The Hero Project #17: Beware of Default Mode

So, I’m still making my lists… Types of love interest:

1. The Conscience: bring the protagonist around to goodness
2. The Goody Two Shoes: the protagonist loosens them up
3. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl: loosens the protagonist up. Has there ever been a manic pixie dream boy?
4. The Total Bad Ass
5. The Daemon Lover
6. Out of Their League
7. The Best Friend Seen in a New Light
8. The Best Friend They’ve Always Had a Crush On: oblivious to their affections
9. The Nymphomaniac Virgin: The heroine of every bad coming of age movie. Totally sweet and innocent but can’t wait to have sex with our hero or heroine when the opportunity presents itself.
10. Warts and All: they’re neither savior or damnation, which is far too rare in movies

Types of friends:

1. The Conscience
2. The Mentor
3. The Helping Hand
4. The Counter-Example: makes the hero look good by being hopelessly lame
5. The Trickster: gets hero in trouble to liberate them
6. The Corrupter: gets hero into trouble for their own purposes.
7. The Weasel: blatantly and ineptly follows their own self interest
8. The Bad Ass
9. The Object of Envy

Tomorrow I’ll try to plug these four types into the new character creation checklist I’m working up. In the meantime, let’s grapple with something: aren’t these just lists of clichés to avoid? If these have all been done a bunch of times, why do it again? Stock characters cause audiences to roll their eyes. But they exist for a reason: They provide shortcuts when you need them, and all stories need a few.

Yes, the goal should be to come up with new types, new motivations, new stories, every time. But we always fall short of our goals. Even if you do come up with an original story idea that has real verisimilitude, you’ll find that you don’t have the space to flesh out every character in every scene. In (500) Days of Summer, I thought that the writers came up with realistic lead characters in a very believable situation. Here’s the ultimate compliment: the core emotional conflict reminded me more of real life than it did other movies. But, the same couldn’t be said for the hero’s confidants. His guy-friends were lightly sketched, and his wise-beyond-her-years little sister was insufferable.

Even when you’re really hitting a vein of truth, you can still find yourself falling back on cliché in minor parts of the story. Don’t beat yourself up for writing a “typical” scene every once in a while, but you want to at least make sure you know which cliché is which. The biggest fear is that, in an attempt to avoid using any clichés at all, you begin to use them blindly. If you find yourself thinking, “this is the sort of scene where the friend always says [blank]”, then you need to at least stop yourself and ask: “Wait, which type of best friends would have which type of advice?” It may seem reductionist to identify ten types of best friends or love interests or villains, but it’s better than merging every possible type into one platonic ideal.

The Hero Project #16: Now Meet the Villains

One more week of the Hero Project (I

’m on a deadline, so no time for watching movies)

I got very systematic in my discussion of types of heroes, but what about villains? There are lots of very different types of villains, but I wasn’t able to come up with a chart of different factors that would generate each of these types, so I

’ve

just brainstormed until I seemed to identify most of them. I’m sure there are more, so feel free to toss more out there…

1. The Flip Side of the Hero: They

   ’

   re much like the hero, but they spent their life fighting for all the opposite values (Voldemort, General Zod in Superman II, Magneto in X-Men, the original Lex Luthor)
2. The Corruptor: (Liam Neeson in Batman Begins, Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Brad Pitt in Fight Club)
3. The Ambitious Businessman: (Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, Douglas in Wall Street, Sam Rockwell in Charlie’s Angels-- a character he reprised in Iron Man 2, the later version of Lex Luthor, Auric Goldfinger and most Bond villains)
4. Good Person Corrupted by Money: (Krabbe in The Fugitive, Voigt in Mission: Impossible, the bad men and/or heroes in most noirs)
5. One Bad Choice Leads to Another: (Darth Vader, the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, the Sandman… Obviously Stan Lee and Steve Ditko loved this type of villain)
6. The Miserable Psychopath: (Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, The Sniper, Norman Bates)
7. The Happy Psychopath: (Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, The Joker, Enthusiastic Nazis)
8. The Sycophant (the head psychiatrist in Silence of the Lambs, all the bad guys in Ghostbusters, and most eighties comedies, Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
9. The Nihilist: (Robert Shaw in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the killers in Scream, Spacey in Seven)
10. The Righteous Revenge Seeker: (Robert Ryan in Act of Violence, Rourke in Iron Man 2, Max Cady in Cape Fear… but more in the remake than the original)
11. The Faithless Pleasure Seeker: (most femme fatales, most “Lifetime Network” husbands)
12. Just Doing His Job: They feel like they had no other options, if they didn’t want to buck the system that they were born into (most mobsters, a lot of movies with German army guys who are explicitly not Nazis, like 36 Hours)

Celebrate Labor Day

by demanding a fair wage!

The Hero Project #15: Hit The Ground Running Uphill

It’s all about the first twenty minutes. The first act may feel the most leisurely, but it has the most work to do of any part of a story. There’s a lot of character work that a story has make clear right away, because it will seem unfair to suddenly mention it later: If a dam starts to break two-thirds of the way through, it will be too late to establish that the hero is an expert spackler.

