Velociraptors on the Space Shuttle

My Name Is In The Motherf%*&!@$ Hollywood Reporter

2006-06-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's only the production listings, page 66 (of the weekly/international edition, anyway), the tiny gray box for "The Nutthouse" under independent productions, check out the screenwriter (Scr.). Yes, that's really me, and yes, I really wrote a feature screenplay for the tiny little "production" "company" that I "started" with my Cousin the Actor and his Actor Friends. I had more or less forgotten about it until I got a call last night from my cousin, telling me to get a copy of the Reporter.

Holy shit.

Oh, and, uh, sorry I haven't posted in a while... don't really have time at work any more, and things are busy at home, too. But hey, if this leads somewhere, hopefully I'll come back on a more regular basis. :)

Arclight Dux

2006-04-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

Because "Redux" would mean I was going over it again, but I haven't yet, so... take that, Latin!

The Arclight was among the first in a wave of "deluxe" movie theaters, but it was the first one to really get it right. Nobody's perfect, especially not giant faceless corporations (as I understand it, the Arclight is owned by Pacific, which is owned by Disney). But the Arclight does a pretty damn good job. Reserved seating is a thing of beauty. Three trailers before each showing. No commercials. Plenty of legroom, every seat, in every theater (except the Dome, which is a special case).

On Easter Sunday (screw you, Jesus), we went to see Ice Age: The Meltdown at the Bridge Cinemas, down at the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center, which is a business/entertainment complex just off Sepulveda south of Centinela. (We went there instead of the Arclight because we were going with a friend and their daughter, and they live right near there, so it was more convenient, geographically.)

"The Bridge Cinema de Lux" is its full name, and it's got "value-added" features that presumably make it a more attractive option than your standard multiplex, but despite its pretensions, it ain't the Arclight.

The fundamental difference is that the Arclight is trying to make the movie-watching experience better, while the Bridge tries to make the complex as a whole more interesting... except the way they've chosen to do it is to add what are essentially bells and whistles, without addressing some of the core issues of the experience.

There's a series of alcoves along the main hallway outside the lower theaters, in which are situated couches. And behind each couch is a video screen embedded in the wall, which cycles through camera views of the other alcoves. So you can watch other people in other alcoves watching you on their wallscreen... which is very meta, but really has nothing to do with being in a movie theater, and the screens or cameras are frequently on the blink. It comes off as tacky and faintly unsavory.

Then there's these overhead projectors which display the theater number on the wall, in the style of the old circular-sweep countdown you see before old movies (there's a name for it, I just forget). They do this by projecting a static image on the wall, and having a little rotating wheel -- a mechanical rotating wheel -- in front of the lens, causing the image to be interrupted a few times a second, so as to imitate the flicker of a movie projector. They don't do a very good job. It's vaguely lame. Does this really improve the movie-going experience?*

In essence, they wasted a bunch of money on shiny crap that doesn't work all that well and doesn't really add much to the experience. (And for some reason, the theater's screen had a big dirty blotch covering most of it. Srsly.) I think the Arclight's model is the one to beat.

* No.

Closing Credits

2006-04-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

Unless there's some pressing issue (bathroom, phone call, nuclear winter), I always try to stay to the end of the credits after a movie. Only a small fraction of the reason is to honor those involved in making the film -- I don't recognize more than the tiniest fraction of the names anyway, so it's really just symbolic recognition.

A larger reason is to get the "monk's reward," if any. The monk's reward is what Ebert calls the extra scene they add after the credits, or during the credits -- so-named because of the "monklike devotion" it takes to sit still throughout the credits scroll.

But for me, the primary reason is to use the credits as a psychological cooling-off period, letting my mind wend its way back into reality, and start to process what I've seen. While I'm watching a movie, I rarely analyze what's going on; I just sit back and absorb it, and do the analyzing later. Most of the time, I can't express more than an extremely general opinion of a movie until at least a few hours after I've seen it. The best I can do is "It was good" or "Ehh, I didn't like it so much" or something equivalent.

Sitting through the credits lets me decompress a little bit. Shake off whatever tension I've worked up from watching the (presumably) tense climax. Start working through the movie in my mind, the dramatic implications, remembering scenes I liked or didn't like, beginning to construct an opinion. This isn't a hard-thinking process; it's just sort of the natural coagulation of the experience into something more solid. But I find that sitting through the credits helps me do that; I don't feel like I'm in a rush to get to my car and leave.

It also helps when the theater has plenty of legroom, so that other departing patrons don't disrupt my reverie by kicking me in the shins. Ow.

The Unshootable Bandwagon

2006-04-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

Whether or not you should write "unshootable" stuff is more or less a solved problem. But what qualifies as "unshootable"?

A common example is action lines that describe what a character is thinking, rather than what they're doing. But there's a fine, fine line between something a character is thinking or remembering, and something they're feeling. Thoughts don't show on a person's face, but feelings do.

Fantastic Four, though a crappy story, is at least well-styled. To wit:

VICTOR
So it's not my money you want. It's my toys... Tell me: if NASA doesn't trust you, why should I?
Victor is a step ahead. Reed pauses, thrown for a beat. Ben wakes up, suspicious. Victor notices. He notices everything.

There's four separate "what a character is thinking/feeling" moments right there in that one line of action:

"Victor is a step ahead." On its face, this is describing the momentary power relationship between Victor and Reed. How do you "shoot" that? Well, you don't, not explicitly: the way this manifests itself on-screen is in Victor's mien as he says the line. It's more or less information for the actor's sake, so that he knows that Victor is delivering this line with a bit of relish in the fact that he's got one up on Reed. (Of course, the actor always has the right to make choices, but I entirely reject the idea that the writer should never write anything that indicates how a line should be read.)
"Reed pauses, thrown for a beat." This is a little easier to shoot, it would seem; someone pausing is definitely shootable. But it's not just Reed pausing; he's also feeling disoriented by Victor unexpectedly knowing what Reed's after. Disorientation can show on an actor's face. It's the same thing, a suggestion to the actor.
"Ben wakes up, suspicious." Same deal. Ben Grimm is standing there, not really paying too close attention. But when Victor says his line, Ben realizes, Waitaminit, something's going on here that I'm not clued in to. This could manifest itself as Ben tilting his head up sharply, his eyes focusing more closely on Victor, his body tensing as the fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.
"Victor notices. He notices everything." This one is actually sort of a meta-instruction, referring to the previous three sentences. It tells us that Victor is aware of Reed and Ben's reactions, and what they mean. Again, this ends up functioning as a suggestion for the actor, that Victor maybe glances at Reed and Ben in turn, soaking up more information. And it's also a detail about Victor in general; he's always noticing everything that's going on with people he's interacting with.

This is stuff that can be easiy confused with "unshootable." It's not, and we don't want to over-discriminate against action lines that actually can be shot, but aren't broad actions like moving one's limbs. All four of the above action lines can be accomplished with, at most, slight changes in posture or facial expression.

Memories are what people usually mean when they say, "Don't write unshootable stuff." More specifically, memories of things the audience didn't see happen. If a character remembers something about their childhood, the best you can do to shoot that information is to have the actor express an emotion that relates to it. Maybe he smiles fondly, or grimaces sadly, in either case his eyes unfocused, staring off into space. But unless we have some other way of knowing what he's reminiscing about, he could just as easily be remembering the awesome steak sandwich he had for lunch, or regretting the chocolate milkshake that's giving him gas.

Sometimes, you can write something that would be unshootable, if you wrote it a little differently. For example, describing a woman as "still riding high off the glory of winning Miss Alabama ten years ago." How does her facial expression or posture tell us that she won the Miss Alabama pageant (as opposed to Miss Georgia, or Miss Issippi)? The only way to do it would be to either show a photo or newspaper clipping on her dresser, or a flashback, or have someone bring it up in dialogue -- and if you're going to do that, why bother putting it into the action line?

On the other hand, imagine describing her as "the kind of woman who won beauty contests when she was younger." A decent actress's demeanor can easily demonstrate that kind of history.

Okay, that's enough blathering for today. Back to writing.

Begin fight!

2006-04-11T17:56:00.000-07:00

The relative merits of quantity and quality are debated all the time, but it's obvious that quantity will win in the end, simply because quantity outnumbers quality. Then again, maybe quantity and quality obey the One-at-a-Time Attack Rule.

People often point out that the movie industry is a really insane business. Given most of the stories you hear about this or that project happening (or almost happening), it seems like a statistical miracle that any movies get made. And yet they do, which brings up the question: Is it really that hard to get a movie made?

It depends what your definition of "movie" is. Most people, when they think of a movie, think of your average Hollywood few-dozen-million-dollar budget handful-of-A-listers whatever-thon. But there's a lot of other movies out there. B-movies, C-movies, all the way down to the stuff that's so far below grade Z we have to start borrowing Cyrillic letters to label them. Hundreds, nay, thousands of these are churned out every year, and most people never even hear of them. They get no theatrical release or advertising; you might see one on the shelf at a video store, if you're still into that kind of "shopping in a physical store" thing. Netflix might have 'em.

Is it a miracle that these movies get made? No. Vanishingly small budgets put together on the backs of a hundred favors owed to a putative director, that's what these movies thrive on. Loaded with probably gratuitous sex and violence, they can actually make some money in foreign markets. Or on Netflix, where some people are inexplicably willing to check out random zany comedies with scripts written in two weeks, and shot in one.

Getting a movie made isn't that hard. Getting a movie made at one of the major Hollywood studios, that's hard. But they aren't the only game in town; they're just the biggest, and get the most attention.

Memes 'n' Biz

2006-04-06T14:36:00.000-07:00

Scott the Reader put up an interesting meme, which is to post the first ten verbs in a script. Putatively, it's to see if the script is "too passive," although I'd be wary of tarring an entire script with a brush made from bristles entirely culled from the first half a page. That's how long it takes WAR, INCORPORATED to use up ten verbs:

howl
strech
hover
loom
roar
are
approach
adorn
pledge
stand

Those are the base forms, not the actual usages ("howl" is actually "Wind howls..." in the script). It would be more interesting to analyze all the verbs in a script, statistically, and see with what frequency you use passive or active verbs.

On the other hand, is such analysis useful in any more than an academic sense? Using active verbs instead of passive verbs is one of the easy parts of writing. It's a specific, distinct, noncomplicated task you can do in a single revision pass. It can go into the toolbox, I suppose, but it's strictly a polish-level tool. One of the last things you should be doing, after you're certain your story and characters are solidly built.

I'm definitely submitting WAR, INCORPORATED to the Nicholls this year; and per the FAQ, which says to feel free to shop your script around while it's in consideration at the Nicholls, I'm on that as well. My tentative plan is to get the Hollywood Agents and Managers Directory, put together an appropriate list of targets, make a metric shit-ton of phone calls, and then spray WI everywhere until someone buys it, agrees to represent me, or a slavering mob of producers shows up at my door with torches and pitchforks.

Any particular advice? Anyone got a producer or agent friend who they'd like to slip the script to? Anyone want to read a copy? It's all spit 'n' polished in nice PDF format; just send me an email.

OMFG, the Nicholls!

2006-03-31T15:25:00.000-08:00

In a drunken haze last night, I suddenly remembered that the Nicholls might be coming up... so I looked, and the submission deadline is May 1st, but the application form isn't available online yet.

The Nicholls are only open to people who haven't earned more than $5,000 from writing. I qualify on that front. So I'm going to submit WAR, INCORPORATED to the Nicholls. On the other hand, I think WI also has a good shot if I do the usual send-it-out-to-prodcos-and-agents thing, so... does submitting it to the Nicholls mean I can't send it out otherwise until I either get rejected by (or, in the Bizarro universe, win) the Nicholls?

Moving on

2006-03-24T13:32:00.000-08:00

Spec #5 is, for better or worse, done. I've sent it to a few people for sanity-check feedback, to make sure I didn't miss anything blindingly obvious. Once I deal with that feedback, it's off to prodcos and agents, and into the hands of the very few contacts I have in the industry. The title is WAR, INCORPORATED. Here's a (not necessarily final) logline.

Corporations have become independent city-states, with their own laws and militaries. "Hostile takeover" doesn't just mean stock trades and layoffs; it can also mean invasion by force. When the militaristic Global Defense Manufacturing attempts to conquer the more civilized Henckel and Sons, a small group of employees fights back, trying to stop GDM before it can tear their community apart.

I'm moving on to another spec, which is quite definitely not in the action genre. It's comedy-fantasy (think LIAR, LIAR or GROUNDHOG DAY, may the fates let me write something half so good).

Uh... yeah, I meant to do that!

2006-03-21T17:39:00.000-08:00

"Dear Variety, I never thought this would happen to me..."

I gave a draft of the current screenplay to my wife, who did me the favor of reading it. Among other things, she commented on a particular action by one of the characters, saying that she really liked how this action symbolized a later set of actions, and it was tied together really nicely.

And I'm all, "...buh?" Because I didn't do it on purpose. I never even thought about it. And there were approximately half a dozen times where she pointed out another such element in the screenplay, that I had never consciously thought about. So either:

1) I'm a screenwriting savant. (Insert your own "idiot savant" joke here.)
2) It was just sheer coincidence.
3) The deliberate, thorough, lengthy method which I used to write this screenplay ended up just sort of naturally coming together, because of the thoroughness with which I worked out all the story beats and character elements to begin with.

What I call "thorough" others might call "anal retentive," though, so, actual mileage may vary. Anyway, I'm keeping this short so that I don't spend hours tweaking the blog and instead spend hours tweaking the screenplay.

Hulk Revise!

2006-03-14T14:39:00.000-08:00

The current script is down to around 126 pages, and I've still managed to avoid excising any complete scenes. Some scenes have been cut down significantly (especially where I realized that I was spending time unnecessarily focused on a secondary character, in order to flesh them out -- fleshing that could occur elsewhere, in many fewer lines), but 90% of the compression has come from simply shrinking action and dialogue, and removing superfluous action and dialogue. Shortening conversations. Removing unnecessary reaction lines. Removing unnecessary description.

I'm getting down to the bone, and that worries me, to a degree. I worry that the whole thing will end up being too long and too skeletal, leaving me with the unavoidable task of rejiggering the whole story to eliminate one or more subplots. (Followed by the subsequent pass to fix all the dialogue and description that's now broken because it references things that no longer occur.) The problem with that is that it might be more time and effort than it's worth, for this story; and I think I can get this below the 120-page mark without removing anything major. Yes, yes, I know, kill your babies; the problem is that there are no babies left in this thing. It's nothing but unruly teenagers, dotting the scene breaks with their rebellious spoor.

Then, it's time to start sending it to agents and prodcos. Huzzah! My first screenplay that I think is actually worth a damn!

Ka-SHUNK

2006-03-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm sending up a flare.

The current script is almost done. The first draft was 173 pages. After a single compression pass, it was 143 pages, and that was only via removing/combining some dialogue, and shortening action and dialogue lines. Then I realized the line spacing was too large (more than standard), so now it's 135 pages. I think it stands on its own at that length -- and yes, I'm well aware of the difficulties inherent in specs longer than 120 pages or so. However, the set of acceptable outcomes for me also includes getting work based on the quality of my writing, and not just selling the script di-rectly.

