How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 6: Start with an Image

A man waiting at a lonely crossroads suddenly realizes that a cropduster pilot is plunging down towards him with death in his eyes. Why? A house lifts up out of the city, carried aloft by thousands of helium balloons. Who’s in it? Where’s it going?This is one of the most exciting but dangerous ways to generate an idea. You’re essentially starting with the poster: an arresting image that would make anybody want to see more. All that you’re missing is characters and a plot and a theme. The danger, of course, is that once your hero comes to life, he’ll think of easier ways to get down to the Amazon. If you start in the middle, there’s no guarantee that your hero will want to get there.

I’ve had an image in my head for a while: a horde of Tyrannosauruses rampaging down the streets of modern day New York. How did they get there? And who will discover the cause of the problem? And why will the audience love that character? And what does any of this have to do with any genuine emotion of mine? Most importantly, what is the metaphor here? The image gives me none of this. It’s just a great poster.

Ultimately, it’s much more organic to start with a universal emotion and extrapolate an extreme situation from it, rather than starting with an extreme situation and reducing it back down to the emotion at its core. But it can work either way, if you’re very careful.

Pixar is especially good at this. I would imagine that most of their movies began with an image (toys coming to life, a mouse-chef in a human kitchen, a ruined planet covered in trash), but they don’t move forward until they’ve connected those concepts to very universal emotions.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 5: Search For Empathy

Occasionally there will be a small news item that will seize hold of the nation’s collective subconscious, generating dozens of famous stories. One such story was the arrest of deranged loner Ed Gein, who provided the basis for dozens of horror stories, the best of which was Robert Bloch’s novel/screenplay “Psycho”.

Movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre imagined what it might be like to be one of the Gein’s victims, but Bloch’s genius was to ask himself, “How could I make this guy sympathetic?” (The answer, as always, was a disapproving parent.)

Likewise Zoe Heller’s novel “Notes on a Scandal”, which Patrick Marbur adapted into an excellent movie of the same name, dared to find empathy with a female high school teacher who begins a sexual relationship with a student. The title of the American release of the book spelled out the source of Heller’s idea: She read a spate of news stories about similar cases and wondered, “What Was She Thinking?”

The most famous example of all was probably Citizen Kane. Far from being the cruel denunciation that William Randolph Hearst imagined it to be, the movie is actually an extraordinary act of empathy. Welles may have set out to topple a giant, but he wound up ennobling his deeply-flawed target. Instead of finding a villain in Hearst, he found a kindred spirit, and the movie acts as an unheeded cautionary tale for Welles’s own life.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 4: Do the Craziest Thing You’ve Ever Wanted to Do

Who hasn’t thought, after a bad break up, that they’d rather just wipe the whole experience out of their mind? Well guess what: in a movie, you can! Hard sci-fi starts with existing technology and extrapolates where it might go, but zanier stories like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind start with our hopes and fears and invent some vaguely-explained tech to make them manifest.

And you don’t have to go all the way into science-fiction. Take High Fidelity: I doubt that Nick Hornby ever actually called up all of his exes going back to elementary school and asked them what was wrong with him, but as soon as he had the idea, he knew it would make for a good novel and movie.And Jonathan Ames obviously didn’t actually chuck his writing career to become a cragslist-private-eye, but he considered it long enough to realize that it could make for a good TV series.

All three of the above stories worked, but be warned that this can also be a way to generate dubious gimmick-driven hokum like Yes Man, in which a man says yes to everything for a year, or self-indulgent messes like Synecdoche, NY, about a man who transforms his whole life into an elaborate theater piece.

These are all stories about the sort of grand romantic gestures that people make in their head but never in real life. The difference is that the first three projects are all about characters who come to realize the folly of their grand conceit, whereas the latter two stories supposed that these enterprises could be a source of profundity.

Ultimately, there’s a reason that we only do these sorts of things in our heads. If you’re going to try to turn one of these grand romantic gestures into a movie, then your hero needs to come to realize this sort of self-indulgence is a bad idea.

Underrated Movie #147: Wendy and Lucy

Title: Wendy and Lucy

Year: 2008

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Writers: Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt, from the short story “Train Choir” by Raymond

Stars: Michelle Williams, Lucy the dog, Will Oldham, Will Patton 

The Story: Destitute drifter Wendy, traveling with her dog Lucy, is making her way towards Alaska looking for work, but they get separated after a series of misfortunes in Oregon. As Wendy’s search for Lucy becomes more desperate, she realizes how untenable her life has become.