You have 5-20 minutes max to establish at least six essential things:

1. Their skills (so that we’ll trust them to solve the problem)
2. Their unique perspective on life (so we’ll know why you chose this hero)
3. A moment of badass-ery (so that we’ll like them)
4. A moment of vulnerability (so that we’ll care about them)
5. What they want (so that we’ll identify with their journey)
6. What their problem is (so that the story can begin)

But wait, aren’t some of those the same thing? Sometimes these moments can be combined (maybe a moment of badass-ery can also establish their skills, or maybe their want and their problem are the same thing) but not necessarily: in many, many movies these six things are established separately, so don’t assume that one will take care of the other. But there’s also good news, there’s some things that don’t have to be established in the first act:

1. Their backstory
2. Their dark secrets
3. Their inner needs.

All of these things can come out later. This brings us back to our question from yesterday: Why does it help to know what type of hero you have? Different heroes have different groundwork that has to be laid in the first twenty minutes. Here are four examples:

1. Fish Out of Water (Coogan’s Bluff, In the Heat of the Night, etc.): These movies can begin in different ways-- In the first example, we see how good Clint is at home, in the second we start with Sidney already arriving in unfamiliar territory, but in all cases we need to know right away how good and cocky they usually are, but see that those skills won’t necessarily translate to a new setting. We also need to see pretty quickly that they’re unwelcome and they know it.
2. Well-Trained Rookie (Silence of the Lambs, Buffy, etc.): The question you need to answer right away is this-- If they’re not very good yet then why do we trust them to be our hero and not, say, their boss, who actually knows what he’s talking about? Is there a value to their newness that makes them a more interesting hero? You need to make us trust them even while you’re establishing that they don’t trust themselves yet.
3. The Rogue (Robin Hood, Zorro, etc): A rogue’s life is dominated by his outsize reputation. Everybody reacts immediately to a name likes Captain Jack Sparrow or Aragorn. We need to see in which ways in they live up to their famous name and the ways in which they don’t. Here's what you don’t have to establish right away: why they’re out of the job. That can come out later for a big reveal.
4. The Exile (John McClaine, Shane): These are Rogues who have given up and moved on into unknown lands: they’re acutely aware of their lack of reputation in their new home, although the audience should quickly see that the new town is badly underestimating the hero. We see that their badass-ery is their secret, for now. They expect respect but no longer get it. Here again, you don’t have to establish right away what mistakes have set them to wandering. We’ll find out when we need to know.

The Hero Project #14: So Why Categorize?

So I invented a bunch of categories for heroes and then spent a lot of time nit-picking and second-guessing my definitions, but what’s the point? Are movies more fun when you pigeonhole the hero into a certain category? Not really. But I do think it can be a useful tool, whether for creating your own heroes or evaluating the work of others. First and foremost, it should remind us that not every “rule” for heroes can or should apply to each particular hero. Some heroes suffer a lot, some hardly at all. Some are proven wrong, some are proven right. Some start from scratch, others show what they know. In order to know which rules apply to which hero, it helps to figure out which type they are.

Not that it will make the writer’s job any easier-- In fact, defining your hero makes for new challenges. Each type of hero has different danger zones: specific issues that arise based on how where your hero’s coming from. I’ve already mentioned some of the things you have to watch out for in the last two categories, but what about challenges that arise in some of the other categories? Like a modern-day Kenny Loggins, I’m gonna take you right into the danger zone.

Take, for instance, the Pro at Work. The good news is that choosing this category instantly takes a lot of work off your plate. It requires a lot fewer plot machinations to convince your hero to tackle a problem: they do this every day. It’s their job, they’re on their home turf, and they’re well-qualified. So instead of spending your intro contriving a reason for them to get into trouble, you need to spend that time establishing how good they are, while also implying what tensions they have that will be laid bare by this new problem.

But there are also big challenge when writing about a Pro at Work: like what’s so special about today? They do this every day, so what makes this particular problem a big deal? Why would this situation change them? Do they have to change? Can you make the story significant to the audience even if this particular problem isn’t a big deal to the hero? TV writers have to accept that last challenge all the time: not every week can provide a “very special episode” for the hero! (Every case House handles has to be important to us, even if it’s not important to him.) But in most movies, the problem is supposed to be a big deal. Here are some possible answers to this challenge, but each one is a potential cliché: this time they have something personal at risk, or this is the time they cross the line, or the time that makes them realize that they’ve gotten too old for this.

Generally speaking, in order to make a Pro at Work’s problem interesting, you need a great villain, one worthy of your hero’s skills. This isn’t the case if your hero is a rookie. For a rookie, every challenge is a big deal, and an everyday villain can still provide them with a huge problem. Either way, it’s good to know what type of hero you’re writing about so that you can know which danger zones you’re stepping into.

