Problem, Opportunity, Conflict, Part 4: How It Plays Out

So we’ve broken up the idea of an “inciting incident” into three parts: an old problem, a scary opportunity, and an unforeseen conflict. But what does this do to the climax of the story? Do all three of these elements resolve at the same time? Not usually. The problem that became acute in the first scene is almost always resolved in the very last scene, but the other two elements don't always resolve themselves in the same order...

Sometimes the opportunity ends early, but the conflict continues, which looks like this:You’ll recall that Gulino preferred a structure in which the original dramatic question was taken off the table at the ¾ mark, forcing heroes to reverse course and spend the rest of the movie undoing the damage they’ve done, now that the consequences are raging out of control. Obviously, this structure tends to imply that the opportunity was ultimately too costly:But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the hero doesn’t reverse course. In these movies, it’s actually the conflict amongst the main characters that resolves itself early, so that the third act becomes a unified struggle to pay off the opportunity. These movies look like this:The result is movies that are more uplifting...Superbad is an interesting case, because it splits the difference. There are two co-equal plotlines: our heroes say they want to split up and get girlfriends, but what they really need is to admit that they love each other as friends and will miss each other at different colleges. Thus we get a split: in one plotline, the conflict is resolved early, allowing the opportunity to pay off later. In the other plotline, the opportunity fails early, bringing on the conflict later.So much for Problem, Opportunity and Conflict. Now we’ll bring it all together for a week on How to Structure a Movie, but first tomorrow we’ll have a very special 100th installment of Storyteller’s Rulebook where I add one last key concept into the mix...

Problem, Opportunity, Conflict, Part 3: Test Run

So now we’ve dumped that hopelessly vague term “inciting incident” for a more complex version: old problem, scary opportunity, unforeseen conflict. Let’s examine some movies in different genres through this prism:

Comedies:

Dramas:

Adventure:

Thrillers:

So far so good. It usually applies, but not always, which is my definition of a good rule. But if we’ve split our beginning up into three parts, then where does that leave our endings? We’ll check that out tomorrow, when we conclude this little mini-unit...

Problem, Opportunity, Conflict, Part 2: How It Works

When we left off, I was saying that I’ve come to realize is that the “inciting incident” usually consists of three distinct events.

1. Page 5 or so: A longstanding personal problem becomes more acute for the hero.
2. Page 15 or so: An intimidating new opportunity to solve the problem presents itself.
3. Page 35 or so: Taking advantage of the opportunity leads to unforeseen conflict.

Or to put is more simply: Longstanding problem, intimidating opportunity, unforeseen conflict. So this is the set-up for most romances:

1. Longstanding Problem: Loneliness (or dissatisfaction with current relationship) intensifies
2. Intimidating Opportunity: A new love interest out of the hero’s league appears.
3. Unforeseen Conflict: Someone is opposed to the match (sometimes another lover, or a parent, or the actual love interest, who isn’t interested).

Here’s most noirs:

1. Longstanding Problem: Hero becomes more desperate for money
2. Intimidating Opportunity: Hero gets roped into committing a crime
3. Unforeseen Conflict: Cops close in and/or hero finds out it’s a set up.

There are many reasons why this is a stronger conception of story than the traditional Jaws “contented guy gets a problem, then solves it and returns to contentment” paradigm. Here’s some problems with the idea of an “inciting incident”:

• It de-emphasizes the importance of change.
• If you define the inciting incident entirely in the negative, then the hero rarely has enough motivation to get through the story. “Return to normality” is a weak motivation. The hero isn’t really trying to gain anything, just return to zero.
• The hero isn’t proactive enough, they’re reacting to events instead of choosing to act upon them.
• One reason that many movies bog down in the second act is that the hero has already jumped in with both eyes open by the end of the first act. A problem arrives and they understand the danger of it right away, but now they have to wait until the third act to defeat it. So what’s the second act for?

But if we use a “longstanding problem, intimidating opportunity, unforeseen conflict” paradigm, we can turn the “inciting incident” formulation on its head. Heroes should not start out happy, they should start out with an old problem. The catalyst that starts the story shouldn’t be the appearance of a problem—just the opposite: it should be the appearance of a scary opportunity to solve that problem. The conflict shouldn’t be the reason the hero acts, but an unforeseen complication. This is stronger in many ways:

• The focus is on change.
• Now they have a much stronger motivation: this journey is one that they’ve needed to take for a long time. Their goal is to change their life for the better, not just return to zero.
• Now the hero is more active: they are proactively choosing to seize an opportunity that they’ve spotted, rather than merely reacting to a problem (which is something that anyone would do).
• So now what is the second act for? For realizing the unforeseen true nature of the conflict! This only works if the first act shows what seems like a positive (though scary) opportunity, without realizing how much conflict it will cause.

