like The Parallax View, Winter Kills and The Package that take some of the most wild-eyed theories about the Kennedy assassination and bring them to life in a lightly-fictionalized way, but now I’d like to dig further into that and create a corollary rule.

Politically, those movies seem to be on somewhat safe ground, because America’s debates about the Kennedy assassination have never been particularly partisan. Many staunchly defend the official lone-gunman story, and many others passionately believe in various conspiracy theories, but no matter how righteous people get, they don’t really get morally offended by the other side.

But here’s the funny thing: Even when you look at some more inflammatory versions of “What if it’s all true?”, you notice that it doesn’t actually matter, because audiences tend not to take offense no matter what.

There’s no better example of this than “House of Cards”. I know a lot of Clinton-loving Democrats who adore this show...and that’s downright weird, because it’s predicated on one simple supposition: What if everything the ultra-right said about the Clintons in the ‘90s turned out to be true? What if they really were soulless Machiavellian psychopaths? What if they really were killing former allies with fake suicides? What if they really were having creepy threesomes with secret-service agents? It’s all there!

It’s funny how much people talk about the show without mentioning the Clinton element, despite the many obvious connections, both in front of and behind the camera: After all, Beau Willimon, the creator of the American version, worked on the 2000 Hilary Senate campaign, and star Kevin Spacey is an occasional F.O.B. (they infamously flew to Africa together on the jet of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein). And yet almost everybody politely declines to note the parallels.

Why is this? I’m not sure. Obviously, the fact that the names and major details were changed makes a big difference. When CBS made a docudrama claiming that Clinton was somehow responsible for 9/11 (“The Path to 9/11”), there was enough outrage to pre-empt it off the air. But a fictionalized version of other allegations, even one that faithfully recreates a lot of very-specific allegations, is seen as harmless.

Actually, because most of my friends are either Democrats or leftists, I don’t actually know how Republicans feel about the show. I assume they like it, but do they? It would be fascinating if they didn’t.

It’s interesting to compare the show to the remake of “Battlestar Galactica”. I wrote here about how that show’s premise seemed to be, “What if everything the far right claimed about Muslims was actually true? What if they really were a unified death-crazed theocratic hive-mind infiltrating all of our institutions in order to eradicate us?” In that case, this was clearly a show aimed at those who didn’t believe that, because it was implicitly asking “Even if that were true, what it be worth abandoning our values in order to defeat them?” And the implied answer was: “No.”

But “House of Cards” isn’t doing anything like that. It’s not, for instance, exaggerating Frank’s horribleness to make the point that he’s still better than the opposition (at least not in the first two seasons.  I haven’t started season 3 yet, so no spoilers!) Spacey, on “The Colbert Report” (the only place I’ve seen him called out on the Clinton parallels), made a half-hearted attempt to say, “Yes, but at least he’s getting legislation through!” but the show itself, to its great credit, has not done that. There is no sense of “Yes, but we need the Frank Underwoods of the world.” He’s just terrible.

So I can only conclude that audiences just don’t care. We may find a particular allegation wildly offensive in real life, but as soon as it gets fictionalized, we’re just ready for the popcorn. One wonders how far you could take this…If they made a fictionalized version of a “9/11 truther” theory, would people accept that? Last year on the Black List, there was a script about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landings. That’s a loony theory that many people find particularly offensive…but would it bother them onscreen? I guess we might find out…

But wait, all of this brings another permutation to mind! Come back tomorrow for yet another similar type of story idea suggested by “Les Miserables”, The Manchurian Candidate, and “24”...

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Plant Solutions as Problems

So I’m hoping that the “Breaking Bad” checklist finally looked good on everybody’s computer, whether desktop or mobile. I’ve been fooling around with the format on these things forever, but I feel like I actually have it down. To celebrate, I’ll be reposting most of the old ones, all of which I’ve updated for Checklist v5. As I do so, I’ll revisit some of them, starting with Iron Man…

The first time I evaluated this movie on the question of hiding plot contrivances with set-up and payoff, I focused on two that it failed to disguise:

• Why does Pepper wait until the sun has gone down (a minute too late) to call Tony and warn him about Stane?
• During Tony’s big fight with Stane, why is Pepper standing in the same spot 10 minutes after the fight began, insuring that she’ll be in danger again when they crash back down to Earth?