 

How it Came to be Underrated: Reichardt has a small-but-devoted following and she seems to have no trouble getting her movies made, but she’s still far too little-known. 

Why It’s Great:

1. Reichardt’s first movie won her a lot of fans, but the most important one was clearly Michelle Williams, whose offer to star in the next two movies no doubt helped quite a bit with financing. Williams’s stunning, utterly unglamorous performance shows how you can be totally naturalistic and yet heartbreaking at the same time.
2. Reichardt’s movies are sometimes lumped in with the “mumblecore” genre, but she and her characters are far more concerned with real world problems, rather than awkwardness or enuii. She really has more in common with the Italian Neorealists: Basically, this movie is about what happens to one poor girl who finds herself living both The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. at the same time.
3. Whatever happened to Will Patton? As sort of a poor man’s Gene Hackman, he made a nice career for himself by being the best thing about a lot of not-so-great movies and TV shows. I always thought he would helm his own “Law and Order” or “CSI” spin-off some day, but he just disappeared… until he showed up again in Reichardt’s movies, of all places, with his gruff charm still intact.
4. SPOILER: I’m not a dog person, so I thought I would be immune from this movie’s tear-jerking, but boy was I wrong. In fact, early on, when an asshole-ish character says, “if a person can’t afford dog food, they shouldn’t have a dog”, I found myself thinking, “Well I kinda agree.” Then I got to the end, when Williams herself ultimately comes to that same conclusion, which is one of the most painful moments I’ve ever seen onscreen. I choke up every time I even hear the title of this movie!

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Reichhardt’s other two movies are also excellent. Her first, Old Joy, tells the tale of two estranged friends on a hike in the woods, and her third, Meek’s Cutoff, brings back Williams for an allegorical wagon train period-piece.

How Available Is It?: It’s on DVD and Netflix Watch Instantly, as are all of Reichardt’s movies.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Plunder Pooch!

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 3: Tap Into Your Irrational Fears

One problem with serial killer movies is that the victims are over-motivated to stop the killers. A serial killer is so obviously evil that opposing one is a no-brainer. If fears are perfectly rational, then your story runs the risk of being too generic. If you want to write a story that’s specific to your character’s psychology, then make your character’s most irrational fears come true.

Every pregnant woman suffers the occasional fleeting fear that this process is actually entirely unnatural and there’s a monster growing in her belly… That’s why Rosemary’s Baby resonates so powerfully.

And this doesn’t just work for horror movies. Who hasn’t idly wondered, in their more paranoid moments, “What if everyone around me is in on a secret? What if my life is secretly being manipulated for the amusement of others?” The Truman Show made those fears come to life in an especially trippy way.These movies work not simply because the audience worries about Rosemary and Truman, but because we feel a creeping sense of dread that our own craziest fears are being exposed to all the world and made manifest. We can’t help but wonder: if this fear can come true, what’s to stop all the others??

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 2: Start with a Unique Relationship

It’s fascinating to go back and re-watch the first six episodes of “30 Rock”. All of the elements of greatness were there, but they didn’t add up, because the show hadn’t found its focus. Liz’s boss yelled at her, to little effect, and she yelled at her employees, to little effect. The individual characters were hilarious, but these were all relationships we had seen before.

Then, suddenly, in episode six, everything snaps into place, and the show re-centers itself around a new, never-before-seen-on-TV relationship. Despite the fact that she’s a loosey-goosey ultra-liberal girl-about-town, Liz reluctantly accepts an ongoing offer of mentorship from Jack, her type-A ultra-right ultra-sexist boss. This odd but mutually beneficial mentor-mentee relationship quickly became the heart of the show, and it has been ever since.

As I’ve said before, movies are defined not by unique characters but by unique relationships. This is good because we’ve already seen every type of character onscreen before. I’ve met a lot of oddballs in my life, but none that were totally unlike anything I’d seen onscreen. There’s always some movie somewhere that’s already gone there. Likewise with the heroes, villains, and love interests I’ve encountered. But I’ve had plenty of relationships that I’ve never seen onscreen before.

Think about times in your life when a teacher suddenly needed your help, or a favor turned into an bizarre feud, or a love affair turned into something else entirely. If this was a fascinating relationship that we haven’t seen onscreen before, then you’ll find a treasure trove of fresh, un-cliched emotions that you can tap into.