As with any paradigm, it’s all well and good to say that movies should do this, but does this actually apply to movies you’ve seen? We’ll look at that tomorrow…

Underrated Movie #135: Easy Living

Title: Easy Living
Year: 1937
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Writers: Preston Sturges, based on a story by Vera Caspary
Stars: Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, Ray Milland, Luis Alberni, Mary Nash

The Story: Another tale of the perils of mink ownership: A young secretary is riding to work in an open-topped bus (?) only to have a mink land on her head (thrown away by a financier cleaning out his wife’s overstuffed closet). Soon she’s the toast of the town because everybody assumes she’s the man’s mistress, but she falls for his layabout son instead, who is working incognito in an automat.

How it Came to be Underrated: When Struges’s films were belatedly elevated into the canon, less attention was paid to the movies he wrote before he was directing his own scripts. In the hands of a witty, sophisticated director like Leisen (sort of the poor man’s Ernst Lubitch) this becomes a prime slice of pre-Struges-Sturges (we even get appearances by Pangborn and Demarest! )

Why It’s Great:

1. In the interest of leanness, Sturges not only knows how to lop off the beginning and end of each scene, he can even chop out the middle! He shows Arthur and Arnold start to argue about compound interest in the back of a car, then cuts to an exterior shot of the car, then cuts to them getting out once the argument has reached a crescendo. Another example: Arthur walks into work wearing her new mink and eyebrows are raised, cut to inside the boss’s office as she’s already halfway through trying to explain.
2. Why has Hollywood failed to make any great movies about our current interminable financial strife? Because writers these days are far more likely sympathize with the 1% and not the 99. Movies like Company Men and How Do You Know fret over the fate of white collar workers, but movies won’t dare attempt to sympathize with the automat-customers of today: they’re such losers.
3. But there are few characters as sympathetic as Arthur: she finds out that she’s accidentally become rich, so she instantly starts crying tears of joy and says “I’m gonna buy a dog!” Now, that’s lovable.
4. This movie reminded me of going to Sundance: I was amused to find that the parking meters only worked with credit cards, but then I realized that nobody bothered to ticket you if you didn’t pay. You’re in the middle of an elite ski resort, but you never actually have to spend any money. When there’s an assumption that everybody’s rich, nobody charges each other anything.
5. Here’s a good trivia question: what do the seemingly dissimilar classic movies Easy Living, Laura and A Letter to Three Wives have in common? They were all adapted from the writing of the unjustly-forgotten Vera Caspary.
6. Ah, the poetry of Sturges: “Don’t be a sucker, sister, that beef pie is a wow!”

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Jean Arthur is best remembered for her legendary Frank Capra movies, but she also specialized in non-romantic pairings with stout older actors: she followed this one up with two equally underrated comedies co-starring, of all people, Charles Coburn: The Devil and Miss Jones and The More the Merrier.

How Available Is It?: It has a nice-looking DVD with an introduction by TCM’s Robert Osborne

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Problem, Opportunity, Conflict, Part 1: The Problem with Inciting Incidents

As I’ve been sifting through the suggestions of these gurus, one of my persistent complaints is how vague they are. They’re selling their formulas as magic one-size-fits-all prescriptions for success, rather than lists of common trends in successful stories, so they feel the need to phrase everything as generically as possible, ensuring that every buyer will feel like they got their money’s worth.

As a result, everything the guru says is true of every story. There’s just one problem: that provides no actual guidance. In the second half of each book, the gurus always go through a litany of their favorite movies and point out how each one conforms to every point of their process, but we don’t always see for ourselves the trends they’re trying to point out. Just the opposite: we see them twisting and warping the story to fit their pre-established thesis.

One thing that really stands out to me is how un-helpful the phrase “inciting incident” is. I was once criticized online (in this epic two-part piece) for using the term imprecisely myself, and I concede that I was letting the term float in the entry they were mentioning, but I felt free to do so because it rarely means the same thing twice.

