The 15 Minutes Project #10: Dave Chappellet in Downhill Racer

Any hero can win our sympathy by saving cats, but what if the writer wants us to like a jerk? This week, we’ll try to figure out why we care about certain heroes, even through they’re jerks...

Dave Chappellet in Downhill Racer:

1. Opening montage: ski lift cable, shots of snowy mountain, scared skiers above, anxious fans below. A cameraman who looks like a sniper. Tense action movie music kicks in.
2. Coach Claire (Gene Hackman) waits halfway down the course with a stopwatch, looking intense…
3. An American skier makes an amazing run down the mountain as the credits roll, but near the bottom, the skier wipes out spectacularly.
4. Claire looks sick at the news. Helicopter comes in and takes the skier away.
5. Claire sees his skier in the hospital, looks worried.
6. Dave Chappellet (Robert Redford) arrives at a European airport, but there’s no one there to meet him. He clearly doesn’t understand Europe.
7. Chappellet and another new recruit, D. K. take the train. Chappellet is awkward getting through the train with his skis. He roughly takes a sandwich and a drink from porter.
8. They arrive outside his hostel. D. K. heads in immediately, but Chappellet pauses to look up at each mountain, takes a deep breath and smiles…
9. Chappellet arrives at the front desk, where Claire is on the phone, arguing about a reservation. Claire sees Chappellet and D. K., says he’s glad they got together, but they haven’t, really. Guy goes over to shake the hand of the other skiers, ignores Chappellet. Claire finally shakes Chappellet’s hand but has no time for him.
10. Chappellet checks into his room with D. K. He’s baffled by the bidet. D. K., trying to friendly, chuckles and asks, “You know what that is?” Chappellet sullenly lies, “Yeah,” and leaves.
11. Chappellet gets in bed, asks where he knows the other skiers from. D. K. says “Dartmouth. I was one of the Olympic hopefuls. I was hopeful, not them.” Chappellet mutters “Dartmouth” to himself, in disgust.
12. The next day, they all put their skis on the the van. The big guy introduces himself, “Chappelet, I’m Johnny Creach.” Chappellet responds, “Yeah, I know.”
13. Claire and his assistant time the skiers. One goes through and the assistant says “Not bad”. Claire grunts, “Too much style” The assistant says “Who’s next, Chappellet?” Chappellet skis.
14. Claire, shocked, asks what time his assistant has. The assistant says 28:08. Claire smiles, “That’s what I have.”
15. The next day Claire hands out the bibs that tell the skiers what order they’re going to race. He gives Chappellet a starting number of 88, and apologizes that he’s so far back. Chappellet says that he’ll be in ruts up to his knees. “What’s the point of even racing?” “Same as always, try to win,” Claire says.
16. Cut to back at the room, Chappellet refused to race. D. K. asks why, Chappellet explains that he was seeded too far back. D. K. says he should have raced. Chappellet expresses annoyance that he has to call him “D. K.” which sounds too preppy-ish for his tastes.
17. They take a train to the next meet. Chappellet watches the press gather around the star and looks jealous.
18. Everybody gets their bibs. Claire gives Chappellet a similar number and teases him about it.
19. Chappellet races and does great. Claire is pleased, despite himself.

Chappellet is a surly jerk, a bad sport, and a guy who expects acclaim before he proves himself. We should hate him, but we don’t, entirely. Why? Americans are never supposed to mention class resentments, but we all feel them, so we certainly identify with that, as well as the universal feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. And it helps that he’s really quite handsome, of course. And that he keeps winning.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a daring movie that pushes our sympathy to its limits, and forces us to admit that what we actually admire doesn’t always match was we should admire. Still, it’s worth noting that the movie does use subtle tricks to ensure that we’ll feel some genuine sympathy.