Can you find relationships from your life that are as incongruous as those seen in Paper Moon, Midnight Run, Election, etc? If not, you can always invent one from scratch. Simply take two very different types of characters and force them to rely on each other in a unique way.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 1: Imagine the Worst Case Scenario

True story: Many years ago, four Atlanta businessmen decided to take a weekend trip to the woods of North Georgia, hoping to canoe a river one last time before it got damned up. They didn’t plan things very well, and soon found themselves hopelessly lost on the river, far away from their cars or any town. They gradually came to realize, however, that the woods around them were filled with backwoodsmen. What happened next?

I’ll tell you what happened. Some mountain folk invited them back to their cabin, fed them a great meal and then escorted them back to their cars, with a warm farewell and an offer to stop by again anytime.

As the four men were on the way home, one of them wondered aloud, “Gee, what would have happened if those mountain folk hadn’t been so nice to us?” Things might have ended there, but one of the four men was James Dickey, who wrote the novel (and later screenplay) “Deliverance” based on that supposition. Ever since, the whole world has associated the fine people of North Georgia with psychotic depravity. No good deed goes unpunished.

One can carp about the ethics of throwing one’s rescuers under the bus like that, but it’s still a good lesson to writers: if the worst thing that ever happened to you wasn’t that bad, feel free to write about the worst thing that could have happened to you.

This gives you a chance to tap into the fears you actually felt, even if they turned out to be unfounded. After all, what really fuels Deliverance isn’t the (invented) evil of the tormentors, but the (very real) feelings of feelings of masculine inadequacy and disconnectedness from nature that grip the isolated men.

Storyteller's Rulebook #121: Don’t Presume Your Premise

I sometimes get to read scripts long before they’re made, and one of my favorite scripts in recent years was cheekily titled “Fuckbuddies”. Naturally they had to change the title, and they wanted to call it Friends with Benefits, but they found out there was already a competing project with that name, so they ended up with the name No Strings Attached.

 

“Fuckbuddies” was a very popular script, largely because the screenwriter’s “voice” was so strong: it felt fresh, real, and raw. But by the time it made it to the screen, directed on autopilot by old duffer Ivan Reitman, that bold voice had been reduced to a mutter, and the resulting movie is shockingly awful. Friends with Benefits, on the other hand, earned fewer fans as a script, but it really came alive onscreen, making for a surprisingly fun movie.

 

It’s tempting to blame NSA’s script/screen disconnect entirely on rewrites, and those certainly didn’t help, but it also had another problem: that bold fresh voice had been masking some fundamental construction problems, and once the voice was muted, those problems became glaringly obvious. 

NSA fails, in part, because it simply presumes its premise. We start with a too-cool-for-school heroine who has never had any interest in romance. When she announces to a schlubby acquaintance that they should have a loveless romance, he hastily agrees, and the movie is off and running. It’s not that her beliefs are unmotivated—we certainly understand how her home life left her afraid of commitment, but that’s just backstory, we never get to see those scars form.

FWB, on the other hand, builds its premise in a much more straightforward way. We begin by intercutting our two future lovers as they both go through exasperating break-ups with annoying exes. We then see how satisfying their work lives are by comparison. By the time they meet, we totally understand why each would be reluctant to get seriously involved.

 

Most telling are the actual hook-up scenes in the two movies. NSA goes for the old “jump each other’s bones when you least expect it” set-up, which always gets a laugh, but rarely makes sense. FWB, refreshingly, shows a far more believable hook-up: a guy and girl are hanging out platonically when, struck by a fleeting moment of horniness, the guy makes a half-hearted pass at the girl. They then discuss whether or not that’s a good idea. After coolly batting the idea back and forth in a sexy, witty, but utterly realistic way, they decide to go for it: provided that they don’t bring emotion into it. With that, the premise is strongly established, and they’re off.

 

Alas, this is why screenplays need to have rock-solid infrastructure: because that’s all that will be left by the time they make it to the screen. “Fuckbuddies”, on the other hand, had as its selling point a certain je ne sais qua, which translated onscreen to “Say what?”

If you’ve got a strong dialogue voice, you might have more luck on TV—and sure enough “Fuckbuddies” writer Liz Meriwether now has a witty, quirky hit sitcom, “The New Girl”, which has done a much better job at conveying her unique voice.