The problem with the usual definition of “inciting incident” is that it’s a rule that nobody can break, because it’s just about impossible to create a story that doesn’t have something that could be called an inciting incident. The purpose of rules should be to separate good behavior from bad behavior, so that you can explain why some stories work and others don’t.

A classic example that is often used to demonstrate an “inciting incident” is the one from Jaws. Everybody in the town is happy, then a shark attacks. In the end, they kill the shark so that they can all be happy again. That’s very tidy, but most movies don’t work like Jaws. In most movies, heroes have a much more volatile and ironic relationship to the events that befall them.

What I’ve now come to realize is that the “inciting incident” usually consists of three distinct events: the old problem, the new opportunity, and the unforeseen conflict that arises. We’ll pick up there next week…

The Great Guru Showdown, Part 9: Jule Selbo

The Guru: Jule Selbo
The Book: Gardner’s Guide to Screenplay: From Idea to Successful Script
The Year: 2007

The History: Unlike our other gurus, Selbo’s book is not well known and hasn’t had a seismic effect. I’ve included her for two reasons: (a) to show that there are dozens more structures available in other books, and (b) because I love how her structure doesn’t resemble anybody else’s, but still pretty much works. Selbo teaches at California State Fullerton and she’s written several direct-to-video sequels to Disney movies.

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: None, really. Selbo is a good, down to earth writer who doesn’t engage in outrageous overreaches.

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

1. I like how she questions the rigidity of other structures, but the flip side of this is that her structure slides around too much. It fits every movie, but, by her own admission, some movies spend 60 pages on just one of the steps. If so you’re not going to get much guidance here for those 60 pages:
2. As a result, this is a good structure for figuring out which beats are missing from your hero’s story, but it’s not very helpful for figuring out where you need to be on any given page. This structure won’t tell you: “Uh-oh, you’re halfway through, so it’s time to kick things up a notch.”

Useful Wisdom:

1. I was really struck by how unique but nevertheless universal Selbo’s structure was, which convinced me that every story structure was really an attempt to describe the inherent structure of a problem, rather than merely the traditions of previous writers.
2. This is proven by the fractal nature of her structure: it applies to a whole movie, it applies separately to each sub-plot, it applies to each sequence, and it even applies within each big scene.
3. I love how much she stresses that the hero must first try to solve the problem logically. Blake Snyder insists that you get to “the promise of the premise” by page 30, but this can lead to movies like The Negotiatior, where Sam Jackson decides to take hostages way too quickly. Compare this to Safety Last: people have come to see Harold Lloyd climb a building against his will, but Lloyd smartly takes the time to exhaust all the other options, even though it means that the promise of the premise doesn’t arrive until halfway through.
4. She does a great job walking you through several movies and showing how her structure applies. The book is a simply a good read.

The Great Guru Showdown, Part 8: Blake Snyder

The Guru: Blake Snyder
The Book: “Save the Cat!” and “Save the Cat Strikes Back”
The Year: 2005 and 2009

The History: Unlike most of the others on this list, Snyder actually wrote a few theatrically released movies, but the only one you’ll remember is, alas, Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! After his career petered out, he wrote a slim screenwriting book that became wildly popular. His follow-up book turned him into a full-fledged guru by laying out his version of structure, but he didn’t live see it published, dying suddenly at age 51.

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: “Existential dilemmas are what close on Saturday night, as the low-performing art house gem Memento proves. Gimmick or really dull movie? You decide.”

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

1. Snyder’s first book was way too snide and arrogantly anti-intellectual. Look at that quote! How many things are wrong with that statement?? I initially skimmed the book, found quotes like that, and quit reading. It was only after the book became a phenomenon that I tried it again, and realized there was a lot of great analysis buried beneath the arrogance.
2. As part of his overly-bluff tone, Snyder is far too specific about which page number each beat should happen on, causing many to dismiss his work as a “paint-by-numbers” formula.
3. His central point, that bad-ass heroes like Jolie’s Lara Croft aren’t actually sympathetic, and heroes should go back to saving cats occasionally, is a good one, but he gives too few examples of varieties of “cat saving,” leaving the reader adrift.