But upon re-examining the movie, I decided that I’d been too hard on it. The fact is that plotting action is extremely hard. You don’t just have to work out the story beats, you also have to time them precisely to all the other beats, because of the urgent nature of the situation, and, of course, you have to keep endangering the love interest without making her/him stupid or making the hero seem callous for endangering her/him.

If you’ve ever written action, you know how nearly impossible this is, and it’s all the more frustrating because nobody notices your accomplishment. Nobody ever walked out of an action movie saying, “Wow, they did a great job keeping the intelligent love interest constantly in danger for believable reasons!” They only notice if that isn’t true.

Keeping that in mind, the plotting in Iron Man is actually really elegant, and it demonstrates one trick that I’ve never highlighted before…

When you write an action movie, you have to constantly create impossible death traps and then have the hero get out of them anyway. That’s where the adrenaline rush kicks in. If the problem is within the scope of the hero’s standard skill-set, then it’s not exciting to watch him or her triumph. If, on the other hand, the hero utilizes an escape that’s never even been hinted at, the audience will feel cheated. So the whole job is to quietly set-up a future solution, then trick the audience into forgetting about it just long enough to freak them out about the next big danger…only to have the pre-planted solution unexpectedly pay off.

This is really hard to do, but Iron Man shows how it’s done: If you’re going to plant a solution, make it seem like a problem at the time, so that it won’t occur to the audience that this might come in handy later.

One example is the rescue of Pepper, when Stane catches her downloading files in Tony’s office. Let’s look at the potential ways Pepper could get away…

• Let her slip away easily? No, this lacks suspense, and makes the villain look dumb.
• Have her break a vase over someone’s head? No, this is an old cliché born of the desire to have a woman be good in a fight without any actual fighting skills.
• Have her suddenly busts out some kung-fu moves? I suppose, but it strains credibility when everyday people have fighting skills. Audiences want realistic characters, even in action movies. Not every woman needs to be a fighter in order to be a strong female character. (In fact no character in this movie, male or female, displays any unaided hand-to-hand skills, which is refreshing for an action movie)
• So that means she has to benefit from outside intervention. (Yes, it’s okay for a female character to get rescued every now and then, especially if she got into this by doing something heroic, and she’ll do something heroic as a result.) So who should rescue her? Tony? No, this violates another rule: you have to limit the number of direct confrontations between your hero and your villain, because, we all know that these will be inconsequential confrontations until the end of the movie, and the audience only has so much tolerance for those. Even an action movie can’t be one long direct confrontation.
• So that leaves one option: an unexpected rescuer.

But we can’t have that rescue be totally unexpected, because that would feel like a cheat. So how do you set it up surreptitiously? By introducing the solution as a problem. In addition to dealing with Tony’s outlandish needs throughout the movie, Pepper also has to run interference for him, putting off people like Mr. Coulson, a government agent who keeps meekly requesting a moment of Tony’s time. By making Coulson a persistent annoyance, we don’t notice that he’s being set up to be there to rescue Pepper when the time is right.

(…and even then, it feels like she’s rescuing herself, because she uses her special skill to solve this life-threatening situation: scheduling access to Tony. It just goes to show that any special skill can have a nice pay-off!)

The movie does this again with issue of icing. At the end, when Iron Man fights Iron Monger, it has to be clear that Stane’s armor is more powerful than Tony’s so that we’ll feel that adrenaline rush, but Tony has to defeat Stane anyway in a way that makes sense. Once again the solution was established as a problem: When Tony was first testing out his armor he took it too high and almost died when it iced over. This felt like its own harrowing moment, not a set-up for a later rescue, but it’s the perfect solution to his later problem

(And, yes, this taps into Tony’s special skill: Stane may be able to steal and max-out Tony’s original plans, but he doesn’t have Tony’s insatiable urge to endanger himself and then tinker around to solve the problems he encounters while doing so. Thus Tony has solved the icing problem and Stane hasn’t.)