Underrated Movie #139: Love Me Tonight

Title: Love Me Tonight

Year: 1932

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Writers: Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young and George Marion, Jr, based on a play by Leopold Marchand and Paul Armont, with delightful songs by Rodgers and Hart

Stars: Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Charlie Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, Myrna Loy, C. Aubrey Smith

The Story: A poor but happy-go-lucky Paris tailor decides that he must track down a deadbeat client at a grand country estate. While there, the tailor falls in love with his client’s royal sister.

How it Came to be Underrated: MacDonald and Chevalier were wildly popular for a short time, but their light-operetta style started to seem very old-fashioned and their fame faded quickly, which is ironic, since the movie seems so startlingly modern today.

Why It’s Great:

1. If you were to poll the general public about the greatest musicals of all time, this wouldn’t crack the Top 50, simply because many haven’t heard of it, but a good number of film historians would put this all the way up near number one, making this one of the most underrated movies ever. No other musical has done such a great job capturing the infectious joy of song. Chevalier the tailor cheerily bounces through Paris singing, “Isn’t It Romantic.” Soon, a passing taxi driver starts singing the same tune… The tune then passes to his fare, who passes it to an army troupe, who march through the countryside singing it, where it finally makes its way to the ear of a lonely princess looking wistfully out her window... Inevitably, of course, this bond of song will bring these two together. It’s one of the joyous sequences ever shot.
2. Experimental filmmakers at the time were having some success making feature-length montages of city life called “City Symphonies” Mamoulian takes this concept and makes it literal: In the opening shot, a long workman with a pickaxe emerges onto the streets of Paris in the morning and begins a rhythmic clanking, then he’s joined by shopowners sweeping the streets, maids beating carpets, cobblers nailing on heels, cascading car horns, babies wailing, laundry whipping in the wind, etc. Each sound is transformed from a nuisance into something beautiful as they all blend together. Every moment in this movie is a pure unadulterated delight.
3. Why did musicals becomes so artificial after this? Once musical production units split off from the rest of the studio system, they prided themselves on attracting the best dancers and choreographers from Broadway, who expected indoor work, elaborate lighting, and a proscenium arch. Mamoulian will have none of that. Rather than cut away to “musical sequences” this whole movie hums to life.
4. The movie is wonderfully naughty. Mamoulian was one of those directors that enjoyed the lawless pre-code days so much that he never was never quite able to reach the same heights under the puritan strictures of the Hays Code. He was most often compared to Lubitsch, who did a better job adjusting his level of subtlety to fit the new system that came in from 1934 on.
5. But as indebted as he is to Lubitsch, Mamoulian also looks ahead to the mapcap post-modern absurdity of Frank Tashlin: Chevalier slows down the film stock when it suits him. Angry sculptures of ancestors sing about how disappointed they are by their descendants. There are no rules here, and it’s thrilling.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Besides this and Queen Christina, Mamoulian’s other pre-code triumphs Applause, and Jekyll and Hyde. One of his best post-code movies was The Mark of Zorro.

How Available Is It?: There’s an excellent Kino DVD with an in-depth commentary by Mamoulian protege Miles Kreuger.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Cross Country Girl Hunt!

Rulebook Casefile: The Structure of Problem Solving

So, funny story: I’m coming up on a deadline soon. Everything was going well, but now, about halfway through, the whole story has suddenly fallen apart. I can’t keep going because the characters’ actions don’t make any sense to me anymore. Naturally, I’m starting to freak out. Why is this happening?? Even worse: I’ve started to notice that this always happens to me halfway through writing a script. Why does everything fall apart at the midpoint??

Then I take a step back, and I start to laugh.