Right now I'm doing a full-spectrum dialogue pass. This means establishing a dialogue style for every character, and then making sure every line of their dialogue fits that style. This is micromanagement at its finest; I'm glad I spent all those years fine-tuning my colonies in Master of Orion II. This is asking questions like, Does this character use phraseology like "I want" or "I need"? Does he say "This is X," or "I think this is X," or "Do you think this is X?" Does this character use words with Greek roots, Latinate roots, or Germanic/Norse roots?

More than that, I'm also making sure that the characters' dialogue flows well and is interesting. The hopeful end result is that someone reading the script will have the sense that the dialogue is good, but not be able to tell why. This is incredibly tedious work, but it's the kind of fine detail that I think is important in making a script excellent.

Manipulative

2006-02-22T07:45:00.000-08:00

Just a quick thought. When someone complains that they thought a movie was "manipulative," what they really mean is that "The movie manipulated my emotions in ways I don't approve of," or something similar. All good movies manipulate your emotions; that's why we go see movies, and experience storytelling in general: to have our emotions manipulated. Casablanca manipulates you into sympathizing with Rick; Star Wars manipulates you into rooting for the scrappy Rebels; Crash manipulates you into... well, I don't want to spoil anything for those who haven't seen it, but the scene with the little girl and her father and the Iranian shopkeeper? Yeah. The whole point is manipulation.

In a nutshell

2006-02-21T12:59:00.000-08:00

Not dead. Writing. Very busy at work. Wife's cousin died, so we're dealing with that. Friends visiting from out of town. Starting the long process of home-buyin'. If I can find time to pound out a blog entry, I will.

Sales, Fantastic, Oscars

2006-02-02T14:26:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the recent AWOL-icity, I've been working on the first (well, fifth, but first since I actually mega-outlined it) draft of the... near-future... sci-fi... thingy... screenplay. Right now I'm falling asleep at work, I'm in a holding pattern on the current task, and can't think straight enough to code. But I can think straight enough to bloviate about the movies.

On to topics.

Budding screenwriters are advised to read lots of screenplays. 99% of what you can get out there are final drafts -- the last version.

What I really want to see are more of the drafts that actually got bought. Certain screenplays are famous among writers for being a first spec sale, subject of a bidding war, turned into a hugely successful film. But we rarely see the version that an executive read, and said, "Let's buy this." The version we see, I imagine, is the one that subsequently went through development and then got green-lighted for production. So that's just a pet peeve, really.

I read the shooting script of Fantastic Four the other day. I haven't seen the movie, but from what my wife described, it sounds reasonably close. I recall a lot of the reviews saying that the heroes aren't really that heroic; they spend the bulk of the movie whining and arguing and using their powers as gimmicks rather than as heroes. But I think I realized the actual, core problem:

The first act is the first three-quarters of the movie.

Presumably the inciting incident, the event that gets the ball rolling, is the accident aboard the space station. Except the way the story plays out, it's not, really. The villain, Dr. Doom, doesn't even really start to become villainous until well over halfway through the movie (and he doesn't really do much villainy until act 3)! Johnny is still off exploiting his powers for cash and poon, rather than for the good of mankind, three quarters of the way through! Reed and Sue are still arguing about what to do about their powers at the end of (what would normally be) the second act! Good lord.

Nonetheless, I (sort of) liked the writing style of the screenplay. Descriptions of characters' reactions teetered on the line of showing-what-they're-thinking, except they were almost always cases of indicating an entire set of physical motions and facial expressions with a few words. Very well-done. The style is great, the substance is... not.

Hey, the Oscars! I could prognosticate, but, meh. I thought it was interesting that for the first time in twenty-odd years, the Best Picture nominees match the Best Director nominees. And I hope Jon Stewart's good. He's not really a movie guy, despite his sporadic film résumé, and the last time we had a real solidly TV-world host was David Letterman, and, uh, nobody wants that again. Before that, you have to go way, way back to Johnny Carson, who's about as TV as you get. That's the kind of hosting we want to see, really. (I only recently came to fully appreciate the irony of an awards ceremony for the movie industry being shown on television. That's some deep shit right there.)

On the other hand, Jon Stewart will probably bring the political funny better than Chris Rock did, without spending 5 minutes of his monologue on topics that had nothing to do with the movie industry. It's still the Oscars.

Underrated

2006-01-20T17:02:00.000-08:00

It's a reasonable thing to say that if the MPAA hadn't been formed, Congress would have tried to enact some fairly restrictive legislation in its stead. For the most part, they leave Hollywood alone, because not enough people complain that Hollywood is trying to Corrupt Our Children. Hollywood self-regulates enough that society leaves them to it.

Not that the MPAA ratings are really of much use. By their very nature, they represent the opinions of a small number of people whose job it is to watch these movies and rate them. True, they try to rate according to the mores of the day... but there's ultimately only five categories: G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17. There's also a line of text that tries, in a paltry handful of words, to convey what it is that might have earned a movie the rating it got -- "Some sexual content" says the R rating stamp for Casanova. That doesn't tell me much. Is that a handful of female nipples? A single female frontal nudity shot? Is there any man-ass? No visible genitalia, but maybe lots of scenes of people discreetly screwing?

How about Hostel? It's rated R, "for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use." You know, "brutal scenes of torture and violence" could apply to Schindler's List, which was rated R "for language, some sexuality and actuality violence." The violence in Schindler's List isn't as visually graphic as the violence in Hostel, but Hostel's violence is horror-movie-esque random excessive slaughter, whereas the violence in Schindler's List is based on actual atrocities committed here in the real world, motivated by racial hatred and with the intent of wiping out entire ethnic groups. I find that kind of violence a lot more objectionable than the random, cartoonish "horny backpackers get punished for their lust" violence shown in gorefests like Hostel. But does the MPAA agree? Noooo, so Schindler's List gets "actuality violence" whereas Hostel gets "brutal scenes of torture and violence," which sounds a lot worse, if you don't know that Schindler's List is about the (actual, real) Holocaust and Hostel is gross-out fiction.

And then there's the fact that Hostel and Casanova are both rated R, even though Casanova features less sexual content than Hostel, and apparently no violence, language, or drug use worth mentioning. R is a broad, broad category. (Except, as everyone "knows," any sexual or language content will get you an R long before an equivalent amount of violent content.)

Okay, I don't really put that much stock in the MPAA's ratings. I don't think most people do; to give the cynic in me equal time, I'll say that the MPAA is primarily a tool of the movie industry that lets it dodge heat from moral watchdogs. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this; the MPAA is a corporation and a tool of other corporations (the studios), none of whom have any morals or scruples, because, hey, they're corporations. Nobody expects corporations to have a conscience. The MPAA exists because society demands it of the studios, not because someone had an attack of moral conscience and thought, "We must protect the children!"

Before I turned 17, I paid close attention to the rating each movie received. For any movie that looked vaguely interesting, I always made sure to check the rating as soon as possible. Nothing was more frustrating than learning that "THIS FILM HAS NOT YET BEEN RATED." I checked the newspaper daily to find out when a rating had been assigned. Amusingly, I never once got asked for ID to see a rated R movie before I was 17, and only once after I was 17. (The Puppet Masters, in case you care, which you don't.)

Practically the day I turned 17, I suddenly found that I no longer cared about the MPAA rating, since I was now allowed to see any MPAA-rated film. (This was back when NC-17 meant "seventeen and up OK." By the time they changed it to mean "eighteen and up OK," I was already 18.) These days, I never pay attention to a film's rating unless it comes up in conversation, or there's some other cultural significance to it -- I'm well aware that Revenge of the Sith is rated PG-13, mostly because there was so much coverage of that fact. But otherwise, I don't really care, because the MPAA rating of a film gives me no useful information -- I never use the rating of a film in deciding whether I want to see it.

But now I have an eighteen-and-a-half-month-old son, who will probably soon be able to focus his attention long enough to actually sit down and watch a movie. Am I going to start paying attention to the MPAA ratings? Hell no. They're still of no use to me, because they don't tell me anything about a film. I'm of the strong conviction that there is very little a child should be forbidden from seeing, as long as there is a responsible adult around to explain it to them and answer any questions. My parents were always there to discuss movies afterward. My father made the point many times that violence should always be an absolute last resort.

Does this mean I'll let my son see any movie he wants? For the most part. There's always the chance that something will come along that I don't think he should see, but then if we raise him right, anything I don't think he should see, he probably won't want to see either, so the issue may be obviated.

There's a website called ScreenIt that "rates" movies by thoroughly listing every conceivably objectionable thing the movie contains. It's got the obvious categories like "Violence," "Sex/Nudity," and "Profanity," but also categories that are presumably of interest to the modern parent -- "Disrespectful/Bad Attitude," "Music (Scary/Tense)," "Imitative Behavior," "Tense Family Scenes," and so on. Each movie's rating page has extensive lists of every event in the movie that can fall into one of those categories. By casting a wide net, they ensure that virtually everyone will be able to tell whether or not the movie contains material they'd be okay with their kids seeing. Here's their review of Brokeback Mountain, for example. (Warning: Contains man-ass.)

Of course, there's a problem. The categories they use are intended to be so broad as to cover everything that any significant number of people might object to their kids seeing. (Or even seeing themselves -- not all adults can comfortably watch gay cowboy sex.) But they can never cover everything that anyone might find objectionable. They don't have a category for, oh, I don't know, "Kindness Toward Animals," which would no doubt offend certain fundamentalist segments of society who think that Man's dominion over the world precludes kindness or sympathy toward the lesser beasts.

Okay, that's a stretch, but the point is made: No rating system can ever completely substitute for seeing a movie yourself and deciding whether it's appropriate for your kids.

Losing the fun

2006-01-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

The more practice I get at screenwriting, the harder it becomes for me to enjoy watching movies and TV. I find myself constantly analyzing the story structure and dialogue. I suppose this is a good thing for my craft, but it's making it harder to enjoy stuff.

I also find it harder to be pissed off by bad material, because I see it more objectively, examining its structure, rather than its aesthetic value. I'm not sure if that's an upside, exactly, but there you have it.

Actually, this happens a lot more with stuff I've seen before than with new stuff, thankfully. But it means it's harder to go back and enjoy my favorite stuff without automatically starting to tear it apart.

Random question of the day: What line of dialogue, story beat, or other element of a movie did it take you surprisingly long to figure out? For me, the most memorable was in The Princess Bride. We start off hearing about how Westley always replied to Buttercup with "As you wish," but really meant, "I love you." After she pushes him down the hill (in the guise of the Dread Pirate Roberts), he shouts it out to let her know who he really is. And then, much later, in fact the very last line in the movie, after the Grandson asks if the Grandfather could come back and read him the story again tomorrow, he says, "As you wish."

I swear, I saw the movie dozens of times before I realized that the "As you wish" = "I love you" actually applied to that last line. I understood before that he was referring to the "As you wish" bit from earlier in the movie, but not that he really meant "I love you, Grandson" when he said it. Now every time I think of that scene, I tear up. Seriously. I had to stop writing this entry a minute ago to rub my eyes. I know, I'm real manly.

Anyway. What's your answer?

A History of Violence

2006-01-11T14:22:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't about A History of Violence.

If a person A wants to kill a specific person B, there is a very, very high probability that A will succeed. In modern America, there is a fairly low probability that they'll get away with it, but that's not the issue. If someone really, really wants you dead, you're pretty much screwed. If you know about it in advance, you can take steps to defend yourself; set a trap for them, or kill them preemptively.

The situation changes if A intends to do the deed themselves, or if they intend to get someone else to do it. In the first scenario, you only need to eliminate A in order to save yourself. In the second scenario, you need to eliminate A and whoever they hired. You may also possibly need to eliminate other people, since even though A might be the primary Architect of your doom, they might have friends who will take up their goals if they die. (I'm thinking, like, the Mafia.)

Many, many action movies are predicated on the idea that Bad Guy A wants to kill Good Guy B, and ultimately fails. On its face, these failures are highly implausible; B usually survives by having better luck than anyone in history, and also because A's minions are all terrible, terrible shots.

A is also willing to underwrite a great deal more violence than is plausible in Western society. In the real world, if A sends five black sedans full of minions out to kill B, resulting in a chase through a shopping mall and dozens of injured or killed bystanders, the most likely result is that dozens of police would show up and end up arresting the minions (assuming the minions didn't start some kind of hostage standoff in the mall). With that many minions, A would definitely get named, and there'd be a huge big ol' trial and it'd be the biggest news story around for months on end.

In the movie, the minions will either all get killed or evaded during the chase, no police show up, and A proceeds with his evil plan for another act and a half before B, of all people, personally kills him.

In the United States, the rule of law is very strong, and there is virtually no chance that any such large-scale attempt to murder someone would result in anything less than an overwhelming police response. Take a real-world scenario where one guy kills another guy. No accomplices, no grand plan, no minions. The perp is sitting at home, with no idea that the cops are coming to arrest him. How many cops? Probably a dozen, at least, for this one guy, even if they know for a fact that he's home alone, unarmed. Five sedans of minions driving through a mall, shooting helter-skelter at their target, would draw no less than a hundred cops, SWAT teams, and possibly the military.

Nonetheless, we accept the Wealthy Villain With Countless Minions (as well as massive, and massively implausible, chase scenes) as a standard trope of action movies. Why?

Nonstandard

2006-01-06T14:23:00.000-08:00

At its simplest, a screenplay's protagonist is also the main character and the hero, where the protagonist is the one who learns/changes the most, the main character is the one with the most screen time, and the hero is the one who we want to see "win."

Most films follow this mold, as well as most great films. What are your favorite films that do not contain any characters who serve all three of these purposes?

A black guy, a Chinese guy, and a Jew walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, a joke?"

2006-01-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

If Alex Epstein, Craig Mazin, and John August think it's an important topic, then by gum, that's one bandwagon I'll gladly dive aboard.

First off, what's the issue at hand? I suppose it's a question of how to address the ethnicity of your characters. I think August is right in that readability is an important practical issue that can be helped by picking distinct non-whitebread surnames for secondary characters. But this is only the case because most of the people reading the script will be white.

The real issue is that most screenwriters are white men. Most studio executives are white men. Most directors and Big Movie Stars are white men.

Now, wait a damn second. What do I mean, "issue?" Do I mean "problem," as in something that needs to be fixed? Or am I just talking about the current state of things, without judgment?

Why do we write screenplays? The desire to express ourselves creatively in general, the desire to be a part of filmmaking in particular, the desire for lots and lots of money. I suspect that these are all motivations for all of us in varying degrees. I love creating, and I love movies, and I also love money.

What does it matter to me whether my characters are all named Smith, Brown, and Johnson, or whether they're named Yamaguchi, Nmebe, and Ramirez? At its base, nothing, particularly. When I first conceive a character, unless a particular ethnicity or gender is immediately an important part of that character, I automatically envision them as a white man. Not consciously, but when I think about what the character is going to do now that I've created him, in my mind's eye, he's white.

Why? Probably because I'm a white man, and being a white man is what I'm most familiar with. Most of the people in the office I work in are white; my whole family is white; most of the people where I live are white. Doctors, cops, judges, thugs, villains, heroes -- with rare exceptions, in my mind they're white guys. Or white women, if the gender matters.