Underrated Movie #147: Mickey One

Title: Mickey One

Year: 1965

Director: Arthur Penn

Writer: Alan M. Surgal

Stars: Warren Beatty, Alexandra Stewart, Hurd Hatfield, Franchot Tone, Kamatari Fujiwara

The Story: An ultra-cool Detroit nightclub comic finds himself on the wrong side of his club’s mobbed-up owner. Fleeing on the lam to the seedy side of Chicago, he imagines killers are hiding in every shadow… but he has a pathological urge to return to the stage...
 

How it Came to be Underrated: This movie has two big problems: it’s always divided audiences, and it’s always been hard to find. After wildly mixed early reviews, it was dumped as a drive-in movie, where audiences must have been truly baffled, since it was one of the first attempts to do a dryly-surreal American art-film. The movie has never been on video, and even when it shows up in revival theaters, it continues to attract as many detractors as fans. I happen to love it.
 

Why It’s Great:

1. By 1965, there was a huge gap between the unapologetic artistry of European cinema and America’s widescreen technicolor blandness, but a few brave souls wanted to drag Hollywood into the modern age, and none moreso than Warren Beatty (of all people). He really wanted to hire Godard or Truffaut to come over the pond, but instead, he made do with ambitious American TV director Arthur Penn. This was their first attempt to import a new wave sensibility, and they succeeded onscreen, but not in theaters. Nevertheless the pair tried again two years later with Bonnie and Clyde and finally ignited an American Renaissance.
2. American street-level noir and European high-minded existentialism have always been incestuously entertwined: Nobody believed Camus when he said that “The Stranger” was merely his attempt to imitate James M. Cain, but he wasn’t half wrong, and noir itself never would have taken hold without the infusion of émigrés fleeing Hitler. (even then, it took the French to recognize the genre and name it). Penn’s oddball intellectual noir delicately straddles the end of one era (noir) and the beginning of another (art cinema), not belonging to either but worthy of both.
3. The offbeat sensibility and staccato rhythms make this movie the visual equivalent of jazz, and so it’s only fitting that it’s got a hopping jazz score by the great Stan Getz.
4. Beatty always seemed miscast to me in movies like The Parallax View and Dick Tracy… Basically I think that he’s only really good at playing one thing: angry, half-witted loverboys whose charm masks a deeper angst. ...But whenever he got a role like that, he was amazing. After all, many or our greatest stars made a nice living for themselves by doing one thing well.
5. This kafka-esque nightmare is actually a great metaphor for the bleak life of a stand-up comic, then and now, where the goal is to “kill” onstage before the audience can do the same to you. At least these days the mob no longer runs the nightclubs, so that’s less literal, though just as figurative.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Another fun attempt to merge jazz sensibility and noir style was the short-lived 50s TV show “Johnny Staccato”, starring John Cassavetes as a bebop pianist who moonlights as a hardboiled detective. It’s now on DVD. Alice’s Restaurant is another great Penn movie and Funny Bones is another darkly comic look at stand-up.

How Available Is It?: After the floodgates broke open last week, there’s no stopping me now: This is another only-on-bit-torrent special. The print I found is good but a little small.
 

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: The Crimson Clown!

Storyteller's Rulebook #120: Reboots Must Re-Establish the Metaphor

Apes week concludes!

Relaunching a franchise has a lot of upsides:

• You have old hardcore fans who are desperate to see more material, even though it might ignore previous stories.
• You have semi-interested non-fans who recognize the name and will see this as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a phenomenon they originally missed out on.
• Most importantly, you have years of stories to pick and choose from, allowing you to take the best elements and jettison everything that no longer works.

But it’s also a minefield. As I said yesterday, ever great genre story is a metaphor. It’s an extreme situation that’s a metaphor for a universal emotion. The reboot must either re-establish the original metaphor or re-shape the material into a whole new metaphor.

 

The worst way to do a reboot is to simply make a skewed twist on the original idea: that’s an abstraction of an abstraction. An example of this was Tim Burton’s horrible 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. They simply put the original movie in a blender and served it back to us in a weirder, wilder, and more twist-y format. “You thought the original movie’s ending was mind-blowing? Well, we’ve topped that: our ending is mind-boggling!”The right way to do it was shown by the new Apes reboot: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The bigotry metaphor of the original movie, as brilliant as it was, is totally discarded here, in favor of a rich new metaphor about generational displacement, the limits of science and different varieties of infantilization.And why not? The original movie was a masterpiece, so you’re not going to beat it at its own game. But the specter of an ape planet is still fear-inducing, so why not find a all-new use for that potent imagery? 