I’m sure you’re way ahead of me at this point, but let’s examine what ALWAYS happens when I get a writing assignment:

1. At first, I find myself with no upcoming projects. I try to blame the economy but then I hear that a peer has just gotten a fat paycheck, or ever worse, an onscreen credit. I feel humiliated.
2. Then the phone rings. My manager has an offer from a producer—but the project seems really sketchy… Maybe three writers have quit already, or the book seems unfilmable, or the producer’s take on the material seems bizarre… I’m dubious.
3. But my baby plaintively cries from the other room, and the student loan bills pile up. I realize I must seize this opportunity…
4. I write a fun, breezy outline for the story. The producer loves it. I commit.
5. Almost immediately, I start to run into conflict. The characters resist doing what I want them to do, and the plot details play out awkwardly on paper, but I breeze past these difficulties, doing spot fixes here and there to paper over the problems.
6. Soon, I’m having fun! This is easy! This is why I became a screenwriter! I’m writing my requisite five pages a day, every day! Clearly I’ve turned my life around. I begin to dream up all the future projects I’ll write with this newfound ability to pound pages out.
7. And then, all of a sudden, the pages stop! I hit a brick wall! Everything falls apart! I’ve torqued my characters’ motivations a little bit too far, until they shatter like glass! Nobody will do what I want them to do anymore. Now that I’m approaching the second half where I have to apply some pressure to my characters, all of those little spot fixes erupt again, and gaskets are blowing everywhere. All is lost!
8. What do I do? I face the unthinkable: that beautiful outline, the one that the producer signed off on… is the problem. It was a false goal. I have to throw away the map, which was based on false assumptions. I have to deal with every aspect of the story that I was afraid to face before… Is it worth it?
9. Then I notice the date! The deadline is in one week! There’s no time to despair, I’ve got to fix this!
10. And maybe, just maybe, it’s not so bad... Now that I’ve written a bunch of dialogue and gotten to know my characters, I can take a step back and figure out the theme. I slowly realize what this story is really all about...
11. I fix the first half and then write a better outline for the second half. I’m finally pursuing the correct goal…
12. Now I’m ready to start writing pages again… But can I possibly do it in time? I’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there!
13. I pull all-nighters. I open my veins and pour real emotion onto the page. I feel exhausted but cleansed.
14. I turn it in one minute before the deadline! But is it good enough to feed my starving baby?? The next day, my family and my reps all come together to gather around the phone, waiting for the verdict from the producer…

The point is that we’ve seen this structure before, haven’t we? As I said before, this isn’t just the structure of a screenplay, it’s the basic structure for solving any big problem, including… writing a screenplay! I’ve proven to myself that my structure is universal, in the most ironic way possible.

The 15 Minutes Project #9: Jake Gittes in Chinatown

Actually, Jerk Week is next week, but here’s a one-day preview...

Jake Gittes in Chinatown

1. Old fashioned art deco opening credits, muted trumpet plays...
2. Working class husband looks at photos Gittes took of his wife having an affair. Gittes looks somewhat sympathetic, but eventually rolls his eyes: “Alright, Curly, enough’s enough. You can’t eat the Venetian blinds, I just had them installed on Wednesday.
3. [Missing lines about how you can’t kill a guy unless you’re rich.]
4. Meets the fake Mrs. Mulwray, who says her husband is having an affair. Gittes says, as deadpan as possible, “No. Really.” He insists that she’s better off not knowing.
5. He asks her husband’s first name. “Hollis.” Gittes immediately responds, “Water and Power??” He tries more powerfully to get her to drop it, but she won’t.
6. Gittes attends a hearing about a new dam, sees Hollis Mulwray speak: He explains that he signed off on a dam that gave way. He sees the same problem here, and he won’t okay it this time. Ranchers bring their sheep into the hall to complain about how their water was stolen, accuse Mulwray of stealing their water.
7. Gittes watches Mulwray drive out into a dry riverbed and look around.
8. He then watches Mulwray drive out to the ocean where a metal pipe is pointing off a cliff. Gittes climbs into the pipe to hide.
9. After the sun sets, Gittes suddenly has to jump out of the pipe as water pours out!
10. Gittes sees that Mulwray isn’t going anywhere, so he goes back to his car, finds a flyer under the windshield: Los Angeles is dying of thirst, vote Yes!
11. He opens his glove compartment, revealing a dozen stopwatches. He sets one to the current time. He sets it behind a back wheel of Mulwray’s car and leaves.
12. In the morning, his operative brings him the watch, smashed and frozen at the time Mulwray pulled away. The op explains that Mulwray was there all night. Then he followed Mulwray around all day, arguing with people about the dam. He hands Gittes a fixer tray where he’s just printed photos of Mulwray arguing with someone (John Huston).
13. Gittes, nattily dressed as always, shakes the fixer chemicals off his hands in disgust. “This is what you spent your day doing?? Let me explain something to you, this job requires a certain finesse.” The other op calls: “I got it, he’s found himself some cutie. They’re in Echo Park.” Gittes hangs up: “Echo Park. Water again.”
14. Gittes’s op rows him around the park’s lake. Mulwray rows by with a teenage girl in a pretty dress.
15. Gittes climbs the roof of Gittes’s house and gets photos of the Mulwray and the girl: She tries on a dress for him and he kisses her gently. He slips and almost gets caught, but gets away…
16. Unexpectedly, the photos are on the front page of the paper the next day. As Gittes gets shaved, the barber congratulates him for being so famous. A car overheats out on the street for lack of water. A mortgage banker in the next chair is disgusted at how Gittes makes his living. Gittes responds: “Listen, pal, I make an honest living. People only come to me when they’re in a desperate situation. I help ‘em out. I don’t kick families out of their houses like you bums down at the bank do!” The barber tries to distract him with a dirty joke about how the Chinese screw their wives.
17. It apparently worked because Gittes comes back to his office and insists on telling the joke to his operatives. First he ushers his secretary to the restroom so she won’t hear it, then tells the dirty joke. His operatives, with embarrassment, point out that Faye Dunaway is standing behind him waiting for him. She reveals that she is the real Evelyn Mulwray.