Their ethnicity only changes if there's a reason for it. Like John August, I usually don't even specify it. I don't do the ethnic-surname thing like he does, although that seems like a very good idea. But the main characters in my spec scripts are probably always going to be white people. Is it a great idea to "ethnicize" the secondary characters, when the main characters are all white?

So why don't I just write non-white main characters? Because I know what it means to be white; it's what I'm most familiar with. And the journeys of the main characters are the most important element of any story. It follows that it will be much easier for me to write stories about white people than it will be to write stories about non-whites.

I'm not going to get into the social-justice issue; I hear enough about social justice from my wife. ;)

I'm not dead yet

2006-01-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

Been writing a lot, went to Disneyland yesterday with the family, yadda yadda. New entry soon.

Agonists

2005-12-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

So I was going to write something about the difference between the protagonist and the main character, but decided to look up what others had said. The first Google hit was for John August's post from July on the topic, the comments of which reference Craig Mazin's post on the same topic. So, that ground having been covered, let me see if I can come up with another angle.

What a writer means when he says "protagonist," "hero," or "main character" seems to depend mostly on that writer's opinion -- they're not always hard and fast terms.

"Protagonist," despite its pretentious Greekiness, is the easiest and probably the most widely agreed-upon. As Craig Mazin says, "I define the protagonist as the character who changes in order to live his or her life by [the] propositional argument of the theme." Imagine a story with two main characters, one of whom goes from being good to being evil, and is hunted and defeated by the other. The hunter, in this case, is the obvious choice for "protagonist," assuming he undergoes some level of change. But what if the "good guy" undergoes no change? Is the "bad guy" now the protagonist? Nobody is changing "in order to live his or her life by the propositional argument of the theme." Does this story have no protagonist? Can a story have no protagonist?

"Hero" implies a level of heroism, especially in contrast with some level of villainy present in one or more of the other characters. No one¹ would seriously claim that John McClane, Luke Skywalker, or Martin Brody aren't heroes. But is Phil Connors a hero? What about Lester Burnham? Michael Dorsey?

As I see it, the fundamental problem with August's definition of definition of "hero" as "the character we want to see win" is that the instinctive opposite of "hero" is "villain." There is no identifiable villain in Groundhog Day. There is an antagonist -- Phil's own selfishness -- but "villain" is not synonymous with "antagonist." Groundhog Day has an antagonist (and its opposite, the protagonist), but no villain (and thus no opposite, the hero). Now, if we define "hero" the way August does, then trivially Groundhog Day has a hero, but I think our other dramatic associations with the word "hero" render this definition problematic.

Another problem with "hero" is that we don't always know what the obvious candidate for "hero" really wants. Take Casablanca. We don't really know Rick's motivation until he tells Ilsa to get on the plane with Victor! Is he not a hero up until that point? He's sure acting non-heroically in the scenes leading up to the airport. On the other hand, if the film is constructed properly (which, Casablanca? definitely is), then we still root for that character to get what he wants, even if it's something as small as wanting another character to stand here or there, or say this or that. We want him to win every conversation, every interaction, every beat.

Yet another problem with this definition is that it's subjective. If an audience member wants Emperor Palpatine to win, then even if George Lucas thinks Obi-Wan is the hero... actually, since Obi-Wan is a complete failure, doesn't get what he wants, and doesn't learn from his mistakes, he's neither hero nor protagonist. Okay, bad example. Let's try again.

If an audience member wants Belloq to win, even if Kasdan, Spielberg, and Lucas think Indiana Jones is the hero, then as far as the audience member is concerned, Belloq is the hero. In the unlikely event this audience member sat down and chatted up Kasdan, Spielberg, and Lucas about Raiders of the Lost Ark, none of them could refer to "the hero" without having to specify who they meant, thus rendering the term useless.

"Main character" is pretty universally agreed upon to mean "the character the story spends the most time with." Of course, in this definition there is an implicit assumption that there is one character who the story spends the most time with. Who's the main character of Syriana? None of the five largest roles -- George Clooney's CIA agent, Alexander Siddig's prince, Jeffrey Wright's lawyer, Matt Damon's energy analyst, or Mazhar Munir's budding terrorist -- have substantially more screen time than the others. Are they all "main characters?" What about a film that, for better or worse, has twenty characters each with equal screen time? Is it even meaningful to call them all "main characters?" Where do we draw the line?

In practice, we come across few films that have more than one or two plausible candidates for "main character," nor do we usually strive to create works whose characters defy all attempts at classification. So given a movie like Die Hard, which has a blindingly obvious main character -- John McClane -- is it useful to identify him as such? Are there qualities or attributes that all main characters share, besides their dominance of the screen? I don't believe so. Take Face/Off. Travolta and Cage's characters (despite who's playing whom) have roughly equal screen time, but one (Castor Troy) is definitely a villain and antagonist, while the other (Sean Archer) is definitely the protagonist and, depending on your definition of "hero," a hero. But they both share screen time. So they both qualify as "main character." Or take any romantic comedy, where the two leads share equal screen time, are both protagonists, and neither of whom are villains or antagonists.

Except "main character" is also a tainted term, because instinctively it's used to mean the same thing as "protagonist," and because in most movies, the main character is also the protagonist and, frequently, the hero (by whatever definition). Argh!

Problems of definition aside, the overwhelming majority of movies have the protagonist, hero, and main character rolled up into one. Sometimes you get a character who's all three, and then secondary characters who are also heroic, and maybe secondary protagonists -- but I think it would do us all well to study great films that don't follow this paradigm.

In fact, ultimately, if you say, "This character is the [hero|protagonist|main character]," what you're really saying is, "This character is the [hero|protagonist|main character], and therefore X, Y, and Z." If the terms don't accurately serve that function, they should be replaced with something else.

¹ You know what I mean.

The OSTG

2005-12-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

William Goldman once said, "Nobody messes with the cinematographer, because nobody knows what the hell a damn f-stop is -- but everybody knows the alphabet." Terry Rossio then proposed that screenwriters needed to come up with obscure technical lingo for our own craft, so that producers and executives can't mess with our work so easily. He was half-joking, but you know what? I think we should give it a shot.

Terry's examples mostly (mis-)used grammatical lingo so as to confuse executives, but I think we need to focus on the actual hard story elements and devices that we use. It's not about the language, it's about the mechanics. One problem is that we can't change certain words that people in production need to use -- like scene, line, slugline, shot, beat, etc. But there's a lot that goes into story creation that has nothing to do with the format in which it's presented, and that's where we attack.

Thusly, here I present the first (small) edition of the Obfuscatory Screenwriting Terminology Guide - the OSTG. Part of the idea is that we come up with frightening-sounding acronyms for well-known devices, or construct technical-sounding terms for simple concepts. My favorite example of this is the fearsome Thermoelectric Phase Converter, also known as... an oven.

EMD (Ex-Machina Device) - Any element, plot device, or character in a screenplay that functions as a deus ex machina.
inflection point - Any story event that causes or triggers character change.
OTTP (One-Two-Three Punch) - When a plot element is used once to establish its existence in the screenplay's world; used a second time to cement its place in that world; and a third time, with a twist, to surprise the audience and provide drama and/or growth. Canonical example is Marty's guitar-playing ability in Back to the Future.
subtend - In mathematics, an arc spans from one point on a circle to another, and we say it "subtends" a number of degrees. In a screenplay, a character thusly "subtends" their character arc. Can also be used to mean "change," e.g. "The confrontation between Frank and Sally causes Frank to subtend toward his terminus."
terminus - The points in the story when a given character is at the beginning or end of his arc.

Play along at home! Suggest your own terms!

There is at least one practical problem with this, in that if a screenwriter is working alone, then we can't get into the situation where two writers are sitting in front of an executive and a producer, flinging obscure technical terms back and forth, and causing the suits to get totally lost. Alas.

The ten-word King Kong review

2005-12-18T14:06:00.000-08:00

The love story works, and that's ultimately all that matters.

The Aged Oscars

2005-12-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

If you don't know anything about the movie business, then you probably think the Oscars are some kind of true measure of a film's quality. Oscar-winning films are Good By Definition; there is no higher film award in the world than to win an Academy Award. I don't want to say "I know better" because, well, I was happier when I thought the Oscars were an accurate measure of quality. It's better that I know the truth, although only in the way that broccoli is better than ice cream.

In reality, the Oscars are a gigantic advertising stunt for the Hollywood film industry. Presumably corruption-free (PriceWaterhouseCoopersVoldemortBeeblebrox is apparently trustworthy), the Oscars give us insight into the current, collective tastes of the members of AMPAS. It's not a bad first step for identifying the Best Pictures that are produced, but it's hardly the be-all, end-all.

To date, 77 films have won the Oscar for Best Picture. I've seen all of them. This isn't by accident; I made it a project back in college (when there were a measly 72). I've kept up since then, and have managed to see each Best Picture winner, before it won, since Unforgiven (1992). Some of the BP winners hold up. Some don't.

We can ignore the first ten years of Oscar history, because, frankly, Hollywood hadn't really figured out the talkie-as-art-form yet. 1939 was the obvious turning point. Since then, most of the Best Picture flicks have been pretty good, but there are some stinkers (granted, this is from the point of view of someone born long after most of these movies were released):

How Green Was My Valley (1941) - One word: Treacly. My dad calls it Al Green Was My Valet.
Mrs. Miniver (1942) - Wartime hoo-rah propaganda, but otherwise, it's a soap opera.
Going My Way (1944) - Treacly blah. Bing Crosby is not really believable as a priest, but maybe that's just the cynicism talking.
Hamlet (1948) - Olivier's version is long and boring and staid. I think this is why Shakespeare movies had such a bad name among high school students for so long. It's the cinematic equivalent of asparagus. Good for you, but kids just don't appreciate it. And Branagh's version is a lot more interesting to watch. Hell, so is the Mel Gibson version. Or the Ethan Hawke version.
An American in Paris (1951) - Or An American In Traction, as we call it. It's charming but stupid and not within shouting distance of being worthy of Best Picture.
Marty (1955) - Also known as Stempel's Bane. It's short and cute and otherwise kinda forgettable.
Around the World in 80 Days (1956) - This movie has no story. It's just a bunch of random set pieces in colorful locales featuring lots of celebrities. Apparently the novelty was enough to win it Best Picture over Giant and DeMille's 48th version of The Ten Commandments.
Tom Jones (1963) - I think the Academy foresaw the imminently debaucherous years of the late 1960s, and decided that Tom Jones would make a good enough sacrifice to the gods of lewd behavior.
Oliver! (1968) - Cute, and a musical (which earns it bonus points pre-1970), but come on! This was a better film than The Lion in Winter? Than Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet?

And then, suddenly, in 1969, everything changed. Because Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture. I don't think it's quite that great of a movie; certainly plenty of memorable lines, scenes, and characters, but I think it won partly because of its relative shock value. It was rated X to begin with, but re-rated R in 1971, and these days it'd probably toddle on the borderline of PG-13. But if you look at the Best Picture winners since Midnight Cowboy, the one consistent factor is that (virtually) none of them contain any of the silly froth that you'd see in movies like An American in Paris or Around the World in 80 Days.

In fact, since then, only two comedies have won Best Picture (The Sting, 1973, which is arguably not really a comedy, even though it has plenty of funny dialogue -- the situations are not funny; and Annie Hall, 1977), and one musical (Chicago, 2002). Everything else: drama. The zeitgeist changed somehow. I blame Vietnam.

And of course, as time has progressed, some films have been revealed as brilliant, underappreciated gems, and previously glorified movies have fallen by the wayside. It's not reasonable, today, to say that How Green Was My Valley is a better film than Citizen Kane. It's not even better than The Maltese Falcon, which was up for Best Picture the same year.

But this process continues apace. In 1994, Forrest Gump won Best Picture... but Pulp Fiction contributed a lot more to the development of cinema. The Shawshank Redemption is more widely loved. Ed Wood is technically superior, and provides much deeper insight into the main character. In my worthless individual opinion, all three movies were more enjoyable than Forrest Gump. (For what it's (unscientifically) worth, Groundhog Day has the same 8.0 rating on the IMDB as Schindler's List. Ever wonder if Oskar Schindler would have eventually learned to make ice sculptures with a chainsaw?)

They oughta hold a ten-year-retrospective Oscar ceremony each year. Now that we've had ten years to look back, what were the best films of 1995? Was Braveheart really better than Toy Story? Heat? It's had less impact (though been parodied more) than Se7en. What's your vote for the best film of 1995?

How about a retraction?

2005-12-15T10:35:00.000-08:00

What slump?
In October, I (along with everyone else in the scribosphere) wrote my two cents about the supposed box-office slump, bitching specifically about how the New York Times kept having weekly stories about how the box office was imploding. Now the New York Times has an article saying that there is no slump (soul-crushing NYT registration required). No shit.

Of course, this article is by one "Lorne Manly," which sounds like the name of a porn star, and the weekly doom-and-gloom articles were not, as far as I can tell. One from October 31st ("Horror Reigns at Box Office, but Slump Persists") has a byline credited to "CATHERINE BILLEY; COMPILED BY BEN SISARIO (NYT)". It's not like it's surprising that a major newspaper doesn't hold a strict line on the box-office news coming out of Hollywood. Doom-and-gloom sells better than the reality of "Everything's fine, it's just a fluke."

In fact, they've managed to spin two sets of stories out of nothing at all: The first set talking about how there's this horrible slump, and the second set talking about how there really IS no slump. I just wish the latter set of articles would mention, "Ha ha, whoops, we just happen to be among those who published weekly articles about this supposed slump, which doesn't really exist. Oops." Of course, they could have saved everyone a lot of time and anguish by simply... not publishing the non-issue non-stories to begin with.

Close Expectations of the Third Kind

2005-12-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

So I saw The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe last weekend, and enjoyed it. I'd read it as a kid, at least thirteen years ago, and remembered virtually nothing about it except that it featured (among other things) a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe. I didn't have a lot of specific expectations about whether the book would be translated faithfully to the screen.

I started thinking about adaptations and wondering what was important about translating a well-known work (novel, comic book, etc.) to the screen. Some people get furious if anything is left out; these are the people who bitched when Tom Bombadil was left out of Fellowship of the Ring. Frankly, screw those people. In the long run, a movie's quality and contribution to cinematic history is only vaguely dependent upon how faithful it was to its source material.

This isn't to say that changes away from the source material are always non-negative; usually, if a novel is being made into a movie, it's because a lot of people like it, and that's usually because it's a good story, so why tamper with a proven work? But that's more about whether you want people to like your movie in the near-term. People constantly discuss the near-mythical greatness of the film of The Godfather, but rarely does anyone mention the quality of Mario Puzo's novel, and nobody these days gives a crap about whether or not the movie was different from the book.

Trailers. All damn day long.

2005-12-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

What's the best part of going to the movies?

Seeing trailers for movies you're looking forward to.

It's almost invariably better than seeing the movies themselves. I've lost count of the number of times a movie hasn't lived up to the expectations set by its trailers. It's gotten to the point where I have to force myself not to watch a trailer more than once, if it's for a movie that I'm excited about, because the more I see the trailer, the more excited I get.

One solution to this problem would be to simply make movie trailers without actually making the whole movie. Take J. Random Comic Book, work out a treatment (it doesn't have to be any good, because we're not showing anything more than disconnected, out-of-context bits of dialogue and explosions), and figure out how little you can get away with shooting.