The Hero Project #13: Hitchcock In The Shadowlands

Rebecca, adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s novel, is the story of a mousy girl who becomes the second wife of a brooding aristocrat, but finds that she cannot escape the long shadow of his dead first wife, Rebecca DeWinter. Our heroine, played by Joan Fontaine, is never named (nor was she in the novel). Most people watching the film fail to notice this until they try to discuss it afterwards and they realize that they have no way of identifying her.

Equally strange, in this visual medium, is the fact that the title character, the first wife, is never pictured. True, she’s been dead for years before the story begins, but she could have appeared in a flashback, or a photo, or a portrait. Usually, if an element is notable by its absence, then screenwriters make sure to visualize that element as often as possible and make it real for the viewer, but not here.

So we have one character who has a face but no name, and another character who has a name but no face. Each has been reduced to one half of a whole. Shortly after her marriage, Fontaine gets a call for “Mrs. DeWinter”. She instinctively responds “Mrs. DeWinter is dead,” and hangs up, only to realize that the call was probably for her. As Emily Dickinson would say, “I’m nobody, who are you?”

North by Northwest is, in tone, on the opposite end of the Hitchcock canon. It’s hip, breezy and modern, while the other was classical, brooding and gothic. But it creates a similar situation. Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill is quick to point out that (as was the case with Hitchcock’s former boss David O. Selznick) he doesn’t actually have a middle name: “The ‘O’ stands for nothing.” And we all know what it means when a character says that a certain trait is his middle name.

Much like Fontaine’s unnamed character, Thornhill is disparagingly compared to an unseen, unknowable doppelganger. In this case it’s a non-existent super-spy named George Kaplan. Like Fontaine, he is expected to wear the clothes of his doppelganger and keep his appointments, though he knows that the people there will be bitterly disappointed with the substitution.

We’re back in Jung territory here. This all echoes Jung’s idea of the shadow-self. Fontaine and Grant never lay eyes on theirs, which may be for the best-- I previously described a Hitchcock-directed episode of his TV show with a similar story starring Tom Ewell. Ewell actually met his doppelganger face to face and was destroyed by it, something that Jung warned of. Let’s cut and paste from Wikipedia, shall we? Jung says that if and when “an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others - such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots”

This goes back to another point I made before: Thrillers are nutty. How do you justify that a normal person would go to such ludicrous extremes to solve their problems? By the rules of our world it makes no sense, but these heroes have entered into a dream world. Hitchcock has plunged them into that shadow-realm of “unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots.”

Robert Donat in The 39 Steps has no doppelganger in the classical sense, but he too has a disturbing amount of blankness under his dapper exterior. He never mentions his past and he has no friends or allies. Everything in his rented room is unused and covered with sheets. He mentions that he’s visiting on vacation from Canada but we get the feeling that he’s been in England for a long time, and has no plans to return home any time soon. Who is he? He makes it up as he goes along.

Perhaps it’s actually valuable that Donat has no pre-established skills to rely on. The target of his search turns out to be a vaudeville performer named “Mr. Memory”, who has memorized every known fact, and that has become a fatal burden. Donat, on the other hand, seems to know nothing in particular, and he gets by just fine. He is not just lacking in skills, he’s totally liberated from the burden of the self. It seems to me that Hitchcock succeeded in breaking the rules because he created his own fully-realized dream-logic.  He could use blank heroes because he made their blankness fascinating. 

The Hero Project #12: Hitchcock's Ill-Equipped Heroes

So I’ll pick right up from yesterday: Why was Hitchcock able to tell compelling stories about heroes without skills, even though that’s usually a bad idea? I reconsidered nine different movies he made about worst possible picks: 

First of all, I realized that, in four of these movies, my thesis held up: the heroes weren’t interesting enough. These include both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (’34 and ’56) and The Birds. I think these movies would have been improved by having the heroes bring a little more of themselves towards solving their problems. I would also reluctantly include Saboteur in this category, even though I identified it as an underrated movie. In retrospect, the lack of unique qualities in the main character was probably a big reason that Hitchcock couldn’t get Gary Cooper and had to settle for Robert Cummings.

And there were other Hitchcock movies that conformed to my expectations in a different way: I had said before that the only way to make a successful worst possible pick movie was to have the hero suffer endlessly and get saved by someone else. That would certainly describe The Wrong Man and Frenzy. I realized to my surprise that it would also describe Rebecca. Rebecca’s heroine is not able to adapt any of her skills as a paid companion to her new job as mistress of a secret-filled gothic mansion, and ultimately has to pretty much have the mystery spelled out for her at the end. 

Nevertheless, all three of these movies are intensely watchable and very appealing (at least to me). We always hear that heroes are supposed to be proactive and good at their jobs. This is because, otherwise, we won’t believe it when they become clever and successful at the end. But if they remain fate’s pawns throughout, then it’s actually not as much of a problem that they’re totally ineffective. Such movies can still be quite compelling, although they’re bound to be a bit harrowing, as those three are.

So most of Hitchcock’s WPP heroes didn’t disprove my new rules after all, but that still leaves two of his most successful movies: The 39 Steps and North by Northwest. I had to re-watch these two to figure out why they seemed to defy the rules.