Another great example is the recent version of “Doctor Who” starring Matt Smith. This was a “soft reboot” in that it kept (but de-emphasized) the original continuity, but new showrunner Stephen Moffat nevertheless felt the need to create an all-new metaphor for the basic concept. What he arrived at was this: “What if your imaginary friend came back to take you on more adventures as an adult?” Like so: Smith (the youngest to play the role) is the spirit of imagination, come to rescue you from the doldrums of adulthood. This is an entirely new conception of the doctor, never before seen in 40 years of stories. It took Moffat’s genius to somehow find new meaning in such a well-worn concept, and it paid off handsomely: instead of merely re-energizing old fans, his version has found an entirely new generation of fans, who never thought they would like “Doctor Who”.

Storyteller's Rulebook #119: Great Genre Stories Must Be Metaphors

Hey, where’d the apes go? They escaped from today’s post!

So I watched the “Alcatraz”: pilot and it’s…okay. Fun idea, some good actors (not counting the too-cute lead), zippy execution… but it doesn’t add up to anything. Whenever I find myself watching something like this and wondering why it’s not as interesting as it should be, I take a step back and ask myself, “Okay, what exactly is the metaphor here?”

 

“Alcatraz,” I suspect, will never work because it’s not really a metaphor for anything. Compare this to the previous J.J. Abrams Jorge Garcia show about an island, “Lost”, where the “island as redemption” metaphor was quickly established.

 

Now let me be the first to admit: not every fan feels this way about genre shows. Some just enjoy the genre trappings and they could care less what it all means. I was a big fan of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” but quickly lost interest in its spin-off “Angel”. “Buffy” created an extremely rich and flexible metaphor for high-school, coming-of-age, sex, betrayal, empowerment… and almost any other topic the creators wanted to cover, but “Angel” never found its metaphor...At first, it seemed like it might be a metaphor for addiction and recovery, which might have worked, but “Buffy” had already given Angel an epic relapse and redemption arc, which pretty must used up that material, leaving the spinoff with nowhere to go. Ultimately, “Angel” was about a vampire private detective fighting the minions of a vampire law-firm. Huh? What does that mean?

 

But many fans loved “Angel” anyway. The show had some fun horror plots and charming characters. Why nitpick it? The problem, to my mind, was the law of diminishing returns. Once “Angel” de-coupled itself from the rich vein of meaning that underlay “Buffy”, it could keep pleasing old fans, but it wasn’t likely to earn any new fans.

 

Fans don’t need a lot of metaphorical meaning in order to keep watching, but they do need it to fall in love in the first place. “Angel” was a perfectly-acceptable continuation of the “Buffy” universe, but it never found its own metaphor, so it could only be a moon reflecting the light of Buffy’s sun.

To work on its own, “Angel” would have had to start over from scratch with a new metaphor. We’ll get to how to do that tomorrow... (Can you guess which movie will be our example?)

Storyteller's Rulebook #118: Limit Your Hero's Perspective

Apes Week Continues!I’ve said before that a hero can’t succeed by doing what anybody would do. But wait-- Don’t we want our heroes to be relatable, and their actions to be logical? Yes, but you can’t take that too far. A character who is too logical becomes generic.

 

Don’t just ladle on the over-motivation and close off alternate routes until your character is forced to do exactly what you want them to do. Instead, give them just the right amount of motivation, and then let them choose to go the extra step, based on their specific psychology and circumstances. The trick is to allow your hero to have reactions that are surprising but still understandable. 

If we understand how circumstances have limited the hero’s perspective, then it is possible to remain intensely sympathetic to them, even if we know that we would react differently.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it would have been easy to over-motivate Caesar the ape. He could have been expelled from his human home as a result of a false accusation, or an irrational prejudice, but no: he genuinely freaked out and acted overly violent. More importantly, once he’s in state custody, as bad as the conditions are (compared to the human life he used to live) it would have been easy to make his keepers more broadly villainous, instead of merely callous.

 

As I was watching it, I briefly misinterpreted what was happening. I thought that when the keepers showed Franco the nicely-furnished monkey playroom, and then put Caesar into his concrete cell, that this was a dastardly bait and switch. I was relieved when I realized that this wasn’t the case: Caesar did indeed get to spend a lot of time in the playroom, and Franco was in fact aware that Caesar would have to sleep in the cell at night.The decision not to overplay the villainy of the keepers is key, because it keeps the focus on the delicate Franco/Caesar relationship, rather than allowing an outside force to barge in and tip the balance.