Storyteller's Rulebook: Combine An Old Generic With A New Specific

One last little neat thing about the “Breaking Bad” pilot. Sometimes things become clichéd for a good reason. Maybe there’s an over-used metaphor that feels tired, but still rings true because life really does feel like that.

This pilot does a good job revivifying an old cliché. While Walt is being told his cancer diagnosis, all he hears is a wooshing sound. We’ve all seen this onscreen before, but it’s worth repeating, because we’ve also all experienced it: hearing bad news in slow motion, and being unable to process it at the time…even if it’s just a lesser form of bad news such as getting dumped.

But this pilot makes the old seem new again by adding a bizarre new very-specific detail. Walt isn’t just fuzzing out, he’s focusing in on a yellow dot on the doctor’s white coat: presumably a drop of mustard from his lunch. Walt finally acknowledges the diagnosis dismissively, then redirects the conversation to a more pressing issue: the stain.

This is great in so many ways: The yellow dot is such a unique image, and it symbolizes both the cancer itself (an unwanted blob) and the general failure of doctors (who wear these white coats to prove how spotless they are, in every sense.) The addition of the bizarrely specific detail nicely revivifies an overused idea.

P.S…

And hey, just for fun, let me tell you my own diagnosis story, which was so different from the version you always see onscreen: I’d had the permanently-swollen lymph-node in my neck tested before, and it had come up benign, so my doctors had told me to forget about it, but I went on WebMD and convinced myself it was advanced Lymphoma, probably of the Non-Hodgkins variety (55% fatal if caught late) but there was a small chance it was Hodgkins (only 25% fatal if caught late).

So I went to an expert on these needle-draws and told him my suspicions. He pulled out some fluid and cheerfully said he could help me out by running the test right away. I sat there in in the cold waiting room as I heard his steps recede down the hall, and then I soon heard the steps come back. He stuck his head in the door and said, “Congratulations, it’s Hodgkins!” then closed the door again and went on his way. Soon the nurse came and told me they needed the room for the next patient. End of diagnosis!

So it just goes to show that there’s always a version you haven’t seen on screen before!

Rulebook Casefile: Everything and the Kitchen Sink in the “Breaking Bad” Pilot

As I mentioned before, it must have been very tempting to end the “Breaking Bad” pilot with Walt’s proposal to Jesse that they cook meth.

After all, Walt starts the pilot so far away from that moment, and it takes so many details to move him towards it (the birthday, getting mocked by the student at the car wash, the cancer diagnosis, getting mocked by Hank, the news story about Hank’s bust, the unexpected reunion with Jesse, etc…) Surely all of that escalation could have filled up the entire pilot.

But the show somehow manages to cram all of those twists into just the first 30 minutes. This leaves creator Vince Gilligan time to fill the second half with a foreshortened version of a typical episode: a drug deal gone wrong, a harrowing brush with death, a chemistry-based solution, and escalating damage control.

What are the advantages? First of all, it ensures that the first half really flies, which is great, because Walt’s life in this section is really frustrating and he’s not really pursuing any goals yet (Or not that we can see...In retrospect, he may have been considering this life change even before his diagnosis.)

Most remarkably, it manages to do so without ignoring small character moments that have nothing to with the plot. In one odd little scene, we see Walt drive home from school in his Aztek and notice the handicapped mirror-hanger. He gets annoyed by it and tries to toss it in his glove compartment, which won’t close, forcing him to bang it over and over. It’s a little 20 second moment, but it goes a long way to assure us that this isn’t just a Rube-Goldberg-contraption of a story mechanistically headed towards one final outcome. (It’s also a nice hint of suppressed frustration with his son’s handicap, despite how admirably he interacts with Walt Jr. the rest of the time)

But the best reason to compress the story is to ensure that the pilot delivers not just the premise, but also the promise of the show. We see how things might go down and go wrong every week, and we see that it’ll be entertaining.

Of course, it should feel ridiculous to move our idealistic school teacher all the way to his first botched drug deal and his first killing on his first day on the job, but the progression of events feels natural enough.  Actually, the final version is even more sped-up than the pilot script.  In the script, Emilio and Crazy-8 show up on the second day of cooking, which makes a lot more sense, but in the finished pilot, they seem to show up on the first day, which implies that Jesse rushed back to town to sell the first batch while the second batch was cooking. Nevertheless, it doesn’t feel that absurd as it goes down.