Thoughts:

1. In re-watching this, I realized that Gittes isn’t actually that much of a jerk if you just look at his words and actions, but Nicholson chooses to play him with an apathetic sneer—a daring choice for an actor to make. (Actors usually try to make characters more appealing than they are on the page.)
2. One thing that I’ve noticed in my own scripts is that it’s hard to write stalking scenes well. Spying on someone in real life is terrifying and tense, but onscreen it’s hard to capture that tension. To solve this problem, Towne keeps endangering Gittes. Gittes is in the pipe that the water comes out of. Later, he almost falls off the room while taking photos of Mulwray.
3. This is one of those rare scripts where theme is more important than character. Few of these scenes move the character of Gittes forward, but they almost all move the theme forward. The theme revolves around a bad vs. bad dilemma: drought vs. stealing water. Every scene hits this theme hard, which is rare for a first act. Even the barbershop has a car running out of water outside.

Rulebook Casefile: Withholding the True Statement of Philosophy in Chinatown

In Step 9 of my Compelling Character series, I talked about the popular misconception that a hero should offer an overriding statement of philosophy on page 5 or so. I think it works better when the actions of a movie force a hero to arrive at a true statement of philosophy on page 90 or so. If you they offer an such a statement on page 5, it should be false, something like, “I stick my neck out for no one.”

An interesting example of this is in Chinatown. In the first scene, detective Jake Gittes has just shown a working class client named Curly pictures of his wife having an affair, then told Curly he should probably forget about it. In the finished movie, we cut away from the scene to the office outside, where the secretary waits, then Gittes and Curly emerge with Curly explaining that he can’t pay right away. Gittes says he understands, but he was just trying to make a point.

Huh? What point? Did we miss something? Yes we did. The missing chunk of dialogue from Robert Towne’s original screenplay reveals all:

Why was this cut? I think it was because the filmmakers belatedly realized that Gittes couldn’t say this yet because it’s a correct statement of philosophy. If Gittes already understands this, then he has no arc.

The whole point of the movie is for Gittes and the audience to learn this. The movie will show this to us, so they don’t need to tell us as well. Like many screenwriters, Towne was giving the game away too soon by giving Gittes a correct statement of philosophy in the very first scene.