The 39 Steps was the first wildly successful thriller worldwide and it provides the prototype for the whole genre. Vacationing Canadian Robert Donat attends a London vaudeville show that turns out to be a nest of spies. A mata-hari type pretends to seduce him so that she can go home with him and get away from the men chasing her. When she dies during the night, he realizes that he’ll be next unless he can re-trace her path and expose the spy ring. 

According to my rules, Donat should be a totally unappealing hero. He is a total blank. We never even find out what his job is. He shows no skills and no personality traits before the trouble begins. As soon as the trouble starts, though, he turns out to be rather quick-witted, and gets out of most problems through clever bits of play-acting, but we never find out where he might have gotten those skills from.

North by Northwest was a different story, I was at first surprised when I re-watched it to discover that it starts out like a classic adapter movie: unlike Donat, we first see Cary Grant in his natural habitat: he’s basically Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad man who’s good at lying and seducing women. Then he becomes an accidental spy, and spies have to lie and seduce women all the time, so he should have all the skills he needs, established very efficiently in the first five minutes.

But then a funny thing happens, his lying and seduction skills turn out to be weaknesses, not strengths. Unlike Donat, Grant gets exposed quickly every time he lies, and his overestimation of his powers of seduction puts him right into the enemy’s trap. When it actually comes to getting out of trouble, Grant usually has to rely on blind luck: in the drunk driving trap, getting out of the UN, being chased by a plane in a cornfield, etc. The only time that he actually does something clever is at the auction, and that doesn’t really have anything to do with his ad-man skills. By the end, the villains are killed primarily by the handy intervention of Mt. Rushmore.

And yet Grant, like Donat, is not unappealing. In fact, I once described North by Northwest as a “perfect” movie. One could make the case that this is merely because Hitchcock’s every individual choice (shots, editing, mis en scene) was so appealing that he was simply allowed to break the rules: he could make us interested in people we shouldn’t find interesting. But I think that there was more to it that that. Perhaps Hitchcock was able to make movies about hollow men because he had something to say about blankness. This is where our old friend Mr. Jung comes back into play. But I’ll have to pick up there tomorrow...

The Hero Project #11: But What About Hitchcock?

I got a nice response to the first go-round, so let’s try at least another week of The Hero Project. (By the way, in our time off, the project made a guest appearance over at my wife’s far-more-widely-read blog, where she applied it to kids’ books. I show up in the comments to kibitz.)

So I’ve had a few weeks to think about my bumbling attempts to define heroism, and I’ve been wondering where I ever got this impression that the a protagonist should go from “zero to hero” instead of starting the movie with special skills. The more I thought about it the more I realized that there was a simple answer: Hitchcock. When I made my list of the Nine Types of heroes (plus two), I tried to chart some Hitchcock movies, but in retrospect I think I got some of them wrong. Thinking back through them, and rewatching some of them, I realized that most of Hitchcock’s heroes lack skills, and could be described as the “worst possible pick” for solving their problem.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case. He also featured examples of the Pro at Work (Foreign Correspondent, Notorious), Adapters (Rope, Rear Window), a Flounderer (Vertigo), and even a Book Taught Amateur (Shadow of a Doubt). (Yes, I’ve moved some since the original post) But his clear favorite was that riskiest of all categories, the Worst Possible Pick.

My earlier conclusion was that “WPP” heroes only worked in cases like The Terminator and Safety Last where the hero suffered greatly and had some professional help to get them through, while movies like The Spanish Prisoner, where an unskilled everyman hero triumphs simply by working a little harder, were inherently unsatisfying. But Hitchcock frequently made that kind of hero work. In fact, Hitchcock’s first international hit, and the one that formed the archetype for so many others, The 39 Steps, has an unskilled hero with no professional help who is somehow both convincing and appealing.

This is a big part of where I got my habits from. Like a lot of people, Hitchcock is my biggest influence as a thriller writer (he never actually got a writing credit, but most people familiar with his process would say that he ghost-co-wrote all of his movies) And, come to think of it, I’ve been on the phone receiving notes and found myself defending my script in conversations that sounded something like this: Them: “You can’t do that in a movie” Me: “What do you mean? Hitchcock did it all the time.” Now it’s finally sunk in: It’s not so easy to play by Hitchcock’s rules. But why not? Tomorrow I’ll look at several of his movies and figure out why many of his unskilled heroes were so appealing (and why some others weren’t).

Underrated TV (Not) on DVD #14: The Century of the Self

And this wraps up another TV Week-- Next week: more Hero Project!

Series: The Century of the Self
Year: 2002
Creator: Adam Curtis

The Concept: Curtis explores the hidden history of the 20^th century, showing how first consumers and then voters were taught by the public relations industry to listen to their hearts and ignore their minds.

How it Came to be Underrated: This got great reviews when it came out, but it never showed up on DVD in America.