Then we'd convince movie theaters to have one screen dedicated to just running trailers all day. $5 admission, stay as long as you want. Sit and watch trailers and soak up all that exciting goodness. And forget about the movie.

Or, you know... not.

Then there's those movies where the trailer looks, well, meh, but then you see the movie and it's a lot better than you expected. The recent Pride and Prejudice springs to mind. The trailer made it look like, Well, oh, look, another Austen adaptation, yawn. Hey, Keira Knightley. What the hell is Donald Sutherland doing in this movie? Who's that stiff playing Mr. Darcy?

But it was very charming and entertaining and energetic. So it is demonstrably possible for a trailer to outdo its expectations. Even better is when you haven't even seen the trailer for the movie, so you have no idea what it's about or what to expect. The Usual Suspects falls into this category for me. My dad suggested we go see it. All I knew about it was the print campaign, "Who is Keyser Soze?" and all that. And the lineup of the five guys.

So we see the movie, and wow, it blew me away. At the time, it was OMGGREATESTMOVIEEVAR!!!!11eleven, but in retrospect, it was the combination of 1) me being young, inexperienced, and under-educated with respect to cinema history, and 2) my complete lack of expectations.

I could forgo watching trailers entirely. On the other hand, I love the rush from seeing upcoming trailers for Big Action Movies, and I'd hate to give that up either. O, what problems I have.

Page eighty-something

2005-12-12T14:35:00.000-08:00

Red Right Hand has thrown down the digital gauntlet, challenging other spec scribes to post one page of their work. Okay. Here's one from the space pirate script.

To set the scene, our heroes are aboard a stolen naval troop shuttle, a few million kilometers from the blue giant star Alcyone.

FRANK
We need to find out where they're going and why!
ARIA
And that object might be able to tell us! At the very least we can maybe learn something about this whole secret project of theirs!
FRANK
Well... yes!
A moment of tension. Frank spins on his heel and storms into the passenger bay.
CRASHING SOUNDS emanate from the bay, along with Frank's muffled curses.
A minute later, Frank returns, calm and collected.
FRANK
Head for the object.
JOE
Aye aye, cap'n.
Frank stoically avoids looking at Aria. She stares at him for several seconds, but he doesn't even blink.
Finally Aria sweeps out of the cockpit, furious.
FRANK
(to Bergen)
Is she always like that?
BERGEN
You mean right about everything? I'm afraid so.
JOE
Dad?
FRANK
What?
JOE
Does this mean you and mom are getting a divorce?

I showed you mine. Show me yours!

Action!

2005-12-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

Okay, so the first X-Men 3 trailer is online. And it looks good. Fears have been raised that because Brett Ratner is directing X3, it will, well, suck. A friend of a friend informed me that Ratner's directing MO is to plant cameras everywhere and let the editor make the movie. Which is oddly similar to George Lucas's methodology... only Ratner presumably knows better than to try and write his own scripts.

Yes, I'll say it: Brett Ratner is a better director than George Lucas. I know it's a stretch, a risky thing to say, but I'll be bold and put it out there. *snerk*

Anyway.

I'm going through a sticky section of the current script. No, no bodily fluids are involved, except a little spilt blood. The main problem is that the big action setpiece scene I'm writing has very little interaction with any of the character subplots. They're here to stop the bad guys from doing something bad, and their personal character and development have little to do with it. It's action and reaction.

As a result, I have little in the way of external forces shaping the scene. I know where it has to end up, to fit into the structural framework of the story; but the details of how it goes down are unformed. There is, of course, the Old Version, from the previous incarnation of this script, but it feels random and amateurish. So I'm rebuilding the scene from scratch.

It'll probably help to examine action scenes in other movies that have major character moments and see how those moments interact with the non-character story beats in those scenes. I can think of several off the top of my head; anyone got any particular recommendations?

Do noir heroes change?

2005-12-08T16:37:00.000-08:00

I don't think Sam Spade was really putting his heart into it.

If you watch The Maltese Falcon, yeah, he unravels the mystery (or rather the hoax), figures out who's responsible for what, and so on. But at the end, he hasn't really changed. He hasn't grown, or become a better person; he's still the same callous, self-interested mook he was to begin with. I think he's gained a little insight into the human condition, but he's still just as cynical and unhopeful about humanity's prospects as he was to begin with. Even the last line (well, the penultimate line -- the last line is a confused "Huh?"), "The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of," is a recognition of the depths people will sink to in the greedy pursuit of money. And not in a good way.

A lot of noir heroes seem this way -- they start out world-weary and callous, and they end up world-weary and callous. The best you can usually hope for -- at least in hard-boiled detective-style noir -- is that they start out cynical and end up just a little less cynical, a little more hopeful that maybe the forces of evil won't always win. Except usually it's the opposite; they end up even more cynical, after experiencing the depravities of those involved in the case. Chinatown is an excellent example of negative change: Jake Gittes swore off ever helping someone if it involved anything more dangerous than trailing around unfaithful spouses, because of an experience when he was a police detective in Chinatown. But then Evelyn Mulwray comes along, and Jake falls for her, and believes that this time he can succeed where he failed before.

Of course, he's wrong; Evelyn dies, Noah kidnaps Katherine, and by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, the trauma to Jake's psyche would be so severe that he would never again risk that kind of emotional trauma. Realistically, Jake Gittes has nothing more to offer us, dramatically, because he is destroyed by his failure in Chinatown.

So, of course, they made a sequel. *facepalm*

Casablanca is noir, even though it's not in the Chandler-Hammett tradition. Rick Blaine undergoes significant positive change by the end of the movie. He goes from being snarky and selfish to being snarky and selfless. And the flashback sequence is brilliant, because we see him much happier and more positive than he's ever been. This gives us a contrast to his "present" state (drunk, morose, and pessimistic), making him an even deeper character. We don't see his transition to depressed bar owner; we merely see the trigger and are left to work out the rest for ourselves.

Double Indemnity is yet another example. Fred MacMurray's insurance investigator, Walter Neff, comes to realize the mistakes he made and the evil he committed -- and, had the wheels of justice not ground him into a fine paste, he would have subsequently become a good man who would never again commit such a transgression. He recognized his mistakes, unlike Jake Gittes; he did evil, unlike Rick Blaine; and he was the (im-)moral center of the story, unlike Sam Spade.

In fact, I'd venture to say that Sam Spade is not the protagonist of The Maltese Falcon. He doesn't change. Neither, really, does Joel Cairo; despite his barely-veiled rage, he's really no more than an extension of Kaspar Gutman's will. Possibly Gutman is the real protagonist; he learns to overcome shortsightedness and rage when he learns the "Falcon" is a fake, and commits to spending however long it takes to find the real Maltese Falcon. (Nevermind that he's shortly captured by the police and presumably convicted of numerous crimes.)

Lamentations

2005-12-05T14:25:00.000-08:00

Woe is me, for I may have to restructure large sections of the current screenplay, because I came up with a kick-ass new ending; hopefully I can retrofit the story without too much disruption.

When did everyone become a critic? Do you think Ogg and Thorg sat around the cave twenty thousand years ago, debating the clan storyteller's dialogue choices after the evening's entertainment (which consisted of sitting around a fire, listening to a guy make shit up for an hour)? Or that they didn't think this chapter of Rokk Hunts a Wooly Mammoth was up to the dramatic standard set by the original? Criticism in those days probably only came in the form of being stabbed with a spear.

These days, we spend a great deal of time analyzing and dissecting and deciding whether or not a movie was Good or Bad. But entertainment is food for the mind; we need it for mental health just as much as we need regular organic food to sustain our bodies. And rarely do we spend more than a few words on the quality of food, if we do at all. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie, was sated, and thought no more of it.

Probably it's because thinking about an entertainment experience after the fact is as much a part of digesting it as is letting food run through our intestines after consuming it. But evolution has spend hundreds of millions of years giving us the tools to digest food. Do we have the same level of refinement in our tool choice for analyzing entertainment? Clearly we have the tools for complex, abstract thought. What kind of tools let us best digest a movie?

Moo

2005-12-01T18:19:00.000-08:00

Not dead. Busy writing. Hooray!

Mmm... broccoli

2005-11-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

This is probably too precious for its own good, but the "intelligentsia" are the intellectual elite¹ of a society. What about the most hardworking members of society?

The diligentsia.

Screenwriting is a long, tedious business, truly rewarding (for me, so far) only at two times. One is when I'm actually writing in screenplay format. However, the only way I know to write a good screenplay is to spend a long time in outline format, intricately detailing the story elements; the screenplay is the bowl of ice cream after the outline of broccoli and boiled chicken. Like all sugary rewards, it doesn't last nearly long enough compared to the drudgery that came before it... so I take solace in the knowledge that broccoli is good for you.

The other rewarding time is what I non-cleverly call a "Hannibal moment," which is when a plan comes together and you feel great because you've just created something you know will knock people on their ass when they read it (or, Odin willing, see it on-screen). Unlike episodes of The A-Team, These are both rare and irregularly spaced; more like an orgasm than ice cream.

There is a third moment which I expect to be very rewarding, and that is when someone gives me a lot of money for something I've written, but I haven't yet been... diligent enough to experience that. Some people say that writing's not about the money, but I'm on Samuel Johnson's side as far as that goes.

¹ Yes, formally it should be "élite." Kiss my ass. When a word's been used in English long enough, it becomes an English word, and English words don't have accents. Also, this is the Internet.

Subtlety

2005-11-28T16:50:00.000-08:00

So right near the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence is on his way to the general's office to get sent off into the desert, he passes through the officer's club and stops to get harassed by a captain (?) playing pool. The guy asks Lawrence why he's going to the desert, and Lawrence, in reply, slams the cue ball into the carefully racked game balls, scattering them across the table. The obvious metaphor here is that he's going to stir some shit up, disrupting the careful order the British have arranged. I've seen LoA maybe a half dozen times, but not until yesterday's viewing did I pick up on what that particular action meant. I always thought he was just being an asshole. Of course, I'm stupid.

I think a lot of the time, the average moviegoer doesn't know why they liked a movie. They may be able to point at some lines of dialogue, or some cool scenes, but a lot of the things that can make a movie good are very subtle. Like, simple choices in a character's dialogue as that character evolves over the course of a movie. A protagonist who starts out selfish and greedy will use words like I and me and talk about what he wants and what he needs. Later, as he turns into someone who cares about the well-being of the group, or becomes interesting in risking himself to save others, he might start using words more like we and us and talking about what the group needs or wants. He'll still have the same Southern twang/British stiffness/casual profanity that he's always had, but what he's really saying will change.¹

After you see the movie, you come out with the feeling (if you even think about it) that he was a well-drawn character, but you don't really know why. There's the big, memorable actions -- the scene where he rescues the damsel in distress, or the one where he reduces the villain to a quivering fury with a few blistering bons mots in the drawing room, or the one where Jar-Jar reveals that he's Luke's sister -- but those are only part of the equation. The subtle things are the rest. (Of course, the mathematical metaphor should be roundly kicked in the 'nads, since any attempt to reduce art to math is ultimately doomed, even if it may provide some insight along the way.)

And of what are these subtle elements born? To begin with, the anal-retentive efforts of the writer. The writer chooses the dialogue and the action, and even with the most literal interpretation by the actors and director involved, a great story will still come through.

Moving beyond the written word, actors, for example, can subsequently add their own subtleties; take a character who starts out nervous and unsure of himself, but becomes willful and strong throughout the course of the movie. The actor may decide, say, to blink frequently and rapidly during the early scenes, maybe cause his facial muscles to twitch every so often. But later on in the story, he blinks less, doesn't avert his gaze, and his face is smooth and impassive. Done right, you won't even consciously notice the difference, but it will register unconsciously and you'll think, "Wow, Bob really has come a long way since the beginning of the movie!"

¹ This connects to the idea that a character is really comprised of two things: his core character and his outward characterization. I ruefully admit that the expression of this idea I'm most familiar with -- for it certainly didn't originate with him -- is Robert McKee's.

Wanksgiving

2005-11-23T16:46:00.000-08:00

Due to the impending holiday, no new posts until Monday. Except this one.

They say that Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement. With rare exception, nobody will ever tell you to your face that your work sucks, unless it's their job to tell you that your work sucks. And even then, maybe not. Don't ever believe anyone who says your work is good. The only time you should believe the words "I liked your screenplay," are if they're immediately followed by, "...and I want to [buy/represent] it." Otherwise, assume the person's being nice, and ignore their opinion.

I've written several short screenplays which have been subsequently turned into short films by some actorly friends of mine. (If writers are a ravening horde of infinite monkeys, what are actors? Peacocks, I suppose.) The peacocks have the time, energy, and flexible schedules to turn a work of words into a movie. This monkey slips in fits of writing between tasks at work and time at home, playing with my kid, playing Sudoku with the wife, etc.

And so it came to pass that the fourth short to be filmed, but the third to be completed (long story), was screened night before last at the Anabelle Hotel in Burbank, at which one of the peacocks tends bar as his day job. Er, night job. Friends and family gathered to witness the latest minisculum opus, and aside from some sound problems, it went okay. Afterward, many congratulations on a job well done were tossed about -- oh, I liked it, oh, it was good, great, ha ha, blah blah blah fishcakes.

Bullshit. I hated watching its utter inconsequentiality -- not true of the first two films. There were a few good lines that got some laughs, but... gah. It wasn't the dialogue or characterization that were bad (although you can only have so much in a ten-minute short), but the story... Gah. No story. Barely anything happens. Nobody cares. I didn't care. I wrote it. I knew at the time I wasn't doing a good job, I just sort of blasted it out in a few hours so that we'd have something to shoot. And now I feel stupid.

Yet nobody told me that it was thin or weak. Actually, one person did: My wife. Back before it was shot. Did I do anything to fix it? No. This qualifies, in the small domain of this film and the things it influences, as catastrophic failure. Yecch.

We're meeting next week to plan the next short, and this time I'm going to write it right. The problem with the last one was not that I didn't outline (I did), but that I didn't make sure it was good before I wrote it. Compelling. Interesting. I didn't spent enough time revising it. I just got it done, did a dialogue pass, and that was it.

If I had a time machine, the first thing I'd do is go back in time and kill Hitler. Then I'd go smack myself for writing this piece of crap.

Linkage

2005-11-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

Off-topic: Does anyone see advantage one way or another in the number of links in a blog's sidebar? I link here only to half a dozen blogs, plus Wordplay; most other scribospherical blogs I see (save the infinite monkey's) have a dozen or two links at least just to blogs, and then yet other links pointing elsewhere.

The reason I keep my links limited is because I don't see much purpose in promoting blogs that I don't check daily. To those of you who have got a score's links in your blogs, I ask: Do you read all those regularly? Or do you just choose to link to blogs that you read a few times and liked?

Which came first, the chicken or the film adaptation?

2005-11-21T18:20:00.000-08:00

When a movie is made from a book, is it better to read the book first, or see the movie first?

Watching a movie (especially with a large crowd) is an intense, mob-mentality experience. When suspense or tension arise, shortly to be paid off one way or another, you're gripped the entire time. Surprises and reveals are better experienced with the excitement of a crowd, in the visual format of a movie, than they are in the pages of a book -- since you always watch a movie all at once, but rarely read a book all at once, watching a movie is a singular, more concentrated experience. Watching a movie, you're not going to suddenly find that it's time to go to bed, or to work, and be interrupted.