One neat trick was to have the deal go south instantly because Emilio recognizes Walt from the earlier bust and assumes he’s DEA.  This not only gets Walt into trouble faster, it’s also far more compelling and believable than the lazy version they could have gone with, in which Emilio and Crazy-8 simply come there to kill Walt and steal his product in the first place. It’s always better to have things escalate because of an ironic sequence of events, rather than sheer aggression that doesn’t match the villains’ best interest.

That leaves one last trick, which is something that most pilot writers can’t do: it cheats on the time. The episode takes up a 58 minutes without breaks, which means that, whenever AMC runs it, they have to show it with limited commercials or expand it to 90 minutes, which messes up their schedule.

You might assume that this was because it was developed for HBO or Showtime, but no, it was developed for FX before it made the jump to AMC and FX also has ads. Basically, Gilligan just used the clout that he had accumulated on “The X-Files” to demand special treatment, and he got it.

So don’t try this at home, right? Well, some spec-pilot-writers claim that their pilot is intended for pay-cable, even though they know it’s more likely to find a home on FX or AMC, and they just want more pages. It’s a cheat, but if it gives you the freedom you need to write something as good as “Breaking Bad”, it just might be a cheat you want to take.

Straying from the Party Line: Sacrificing the Other Characters In Favor of the Lead in “Breaking Bad”

The “Breaking Bad” pilot has a big job to do, getting us to like a character with two big empathy holes: The big one, obviously, is that he decides to sell meth, but almost as bad in the eyes in the audience is the fact that he’s such a sad-sack guy until he makes that shocking decision. Yes, the ironic contrast of these two extremes is compelling, but that doesn’t change the fact that neither persona is inherently sympathetic.

One solution, which I talked about before, was to jump ahead in the first scene and give us a preview of the disconnect. To a certain extent, Gilligan borrowed this trick from “The Sopranos” which began with a framing sequence in which Tony was already in therapy, previewing the ironic contrast that would soon define his life.

But this trick couldn’t carry all the weight. Gilligan still had to move heaven and Earth to generate empathy for this weird, passive guy. In order to do so, he borrowed another trick from “The Sopranos”: he made almost everybody else in Walt’s life appear to be absolutely horrid on first blush.

In both “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” we quickly come to feel that the wife is a much better person than her husband, but this is not at all clear in the pilot, where both wives come off as contemptuous users: In the “Sopranos” pilot, Carmela tells Tony that he’s going to hell as he’s sucked into a CAT scan, and in the “Breaking Bad” pilot, Sky gives Walt the world’s most contemptuous handjob for his birthday.

Likewise, in both pilots, we meet everyone else in the anti-hero’s life at their very worst moments. In “Breaking Bad”, we meet Hank as he humiliates Walt at his own birthday party and we meet Marie as she mercilessly mocks her sister. Jesse is somewhat appealing in the pilot, but shows little of the depth or volatility he would eventually accumulate. The only character who doesn’t come off as a jerk is Walt, Jr., but he falls well short of becoming a fully-rounded character in the pilot. (Notably, the pilot has no sub-plots, which is unusual. This is Walt’s story and only Walt’s, at least for now.)

This was a risky choice. A good pilot should usually show empathy for all its characters, but this pilot breaks that cardinal rule. Nevertheless, this strategy paid off. The show was mostly off the radar until it won best actor for Bryan Cranston in a shocking upset after the first season. And it was only when Cranston won again the following year that the show really broke through the cultural conversation. Serving this one character and his arc got the show where it needed to go.

And, for the most part, the show was able to rescue the other characters. If you had told anyone watching this pilot that Hank, Jesse and Marie would be the moral exemplars of the show’s final season, they would be pretty shocked…and especially if you told them that Hank’s heroic death would be one of the most painful TV deaths of all time.

But the show had a harder time turning the audience around on their initial prejudices against Sky and Walt Jr. Infamously, a subset of the audience furiously insisted that Sky’s coldness made her somehow worse than Walt, and it was never easy to empathize with Walt Jr’s perpetual obliviousness, especially once he became the only one left unaware of his father’s true nature.