 

Since Caesar’s banishment was his own fault, and Franco did everything in his power to stop it, and the keepers aren’t overly evil, then Caesar’s feeling of isolation and betrayal is all the more tragic and universal. Though he has a genius IQ, it doesn’t stop him from feeling a child’s illogical sense of betrayal when he discovers that the world is unfair and not everyone will treat him as well as his parental guardians did.We can see that Caesar’s sense of betrayal is unfounded, but we understand his limited perspective (and remember feeling the same way as children) so we intensely sympathize, far more than if Caesar had suffered a more exaggerated betrayal.

Storyteller's Rulebook #117: Create Reversible Behaviors

Finally saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes and loved it! Let’s do a mini-unit of Apes rules...

In every scene, you must convey the hero’s internal state to the audience. In screenwriting, you have three ways of doing this: voiceover, dialogue or behavior:

• The advantage of voiceover is that it allows the hero to honestly and directly tell us what’s going on. The disadvantages, however, are many: it’s inherently un-cinematic, in that it’s invisible, and it takes us out of the story by breaking the fourth wall.
• Dialogue is also problematic: in real life, people don’t like to honestly tell other people what they’re thinking or feeling. Usually the other character has to trap the hero into revealing their thoughts.
• The best way to detect the internal state of others, in movies and in real life, is through behavior. But behavior is very hard to write. Many readers, myself included, tend to breeze through scripts by reading only the dialogue, skipping over the prose paragraphs entirely, because they tend to be turgid and repetitive. Knowing this, writers are understandably loathe even to attempt to write actions that will speak louder than their words. But this is a mistake. Instead, in order to keep the reader from skipping the descriptions of behavior, every screenwriter must (against expectations) also be an excellent prose writer.

In order to convince the writer to read your prose (and get the movie’s future audience to invest in paying close attention to your characters’ actions) you need to create behaviors that, like good dialogue, are streamlined, deliberate, and packed with meaning.
 

Behavior, like dialogue, benefits from the old trick of ‘set up and pay-off.’ One advantage of this is that it allows you to create potential energy early on with the set-up, and then release that energy swiftly and efficiently when the pay-off hits. The audience loves to see this happen: Because they saw the set-up, they are in your secret club and know instantly what it means when they see the pay-off, even though a casual observer wouldn’t. 

You can do this with physical actions as well by creating reversible behaviors. Rather than come up with new behavioral clues from scratch in every scene to convey emotional states, you can give a character a behavior that means one thing, then later have the character reverse that behavior, letting the audience know instantly that the internal state has flipped as well. This is why it’s always good to look for behaviors that can do double-duty: meaning one thing now and the opposite later on.
 

Several great examples are on display in the wonderful recent blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes. When we first meet John Lithgow’s character, he’s attempting to play the piano but merely banging out dischordant notes, letting us know instantly that he’s losing his mind. When his son gives him an anti-alzheimer’s medication, he awakes the next morning to find his father playing the piano beautifully. We instantly understand what this means.(Interestingly, the writers later have an opportunity to flip this again, but they don’t use it. When the drug starts to wear off and Lithgow begins to lose his mind again, rather than put him at the piano a third time, the writers craft a heartbreaking moment where the two main characters silently notice that Lithgow is trying to chop up his eggs with the wrong end of his fork. Having used reversible behavior to good effect once, they decided to start fresh with a new behavior to indicate Lithgow’s gradual return to senility)We get another powerful example of reversible behavior when Caesar, the human-like ape, is kicked out of his human home and sent to live in a concrete cell. At home in his attic loft, Caesar looked out on the world through a distinctive window.In the cell, Caesar touchingly scratches a replica of the window onto his wall, showing that he wishes to return there. Later, once he realizes that he can never trust humans, he violently erases the drawing off the wall. The audience knows all too well what that means.

Underrated Movie #146: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Title: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Year: 1970
Director: Elio Petri
Writers: Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro
Stars: Gian Maria Volonte, Florinda Bolkan, Gianni Santuccio, Orazio Orlanda

The Story: As Italy’s postwar government slowly devolves back towards becoming a police state, an unhinged chief of detectives decides to test the limits of his power by murdering his lover, then leaving a series of clues pointing towards his own guilt, desperately hoping to be caught, but knowing full well how unlikely that is.

How it Came to be Underrated: This is a special case, it was not underrated at the time: in fact it won the Best Foreign Film Oscar…But, for some reason (which I’ve never been able to determine), it has never been available on video or disc in America. Until recent advances in piracy, it could be seen only at revival houses. Inevitably, it has been forgotten here, which is a shame, since it’s a masterpiece.