Sample Episode: Episode 1: Happiness Machines
Writer: Adam Curtis
The Story: In Part 1, we meet Edward Bernays, the American cousin of Sigmund Freud himself, who used his “Uncle Siggy’s” ideas for crass commercial purposes, creating ideas of mass consumer persuasion that redefined American culture. Bernays recalls how, after advising Wilson during the WWI peace talks, “I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, then you could certainly use it for peace.” He opens the first public relations firm and starts by convincing women to smoke. His success makes him very wealthy and highly influential...

Why It’s Great:

1. This is more of an essay-film than a documentary: Curtis illustrating his daring thesis with a fascinating rapid-fire montage ranging freely back and forth across the 20^th century, creating an experience that just as fun to watch as it is bracing to hear.
2. But he doesn’t just ask us to take his word for it. He has uncovered an amazing treasure trove of quotes which amply demonstrate his thesis. Here’s one of Bernays’s clients: ”We must shift America from a ‘needs’ to a ‘desires’ culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
   
3. Curtis shows how the powers-that-be, once they realized what Freud was saying, quietly decided that democracy was no longer a tenable idea: If mankind was essentially irrational and animalistic, then the unwashed masses couldn’t be trusted with power. But there was no need to openly do away with the system, because the new techniques could be used to manipulate the crowds into neutralizing their own power. Part four talks to the engineers of the campaigns of Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and Blair. Given what we’ve heard, what they have to say about how they sold their candidates is genuinely chilling.
   
4. This one isn’t on DVD, but it led to a follow-up about post-9/11 propaganda called “The Power of Nightmares”, and that one’s finally out on DVD. You can get it through Netflix.

How Available Is It?: All four hours are watchable at Google Video and well worth your time. The video quality isn’t very high, but it’s perfectly watchable. I literally sat down one day to watch the first five minutes of the first one and got up four hours later.

But Don’t Take My Word For It:

Storyteller’s Rulebook #42: People Only Want What They Want

Here’s another “a-ha” moment gleaned from a TV-DVD extra-- Each episode of “Mad Men” has at least one commentary, usually featuring Matt Weiner and another creator, and they’re all worth listening to. At one point, Pete the weasel is stewing in his office, as usual, and Peggy comes in to discuss a project. In his commentary, Weiner points out (paraphrasing here:) “This is the point on most shows where they would ask ‘what’s wrong?’ as if people go around trying to solve each other’s problems all the time.”

But Peggy doesn’t notice what’s bothering Pete, even though she’s probably the most sympathetic character on the show (and occasionally in love with him). People only want what they want, and that doesn’t make them bad people. Unless your character is an exceptionally caring parent or spouse, they shouldn’t become selflessly concerned with the emotional state of another character, unless they have to act that way to get what they want. That may sound terrible, but it’s how life works and it’s probably for the best...

You, as the writer, know what every character’s problem is, and so you want them to know it too. The easiest way to do that is to have someone come into the room, size up the situation, and say, “Do you know what your problem is? It’s…” But in real life, such conversations are uncommon and unwelcome. On those rare occasions that I do get armchair diagnoses from friends, they tend to be benign but unhelpful, because their friendship keeps them from perceiving my faults. The few times that someone has told me what my problem was and actually hit the nail on the head, they were people who hated my guts and never wanted to see me again. In each case, I wasn’t happy to hear it, and I tended to let them know it. Only later did I sheepishly realize that they had actually told me something I needed to hear.

Weiner’s comment has ruined a lot of movies and TV shows for me. Every time someone walks into a room and helps the hero get to the heart of a problem, it now sets my teeth on edge. The ghostly voice of Matthew Weiner wafts up from the ether, providing a running commentary to everything I watch, always reminding me: “People only want what they want!”

Underrated TV (Not) on DVD #13: Lou Grant

TV week, day 3:

Series: Lou Grant
Years: 1977-1982, five seasons, 114 hour-long episodes
Creators: James L. Brooks, Allan Burns, Gene Reynolds, Leon Tokatyan
Stars: Edward Asner, Robert Walden, Mason Adams, Nancy Marchand

The Concept: After getting unceremoniously fired by on the last episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, Lou Grant realizes that he’s “a 50 year old man with $280 in his bank account”. He moves to LA and goes back to the newpaper biz , managing the city desk at the Los Angeles Tribune.

How it Came to be Underrated: This was a hit at the time, but it’s largely forgotten today. It was followed up and overshadowed by two even-better MTM shows about crumbling city institutions, “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere”.

Sample Episode: 1.1 Cophouse
Writer: Leon Tokatyan
The Story: Lou lands in hot water right away—a hotshot young reporter accuses the paper’s longtime cophouse reporter of thinking like a cop, covering up scandals instead of exposing them. Lou finds himself caught uncomfortably between the crusty old guard and surly Watergate-inspired rookies.

Why It’s Great:

1. This first season had my favorite opening sequence of any TV show ever. It’s a beautiful little short film about the futility of all human endeavors. I’m sure it got a big laugh, but then the creators had the mighty task of getting people to care about birdcage lining, week after week.
   