Useful Wisdom:

1. Thankfully (and poignantly) Snyder’s posthumous follow-up book was far more mature and humble that his first. It’s in this book that he lays out his whole structure, which is, for my money, the best of the bunch:
2. One of his best no-no’s that is often-quoted today is “double mumbo-jumbo”, which says you can’t have two unrelated sources of weirdness in the same story.
3. Snyder insists that every scene should reverse the change from positive to negative or vice versa. This is the same as saying that every scene should be a reversal. I mostly agree, but not entirely.
4. Snyder focuses a lot on the power of opening and closing images, with the latter preferably being the opposite of the former. Directors rarely do this literally, but if you think of this as some sort of symbolic object that reverses meaning from the first scene to the last, it can be a powerful tool.
5. One idea that’s in Snyder’s structure and no others is the “False victory and/or false defeat,” with one happening around page 60 and the next around page 75. Again, this isn’t always true, but once he points it out, you do start to notice it a lot.
6. …and lots more. These books are really packed with good pithy little nuggets of advice, if you can make it past his initial snotty attitude. Snyder shall be missed.

The Great Guru Showdown, Part 8: The Sequence Approach (Daniel via Gulino)

The Guru: Frank Daniel, via Paul Joseph Gulino
The Book: Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach
The Year: 1970s / 2004

The History: Frank Daniel was a Czech film producer who emigrated to America in 1969, then taught screenwriting at three of the country’s biggest film schools: AFI, Columbia, and USC. At each school he preached the “sequence approach”. He never published these ideas in a book, but instructors at these schools spread the word. Finally, in 2004, one of his protégées, Paul Joseph Gulino, published a book that summarized Daniel’s approach.

Thing that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: Well, before you read a word, there’s Gulino’s author photo (above), which is exactly what you fear a guru will look like.

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

1. As with most books, the description of the structure is too vague and generic, while the definitions of the jargon are too specific and arbitrary.
2. In general, this theory gives too much equal weight to each of the eight sequences. There’s no sense of rising action. Unsurprisingly, devotees of this approach tend to write episodic screenplays.

Useful Wisdom:

1. If you look at what we’ve studied so far (please enlarge!), you’ll notice right away that this one’s significantly different. The sequence camp deserves credit simply for stubbornly resisting the three-act orthodoxy, and reminding screenwriters that there are totally different ways of looking at things.
2. In sharp contrast to Field, Daniel/Guilino stress that the hero, rather than meandering through the second act while waiting for the climax, should always be trying to solve the problem right away and the only reason that it takes so long is that everything keeps getting turned on its head, which makes sure that the screenplay keeps expanding in scope.
3. I love the idea presented here that, after the ¾ mark, the “dramatic question is answered” and now the hero starts working against everything they’ve worked for up until that point. This isn’t always true, but once Gulino pointed it out, I realized how often this happens. Basically the hero realizes that he/she’s been building a house of cards and spends the rest of the movie trying to tear it down.
4. It took me years to figure out that the main difference between the second quarter and third quarter of a screenplay was “the easy way vs. the hard way”. Gulino, unlike Field, does mention this, though he doesn’t emphasize it very much.
5. I like how Gulino explicitly focuses on the audience’s experience of the story, and the need to build false expectations in order to create irony.

Underrated Movie #134: Dead Man

Title: Dead Man
Year: 1995
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Writers: Jim Jarmusch
Stars: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henrickson, John Hurt, Robert Mitchum

The Story: A heartbroken Cleveland accountant named William Blake is lured out west by a false job offer in the town of Machine. While there, he accidentally kills the son of the town’s megalomaniacal boss (Robert Mitchum) who sends out killers after him. He falls under the protection of an Eastern-educated nation-less Indian who mistakes him for the English poet of the same name.

How it Came to be Underrated: I always found Jarmusch’s movies fun but overrated, until this one came along, which I thought was criminally underrated. Depp wasn’t big enough to open a movie yet, mainstream viewers found it too strange (and lacking in color) and Jarmusch’s hip urbanite fans were put off by this detour into Peckinpah territory.