Why It’s Great:

1. Also forgotten in this country is the great Gian Maria Volonte, though you’ve probably seen him more that you realize: as the bad guys in Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More and co-star of Melville’s heist epic The Red Circle, for instance. His coiled fury is utterly hypnotic, hiding a sublimated maelstrom of clashing emotions: guilt for his murder, hatred and lust for his dead mistress, anger at his colleagues, and utter despair at the state of the world.
2. Volonte’s character has no confidant, so how do we know what he’s doing as he manipulates the system, much less what he’s thinking? Luckily his victim was a kinky murder-groupie and he used to explain the wickedness of the system to her during their assignations. Those flashbacks now echo through his head as a bizarre greek chorus, commenting and explaining on his actions. It’s a clever and entertaining conceit.
3. Though no cop would admit it in court, they know all too well that most witnesses cannot accurately describe a face they’ve just seen. Volonte’s detective has had that working against him so long that he can’t resist using it to his advantage now, delighting in the act of prolonging eye contact with witnesses to his crime and cover-up, daring them to finally get it right for once, but knowing that the system only sees what it wants to see.
4. This world isn’t so far away from ours: Steve Jobs refused to put license plates on his car, knowing that no cop in Cupertino dared ticket him, but all that power never made him happy. As terrible as it is to be in a situation where you know you’re being discriminated against, it’s also sickening in its own way to realize that you’re getting unfair advantages. This movie shows how you cannot have contempt for others without also having growing contempt for yourself.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Another brilliant Italian movie from the same year, also about a kinky conscience-stricken fascist, was Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Rewatching this, I also saw connections to the recent German stunner The Lives of Others. 

How Available Is It?: I don’t usually feature movies that are only available on bit torrent, but I was dying to see this again so I made an exception. Since it doesn’t seem likely to ever be released here, you may have to take drastic measures. For what it’s worth, there are great prints floating around out there in the ether.

 

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Anything For Kicks!

Quick Course Correction

At the beginning of the year, I mentioned that I was going to only count pages I wrote, not hours I worked when I wasn’t turning out pages, hoping that that would force me to write more pages: but I forgot that, for some reason, that never works. There are always going to be day when the pages don’t come, but I can still sit there and brainstorm, and when I stop giving myself credit for those hours, I spend too much time beating up on myself. So those of you playing along at home will note that I’ve changed the calender back to hours worked / pages written (lumping script and prose pages in together). Now back to the show.

Film School Confidential, Conclusion: Instead of Film School, Listen to the Crickets

Let me tell you a little fable that also happens to be a true story... The same week I started at Columbia, an old friend from college left New York to attend a different film school in another city. A month later, he came right back. He had taken one look around and realized that film school was a terrible idea.

I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I pitied him. On the one hand, here was I: Whenever anyone asked me what I was doing with my life, I got to say “I’m getting a masters from Columbia University.” Everybody was very impressed. Nobody responded, “Gee what a waste”. Nobody said, “Holy hell, man, how are you ever going to pay that off??” Getting a Columbia degree is a “very worthwhile thing to do.”

My friend, meanwhile, had to admit to people at parties that he was a film school dropout, working as a temp and performing with improv troupes around town. I went to a lot of his shows and let me tell you something about improv: it’s painful. The troupe would do a skit and you would hear crickets. Not one real laugh. I felt terrible: Here I was, being told by famous filmmakers at an Ivy League school that my work was great. And here this guy was, begging for laughs in a basement in Brooklyn.

It wasn’t until I graduated and that I finally asked, “What do I have to show for all those years and all that money?” The truth was that I had experienced the exact same realization as my friend had, two weeks into my own film school experience. That was how long it took me to realize that Columbia had a terrible film program. I should have left, right there and then, but I didn’t, because I couldn’t face the shame.

I wanted to sound impressive at parties. I wanted lots of praise from professors. I wanted these things so badly that I was willing to spend $150k to get them. (Really far more than that. It will probably balloon to $300k by the time I finally get it paid off.)

After graduation, the truth came crashing down: the professors that I thought were my good friends stopped returning my calls, now that I was no longer paying them to like me. Then I found out that no one in the business was impressed by a Columbia degree. Worst of all, my new manager started sending out my Columbia-award-winning scripts and guess what I heard?

Crickets.

Suddenly, I noticed something about my friend that I had never realized before: All that time, he could hear the crickets too. Unlike me, he knew that his work wasn’t connecting to paying audiences. And it hurt. And so he had slowly gotten better.