   (double-click to watch it bigger on YouTube)
2. This was part of a bizarre ‘70s trend of hour-long dramas that got spun-off from half-hour comedies. In this case, it made sense. When you’ve got a great actor like Asner, why not give him some real meat to chew on?
3. Lou reluctantly hands the cophouse beat over to an aggressive young reporter named Rossi but soon tears him a new one for over-editorializing. Their battles became the central conflict of the show. Like any writer, the reporters are forced to see that the only way to win anybody over to their point of view is to be scrupulously fair. Even after all those years, Lou still hated spunk.
   
4. After Lou gives his reporters hell, he has to turn around and fight bitterly to actually get their stories into the paper, which is never certain. The editorial meetings are always a fascinating look into the competing agendas that try to drag important news down the memory hole.
   
5. An quick glance at the episode titles will tell you what the danger zone was for this show: it was addicted to “issues”. When it was smartly done, as it usually was, it was brave and daring and smart, but the weaker episodes play like afterschool specials. As Lou himself realizes, advocacy writing is the hardest kind to do well.

How Available Is It?: This is probably the best TV show left that’s still not on DVD in any way, shape or form. It is on Hulu though…

But Don’t Take My Word For It:

Storyteller’s Rulebook #41: Drama Is How It Is, Genre Is How It Feels

One more thought on “The Sopranos”… I never had HBO, so I finally got to see what all the fuss was about when the first season was released on DVD (which was still a big deal for a TV show at the time, but you kids wouldn’t remember that). I watched the pilot and I had to admit that it was pretty great, but I still had a doubting voice in the back of my head: ‘Who needs to see another show about killing? This show takes itself seriously, but this level of violence and stylization is actually pretty phony, isn’t it?’

Then I listened to David Chase’s commentary track and I had one of those rare “moments of clarity”. He was talking about where the idea for the show came from. He was a successful screenwriter, but he was putting his own mean-mouthed mother in a home and she was heavily guilt-tripping him. He thought to himself “I’m such a monster.” He decided to do a show about what it felt like to be a rich guy putting his mother in a home. Except, in the TV version, instead of the meek TV writer he was, he would portray himself as the monster (aka mobster) he felt like.

Suddenly, I understood the justification for all genre writing. Realism is a fine goal, but it’s not the only way to be truthful. When you make a genre show (and “The Sopranos” was a genre show) you’re telling the truth about how it feels, in a way that realism never can. He was coming clean: this is who I really am— I’m a monster.

Nowhere was this more true than on the other all-time-great show of the late 90s/early 00s, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. That show appealed to lots of non-vampire-lovers because it was such a perfect metaphor for adolescence. In reality, high school problems only felt like the end of the world, but here they really were the end of the world. If it felt like a guy was ripping your heart out, here he really would try, and on and on. These things made the show a lot more fun than 90210, but they also made it more truthful. This may not be how it happened, but it sure is how we remember it-- and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Underrated TV on DVD #12: Better Off Ted

Series: Better Off Ted
Years: 2009-2010, 26 half-hour episodes
Creators: Victor Fresco
Stars: Jay Harrington, Portia DiRossi, Andrea Anders, Malcolm Barrett, Jonathan Slavin

The Concept: Relatively nice people work in the research and development department of a soulless biotech corporation, trying to keep themselves from being compromised by the evil of their bosses.

How it Came to be Underrated: After saddling it with a terrible, meaningless name, ABC dumped it in midseason with very little fanfare. If they had run the second season after “Modern Family”, I’m convinced that it would have found its audience, but instead they burned off the entire season in one marathon month and gave that coveted spot to “Cougar Town”. Damn you, “Cougar Town”!

Sample Episode: 1.4 Racial Insensitivity
Writer: Michael Glouberman
The Story: To save money, Veridian Dynamics installs new motion sensors on every lightswitch, door and water fountain, but they work by reflected light and they aren’t sensitive enough to detect black people’s skintone. When the black employees complain, the company tries to make them happy by giving them separate, manual drinking fountains. For some reason, that just causes a bigger mess.

Why It’s Great:

1. That plot synopsis should indicate that this was the most shocking and sharp satire on TV since “Arrested Development”. That show also struggled with ratings, but at least it became famous for not being famous enough. This show didn’t even get that level of notoriety. It inherited the wonderful Portia DiRossi and it should also inherit that show’s cult status.
   
2. We generally want to see TV shows about good people doing good things, and it’s very hard to generate satire every week without curdling into bitterness, but this show’s likable-yet-culpable characters struck just the right balance: we knew they weren’t ever going to do much good, but we trusted them to try. The actors could move nimbly from broadly-sketched extremes to real human beings and back again as the comedy demanded.
3. The whole cast is great but the real breakthrough talent here for me was the beautiful, funny, and very likable Andrea Anders. I expect her to become a huge star but it hasn’t happened yet. She’s getting a second chance this fall with “Mr. Sunshine”. Unfortunately, it’s a Matthew Perry vehicle. Here’s how much I’ve fallen for her: I’m willing to give it a shot.
   