One reason that it’s usually a bad idea to withhold empathy for the other characters in your pilot is because underwritten roles won’t attract top talent. Indeed, this show was cast with unknowns (whereas most shows have a few TV veterans in the supporting roles) but Gilligan’s eye for talent was simply amazing, especially Aaron Paul, Dean Norris and Betty Brandt as Jesse, Hank, and Marie. And RJ Mitte really does a great job with the very-underwritten role of Walt Jr…

But that once again leaves the question of Anna Gunn as Sky…Was the ongoing refusal to empathize with her on the part of some fans entirely due to the scripts, or was the performance partly to blame? If Sky had been less blandly contemptuous of Walt in the pilot, would the part have attracted a more prominent actress, who might have overcome those issues more quickly as the series progressed?

In the end, I thought Gunn was pretty amazing, and more than met the challenge of this emotionally complex character…but I can’t help but wonder, what if the pilot script had been able to attract a similarly-flinty but more relatable actress like, say, Felicity Huffman?

Ultimately this is the most treacherous rule the pilot broke, and it would create an ongoing challenge for the show, as Gilligan had to race to belatedly ramp up our identification with the initially loathsome ensemble. For the most part he succeeded, but many would feel even at the end that show never quite overcame this empathy imbalance, and this was one of the few knocks on an otherwise-beloved show.

Straying from the Party Line: The Lack of Hard Choices in “Breaking Bad”

On “Breaking Bad” Walter White is facing a terrible situation and he has nothing but bad choices ahead of him, but here’s the thing: they aren’t really hard choices, and that’s very unusual, because most stories are driven by a series of hard choices.

We cancer victims get a lot of credit for being heroic, but this isn’t really true, because heroes are defined by heroic choices, and we don’t really get to make any choices whatsoever. The medical gears that grind us up were set in motion long ago, and they’ll keep spinning long after we come out the other side, whether alive or dead.

Pretty much the only decision we’re allowed to make is whether or not we want to ignore our doctors entirely, and that’s kind of a no-brainer...unless you’re Walter White.

On most shows, even if they’re about unlovable leads, the lead’s bad behavior seems to be necessitated by the impossible decisions they have to make. Jack Bauer and Dr. House are sociopathic in pursuit of their goals, but they get results, dammit! Their unsympathetic behavior allows them the clarity they need to get the job done.

But this is not true at all of Walter White. Yes, he’s desperate for money and treated unfairly by the system, but the decisions he makes are unquestionably wrong. This show is about a man who comes to the breaking point and chooses to break bad, even though it was still possible to break good.

Walt could have just meekly submitted to the process and made the most of his final years with his family, and everybody would have been much happier with the result. Yes, they would have less money, but as Walt soon discovers (and as we can already guess in the pilot) nobody wants drug money anyway. It’s just a really stupid decision.

The wrongness of Walt’s decision becomes even more pointed in the fourth episode when we find out that Walt does have a lawful option for paying his medical debts: his wealthy former business partner is willing to pay for his treatment, but Walt is simply too proud and resentful to accept. Gilligan is keen to drive home that Walt isn’t making the best of this bad situation, he’s making the worst of it.

This was a shocking and brave storytelling choice. This show isn’t going to get you rooting for the bad guy. You’ll be empathetic towards his situation, but you’ll never really empathize with his decisions, because Walt’s decisions aren’t really tough, he just chooses to make them tough. Yes, he’s in a bad vs. bad situation, but he’s clearly choosing the greater of two evils. 

So why does this work? Why aren’t we exasperated by Walt’s willful destruction of his life, even in the face of better options...especially after episode four? Well, we are, but we keep watching anyway. Why?

I think part of the answer is the fact that the show never settles down to a rhythm. Unlike “24” or “House”, “Breaking Bad” never wrapped one story and moved on to the next, so we never had to stop and tabulate the moral calculus in hopes of balancing the books. Just about every decision made things worse, so the entire show became one long downward spiral without any satisfying wrap-ups along the way. Everything was a cliffhanger for five brutal seasons.