Why It’s Great:

1. This isn’t so much a Western as a Northwestern. The North(east), the South(east), and the (south)West all loom large in America’s mythology and imagination. But the Northwest lags behind, though it’s not for lack of majesty and iconic power, as this movie proves. It follows in the proud footsteps of that other great Northwestern, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
2. Depp was capable of great work right from his very beginning, but too often in the early days he came across as too precious and/or precocious (Benny and Joon, et al). In the right hands, he can do great things with that manic style (Ed Wood, Pirates of the Caribbean), but he can be equally powerful in quieter, more intense roles (such as this and Donnie Brasco)
3. It’s no accident that the networks have suddenly ordered no fewer than seven Western pilots for the next TV season. Viewers love Westerns for the unlimited horizons, but writers love them for the opposite reason: nowhere was life more precarious and the options for survival so limited. The Robert Mitchums have returned to power, ripping down most of the progress this country made in the 20th century and dragging us back to the hard-scrabble, no security, day-to-day struggles of the 19th century. America is looking to understand our scary new reality.
4. For the first draft of the score, Jarmusch had Neil Young simply watch the movie and noodle around on a heavy-reverb electric guitar to score it in real time. This sounds like a terrible idea, but Young has a way of breaking rules and getting away with it. The result is at times snarling and raw, at other times mournful and elegiac. (And it helps that Young did build on those initial results, rescoring it in the studio in a more traditional way.)

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: The always entertaining Gary Farmer has, inevitably, played a lot a spirit-guides to white guys, but he’s also gotten some more diverse roles in all-Indian productions such as Smoke Signals and Skins.

How Available Is It?: It’s on DVD and available to watch instantly, where, I’m pleased to report, Robby Muller’s stunning cinematography comes through with remarkable clarity.

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A Tale of Two Pilots

So I watched two CBS pilots this week and they made for a great lesson in the difference between having a great concept and having a great execution.

The fall pilot I was most looking forward to was “Person of Interest.” It was created by Jonathan Nolan, (co-author of most of his brother Chris’s movies), it co-stars the always brilliant Michael Emerson (whom I’ve been a fan of since “The Practice”, for which he won an Emmy long before he worked his magic on “Lost”) and Jim Caviezel (who I hadn’t seen much of, but was good in The Thin Red Line)

More importantly, it had a great premise: A reclusive billionaire, tapping into cameras all over the city, develops a algorithm that can predict patterns of behavior, identifying people who will become involved in violent crimes before those crimes happen, so he recruits a former CIA agent to help him intervene. Creepy and fun!

But it may have been the worse pilot I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot of terrible pilots). Not one scene, not one line of dialogue worked. It was a 100% disaster. Emerson’s fine, but all he does is deliver exposition. He’s a plot device, not a character. Caveizel, on the other hand, is absolutely extraordinary: so sullen, so lifeless, so bland… was he whacked out on painkillers when they made this? Did he refuse to star until they put a gun to his head, then stumbled through it under duress? Baffling.

But it hardly matters, given the quality of the script. Yes, Caviezel knows who will be involved in crimes, but he doesn’t intervene proactively. Instead, he follows the person around, waits for the crime to happen, then shoots the evildoers dead and dumps their bodies in the meadowlands. That’s his brilliant modus operandi.

But surely the story will slowly expand and become more interesting, right? Not if they can help it: Emerson fully explains the origin and methodology of his process, then explicitly says, over and over throughout the pilot, that this same procedure will be repeated, in exactly the same way, week after week. He even introduces the pilot’s person of interest by saying: “This week I’m focused on her.” Get it, folks at home? We’re promising that there will be a new, self-contained case every week! No loose ends, we promise! Ugh.If “Person of Interest” showed what happens when you have a great premise with terrible execution, then “A Gifted Man” shows what happens when you have a terrible premise with great execution. Here’s the idea: an asshole neurosurgeon gets weekly visits from the sweet-natured ghost of his ex-wife, who tries to teach him to be a better person. Ouch! Painful!

But this is the best pilot of the year so far. Everybody involved, creator Suzannah Grant, director Jonathan Demme, and stars Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Ehle, are movie people who are new to network TV and haven’t grown complacent about their new medium yet. The characters are vivid and believable. The story is compelling and thought-provoking. The emotions are hard-earned and raw.

Why did one pilot turn out so well and the other so badly? When I was watching “Person of Interest”, I kept complaining to Betsy that it was too “CBS-y”. In other words: the dialogue was too on-the-nose, the emotional moments lacked subtext, and it was too much of a procedural. I got the distinct impression that the original script might have been interesting, but they made the mistake of selling it to CBS, who buried them in notes that utterly violated the premise until the whole thing became a flavorless lump.

I’ve gotten pretty good at singling out which dialogue was written by the creator and which lines were inserted by the network execs (“This week I’m focused on her”), but “A Gifted Man” didn’t seem to have any of those lines.* Why not? Because they sold their pilot to the right network. The concept was so purely-CBS that the network was able to simply trust the very talented creators to execute it as they saw fit. This round peg slid so smoothly into its round hole that no hammering was necessary, so it never got bent out of shape.