4. Lots of shows are now trying to find ways to trick you into watching the commercials without selling their soul, but this show did it best, each show would have a Veridian commercial in the breaks, wickedly parodying the corporate double-speak that surrounded it.
   

How Available Is It?: I’m anxiously awaiting the second season on DVDs, especially since it will debut the final two never-aired episodes, but that set hasn’t even been announced yet! In the meantime the first season is available to watch instantly on Netflix

But Don’t Take My Word For It: Unfortunately, unembeddable Netflix is the only way you can watch this episode online. It’s one of the few episodes ABC.com no longer has posted. Maybe it was a bit too edgy.

Underrated Movie #90: Salesman

Title: Salesman
Year: 1968
Writer-Directors: Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
Stars: Paul “The Badger” Brennan, Charles “The Gipper” McDevitt, James “The Rabbit” Baker, Raymond “The Bull” Martos

The Story: Four increasingly desperate door-to-door bible salesmen bluff their way into working-class homes, trying to get wary housewives to buy a deluxe $50 bible on the installment plan.

How it Came to be Underrated: This is one of the most influential documentaries ever made, but most DVD renters wouldn’t know anything about that. You can still get people to watch 60s verite classics like Don’t Look Back or Monterey Pop today, but the non-musical verites don’t get watched enough.

Why It’s Great:

1. This was an amazing new way to make documentaries, not based around a subject but around characters, just like a real movie. Though the “verite” movement stressed reality, eschewing voiceover or interviews, the Maysles and Zwerin unashamedly shape their footage into a traditional narrative, with winners and losers and villains and narrative arcs.
   
2. Former TV news cinematographer Albert built his own camera and had a genius for getting heartbreaking Hopper-esque compositions on the fly.
   
3. We aren’t sure that we approve of these guys, but they become very sympathetic in comparison to their cold-blooded, glad-handing boss, who rides them hard and doesn’t want to hear any excuses. In my favorite scene, the boss blithely leads them through a role-play to show how easy it is. As soon as the salesmen get to role-play the reluctant customer, they revel in the chance to humiliate their boss with every baffling refusal they’ve ever heard. He doesn’t appreciate it.
   
4. What makes this such an amazing document is the chance to hear the lost language of sales. The trick of the sale is to create verbal traps where every question demands a positive answer: “Can you see where this would help the family?” “Can you see where this would be a gain to you?” It’s both painful and lyrical to hear.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: The Maysles’ next two docs are justifiably famous: Gimme Shelter documented the Rolling Stones’ disaster at Altamont and Grey Gardens showcased Jackie O’s crazy relatives, but if you get a chance, you should also track down their incisive early profiles: Showman, A Visit with Truman Capote, and Meet Marlon Brando.

How Available Is It?: Excellent Criterion DVD with commentary and featurettes

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Stand back! I’ve got a gun!

Storyteller’s Rulebook #40: Objects Needs Affection Too

The veteran indie producer Ted Hope runs a great blog called Truly Free Film which has good advice for the harsh business of independent filmmaking. Ted once ran Good Machine with James Schamus, and he recently reprinted their house list of No-Budget Commandments.

All of these are good ideas, even you’re not going the indie route. I want to focus on one that you don’t hear that often, which is hidden as the second half of number four: “Invest meaning in everyday commonplace things – make an orange a totemic object John Ford would be proud of.” I’ve only recently become of how important this is. In my entry on Tension I noticed how each character had a totemic object that they were associated with, and now I see it everywhere.

You can’t rely on character interactions to reveal all the emotions you need to reveal. When actors talk with each other, they have three different factors influencing their performance:

1. The current mood of their character.
2. What their character wants the other character to do.
3. How their character feels about the other character deep down.

But when you establish their relationship to an object, they can express their true emotions, unfiltered by other baggage.

I just rewatched The Color of Money, which has aged beautifully, especially the streetwise script by Richard Price. Paul Newman, earning his only competitive Oscar, reprises the role of Fast Eddie Felson, 25 years after the events of The Hustler. Newman schools a naïve young pool phenomenon played by Tom Cruise (turning in a brilliant performance of his own). Together with Cruise’s shady girlfriend (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) they tool around the Northeast, hustling in dingy joints, on their way to a big tournament in Atlantic City.

Each character has their own totem object. First Newman gives Cruise a fancy pool cue, on the condition that he never use it, because that would ruin the hustle. It becomes the object of all Cruise’s frustrations as he tries to learn the business. Mastrantonio wears a necklace that she stole from Cruise’s mother. She chuckles as she explains to Newman: “He says his mom had one just like it”. As they compete to see who will get to exploit Cruise’s talent, Newman keeps an eye on the necklace to remind himself who he’s dealing with. Newman doesn’t get his object until the end of the second act: it’s the special weapon he finds in the cave. Newman finally admits that he needs prescription glasses, and uses them to compete with his former protégé. Count how many glances and comments each one of these objects earns, and how they change meaning over the course of the movie—when they get taken out, or put away, or change hands. The characters can’t say what they feel, but their interaction with these objects reveals all.