A movie, done right, leaves you wanting to know more about that world, to experience it in more depth. Afterward, when you read the book, you get to have that, by seeing what was left out of the (necessarily abbreviated) filmic version, what was changed, or even what was added. Certain kinds of books, like histories or biographies, rarely have a traditional dramatic structure, and so it is better for your first experience of the material to be in a powerful dramatic form, rather than as a (relatively) dry narrative of a person's life. Also, reading the book after seeing the movie allows you to spend more time contemplating the material in its entirety, since you're already somewhat familiar with it from having seen the movie version.

However... When a book is made into a movie, that's (widely considered) to be the cultural apotheosis of our age, the pinnacle of where entertainment media can go. "Oh my god! They're making a movie out of [insert novel/TV show/webcomic/joke on gum wrapper]!" (I look forward to the film adaptation of Verizon's "Can you hear me now?" commercials. Hopefully he gets hit by a truck.)

And this means that the novel (or whatever source material) is already a popular, well-known thing, and so you might already have read it, meaning you don't ever get the choice of whether to read the book or see the movie first. You could always choose to never read anything unless you've already seen the movie version, but I don't think most people would consider that a viable option. (Then there's the red-headed stepchild of the entertainment industry: Film novelizations. What's even worse is when a novelization is made of a film that was adapted from some other source.)

It occurs to me that maybe the ideal read/watch order depends on what kind of source material the book is. Biographies, histories, and stories in The Atlantic Monthly probably should be read after seeing the movie. If I'd read The Orchid Thief before seeing Adaptation., the experience probably would have been unavoidably tainted by my knowledge of the novel. The same goes for Seabiscuit; despite its flaws, the movie was more engaging when I had no idea what was going to happen, than it would have been had I read the book beforehand. (I did read it after; haven't gotten around to The Orchid Thief yet.)

What about fiction? Would I have wanted my first introduction to the world of Harry Potter to have been the 2001 film? Probably not; it was fine, as movies go, but I think lacked a lot of the magic that came from diving headlong into the literary version.

On the downside of book-first, there have been few surprises for me in any of the four Potter film adaptations, since I already know what's going to happen, and that's hardly entertaining. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to wait five years to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, trying the whole time to avoid finding out who dies in the end. That goes double for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, where a much more important character dies (or "dies," depending on which loony theories you believe). To be fair, it has been five years since I read Goblet of Fire, and so the movie did hold some surprises, where I had forgotten a plot twist or two. (Emma Watson needs to get those damn eyebrow muscles under control. I felt like she was in danger of causing structural damage to every ceiling she passed under.)

There's probably no good solution. At best, we can avoid reading a novel within a year of the movie coming out; that way, our memory of it will be faded at best, and the movie version will hold some surprises. If a movie is announced, and we haven't read the book, then maybe it's better to wait to read it until after seeing the movie. (Assuming we're interested.)

Template modified. Hijinks ensue

2005-11-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

I modified the template a little bit; I'll probably modify it more and more over the coming weeks. Just a little at a time, but I thought the cream background was a little depressing, so I've just made it black on white for now.

I'd also like to report that if you search for "velociraptors" on Google, this blog is the 8th primary link out of 103,000. Shiny!

Everyone's a critic. I'd prefer it if everyone were The Critic

2005-11-17T18:08:00.000-08:00

We've all read movie reviews where the critic says something or other about the screenplay. On the surface, this seems kind of unfair, seeing as how they haven't read the screenplay and they had no idea what it said. It's an absolute truism that a great screenplay can easily be made into a terrible movie -- perfect structure, dialogue, and characterization can be undone by poor casting choices, poor editing choices, or any number of other things.

On the other hand, it's impossible¹ to make a great movie out of a terrible screenplay. If the dialogue, story, and characterization are bad to begin with, there's nothing you can do in the production process to make them good. Aside from, you know, changing them.

So who should get the credit or (when due) the demerits for a film's screenplay? Imagine a review for Oscar Bait II: Jerked Tears. The critic says that the director was "saddled with a clunky script." The director, who made last year's Oscar-winning Oscar Bait (and several other decent-to-good movies), is obviously talented; therefore the fault must lie in the script.

Well, no. A movie is built from a screenplay, but there are ninety thousand choices in it that are not in the screenplay. And the sum of these can sink a film, no matter how good the screenplay was. Miscasting, misdirecting, whatever. So it seems unfair for a critic to criticize the screenplay of a film based on viewing the film it was made into.

But what if a movie is great? Great movies always² have, at root, a great screenplay. So if the movie was good, it would be accurate for the critic to say that it was made from, e.g., "an excellent, witty script."

Except by this logic, a screenwriter can never be excoriated in a review because there's no way to know whether the bad movie is the fault of the screenwriter; but a screenwriter can get praise for having written the great script that this great movie was made from. I should be so lucky as to be on the receiving end of this "problem," but it still strikes me as irrational that this should be the state of things.

What if by criticizing the screenplay in so many words, a critic really just means to criticize the structure, dialogue, or characterization? Since that's what screenplays contain, it seems fairer if that's what the critics mean. Except there's still a difference between criticizing the actual screenplay that existed at the beginning of production, and criticizing the structure, dialogue, and characterization (SDC) that were present in the movie.

There are untold countless tales of great screenplays being purchased, mangled in the development process, and then made into mediocre films, despite the screenwriter's best efforts to preserve the screenplay's quality. (The argument can be made that the screenwriter agreed to suffer this indignity by participating in Hollywood, but it is not fair, in any sense, for a critic to specifically blame the screenwriter for a movie's shortcomings, when there was nothing the writer could have done.) Fewer, but no less important, are the great screenplays that remained intact until preproduction began, and then suffered the filmic equivalent of a career-ending knee injury while in production.

So the "rational" thing is for critics to render their opinions of the SDC that are actually present in the film, in so many words. Don't even mention the screenplay, because you haven't read it, and referencing it is meaningless. Making everything worse is the fact that the credited screenwriter may not actually have been materially responsible for the production script, so even if you had read it, you may well be crediting the wrong person by mentioning them. (Again, the argument can then be made that screenwriters willingly subject themselves to being mis-credited merely by participating in Hollywood, but it is not just by any stretch of the imagination.) Even if the writer is always correctly credited, the fact remains that the critic still hasn't read the screenplay.

But rationality hardly applies to Hollywood, fame, and anything that touches them. Film critics are ostensibly providing a service: Telling their readers whether a movie is worth spending the time and money to see. Some publications and their critics aspire to more highbrow analyses of a film's worth, rather than simply analyzing whether or not it passes the magic point at which it flips from being not worth seeing to being worth seeing. To a degree, movie reviews are themselves content.

The upshot? I don't know, I'm not drawing any conclusions here, just going through the arguments. Should something be done about this? Probably. What? No clue.

¹ Yes, even for a computer. (+1 point if you got the joke.)
² Not always.

I hope it's good

2005-11-16T18:50:00.000-08:00

It kind of dismays me whenever I overhear discussion of a film's commercial prospects. I mean, it's not like there's anything wrong with such a discussion, aside from the fact that smart people who study the subject for years still can't accurately predict a film's box-office performance, which makes the guesses of random Joes about as meaningful as pissing into the wind... actually, that's exactly why it bugs me. You don't know how well that movie's going to do. I don't either.

Oddly enough, between us, we do know how well the movie's going to do. Probably better than any individual expert. Go read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The salient point is that averaging the guesses of a group of uninformed individuals, when it comes to things like predicting box-office performance, is likely to be far more accurate than the guesses of professionals. The book explains how it all works, and I'm not going into it, because that's not really the subject at hand.

What makes a movie good?

Imagine you are given a ten-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, only it's blank, and you're told that you have to paint a masterpiece on the puzzle, and you have to do it one piece at a time, while they're disconnected. If you change one piece, that causes the next forty pieces over -- and maybe some pieces on the other side of the puzzle -- to need to be changed.

A screenplay is ten thousand choices; a movie is a hundred thousand. In a good screenplay or movie, every choice is made in the context of every other choice. They integrate as a whole, rather than merely being a collection of good but otherwise unrelated choices. They have, for lack of a less fraught word, synergy.

The choice to have one character have behavior X should be integrated with the choice of another character having contrasting behavior Y; deliberate symmetries and parallels should be present on the levels of beat, scene, sequence, act, and overall story. Costume choices should complement character attributes; set design should complement the characters when we want the audience to feel comfortable, and it should contrast with them when we want the audience to feel uncomfortable or wary.

I marveled when I discovered that the mere choice of camera lens could affect the feeling of a scene. Choose a wide lens, and move the camera in; choose a long lens, and move the camera far away. You may be framing the same angular distance, but the scene will look different, and feel different. Is a cold-blooded assassin professionally taking out his target? Try a long lens and minimal camera movement, to get a calm feel. Got a drunken husband busting in on his cheatin' wife, and beating up her lover? Wide lens, close shots, move the camera around. You want the audience to get in and feel what the husband feels, feel passionate about beating up this cheating scumbag.

Or shoot it from the wife's point of view; she's a wicked manipulatrix who wants her husband to catch her in the act and kill the guy she's sleeping with. So use a long lens at medium, so that the fight is in the background of the shot, and she's in the foreground, pretending to cower but secretly thrilled that her plan came to fruition.

I'm pulling these out of my ass, I'm sure half of what I just said about lenses and angles is bullshit, but the point remains: Good movies are good because their thousands of choices are fully-integrated.

The End Is Near!

2005-11-11T09:33:00.000-08:00

So when you read a book, you know that the end of the story is coming soon, because there's only so many pages left. You can feel the diminishing thickness of the remaining pages in your right hand as you progress. This can be offset by having some extra pages at the end: The Wheel of Time books all have a lengthy glossary at the end, which is usually 30-40 pages, so it's a little less obvious that you're about to hit the end of the main narrative.

With a movie, things are different. You can't see how much film is left on the platter; the only clues to how close to the end you are, are whether the story has reached its final climax. (Assuming it follows standard story structure.) If you happen to know how long it is, you can look at your watch; but assuming you don't do that, it's hard to know when a movie will end.

The "traditional" story structure has a final climax followed by a cool-down period, giving the audience a chance to catch their breath before leaving the theater and extracting themselves from the shared moviegoing experience. People have an intuitive feel for when a movie should be ending; a lot of the complaints against The Return of the King had to do with its several "false" endings, although I think that was due more to Peter Jackson's choice to fade to black each time.

What about screenplays? They're paper documents, like a novel, so someone reading a screenplay has the same experience of knowing how far they are from the end. And unlike a novel, you can't pad a screenplay. Physically, you can; you could add a dozen blank pages to the end, just to throw off the reader. However most of the time someone reads a screenplay, the first thing they check is how many pages it is, and so the extra paper would be obviated. (And it would probably confuse and anger readers.)

It's odd how large the disconnect is between screenplays and movies, considering one is the foundation for the other. Screenplays don't have more than rudimentary indications of the visual or sound design; the only thing they describe in detail is what happens, and even then, only to a point: A scene that has two characters talking isn't going to lay out the exact physical mannerisms of each actor, but they're in the movie.

This means a screenplay is the basis for a movie, but there are thousands of decisions that go into the movie that are not in the screenplay. In a mathematical sense, it means there are more possible movies than screenplays, since a given screenplay can be made into multiple movies, but a given movie can only really have one screenplay culled from it (if you did the process in reverse). I'm sure this has been done, though I've never come across it myself, but it would be fascinating to see the same screenplay made into multiple films by different crews.

NaNoWriMo

2005-11-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. It's an interesting idea, and possibly a way to spur some people to write more -- deadlines are the enemy of procrastination, obviously -- but I think this may be a case of a path to Hell paved with good intentions.

The basic idea is that you write a 50,000-word novel in exactly one month, starting November 1st and ending November 30th. Thousands of people are participating, although I'd only expect about ten percent of the participants to actually finish 50,000 words.

So what's the problem? The NaNoWriMo page itself even says that they don't expect people to create great works of art out of this -- rather,

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I think they're underestimating by saying that people will be writing a lot of crap. I think that virtually everything written for NaNoWriMo will be crap. A higher percentage than comes from "regular" writing, even. Novels are a lot more tolerant of this writing style than screenplays are, because you can take as long as you want to work around whatever plot problems arise (although your readers may not tolerate reading that much drivel), but even novels will still suffer from random, errant, aimless writing.

Do we want to encourage that kind of writing discipline in people? 50,000 words in 30 days isn't a lot, if you already have your story planned out, but NaNoWriMo is all about writing off-the-cuff. Writing a 50,000 word novel in addition to designing the underlying story is not something people can plausibly do in 30 days, unless they do it full-time, like a job. And I assume that most people participating in NaNoWriMo are not professional writers, but are instead writing in their free time.

Does NaNoWriMo bring anything positive to the table? Since the whole intent is for people to have fun creating, without worrying about the quality of what they're creating, and with no expectations that the results will be of any use (that is, sellable -- nobody buys 50,000-word novel manuscripts, which is around 125 pages), then... yeah. From the average participant's point of view, it's a way to establish a motivation to get the writing done in a certain timeframe. Deadlines are an excellent motivator.

But even with all the caveats about the project's intent, I worry that people will still come away thinking that this kind of writing is a good way to do things. Do you?

Solv'd!

2005-11-04T18:25:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy because I just solved a major story problem in the space pirate screenplay. Now I need to work out some other, much less severe issues, but that was the big stumbling block that was keeping me from making progress. Hooray!

There was an actual writerly purpose behind that last entry about supernatural powers. For the life of me, I can't remember what it was, although I think it went something like this: When you create technology or magic in a story world, you have to be careful that it's internally consistent. Working out all the rules of the magic system in advance -- even if you don't reveal any but a fraction of them in the story -- is very important.

If a story world persists through enough story material, you inevitably start to have problems with the super powers your characters have. It can be "Superman syndrome," after the fact that as the decades wore on, Superman inevitably gained more and more powers until he was so godlike that it was impossible to come up with anything that could harm him. Eventually DC was forced to reboot the character, starting him over with a lesser set of powers. Nonetheless, the power creep began anew.

A way around this problem is plot-related changes to the system. ** ARR, THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD MATEY ** In book 9 of the Wheel of Time, Rand and his cohort finally cleanse saidin, removing the taint that the Dark One placed on it three thousand years earlier. For the first nine books, saidin's taint caused almost everyone to be frightened of the men who could channel it. But now that it's cleansed, and no longer drives its users mad, that brings about a fundamental (and rather organic) shift in how the characters react to it. (And I bet the Dark One is pissed.)

This all goes the same for futuristic technology, obviously.

Tangentially, just let me say that it bugs me when a technology is introduced for non-story reasons. In DOOM, they have things called "nano-walls" which are basically doors that can shift from amorphous and permeable (allowing you to walk through it easily) to solid and hard as metal, at the push of a button. The instant this technology is introduced, we just know that someone (or some thing) is going to get caught in the door while it's shifting. This in fact happens later on, as a mutant chases our heroes through the door, who then hit the button as the mutant is passing through it, and the thing gets stuck in the door.