* Okay, just one, Wilson is talking to a tennis pro and says something like “Anyone who feels the need to be the best, whether they’re a tennis pro or a surgeon, knows….” That insert about the surgeon was almost certainly added by a network exec who was afraid that we wouldn’t know he was also talking about himself. Still, most pilot have about twenty of those clunky insertions.

The Great Guru Showdown, Part 7: Syd Field

The Guru: Syd Field
The Book: Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
The Year: 1979

The History: Field had been an unproduced screenwriter (aren’t we all?), a development exec, and a lecturer for many years, until he got fed up with the lack of any books about screenwriting. He wrote the first one and it became a wild success. He’s published several more books and lectured around the world ever since.

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: (On how well you have to know your characters) “I’ll write more than 20 pages, starting with my character’s parents and grandparents on both sides, and then I’ll even use past lives and astrology to further insight into my character.” Ah, the ‘70s…

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

1. Field, like most screenwriting gurus, is maddeningly generic. Anyone who charges money for their seminars loses the luxury of saying “well maybe my ideas don’t apply to your story.” They have to insist that their ideas are universally applicable, which turns them into mush.
2. And so phrases like “inciting incident” and “plot point” are too vague to be useful. Here’s a typical paragraph: “The function of the Plot Point is simple: It moves the story forward. Plot Point I and Plot Point II are the story points that hold the paradigm in place. They are the anchors of your story line” Oh, okay. Wait, what? It’s meaninglessness. It provides no real guidance.
3. The now-omnipresent phrase “Inciting incident” makes no differentiation between the problem, the opportunity and the conflict. I’ll delve into that more soon...
4. The other huge problem with Field’s structure, as you can see from the diagram, is that it leaves you totally adrift in the second act, without even a recognized midpoint, writers have no clue how to get through the meat of their screenplays. The result is that a lot of Field’s devotees wind up just marking time until the climax finally begins.

Useful Wisdom:

1. For good or ill, Field ideas were generally applicable enough to give the entire industry some common terminology, such as “Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3,” which does greatly help the notes process.
2. Field is the most laid-back of the major gurus. His tone is calm and helpful, he does a great job linking everything back to examples.
3. He’s great with character creation and gives good examples of ways to show character through behavior.

The Great Guru Showdown, Part 6: Joseph Campbell

The Guru: Joseph Campbell
The Book: The Hero With A Thousand Faces
The Year: 1949

The History: Campbell traveled the world, learned six languages, studied Freud, Jung, James Joyce and James Frazer, translated ancient tablets, and defined the underlying structure beneath heroic myths from every culture. His 1949 book was hugely influential. His popularity surged in the 1970s, when his work was embraced by both new agers and Hollywood storytellers like George Lucas.

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: The first line has not exactly aged well: “Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse … it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

Campbell was a great man who humbled the world into seeing their myths from anthropological and artistic perspective, but attempts to apply his structure, derived from religious and foundation myths, directly to screenplays are very problematic....

1. Campbell’s heroes start from a happy status quo, untroubled when the story begins, but this makes for very dull characters. There’s no volatile reaction between the character’s internal problems and the external action of the plot.
2. Campbell’s very big on mentors, which I never see the need for.
3. While Campbell’s circular chart is very elegant, how often do movie heroes, other than Frodo, actually “return with the elixir” to rescue their homelands? Movie execs quote this all the time, but I don’t think it applies.

Useful Wisdom:

1. Obviously, we all owe Campbell for doing the research that proved there was such a thing as universal storytelling structure, and that it arose not from the genius of any one culture (as Aristotle would have it), but from the inherent needs of the stories themselves, with independent cultures all over the world discovering similar rules.
2. One aspect of Campbell’s structure that I do find myself quoting a lot is the idea of “finding the special weapon in the cave” during the third quarter of the story (whether the special weapon is an object, a vital piece of information, or just a self-realization). A hero’s ultimate triumph should come from the failure of their original plan, not the success of it.

The Great Guru Showdown, Part 5: Aristotle

The Guru: Aristotle
The Book: Poetics
The Year: 335 BCE, or thereabouts

The History: Aristotle (student of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great) lectured on every subject under the sun, including the proper form and function of tragic plays. (There was possibly a companion volume on comedy, but that’s lost today.)