As Ted Hope points out, this is the sort of thing that creates easy value for a movie. Too many independent films can be summed up as “people stand around in rooms and talk,” but the world of a movie starts comes alive when the audience knows that certain objects are fraught with meaning for certain characters.

Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #6

Hey everybody, remember Special Guest Picks? Well here’s a straggler. A mere six months after I solicited some special people for recommendations, I got this reply from the estimable Luke O’Brien, who occasionally comments here under the name Ithadeo. Luke and I helped run the film society in college. I called him Luko. He called me Coco. I never knew why. Here's Luke:

I like how Matt not only looks at undiscovered or overlooked films, but also at why we might have missed these films. In this brief guest shot, I want to look at movies that I think have each been pushed into the periphery by a specific film:

1) Dead Reckoning

Long Dark Shadow It Can't Escape: The Big Sleep

The movie opens with a man cast in shadows to make his identity “mysterious” confessing the details of his lurid misadventure to a priest. (It’s the entertaining ridiculousness of Old Hollywood that one of the most distinct voices in Hollywood is giving the monologue.) He recounts his tale of trouble with the hard-broiled dialog you’d expect in radio play, taking us back to a classic set of 1940s tropes: the reluctant war hero, the club dame who can’t quite be trusted, multiple acts of violence by unseen assailants and a delicious unraveling at the end. Falling so closely on the heels of his classic turn as Marlowe (and smoldering chemistry with Bacall), Bogart’s more paternal, less hip role is a perfect fit for John Cromwell’s melodramatic sensibilities. Cromwell’s Of Human Bondage and Lord Fauntleroy are classic dramas and he likes to squeeze all he can out of the moments of anguish on screen – and these moments of anguish are what cements the dark elements of a noir like this.

2) Truly, Madly, Deeply
Long Dark Shadow It Can't Escape: Ghost

In 1990, two movies came out with a woman being revisited by her dearly departed husband but the wrong one became really famous. I’ll be careful here not to slam Zucker’s movie which manages to comically wed FX, 1940s ghost romance clichés and a very simple suspense film thrills. You feel good at the end of Ghost - wrongs are righted, you see the bright lights of heaven, and bask in the glow of after-life sex. But it’s all voyeurism – enjoying some other person’s crazy ride. Minghella’s film asks us for more – it asks us for empathy. Nina doesn’t cry pretty tears – she has a breakdown. She cries a lot. Her job is harder. Her house is still falling apart except now there’s no one to share the problems with. Even when Jamie returns it only makes it harder for her to understand how she’s supposed to live her life with a ghost (especially the boring ghosts who have invaded her life). And when a possible new romance comes along we understand how conflicted Nina is and we follow her as she genuinely comes to grips with her grief.

3) Italian for Beginners
Long Dark Shadow It Can't Escape: Every other Dogme 95 movie (The Celebration, Idiots…)

Some Danish filmmakers in the 1990s led a very interesting film movement directed at making movies that stripped away a lot of the ways directors created reality on-screen. The people who were led to embrace this style felt that it was a more honest way of creating movies, so it’s no surprise that many of the stories involved taboo subjects like family secrets (Celebration, Mifune) and dysfunctional behavior (The Idiots, Julien Donkey-Boy). The movies are often great, but not usually pleasant. So a movie like Italian for Beginners gets easily lost in its associations with this austere school of cinema, which is a shame, because it’s a movie that Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers should be forced to watch on a loop. The plot is simple enough: The progressive new priest in a small Danish village joins the lovelorn singles in town taking an Italian class to add some adventure to their mundane lives. All of the small elements that define the romantic comedy are in place, but the Dogme style (and maybe Danish sensibilities) kill the cliché with realistic and deeply muted performances.

4) Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Long Dark Shadow It Can't Escape: Oldboy

Most people who discover Park Chan-Wook become fans of Oldboy. It makes sense that people fall in love with that movie – the ending is so jaw-dropping and the build up to the revelations is so intimate that the shocking acts of violence at the end aren’t the porn-violence you find in a lot of Korean horror films (or any Eli Roth movie). Revisiting the director, people long to repeat the mind-bending way that film unravels. The first film in his trilogy, however, presents a very different meditation on vengeance, one where the motivations of the people is never unclear. A deaf-mute factory worker searches for a way to provide his sister with a kidney transplant. When he’s laid off, he tries to use a black market kidney exchange. When that goes horribly awry, his leftist girlfriend convinces him that he should kidnap a different factory owner’s son to raise the money he needs. You know from every terrible idea’s outset that things aren’t going to end well. All of the movies take us to a point where we see vengeance as pointless. But here all of the characters have selfless motivations. This movie makes us interested in what can drive people to feel so wronged that they try to exact vengeance and sad to see the toll it takes on all of them.

Luke O'Brien works for a privately held movie database . His day job just supports his avocation: answering people's questions about what to put next in their Netflix queue. If you need help pairing a bad movie with a good bourbon, he's happy to help.