Let’s cut to the chase: A few months ago, he got a call at his temp job, and then he promptly quit. He’s now a staff writer at “The Daily Show”. Every writer on staff gets an Emmy every year. Now he has no problem telling people at parties what he does.

As for me, I started this blog, re-educated myself, wrote a bunch of new scripts and now I’ve making some money, though I’m still a long way away from paying off those loans. But most graduates of Columbia tragically never even secure representation, much less make a sale.

Now I know what I was really buying with that $150,000: I was paying the crickets to stay away. I was insulating myself from any real criticism. I was paying people to like me. In short: I was paying to be coddled. And all that money and all that coddling made me a worse writer.

Film school teaches you how to please your professors, please your fellow students, and, most of all, please yourself. It doesn’t teach you how to please a paying audience. In fact, at my school, if you even said that you wanted to please a paying audience, the professors would tell you that you were making a terrible mistake.

The only reliable way to get better is to put your work before paying audiences and learn to please them through trial and error. Everyday you do that, you will get better. Otherwise, it will be almost impossible. If you go to film school, that’s four years of not getting better, for which you get a lifetime of debt.

The moral of this little fable? DO NOT GO TO FILM SCHOOL. Find yourself a basement theater, or a small newspaper, or an open mic night. Listen to the crickets. Learn to please unfriendly audiences. Slowly, painfully, get better.

Film School Confidential, Part 4: You're The Whale

Don’t worry, folks, there’s only five parts, and I am going somewhere with this...

There’s a great scene in Casino that reveals the secret of Las Vegas’s success: The Whale. The Whale is the rich guy who loves to gamble, and comes to town ready to spend. Once a whale arrives, the entire casino is re-engineered to become one big happiness machine, centered around him: free rooms, free hookers, free anything. And if the whale attempts to leave while he’s ahead, they disable his plane, forcing him to spend one more night on the tables.

Everyone going to film school should watch this scene, and not just to learn about filmmaking. When you go to an expensive film school, you are the whale. Everything they do is designed to keep money shooting out of your spout. Even if that means sabotaging your education.

It doesn’t have to be this way: After I got out of college, I delivered pizzas, made movies on mini-DV and took occasional film classes at a place called Minneapolis Community and Technical College. MCTC charged $400 a semester, which I paid out of pocket using my pizza tips. To my surprise, the quality of the program was excellent. The facilities and equipment were top notch. The faculty was smart, intense and dedicated. The main professor, Bruce Mamer, actually wrote one of the directing textbooks that was used at NYU. He was also brutally honest with his dirt-poor students about the economic realities of filmmaking, which we appreciated.

As part of that program, I made a short film that got me some attention. I decided to use that film to apply to a “real” film school. But when I got to Columbia, I was in for a shock. I was now paying twenty times as much, but the equipment was shoddy and rarely available, the classrooms were rotting, and the professors (with a few notable exceptions) were surly, distracted and ill-prepared. On that last point, we soon found out why: our professors were really “adjuncts” who got paid $4000 a semester. If they spent any time preparing, then they’d be making less than minimum wage.

So where was our $100k in tuition going? Columbia, it turned out, had gotten addicted to buying up property in Manhattan, even though the real estate bubble had inflated prices into the stratosphere, so educational budgets had all been slashed to the bone. MCTC was a government-subsidized institution, but Columbia’s only source of money was us. And they intended to milk us for all we were worth.

But what could I do? I tried not to get upset with the people running the film program: they couldn’t help it that the university was taking our tuition and literally putting it down a hole. They had to make the best of a bad situation and try to get by on the cheap, right?
But even so, that left one thing I still couldn’t forgive them for: the program had no standards. And standards are free.

There was no curriculum. There were no grades. There were no tests. There were no criteria that we were supposed to meet. Simply put, they expected nothing of us. They cheered our output, they handed out prizes, and they told us we would soon be on easy street. Why did they have no standards? Simple: that would have interrupted the happiness machine, and that might have upset the Whales. The longer they kept us happy, the more money we spent.

Of course, if they were loaning us the money themselves, then it would all be different. They would have done everything in their power to harden us into a great filmmakers who could go out there and earn enough to pay them back. But they get paid upfront, so they could care less if their students ever get a career, or even any career skills.

Okay, things look bleak for the struggling filmmakers of the world. Is there any hope? Yes there is. Tomorrow, let’s talk about what to do instead...