This was a trade-off, because it meant that the show couldn’t go for eight seasons, as those others did. In the end, Gilligan stretched Walt’s story out as far as he possibly could, but Walt could only circle the drain for so long until he finally went down.

Was the trade-off worth it? Absolutely.

This show had a lot in common with “The Shield” (FX developed it as a companion show), which did have the courage to portray a truly irredeemable anti-hero on a downward spiral of his own, but Vic Mackey was ultimately more similar to Jack Bauer and Doctor House than Walter White. Sure, he was evil, but he also got a lot of killers and child molesters off the streets, so it was always portrayed as kind of a wash.

In pilot-writing class in film school, I worked on a pilot about a crooked prosecutor who specialized in convicting the innocent. My fellow students were horrified. Who would watch such a show? Well, I said, people watch “The Shield” so they’ll watch shows about evil law enforcers, right? I got blank stares. Then every single one of them said that, as opposed to my anti-hero, what Vic did was ultimately worth it. Now it was my turn to be baffled. Had they forgotten the end of the pilot, in which Vic killed a good cop who was about to catch him dealing drugs? How could that be worth it?? Eh, they shrugged, maybe Vic’s actions weren’t ultimately worth it, but in most episodes, his actions felt right, and that’s what kept them watching.

This is the moral hazard that Gilligan avoided with “Breaking Bad”, Walt’s actions never felt right, and yet we kept watching anyway. This was a genuine descent into evil. Walt had lots of motivation, but no justification, and that was where this show excelled above all the other anti-hero shows, dramatically and ethically. Gilligan crafted a totally-compelling anti-hero without ever letting us cheer for his bad behavior (or not for long, anyway).

This was a very worthwhile goal and the ultimate writing challenge. Next week, we’ll look at more tricks he used to make it work...

Storytellers Rulebook: Save Your Flashforwards For Stories With (Initially) Passive Heroes

I can be a bit of a flashforward addict in my own writing, which puts me in good company, because TV is chock-full of flashforwards these days. But too often these openings are just baffling and dizzying, adding sensation at the expense of sense. There was no better example of this than the all-sizzle no-steak pilot for “How to Get Away With Murder.”

But are there times when it’s actually beneficial or even downright necessary to have a flashforward? Yes, and one of the greatest openings of all time shows us how and why.

In the opening moments of the “Breaking Bad” pilot, we see lots of bizarre imagery: a pair of khaki slacks flutters across a desert sky as a man in tighty-whiteys and a gas-mask crashes an RV that has dead bodies in the back, then makes a tearful video apologizing to his family and prepares to shoot the cops that seem to be following him. Whoa.

That’s a great opening, but was it necessary? Yes. To see why, let’s contrast it with the un-necessary flashforward opening of “How to Get Away With Murder”, in which the heroes cover up a murder at some point in the future. What would happen if the “HTGAWM” pilot had skipped this sequence? It still could been plenty exciting because there are two other unrelated murder mysteries in the same episode and the show could easily have started with either of those in real time...or it could simply have begun in Viola Davis’s high-pressure classroom, which creates more than enough tension on its own without the need of any promise of more shocks to come.

On the other hand, what if “Breaking Bad” had skipped its own shocking flashforward opening? Then what would we have? We would spend our first act with a sad-sack middle-aged guy, moping his way though life, unenthused by his job, wife, son or unborn baby girl. Of course, there’s a hell of an inciting incident waiting at the end of Act 1, when he finds out he has cancer, and the story quickly escalates after that, but would we ever get there?

As a general rule, main characters need to be proactive people who are already pursuing minor goals even before they encounter the big new goal that will drive this story. Of course, some stories get away with breaking this rule, but they have to do so expertly. Basically, they have to promise the audience, “Sure, this hero seems less-than-compelling at this point, but just wait, it gets better!” The best way to do this is with a quick teasing glimpse of the excitement to come.

Most heroes are born active, but others have activity thrust upon them, as is the case with Walter White. We would be hard-wired to reject Walter and stop watching during the first 15 minutes if we hadn’t been promised that this guy would soon become far more engaged. For once this was a show that really needed that flashforward.