This technology exists for the sole reason that it looks cool and lets a monster get stuck inside a door (this doesn't kill it, incidentally). There's no real practical reason given for it. I hate that.

I am a gigantic nerd

2005-11-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

Who would win in a fight between Yoda, Rand al'Thor, and Marc Remillard?

One bonus point if you know who Rand al'Thor is. Two more bonus points if you've read all eleven books in the Wheel of Time, including Knife of Dreams (I haven't finished it yet; no spoilers, please). Five bonus points if you know who Marc Remillard is. Five more bonus points if you've read all four books in the Saga of Pliocene Exile and the entire Galactic Milieu trilogy, including Intervention (or its component books, Surveillance and Metaconcert). Negative three billion points if you don't know who Yoda is.

I'm not going to explain who any of those characters are, so if you don't know, tough luck. There are many ** SPOILERS ** herein, so if you haven't read the books in question, you may want to skip this post.

Ignoring dramatic necessity, my first impulse is that Marc would win. Metapsychics can engage and use their powers on the order of milliseconds, and the total individual capacity of the most powerful metapsychics allows them to direct energies sufficient to destroy an entire planet (granted, it took a metaconcert of, I recall, about 20? extremely powerful metapsychics to do this). Metaconcert allows magnification of metapsychic power, far beyond individual capacity; nonetheless, Marc, by himself, is still extremely powerful.

Rand's power seems far less, in terms of raw physical force. Channelers can begin using the One Power almost instantly, just as metapsychics. Even without augmentation of angreal or sa'angreal, Rand can still unleash a lot of power at once, but on the scale of global magnitude, it's tiny. Killing ten thousand Trollocs in the course of a few minutes, via the constant application of vast amounts of saidin, is impressive, but it's nothing compared to blowing up a planet. With sa'angreal like Callandor or the Choedan Kal, Rand would be able to cause continental shifts; mountains uprising, the land broken and torn, vast cataclysms. But anecdotally, that's about as much power as any channeler can wield; and the Breaking of the World merely (merely! ha!) rearranged the surface of the world. It didn't destroy the entire planet.

Yoda, by comparison to either man, is puny. The largest thing we ever see him move with the Force is Luke's X-Wing; the second-largest are the huge conduit in Dooku's lair, and the hoverpods in the Senate chamber. All those things took him a great deal of effort to move. By comparison, Marc or Rand could easily channel ten times as much energy with virtually no effort, and a thousand or ten thousand times as much if they put their (ahem) minds to it.

But Jedi have one ability that neither channelers nor metapsychics have: Jedi can see a short distance into the future. Some metapsychics have a similar ability, which allows them to sense the impulses and intentions of another sentient, thus predicting what they will do. However, this only gives them the jump on other sentients, and Jedi could use the Force to cloak their thoughts, thus rendering the metapsychic ability useless. At the same time, what the Jedi sees is the future, not from reading a person's mind, but from reading the Force. The metapsychic can do nothing about that.

How fast could each man kill the others at range? A Jedi could, in theory, use the Force to sever your spinal column where it meets the cerebellum. This would kill you almost instantly. (We never see Jedi do this, because they're too goody-two-shoes to kill people that way; we never see Sith do it, because they like to torture people via lengthy choking or electrocution.) Channelers like can weave flows of Air to slice you in half, almost instantly as well. Metapsychics can essentially vaporize you with a thought, also on the order of a fraction of a second.

What about melee combat? Yoda is a lightsaber duelist of the highest order; Rand is a blademaster. Marc, as I recall, doesn't have any particularly special physical abilities, so he's basically dead instantly.

So it's Rand vs. Yoda. If both men are without supernatural abilities, Yoda still wins, because his lightsaber will just slice through Rand's sword, and then Rand has no defense, and he's dead. So let's say Rand's sword can block a lightsaber. Now who wins? Well, without the Force, Yoda can't leap around, can't predict Rand's next move by looking a few seconds into the future... Rand would win, because he's a blademaster even without using the One Power.

Okay, that's enough nerdiness for today. Class dismissed.

Stock Bond

2005-11-01T12:16:00.000-08:00

James Bond is not a character. He's a placeholder, a collection of martini preferences and witty one-liners. He doesn't undergo change or growth in the movies; he decides early on that he must tackle this task, and although he meets obstacles and difficulties, they are always from without, never from within. He has no self-doubt.

Don't get me wrong; I like Bond films, and I like the character. If Bond hadn't been invented, we'd have another superspy character filling that niche. But I wonder whether it's necessary for Bond to never undergo any character transformation?

Bond-as-franchise demands that he never change too radically. For each film, he must always be ready for another adventure. He cannot grow tired of getting shot at all the time, he cannot decide that Britain's politicians are corrupt and resign his position in protest, he certainly cannot grow old and be forced to retire, and of course he can never die from old age or an assassin's bullet.

I've watched most of the Bond films; in particular I've seen all the films starring Dalton or Brosnan, most of the ones starring Moore, and a few of Connery's. Out of all those, the only one that seemed to contain anything like character development was The World Is Not Enough (aka TWINE). Although it came out six years ago, I'll display the obligatory

** SPOILER WARNING **

before I continue. In TWINE, Bond at first thinks he must protect Elektra King, daughter of a wealthy British aristocrat who has been cleverly assassinated (while inside MI6, no less). During the first half of the film, Bond and Elektra appear to fall in love. Alas, Elektra was behind her father's death, and turns out to be one of the film's main villains. Elektra easily pushes aside her feelings for Bond, so that she may pursue her evil plans.

Bond, on the other hand, feels truly betrayed by Elektra. After a series of typically harrowing adventures, Bond and Elektra finally meet once again, on a small island near Constantinople. Bond escapes the usual overly-elaborate death trap, and confronts Elektra, who taunts Bond that he will not be able to shoot her because he loves her. When she pulls a gun, he shoots her anyway (I guess self-preservation trumps affection), but the look on Pierce Brosnan's face in that scene is apocalyptic -- Bond has just been forced by circumstance to kill a woman he loves.

He gets over it in short order, since he still has to thwart doomsday brought on by the arch-villain Renard (whose name is French for "fox," oh ho ho). But I found that one scene, where Bond shoots Elektra, to be particularly powerful, and I think it shows that there is a great deal of room for exploring Bond as a real filmic character.

I've never read any of the Bond novels, neither Fleming's nor the rest. It's possible that Bond actually demonstrates some character development therein, and maybe once I finish Knife of Dreams, I'll see if I can find some of the early Fleming Bonds.

There are no rules

2005-10-31T15:31:00.000-08:00

Don't use "we." It pulls people out of the story. There's always a better way to do it. It's distracting. It's unprofessional. It's amateurish.

And then John August comes along and says, Yeah, I use "we" all the time.

*cackle* I love Hollywood.

It probably is true that the unsold spec writer should, all else being equal, stick to a fairly conservative writing style -- in other words, avoid all those things that everyone says will piss off readers. But if you're telling a great story, then your style doesn't really matter as much, does it?

On the other hand, if you're taking my advice, you have even less experience than I do, and I hate to be the one to break this to you, but your screenplay sucks. Write five more.

RT vs. MC

2005-10-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

Rotten Tomatoes is a great idea. Take reviews from lots of sources, rate whether each review is overall positive or negative, and then give the movie a score based on what percentage of its reviews are positive. Then give it an overall rating of "fresh" or "rotten" depending on whether its percentage exceeds a certain threshold.

The problem is that two movies can have the exact same percentage -- say, 40% -- and yet the reasons they each got 40% can be radically different. Maybe Film A inspired joy and excitement in 40% of the reviewers who saw it, and the other 60% thought it was a bag of flaming dogshit. Maybe Film B elicited shrugs from every reviewer, 40% of whom just barely gave it a positive review, the other 60% of whom barely gave it a negative review. And of course there's the problem of the meta-reviewer having to decide at what point a review crosses the line from positive to negative.

Metacritic takes a slightly different approach. Each review is given a score from 0-100, depending on how positive it is. The scores are then averaged into a final percentage rating for the movie. In practical terms, this leads toward a narrower distribution of ratings; high-scoring movies on RT don't tend to score as high on MC; and low-scoring movies on RT don't tend to score as low on MT.

MT's approach is more accurate; it gives a more precise picture of the aggregate critical reaction. You still have to look at the details of each movie to see exactly why it got rated the way it did. If Metacritic thought enough people knew what a standard deviation was, they'd probably include it.

Both sites attempt to turn subjective opinion into objective fact; but they both still require their meta-reviewers to, well, review the reviews, and those reviews are of course subjective. I don't think they're useful for much more than entertainment, or maybe helping decide which flick to blow your paycheck on this weekend, but a few times I've seen people quote numbers from one site or the other as if that proves that Movie A is better than Movie B in some truly objective sense. Meh.

Sin tax heir ore

2005-10-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

This entry is all over the damn map, but I've got a work deadline.

I said yesterday that screenwriters spend far too much of their online time discussing formatting issues, rather than the vastly more important content issues. There are, of course, issues with discussing content. But first, a lengthy digression:

I'm a mild-mannered web programmer by day, and a marginally less mild-mannered screenwriter by night. And sometimes by day. Or even in outer space, where no one can hear your forehead bleed.

Over the years I've learned a bunch of ways to solve particular types of problems. Most of this knowledge has come from simply attacking those problems, over and over, in a variety of contexts. In 1999, it would have probably been impossible for me to code the project I've been working on for the past two months. These days, it's nearly trivial. There's a lot of small logic problems that come up, questions of whether I should build a data structure this way, that way, or some other way entirely. But I have enough experience that solving most such problems is second nature.

The flip side to all this is that I spend very little time discussing programming or programming theory with other people. I only discuss those topics with cow-orkers in the context of the particular problem at hand. And in absolute terms, we don't discuss them very much, because each of us have our own little code-fiefdoms. Very, very few projects here ever involve more than one programmer.

How does this apply to screenwriting? The best way to get good at writing is to write, but I think you can catalyze the process by making good use of discussion with other people -- not just (or even at all) about your own screenwriting problems, but rather by analyzing extant stories and figuring out what does or doesn't make them tick. This is the good way to spend your time.

The bad way is to waste it talking about formatting issues. Why is so much of the screenwriting discourse online about formatting issues?

Formatting is trivial to professional screenwriters. They spend very little time dealing with it, thinking about it, or discussing it.
Non-professional screenwriters can be split into two groups: the lazy and the hard-working.
Lazy non-pros latch onto the easy things, like formatting.
Non-lazy non-pros work on the hard stuff, and become pros faster. They also aren't spending all their time on the Internet, because they're writing instead.
The population of non-pros becomes disproportionately full of lazy non-pros, who spend all their time talking about formatting.

May I humbly include myself in the group of non-lazy non-pros. Here's some guidelines that were freshly hand-pulled from my ass this morning:

Don't waste time discussing formatting.
Write, god dammit.
If you have to waste time discussing screenwriting on the Internet, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, talk about specific movies and tear them apart. That'll do you some good, builds character, puts meat on your bones, etc.

Peevish

2005-10-26T14:31:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it pisses me off that 90% of Internet discussions about screenwriting focus on formatting issues. Screenwriting can be roughly (and unequally) divided into content and formatting. Formatting itself can be subdivided into quantitative formatting and qualitative formatting.

What the hell does that mean?

Quantitative formatting is how wide your margins are, how far indented your dialogue and character names are, what font you use, where a (beat) or (O.S.) goes, etc. This is the trivially easy stuff, and way too much time and energy is spent discussing it.

Qualitative formatting covers things like, should I write action in the "vertical style" of having a blank line between each sentence, or should I compress my action lines more, or should I avoid having more than four lines of text in a single dialogue block, etc. This is mostly stylistic choices. They can have an effect on the interpretation of the content, but not the, er... content of the content, if you dig. We still spend too much time discussing this.

What remains is content. What happens, what the characters do and say, and how they say it.

We don't spend enough time talking about how to create good content, and that pisses me off. The reason seems obvious: content is the really, really hard part of storytelling. It's easier to fall back on discussing the simple realm of formatting. Creating an original, interesting, intelligent, insightful, exciting, logical, dramatic story... hard. To make it worse, you can only really discuss creativity in the broadest terms: the common dramatic elements of storytelling. Make sure your story has 'em, but without knowing exactly what your story is about, I can't say much more than that. And then I'm writing your story, which... is your job, not mine, and why am I spending time analyzing your story instead of writing mine?

Screenwriting is hard. It's very hard. It's the aspect of filmmaking that's hardest to do well, or even competently. It's the easiest to do poorly, since it has less overhead than any other aspect of filmmaking, which require equipment and supplies, all of which are more expensive than what a writer needs: a pencil and some paper.

Wait, there's acting, too. It doesn't really require less overhead, because you can't act until you have material, so the overhead for acting is a script, which is pencil and paper plus hundreds of hours of bleeding foreheads.

And because every chump who speaks English and can string a sentence together thinks that means they can write, we get the infinite monkeys banging at the gates, showing us just how hard it really is to do this well. (Not to mention getting in the way of the monkeys who know their ass from a typewriter.)

Screenplays are not blueprints

2005-10-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

A screenplay is often analogized as being the blueprint for a movie. This makes the Metaphor Cannon extremely angry.

The blueprint for a building specifies, in exacting detail, every inch of the building -- its foundation, its skeleton, its electrical and maintenance systems, and so on. Blueprints must be so exacting, and followed so precisely, because deviance from the blueprint can kill people.

Screenplays are not nearly so sensitive. A screenplay with many problems can still be made into a decent movie -- and usually, no one dies in the process. A movie contains thousands of details that are not in the script: costume choices, set design, lighting choices, camera angles, actors' facial expressions, line delivery, etc.

You could write a screenplay that contains all those details, although you'd never be able to sell it, because nobody would want to read something that long, detailed, and dry. If you didn't have to worry about selling it, though, why not include all that extra detail? Assuming you're a decent writer and the details mesh with and inform the story, the way they would in a well-written novel, then you certainly could write a 300-page ultra-detailed screenplay. Once a screenplay is committed to production, you don't need to worry about selling it, and so there's no pressure to make it a terse, spare, good read. It can now function as a guide to production, not an entertaining read that has to stand on its own.

Ifa screenwriter was also expert at costume design, set design, and the myriad other decisions that film production entails, then his 300-page screenplay might have a unity of vision that would make for greatness. In reality, even the greatest screenwriters are not experts at all those fields, and cannot do this. Even if you don't have to worry about selling the screenplay, it's pointless to worry about those niggling details, because movies are made as a collaboration, not as the work of a single individual. The set designer will worry about the details of the set design, and they will do a better job than we could.

So screenplays, for good reason, do not contain many of the thousands of minor details that go into a movie. It seems that, in fact, a screenplay is a description of a story, not a description of a movie. Ultimately, a screenplay is not a blueprint for a movie; a better metaphor is to say that it is the foundation for a movie. You can build many different buildings on the same foundation. The rooms will have the same general shape and layout, though the decorations might differ, and the façade might be made of brick instead of wood, but the core of the building, the foundation, remains the same.