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: “The character will be good if the purpose is good. This rule is relative to each class. Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless.” Okee-Dokee then.

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful: I was assigned to read this on the first day of film school, but it didn’t do me much good. Students are hardwired to reject restrictions, so they pick up structure books looking for an excuse to fling them across the room, and Aristotle has no shortage of those:

1. All heroes must come from royal families (An idea that poisoned English and French drama for centuries.)
2. The whole drama should take place in one day in one place. (Ditto)
3. In general, like most of the gurus we’ll look at, he’s overly didactic (“These are the only possible ways”), practically begging the student to find an exception and therefore reject everything.
4. He had little use for happy endings, referring to the third act strictly as “the unraveling.” He didn’t leave any room for triumph.

Useful Wisdom: That said, re-reading it for this entry, I was shocked at how many of the book’s truths I had rejected only to “discover” them for myself much later. These include:

1. Drama is about a person’s problem, not their life in general: “For tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.”
2. One problem should rule the story: “It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
3. The purpose of good writing is to take the “and then, and then” randomness of life and transform this into the “and so, and so” flow that exists only in fiction. (For some reason, Aristotle’s Greek is usually translated into Latin here, so this is called post hoc vs. propter hoc)
4. The best dramas end in a realization (ignorance to wisdom) and a reversal (good fortune to bad, or vice versa). These can happen one after another, but in the very best stories, they happen simultaneously.

Tomorrow, we’ll jump all the way to the 20th century. Sorry, slavery-lovers.

Underrated Movie #133: Barcelona

Title: Barcelona
Director: Whit Stillman
Writer: Whit Stillman
Stars: Taylor Nichols, Chris Eigeman, Tushka Bergen, Mira Sorvino

The Story: A neurotic American salesman stationed in Barcelona in the ‘80s has to play host to his obnoxious Navy attaché cousin. They chase girls, bicker about their differences, and worry about the growing anti-American sentiment around them.

How it Came to be Underrated: All three of Stillman’s movies were cult hits at the time, but his strange disappearance from the scene has caused them all to fade from memory. He’s finally coming out with his first movie in 13 years this fall, so it’s a great time to rediscover his work.

Why It’s Great:

1. The only acceptable form of movie voiceover is if it contradicts what we see onscreen. This movie justifies its voiceover immediately: Nichols tells us, “I was furious but tried not to show it,” just before we see him greet Eigeman with a terse growl of, “You could have called.” Clearly not as good at hiding his emotions as he imagines.
2. This movie has more great one-liners per square inch than most ‘80s ants-in-you-pants comedies, helped by Eigeman’s blandly deadpan delivery: “You can’t say that Americans are more violent than other people, we’re just better shots.” Or: “You are a far weirder person than someone into S and M. At least they have a tradition.”
3. Eigeman’s umbrage about Spanish resentment of America provides a lot of subtle humor. His fellow Americans beg him not wear his Navy blues, but he keeps indignantly saying “Men wearing this uniform died ridding Europe of fascism,” blithely oblivious to the fact that the U.S. cheerfully supported the fascist dictatorship in Spain throughout WW2 and far beyond.
4. Eigeman and Nichols were both veterans of the ensemble in Stillman’s Metropolitan, and they both excelled upon graduating to these lead roles. There’s one silent scene of Eigeman figuring out a plot point from earlier in the movie and we read the whole thing on his face through the most subtle of facial gestures. Both have shown up in movies sporadically ever since, but never got much traction.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Eigemann was also great in Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming. Taylor was good as a screwed-over investor in Boiler Room.

How Available Is It?: It’s on DVD and Watch Instantly.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: How Can You Not Love This Kid and His Big-as-Life Hang-Ups?

The Great Guru Showdown, Part 4: How Do They Line Up?

So we’ll begin at the end: here’s what our gurus look like, all lined up. This is the first (that I know of) structure guru concordance. Click to enbiggen it and then drink it in...Note how some of the structures are just different ways of saying the same thing, while other truly contradict each other (especially in the third quarter, which is always the hardest part of a story to define.)

And for those of you to lazy too click on it and see the full-size version (I know you’re out there), here’s a close-up of the beginnings:

The middles:

And the ends:

But who are these guys and gals, really? Next week we’ll talk about what they have to say that’s valuable and what’s not so helpful...