If they had caught this problem in the script phase, they could have re-written it so that Gittes offers an incorrect statement of philosophy instead, but they didn’t, so they just chopped out the middle of the scene in the editing room. As you’ll see in tomorrow’s First 15 Minutes round-up of the movie, Gittes doesn’t get a false statement of philosophy until much later in the movie.

The Ultimate Checklist: UPDATED

Hey gang, follow this link to discover an expanded and updated version of the Ultimate Movie Checklist. There are many more items on the list, most of which link to recent entries, and more of the older list items have had links added as well. Plus, I’ve added a download link at the bottom, so that you can get the checklist in MS Word doc format, if that’s useful to you. I won’t always announce it, but I’ll keep updating the checklist as needed. Enjoy.

(And I am slowly preparing to try and pitch it as a book, so if that sounds like something you’d like to buy, feel free to mention that in the comments, as said testimonials would be useful to me in that effort.)

Underrated Movie #138: Human Desire

Title: Human Desire

Year: 1954

Director: Fritz Lang

Writer: Alfred Hayes, based on the novel “The Human Beast” by Emile Zola

Stars: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Kathleen Case 

The Story: Ford is a railroad engineer just back from Korea. Grahame is the unhappy wife of the station master. When her brutish husband gets her involved in a murder, she turns to Ford for help, but can he trust himself around her?

How it Came to be Underrated: This was never on VHS and not on DVD until very recently, making this one even more underrated than Lang’s other ‘50s noirs.

Why It’s Great:

1. I first knew Ford as Pa Kent in Superman, a role that tapped into his ability to convey stoic decency, but in noir roles such as this, The Big Heat and Gilda, the same stoicism is always threatening to harden into cold fury, and we get a sense that he’s capable of very dark things if he lets himself go. (And a few times, such as in 3:10 to Yuma, he played out-and-out villains that allowed those dark impulses to have full reign.)
2. Lang hated the title that the studio forced on him, saying “Vat other kind of desire is there??”, but I actually like it. Some treat lust (and its close cousin bloodlust) as otherworldly forces, imposed on us from without, but not Lang. Humanizing desire was what Lang did best. In Lang’s world, the danger is not that the murderer has a master plan that you can’t even comprehend—it’s that the murderer’s guilt may destroy him from the inside.
3. Grahame was possibly the sexiest actress of Hollywood’s golden age, which is startling because, when you just look at a photo of her, she’s not that pretty. Even her voice is squeaky and petulant, on first blush. But let her eyes flare up, let her move… most importantly, let her act, and the screen catches on fire. Behind those eyes: lust, self-awareness, anger, and cool intelligence were warring with each other. When she gets accused of being a femme fatale in this movie, she responds with a blistering and all-too believable story of her lifetime of exploitation. She couldn’t help but humanize every role she had.
4. When Zola wrote his 1890 novel, trains were a symbol of dehumanizing industrialization. By the time this movie was made, they were already rotting relics of a lost world, with jets zipping overhead, but few settings have as much iconographic power as a railyard, and Lang is clearly in love with the mechanics of it all, hypnotically cutting together nearly-Soviet-style montages of the mighty behemoths switching gracefully from rail to rail.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Ford, Grahame and Lang had previously made the legendary noir The Big Heat. Grahame’s greatest noir was In a Lonely Place. An underrated not-quite-noir by Lang from around this time was Clash By Night.

 

How Available Is It?: It now has a beautiful looking DVD, with a nice little introduction by actress Emily Mortimer, of all people.

 

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: (Danger)

Rulebook Casefile: Milking the Unique Relationship in The Apartment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rulebook Casefile: Unintended Consequences in The Apartment

Welcome to a new occasional series in which I present in-depth case studies of Rulebook rules.

In Rule #96, I proposed that fiction that aims to be pure entertainment is generally about intended consequences, whereas literary fiction tends to be about unintended consequences. The implication of this might seem to be that only depressing dramas with unhappy endings could be considered literary, but that’s not the case. The Apartment is a comedy with a happy ending, but it deals almost exclusively in unintended consequences. It’s no coincidence that this was the first comedy to win Best Picture.