* The Metaphor Cannon rolls away, whistling a happy tune. *

DOOM

2005-10-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

So I just saw DOOM. **SPOILER WARNING **

I expected it to be as bad as all the reviews indicated, but you know what? Entertaining enough. Nothing really egregiously stupid. The dialogue and character development were, well... it coulda used another few weeks of polish. No real groaners, but also nothing to write home about. The action scenes were pretty good, some fairly creative bits. As many reviews have pointed out, it's tonally a retread of movies like Aliens. Thankfuly, there wasn't a single moment where I had to roll my eyes and say, "Oh, come on," and I'm the guy who stood up and shouted at the screen during Godzilla and Wing Commander.

What finally became clear is that the character development was not designed into the core structure of the story; it was added on later, laid overtop like a bedspread on a lumpy mattress. *The Metaphor Cannon skulks away quietly.* The characters had, you know, character, but how they acted during the dialogue-heavy exposition scenes had no apparent bearing on their other choices. Not that they were inconsistent; but in the action scenes, everyone's just, you know... doing standard military stuff.

The Rock was miscast. He plays Sarge dead serious, and I understand that barking out military jargon is de rigeur for movies like this, but can't we mix it up a little? When Sarge says, "We're going in hot," you hope that someone will make a witty remark, but instead everyone just nods grimly and gets on with the unpleasant business of wiping out mutants. He was almost believable later on when he decides that they have to kill everyone in the Secret Lab Facility, even though some of them are demonstrably not infected with the mutant DNA.

Karl Urban wasn't miscast, but his character, John Grimm, nicknamed "Reaper," lives up to his name; he has no sense of humor. He came this close to having a soft, chewy, moral center, but ultimately he seemed merely resigned to his destiny of being a bad-ass. Reaper should have, at the very least, had some gallows humor covering up his painful past.

Goat (yes, Goat) has two short scenes where he evinces devout religious faith -- one where he carves a cross into his arm after accidentally taking the Lord's name in vain, and one where he's reciting what I think is supposed to be Bible verses, but sounded made-up (that is, more made-up than the rest of the Bible). Then he gets "killed." Then he comes back to life as an almost-zombie, with enough sense of self to kill himself for good -- after he makes the sign of the cross.

There's no evidence of the religious angle before that first scene. The Kid, youngest member of the squad (it's his first mission--guess what happens to him) starts out timid, then has this pair of weird scenes where one of the other squaddies gives him uppers, and then Reaper gets mad at him for being high; then the drugs never figure into the plot again, then the Kid grows a backbone, and then he dies. Ad-hoc character development at its finest.

There was one very good scene, that actually had some emotional weight. The backstory on Reaper at this point is that his parents started the initial archeological dig at that site (on Mars), and there was an accident where they died when Reaper was a kid. That's all we know; no details.

Anyway, Reaper and Sarge are exploring the very dimly lit archeological dig room, looking for the surface door. As Reaper moves along, we start to very faintly hear the sounds of children laughing. The sound comes up until we are basically hearing the echoing memory of the accident occurring. We don't see it, we only hear Reaper's memory of it. He moves to a window and opens the blinds, providing some reddish sunlight as the memory finishes. The sound fades away, and Reaper looks crushed. We never learn any more about what happened to Reaper's parents, or why he chose to become a marine when his sister became a scientist. I really liked that they understated that part of his backstory, instead of trying to give us the laborious details. We can imagine.

Alas, Sarge comes into view a moment later, in the background, and sees Reaper standing at the window. At this point, Sarge is holding his rifle to his shoulder, aiming around because a mutant might leap out at any moment. And then Sarge asks, "Is this where it happened?" Which was a stupid, stupid thing for that character to say. Sarge never before or again evinces any interest whatsoever in anyone's feelings or thoughts. He's in the middle of a dark room, there could be monsters anywhere, he sees one of his soldiers aimlessly staring out the window, and he asks about the guy's past. No. He should have snapped at Reaper to quit dilly-dallyin' and get on with the mutant-huntin'.

So, yeah. It's an odd movie; it's not as bad as it should have been (especially given the pedigree), it wasn't nearly as bad as a video game movie of this type usually is. It wasn't really bad at all, per se, it was just... okay.

On the gripping hand...

2005-10-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

Re yesterday's post about, er, "open screenwriting."

Is there any difference between audience testing of a (nearly) finished film, and audience testing of a screenplay? You show a preview screening to an audience because you want them to tell you whether they like it as it is; you test a screenplay because you want to know whether it can be made into a good movie.

If you test a screenplay, well, it depends what you do with the feedback. If you're only using it to help you search for bugs in the program, as it were -- illogic, weak character development, clichés, etc. -- that's one thing. But I don't think Average Joe Moviegoer is really qualified to do that. You're better off showing it to one or two professional screenwriters to get their analysis.

But if you use screenplay testing to find out whether Average Joe likes the screenplay... what would happen? Assuming you then revise it so that Average Joe likes it more, then, with a sizable enough sample, you're going to end up moderating the screenplay into generally tolerable pablum...

...which may be a viable economic strategy. If your movies are entertaining and inoffensive enough to make back their production cost, then you're not likely to ever have a smash hit, and you're also not likely to completely fail. You'll never create a great work of art, but you'll also never be in the poorhouse.

I am NOT a committee!

2005-10-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

There's a bit on The Screenwriting Life about a Scottish director who's posted the screenplay for his latest project online, before shooting begins, so as to elicit feedback from "the audience" (presumably any random Joe who wants to contribute his opinion).

I used to be of the opinion that getting feedback on your work could only be helpful. After all, it's just a way for people to give you a new perspective on the situation. Nobody's forcing you to use their suggestions. What better way to see if your screenplay is any good than to let the audience read it before you make the movie?

...

No.

Let's backpedal a bit. What does it mean for a screenplay to be "good"? On one level, on the artistic level, a given person can only meaningfully say that he likes it or doesn't like it; that it moves him or doesn't; that it seems natural or forced.

On the second level, the commercial level, he can try to gauge how other people will react to it. Movies take money to make; is it worth the investment, given that he can't really know how people are going to react to the movie made from it unless we make the movie and release it? Knowing how they react to the screenplay is useless; we're not trying to sell the screenplay to the audience, or entertain them with it.

Is Joe Audience-Member qualified to do either of these things? He can do the first thing, but he's not likely to be able to offer any constructive feedback about specific dramatic elements of the screenplay, mostly because he has no experience identifying them. He can't do the second thing any better than the screenwriter or the studio executive, so there's no point in asking.

It would be exactly like assembling a cast of actors without a script, then asking the audience if they think the cast is good. If they do, so what? The cast may not mesh well in production. They may be wrong for the parts. There's no way to tell without actually making the movie.

Pogue has a simple philosophy: We, the screenwriters, are the professionals. It is our job to know when a screenplay is good and when it is not; which elements work, and which need fixing. There is no point ever showing an unfinished work to someone in order to get their feedback, because who cares what they think? They are not the experts. We are. We are the experts not because we are Better Than Them; we are the experts because we've spent a lot of time Practicing This Shit.

I said earlier that I used to think getting feedback was a good thing. After hearing the thoughts of Pogue (and others), I revised that opinion. Now I think that getting feedback can be a good thing, but only from another professional. Laymen's opinions of a screenplay are, essentially, useless. But a professional's opinion can be useful, if only as a sanity check.

Despite Pogue's opinion, it is a good idea to have a skilled colleague look at your screenplay before you send it to the People Who Might Give You Money For It. Such sanity checks can save us a lot of trouble. Ultimately, whether the screenwriter is the Ultimate Professional who Knows What's Right is irrelevant; even the greatest writer can make a mistake and miss something.

Beans and Routines

2005-10-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

I eat a lot of beans. Canned beans. We buy bulk supplies at Costco. Toilet paper, paper towels, baby wipes, cereal, soy milk, batteries, liquor, shampoo, soap, dates, eggs... and beans.

I'm a big fan of simple food preparation, and so I buy 8-packs of Bush's Best Original Baked Beans. Each one-pound can contains one chunk of bacon, for some inexplicable reason, and of course that's the part I eat first every time I open a can and microwave it for two minutes. Eating out for lunch every day is more expensive than preparing your own food; one of my Life Goals^TM is to be able to afford to eat lunch out at a nice restaurant every day, and never have to prepare my own lunch.

But until then, it's all about the routine. I've been eating cans of beans for a few months now, ever since I discovered them at Costco. It's not every day I have 'em; some days I don't feel like packing lunch, and every Friday me and a couple coworkers go to lunch at a nearby Tony Eatery^TM and spend an hour bitching about our various supervisors.

Why the hell am I blathering about beans? Because routine is an important part of creativity, especially in the highly structured format of a screenplay. Abstract painting? Who cares, throw some paint around until you feel emotionally satisfied. But a screenplay, you can't do that.

[ The Metaphor Cannon sneaks out from behind a hedge, and fires. ]

We must be disciplined monkeys; flinging around our creative poo can make for some novel wall decorations, but it gets old and smelly fast. You can paint a painting on a giant fork-shaped canvas, or an icosahedral canvas, or some kind of four-dimensional Klein bottle canvas, and some art maven somewhere will praise your daring exploration of the form, but you can't* write a 120-page screenplay that's totally blank and have it hailed as a "masterpiece of minimalist expression -- The Times."

Routine is an interesting aspect of self-discipline. Sometimes, we fall into a routine because it's the path of least resistence; sometimes, we have to train ourselves to a particular routine, lest we (for example) develop the gum disease gingivitis. In screenwriting, we need to cultivate the good parts of the routine and excise the bad. Routinely going over your story to make sure you haven't got any orphaned set-ups or payoffs, for example, is a good habit. Routinely using the same clichés over and over again and again endlessly ad infinitum? Not so good.

Screenwriting is possibly the hardest form of creative expression to do well, because the format is so restrictive, and yet we have to transcend these limitations and create something both excellent and fresh.

* Oh, you can try. Go ahead, we're all waiting.

Gods and Mobsters

2005-10-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

Screenwriters are gods, though only in the sense that we create worlds and realities. Our godliness is, frankly, a bit dim when it comes to the power structure of Hollywood, and our creations don't really have free will, and I think this metaphor has already worn out its welcome and is spending all its time around the snack table, eating all the pineapple and cheese sticks, and the Metaphor Cannon is calling its union representative because this metaphor crashed the party instead of being fired into it by the Cannon and enough already.

There is an orgasmic moment of creation that occurs sometimes when writing a screenplay. The first time it happened to me was midway through the rewrite of Script #5, when I went back and looked at the protagonist's role in the story and realized that some major piece of info about him had to be provided at the beginning of act 3, a Big Reveal that would cause the audience to look back at everything he'd done for the first two acts and say, "Oh my."

When I figured out what the Big Reveal would be... wow. A big rush of endorphins, and because I was at work, I couldn't jump up and down and scream "Wahoo!" and run around like a chicken with its trust fund cut off, so I sat there doing the positive opposite of seething, just gloating and reveling in the fact that I'd created something that was so obviously perfect and good and right for the story, and man were people going to drop their jaws when it happened and they realized the implications for the remaining twenty-five pages of the script.

Of course, time passed and the day's fervor drained away, and I began to fear that when I reexamined the Big Reveal, I'd find that maybe it wasn't as cataclysmically awesome as I'd thought at the time, because frequently when I look back at stuff I'd written a while back, my brain tries to escape from my head in order to avoid the inevitable cringing and embarrassment of realizing, "Jesus, I wrote that crap? And I thought it was good?!"

But when I looked at the Big Reveal again, and again, it made sense. It worked within the context of the story. It gave a plausible backstory for the protagonist, and gave him a hidden motivation for every single thing he did in the first two acts, that underlay his apparent motivation. And now I practically live for those moments of creation, when things fall into place. It's the emotional complement of being the audience on the other side of the Big Reveal; now I know how it must have felt when George Lucas realized that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. (Or whoever really came up with the idea, because George? gets a knee to the groin if I run into him.)

* Mobsters have nothing to do with this post, I just like the title as a parody of Bill Condon's excellent film Gods and Monsters.

Ew. Gross.

2005-10-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Every year (well, except this one, so far), box office grosses get higher. You constantly see reports about some blockbuster or other breaking the record for 4-day opening Labor Day weekend, or biggest R-rated comedy opening, or Biggest Non-Holiday Opening By A Columbus Movie.

But so what? Inflation means that a $50 million opening weekend in 1995 might equal a $65 million opening weekend in 2003 (note: not based on real numbers), with the same number of tickets sold for each of those two openings. And even then, what about the fact that the available audience is different? There are more people now than there used to be, and more screens and seats, so it's not exactly surprising that grosses are higher. And what of the fact that the competition from other entertainment media has increased? These days we've got the Internet, home theater, blah blah blah. Is comparing total box office gross really a useful way to compare... uh... whatever it is that comparing grosses is supposed to compare? Is it meaningful that Titanic grossed more numerical dollars than every movie in the 1930s combined? (This may not be true. It's just hyperbole, for Christ's sake.)

From the studios' point of view: Who cares? The fact that numbers are ever-increasing makes us look good to most people, who don't care, or even know, about the economic implications of rising ticket prices, population, and competition. Wow! Titanic grossed a billion dollars! That's a shitload! It's good advertising for the studios, because they can constantly show off.

But this summer, grosses are down a skosh, and so we have no records being broken. Instead, it's the endless parade of doom-and-gloom articles, which... is still media attention being focused on Hollywood.

Damn, they win either way, don't they?

Character[ization]

2005-10-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

I'll admit it: Yes, I own a copy of Robert McKee's book Story. Like all screenwriting "rulebooks," it's got some interesting ideas, some useful tools for writing screenplays. It's also got a lot of bullshit, but there you have it.

One of the tools I like is the concept of character vs. characterization. (First, to clarify: character, here, is an aspect of what we would normally call a character. John McClane is a character, and he also has character and characterization.) Characterization is a character's outward appearance; how they speak, how they dress, how they act, what they like, and so forth. Character is how a character acts under pressure, when the chips are down, when the reaper comes calling, insert-tense-circumstances-cliché-here.

Two characters may have radically different characterizations, but similar characters. To cop McKee's example, imagine a rich, arrogant, sexist neurosurgeon and a poor, skittish, devoutly religious Latina housekeeper are driving down the highway in separate cars (a Mercedes and an old Honda). Ahead of them, a bus full of (let's say) nuns crashes into a concrete barrier and bursts into flame. The surgeon and housekeeper both screech to a halt, spring from their cars, and set about rescuing nuns from immolation, without a moment's thought for their own safety.

And of course two characters with similar characterizations can have vastly dissimilar characters. Imagine a group of nearly-identical punk rockers, leather jackets, metal studs, chains, spiky hair, nose rings, the works. They're heading down a street when, in an alley, they see a pair of women being mugged at knifepoint. Most of the punks just point and laugh and continue on, but one of them goes into a rage, sprints into the alley, and cracks the mugger over the head with (let's say) a crowbar.

All characters should have as good characterization as is possible given the amount of dialogue and screen time they have. All characters should have as strong a character as circumstances allow. Nurse #4, who tells the protagonist that visiting hours are over, probably doesn't need to have her character revealed at all, let alone strongly developed.

Two Outlining Cents

2005-10-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

It's safe to say that the outlining vs. non-outlining debate is the proverbially beaten dead horse. Really, it's more like a horse that's been blasted to atoms, compressed into nutritive horse-cakes, and used as a soy substitute. Soylent Horse.

Nevertheless, here's my take on it.

To me, outlining a screenplay means creating a story. Every element of the story except the actual, final text. You describe what the characters say, but not the exact words they use. You describe what the characters do, but not in the terse, parsimonious style that descriptives should be in. You describe everything that happens, down to the smallest detail.

Outlining is thus the first ninety percent of writing a screenplay. The last ten percent is actual screenplay format. For the most part, assuming the story is thoroughly worked out, you're pretty much just translating. If the outlining was done right, then the biggest choices to make during the final stage are the dialogue and writing style.

Naturally, there are a lot of different tools to use during outlining. One of my favorites is to start writing the script in screenplay format, from the start, and go 30-40 pages. Try to establish what the characters are like, how they think, how they react to things. Then I take this knowledge, go back to the outline, and change it based on what I've learned about the characters. This is a useful tool because without giving the characters a voice, without knowing their personality, it's harder to make their choices accurately reflect their characterization.

I might even do this a few times, using different parts of the story, in order to see how the characters will react in different situations. In my current script, there's a scene where one major character gets killed. Another major character is very upset by this, but in the original outline, she just weeps and is dragged away by the protagonist. I sat down and wrote that scene, and after being dragged away, she instead became enraged and (using a handy plasma cannon) vaporized several of those who had killed her friend.

This led me to redesign her a bit, in other parts of the story. Normally she's very reserved and in control, but after the plasma cannon incident, I decided to go back and make her a bit more spontaneous and reactive -- but only sometimes. She's still reserved and in control, but she shows flashes of passion from time to time. Does it work? Only time will tell.

The Flashback Voiceover Montage Dream Sequence

2005-10-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

Why do overused screenplay devices get so much hate, when badly-written "ordinary" screenwriting is done just as badly, just as frequently? Probably because they're so easy to identify as a Thing Been Done Wrong. Voiceovers, montages, and flashbacks seems to get the brunt of the hate, as they're the most general screenplay devices.

There's two problems with this. One is the generalization that these devices are Always Bad and To Be Avoided, Because Readers Will Automatically Pass If Your Script Has Them. (Then come the inevitable counter-examples of huge, famous award-winning films that are chock-full of these "bad" devices. This of course is the Law of Screenwriting Rules, which is that the only true rules are the ones you can't get away with breaking.)

A subspecies of Always Bad syndrome is the They Are Harder To Do Well disease than "regular" screenwriting. This is horseshit. All screenwriting is hard to do well. Writing a scene between two people standing on a street is hard to do well. Montages, flashbacks, and voiceovers are extremely standard writing devices; they, I believe, are part of the basic lexicon of cinematic speech. Yes, there are certain things which really are harder to do well; interwoven dialogue like David Mamet wrote in Wag the Dog, that's harder to do well than ordinary dialogue. But a montage? A flashback? Voiceover? Come on. There's no significant difference in difficulty between writing a good montage and writing a good dialogue scene.

The second problem is that focusing ire on particularly misused writing devices does a disservice to the writer, because instead of identifying systemic problems with their writing, it puts all the attention on how their writing problems have been used in one particular instance, giving the impression that the real problem is that you used a montage here, not that your writing is (e.g.) generally dull and undramatic. How frequently does this happen:

Joe Writer: So what do you think of my script?
Bob Executive: It's great! We love it. Dialogue is great, characterization is great, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, couldn't put it down. Only one thing. Your flashback sequences suck more than a hooker at a vacuum cleaner convention.

A good screenplay with a bad montage can happen, of course, but it's not because the writer used a montage. Any screenplay element can be done badly in an otherwise good screenplay: a montage, an exchange of dialogue, pacing in a given scene or sequence, whatever. You can argue that these devices are often used when they shouldn't be, when there's no reason to use them other than that the writer thought it would be nifty. But that happens with everything. A scene might be unnecessary or just the wrong focus at the wrong time. A line of dialogue might be completely extraneous, providing neither a laugh, plot propulsion, or insight into a character. The "best buddy" character might be a pointless dipshit. But none of this means we should be especially wary of, or avoid using, scenes, dialogue, or characters.

A New Family Comedy from Stanley Kubrick

2005-10-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

Proof that you can never trust a trailer to accurately represent the actual movie: Shining

A quick take on the whole Hollywood-box-office-is-failing-we're-all-doomed thing, just to consolidate my thoughts.

First off, John August's canonical take on the whole thing, wherein he points out that, yeah, there's no story here.

Second, even if the numbers are massaged to look as b ad as possible, so what? The studios make far more of their money off DVD sales of movies than they do off box office revenues. The theatrical release is an advertisement for the DVD release down the road. Okay, so box office is down. Are total revenues down? Are the studios going to stop making movies now? No, and no.

This is a non-issue non-story. Why do the likes of the New York Times -- the New York Friggin' Times -- feel it necessary to have yet another story every other week bemoaning the imminent end of Hollywood? Maybe it's because it's dire-sounding news, which always sells, but come on.

Not that the studios are run by super-geniuses, but it bugs the crap out of me to hear the usual "Well the movies all suck" justification. Like, yeah, the $9.4 billion in box office they grossed last year -- what morons! Like you could do better.

Precision

2005-10-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

I saw Serenity this weekend, and it surprised me how much I was able to consciously recognize storytelling elements. And yet, none of them really seemed forced; everything flowed smoothly and followed logically from what came before.

*** ARRR! THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY ***

In the scene after the nightclub fight, when Our Heroes are all back on board Serenity, Mal confronts Simon and is furious that Simon had his crazy, violent sister on his ship for eight months. Things get fairly heated, and there's a shot, what I think is a great shot, from the point of view behind Zoe's hip, looking at Wash. Wash doesn't say anything, but the shot comes right after Mal threatens Simon with some serious hurt.

Two things happen in this shot: Wash starts looking really scared, like, "I've just realized I'm sitting very close to people who might suddenly become very violent," and Zoe's hand drops to her holster for a moment -- but then things calm down, and she pulls away. It's a very subtle shot, very precise in its intentions, and conveys a huge amount of information to us about the state of mind of characters who are not even participating in the conversation.

It was at that point that I began to realize exactly what kinds of things a good storyteller can create. And not just what, but how they can create it. At some point, Joss Whedon was writing that scene, visualizing it in his mind, and it occurred to him to take a split-second to show what the other characters were thinking. That's the kind of storytelling that makes a story persist and resonate, the kind of subtle work that makes people like your movie even if they don't know why.

Kinship

2005-09-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

Not that I'm in the same league, sport, country, continent, planet, or star system as Charlie Kaufman, but a couple of weeks ago I saw his play "Hope Leaves the Theater" at Royce Hall, performed by Hope Davis, Peter Dinklage, and Meryl Streep. I can't remember it, alas, but about halfway through there was a line that made me crack up, and virtually no one else laughed.

It occurred to me at the time that Kaufman probably thought it was hilarious too, and yet somehow I was one of, like, four people who thought it was funny. Like it was an in-joke that only screenwriters would get. Wait, I'm a screenwriter? Since when?

On a Sunday in March 2004 I was pacing on the front steps of a house in the hills north of Salinas. My wife and I had driven up that morning to attend her best friend's wedding shower. I, knowing virtually no one there, eventually retreated to the porch. Then my cellphone rang. My cousin Richard, the aspiring actor, who moved back to L.A. from his teenage years in exile in Grass Valley. He wanted to know about writing. He and two friends had decided that waiting around for people to cast you basically sucks, and wanted to take matters into their own hands.

I gave him some advice about writing -- what little I knew at the time, not that I know much now -- and eventually agreed to write something myself. A short film, about ten pages. I ended up directing it.

Then I wrote another one. One of the other guys directed it. He also directed the next one I wrote. Richard directed the fourth one.

So I technically have four produced screenplays. However none of them is longer than about ten minutes. My grand total of things written is four short films and five feature screenplays. Charlie Kaufman probably comes up with and discards more pages of material during any given urination.

But that's okay; everyone has to start somewhere. Now that I've had at least one "screenplay" made into a "movie" that probably about 50 people have seen, am I a screenwriter? Everyone's told me how much they like it. I assume they're all lying politely, because who wants to tell someone to their face that their work sucks?

I'll agree that I've written a good screenplay when someone pays me money for it. Not until. From one point of view, whether or not you are a good screenwriter, or you've written a good screenplay, is an irrelevant game of semantics. All that matters is whether they will pay me money for it or not... right?

The Metaphor Cannon earns its stripes

2005-09-29T15:20:00.000-07:00

I was waffling about this topic, since I thought the Metaphor Cannon might not be up rapid-firing large-bore slugs, but we'll give it a shot and see what happens.

Today's metaphor is... the Unbent Paperclip.

Writing a bad screenplay is easy; you just pound out pages of whatever comes to mind. Worst-case, you're not following any kind of plan; just-as-bad-case, you've got a very basic plan, but it hasn't been refined at all, so you're making up all the details on the spot, and the overall plan may be misshapen anyway.

Writing a great screenplay, well... Even a writer as arrogant and inept as I can't give you an exact specification of what would make up a great screenplay. What I have figured out is that all great screenplays will have one thing in common, and that thing is really a meta-thing:

All great screenplays have every single element worked out in excruciating detail, and every element relates perfectly¹ to every other element.

The inverse corollary is not true: A screenplay whose every stroke has been worked out, both broad and fine, will not necessarily be great.

And now, the Metaphor Cannon. *FOOMP*

Take a paperclip. Unbend it until it's more or less a straight line. Now try to work out the last few kinks: bend this segment just so. Well crap, now the segment above it is straight, but the one above that, which was straight before, is out of line. Now you have to bend just THAT segment, and hope it doesn't scotch your previous work. After a few minutes, you have a straight-line -- analogous to, say, one page of a screenplay.

Now imagine that your paperclip is ninety feet long, six inches thick, weighs thirty tons, and has six hundred kinked segments. That's a feature screenplay. And you have to bend it into a straight line. Using only your tonsils. And you had your tonsils removed last week.

I'm not sure how that dentistry reference got into the Metaphor Cannon, but the point remains: If you change a single element anywhere in your screenplay, there is a significant chance that you will need to change something else. Most likely, you'll have to change more than one other thing. And guess what happens when you change those other two things?

Four more things need changing. Wait, I see where this is going. Hm... what's two to the six hundredth power?

Oh, shit.

No wonder it's so hard to write a great screenplay.

¹ Perfection not guaranteed.

"...workmanlike dialogue..."

2005-09-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

Ugh. "Workmanlike." I hate this criticism. Not that I get it a lot, but I hate it when I see it, even referring to other writers, mostly because I think it's an ambiguous reference to the real problem: This is dialogue that moves the plot forward, or explains what the characters are doing or why, but isn't funny, insightful, interesting, or otherwise deserving of a +1. "Workmanlike" tells you that you need to use different words to say the same thing, but the real problem is frequently that the dialogue focuses on the wrong aspect of what the characters are up to. To wit:

Last night I wrote a scene where two characters improvise a plan to rescue their companion from the bad guys. When I started, they said things like, "Hand me that [object]," and "Okay, here's the plan," and so forth. Lucky for me, I realized that this was stupid and boring and most of all, lazy.

So instead I left the description of what they were doing in the descriptive text, and kept it short. "Frank throws a wrench to Joe," that kind of thing. I rewrote the dialogue into (presumably) witty banter that was only obliquely related to what they were physically doing. As I recall they argued about whether or not they were doomed. Fun!

To begin with...

2005-09-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

Like all good screenwriters, I need a way to prevent myself from writing. Writing leads to madness, and so instead I have created a writing blog.

I've written five complete (which is Italian for bad) screenplays. The fifth is currently undergoing a complete, ground-up, atomic-level rewrite, that will hopefully make it less, er, complete, and more sellable (Italian for home ownership). However it is not so much currently undergoing a rewrite as it is sitting on the back burner while I work on an entirely different script. About a space pirate.

On the advice of a long-time screenwriter (Italian: house north of Montana) who is a friend of the family, I took a screenwriting class at UCLA Extension. I resisted the idea at first, seeing as how I've read every screenwriting book in creation, including -- put down the pitchforks -- Story, and figured that I'm probably past the point where book-learnin' would do me any good. (Italian: I am naïve.)

The class at first had a dozen people, all with varying levels of talent, writing experience, and involvement with the industry. By the end of the class, it was down to five or six die-hards. I speculate that the reason for this was that the class, the supposedly Basic Fundamental Introduction to Beginner Screenwriting 101, was 98% workshop and 2% book-learnin'.

The instructor was a screenwriter, in the neighborhood of 70, who cut his teeth on TV in the '60s. He professes that the best way to write is to just write. There was a lot of hemming and hawing over the details, but it boils down that your story is better when you know your characters well, and you can't really know your characters until you write them doing something. This of course hearks back to the standard outlining-versus-uh, not-outlining debate that flares up semimonthly on sites like Wordplayer, and are summed up by Terry Rossio's inimitable pith:

As we've discovered on this topic before, everybody outlines. Even people who say they don't outline, outline. Those writers who just sit down and bang out a first draft have simply found an incredibly slow and work-intensive way to outline.

Hard to argue with. Terry and Ted Elliott wrote Pirates of the Caribbean (and its impending sequels), which contain one of the most memorable and distinctive characters in cinematic history -- and they outline. However... just let me pull back this sheet... *whiff*

This is the Metaphor Cannon. It is a device designed to pound an idea into your skull until your ears bleed. This time, the Metaphor Cannon will be launching the idea of the writer's toolbox. I did not invent this idea, but I find it a useful tool -- a meta-metaphor, if you will, and if you won't, ALT-F4 -- for thinking about the writing process.

All writers have tools they use to write. I don't mean Final Draft on a Mac or a Mont Blanc on a legal pad; I mean mechanisms and techniques. And it seems to me that evangelizing the undeniable glory of outlining may, may, cause some writers to forgo another tool which is remarkably useful: A character exploration draft.

Big words! Hulk smash! Raar! I have a problem when I write in that my characters tend to be extremely realistic, which is Italian for boring. Real people do not run about tossing off witticisms à la Jack Sparrow. So as my first, largest step in writing a screenplay is laying out the story in excruciating detail, my characters tend to be boring. They do not do interesting, distinctive things. They do what the plot needs done; the plot drives them, not the other way 'round.

So once I work out the general bones of the story, I write some pages, usually from the beginning, trying to give these non-dimensional characters some depth and life. And after a while, I have some better idea of what the characters are "really" like, and how they'd respond to the situations in the story.

Then I go back to the story and start over, knowing that I've got Lively Characters A, B, and C who can now help drive the story by their lively, lovely actions.

Then I repeat this process until I go insane.

If you got this far, you are a special, special person. (Italian: Special Olympics.) The title of this blog refers to the third Snakes on a Plane film, which will be directed by someone who is currently directing Gap ads but will make a big splash next year with a kung-fu movie starring a rapper and an athlete. Said director will become sought-after by the studios despite his complete inability to tell a story, and Snakes on a Plane 3: Velociraptors on the Space Shuttle will feature only one of the original cast members, the one who wanted too much money to be in the sequel, but has since starred in several flopped romantic comedies/serial-killer detective dramas, and has learned how to properly season their crow. It will also star Steven Dorff and/or Skeet Ulrich.