This isn’t to say that the movie is all about folly or the heavy hand of fate. The characters all act in their own self-interest and accomplish much of what they set out to do, but because none of the characters can see the web of duplicity connecting them as well as we can, they don’t realize what consequences their actions will have beyond their immediate gratification.Here’s one chain of unintended consequences:

1. Even though he’s already played host to one tryst that night, Baxter agrees to loan out his apartment key again.
2. The unexpected consequence is that Baxter comes home to find that the executive has left the wrong key under the mat. The next day Baxter must route and re-route keys through the building.
3. Unexpectedly, all this traffic results in Sheldrake finding out about the scheme, and Baxter gets told to cut it out
4. Unexpectedly, Sheldrake then reveals that he wants the key for his own exclusive use. This pisses off the other execs.
5. Later, Baxter takes care of Kubelik but one of the execs unexpectedly shows up and discovers her there.
6. Kubelik’s brother-in-law then shows up at the workplace looking for her. The execs are still pissed at Baxter for kicking them out. The unexpected consequence of that anger is that they tell the brother-in-law where to find Kubelik.
7. The brother-in-law shows up at Baxter’s place, fetches Kubelik and punches Baxter out, but this unexpectedly causes Kubilik to finally realize what a great guy Baxter is, so he’s happy to have the black eye.

Everyone is self-dealing, but the result is a series of results that nobody sought, ending in unexpected happiness for our hero. Not every chain of consequences has to be a downward spiral.

Here’s a completely different chain of events, in which a series of seemingly positive developments has a negative consequence:

1. Sheldrake chooses to take Kubelik, his latest mistress, to the same Chinese restaurant that he took his previous mistresses.
2. Unbeknownst to him, his secretary, one of those former mistresses, still eats there and sees them there.
3. The secretary unexpectedly decides to confront Kubelik at the office Christmas party.
4. Kubelik herself then decides to directly confront Sheldrake with the secretary’s accusations, something that the secretary clearly hadn’t expected her to do. This results in the secretary getting fired
5. The secretary then does what Sheldrake hadn’t expected: she tells his wife everything. For the audience, this feels like a stand-up and cheer moment: the villain has gotten his just deserts...
6. But our expectations are reversed again: this turns out to be a disaster for our hero, because now Sheldrake is free to be with Kubelik, ruining Baxter’s hopes.

This is a series of largely positive developments in which the villain’s scheming catches up to him and the truth comes out, but it has unexpectedly negative results for our hero. 

The unexpected consequences in The Apartment raise the film out of the realm of pure entertainment and into the realm of literature. Rather then simply identify with the characters, our privileged position allows us to see more, feel more, and understand more about life than anybody onscreen.

Storyteller's Rulebook #104: Punish Them By Giving Them What They Want

Movies crave conflict, and the easiest sort of conflict comes from subjecting your hero to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: Hit ‘em when they’re up and kick ‘em when they’re down. But sometimes, the unkindest cut of all is the one you inflict by taking the external conflict away.Throughout The Apartment, Sheldrake cheats and connives and lies to everybody… until just before the end. Think for a moment about how easy it would have been to have him screw our heroes over again at the end. What if, after all this, he left Kubelik for another woman? Or what if he went ahead and fired Baxter anyway?

Either one of these dastardly actions would have been true to his character, and they could have pumped up our heroes’ motivation, rousing them into a final confrontation filled with righteous indignation. That would have made for a very different ending.Instead, Sheldrake actually does come through on all his promises. After his marriage falls apart, he decides to make an honest woman of Kubelik (though he does vaguely imply to Baxter that he’ll be cheating on her). And he gives Baxter the office he’d always dreamed of. They’ve each gotten exactly what they set out to get from Sheldrake… …but it leaves a bitter taste.

Rather than make it hard on them externally by having Sheldrake say “no” to them one last time, Wilder and Diamond make it hard on them internally by having him finally say “yes”. This forces them to summon up the will to say no to their own wildest dreams, in the interest of doing the right thing.