This hilarious list, which was originally posted on a bulletin board on TriggerStreet, was so good I had to share it. It was written by friend and fellow screenwriter,Doc Strange, whose scripts (mostly comedies) have earned him finalist nods in a variety of screenwriting contests. You can read his scriptshere. He also participated in my Love scriptwith a wonderful short called “Might As Well Face It,” in which he made a parallel between an unhealthy relationship and trying to give up cigarettes. You can learn more about him at his website.
I’m also sharing the photo of him and his wife below, because, I don’t know. For one thing, it’s a little known fact that screenwriters are great lovers. Plus, she makes him look good. Hehehe…
Hope you enjoy it.
-MM
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I've been patrolling around message boards, reading books and perusing magazine articles for many years now trying to soak up as much information as I could about the business of screenwriting.
After I had given myself some time to process this information, I have been able to put together a list of 12 hints, tips and pieces of advice that I think every struggling screenwriter should know.
This is my attempt to clear up any misconceptions about how to pursue your career as a writer:
1) Nowadays, capitalizing sounds has fallen out of favor, so make sure you CAP all of them because that is what producers like to see.
2) Chances are that you won't sell a screenplay until you've made a name for yourself by selling a screenplay.
3) Always use a standardized three-act structure or some variation of it that resembles the films you see in the theaters because you can't get something produced if it's not original.
4) Stereotypes are not funny - audiences like to see characters that are derived from real life.
5) Cliches never work and have no place in screenwriting because your audience wants to see things that they are familiar with.
6) Page count is important. You almost never want to go over 120 pages for any script. Dramas can be anywhere from 110 to 130 pages. Comedies should all be around 95 pages because anything under 100 is considered a television movie. And remember, never write less than 90 pages because if you want to write a horror for the big screen, it should be about 85 to 95 pages.
7) Don't put a number on page 1 because all screenplays must have page numbers.
8) Remember that you never get a second chance to make a first impression and producers who are impressed with your work will contact you - so always keep the contact information of all the producers you have sent your screenplay to.
9) Since only perfect specs are the ones that are purchased, make sure your write and rewrite your script several times until it is perfect - that ensures that your manuscript is ready to be rewritten once it is sold.
10) Screenwriting is a prose technique where the only things that are written are things that can be seen and heard, which is why no well-written screenplay is ever devoid of subtext.
11) You should never direct your film through your screenplay and you should never tell the reader things that can be shown.
12) And the biggest tip of all: Since you can't sell a script without an agent and you can't get an agent without selling a script, the best way to break into Hollywood is to either sell a script or get an agent.
I’ve been reading a book called The History of Sex in American Filmby Jody Pennington for mysterious reasons I can’t reveal until late-August. There have been scripts I’ve read in the past where, in some scenes, there are characters in a room and it’s obvious the writer didn’t know what or where to put those characters.
Well, consider this.
The dynamics of relationships, even sexual dynamics, can dictate where to place the characters. Or how they’re behaving. Or whether certain characters should be in the foreground while others are frozen out in the background. Or who has their back to whom. Because you can make visual statements about the relationships without resorting to dialogue and with the simple placement of the characters.
In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) are having some marital issues. We know in a scene in a kitchen the degree of Martha’s discontent, because she tells George (in a scene filled with subtext) about the fate of Rosa Moline, a character in Beyond the Forest. “She’s a housewife… She buys things… She’s discontent.” As Jody writes in The History of Sex in American Film, “Martha’s allusion signifies her dissatisfaction with her own gender-coded role of housewife. It can also be read as a parallel indication that she is aware that her sexual desires and her plans to use sex to escape George’s world for a part of the night parallel those of Rosa Moline to escape the world of her husband…”
Then comes Nick and Honey for a night of drinks. Nick is a new colleague of George’s at a New England college. Consider these two paragraphs from Jody’s book and how placement of characters emphasized new sexual dynamics between the characters:
When the two women return, Martha has changed into something more comfortable. George greets her with a term of endearment – “my pet” – and an ironic “your Sunday chapel dress” (it is early Sunday morning). George reacts to Martha’s change of attire but tells the guests, “Martha is not changing for me.” Verifying George’s suspicions, Martha sits on the couch beside Nick and begins flirting with him. The sequence of shots begins with an extreme close-up of Nick taking a lighter and lighting Martha’s cigarette after George refused to do so…
[Mike] Nichols [the director] underlines the bond developing between Martha and Nick by shooting Martha and Nick in close-ups and medium close-ups and positioning them in the foreground. George and Honey are frozen out and left in the background. As Martha flirts with Nick, close-ups of her are intercut with close-ups of him, with Honey in the background saying that Nick had been “intercollegiate state middleweight champion.” Martha, framed in close-up, remarks, “You still look like you have a pretty good body now, too, is that right? Have you? … Is that right? Have you kept your body?” George’s interjection from the back of the room, “Martha… decency forbids…” is silenced by a loud “Shut up!” from Martha framed in a close-up. When Nick says that his body is “pretty good,” Honey, in a medium two shot with Nick, confirms what Martha thinks she sees: “Yes, he has a very firm body.” Then in quick succession there is a cut to Martha in a close-up, then back to Nick and Honey followed by a medium shot with George behind Martha, sitting at a desk reading a book. George breaks in again, and Martha retorts that George does not “cotton to body talk.” Nichols, with the deft framing of Haskell Wexler, who won an Oscar for his camera work, visualizes the way in which sexual desire can focus the minds of two people that are attracted to one another to the detriment of those around them.
Now consider The Graduate. I’m not even going to set this up, because you should already know this film. Here’s Jody again:
Eventually, Elaine returns from school, and Ben is manipulated by his parents into taking her out. When he picks her up at the Robinsons, Mrs. Robinson is sitting in the jungle room, her legs covered by a leopard-skin patterned blanket as she smokes a cigarette with The Newlywed Game playing unwatched on the television. Ben and Mrs. Robinson have a moment alone, and she tells him that she is “very upset.” He promises he will only take Elaine out this one time. Elaine and her father come in, and while the camera focuses on Mrs. Robinson’s forlorn face in a close-up, her husband advises Elaine “to keep your wits about you tonight. You never know what tricks Ben picked up back there in the East.” Ironically, we see Ben’s real teacher while her cuckolded husband mouths the sexual platitudes heard at Benjamin’s party. The scene is not completely humorous, though. By having this comment occur in this room where Mrs. Robinson first began her pursuit of Ben in earnest and by framing Mrs. Robinson’s despondent face so closely, the film shifts her from a position of superiority to one of vulnerability.
Ironically, Mrs. Robinson eventually intrudes into the intimate space Ben and Elaine share when Ben comes to pick Elaine up for a date. As Mrs. Robinson forces Ben to drive around the neighborhood, she attempts to coerce him into dropping Elaine by threatening to expose their illicit relationship. In his first burst of rebellion, Ben responds by deciding to tell Elaine himself…
On a final note, I must say, I love this paragraph about the montage:
In The Graduate, the fluctuation between the visible adherence to norms and the surreptitious deviation from them are best represented in a European-modernist inspired montage. In a sequence inspired by Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, we see Benjamin’s transitions, and the symbiotic relationship, between his two lives. Benjamin is seen leaving the pool and going into his parents’ house only to enter a hotel room with Mrs. Robinson; he gets up from a bed and goes to shut the door of the dining room where his parents are eating dinner, lies down on his bed again, but is now in the hotel bedroom. In the hotel bedroom, Mrs. Robinson walks back and forth in the foreground, getting dressed, and then leaves, followed by Benjamin leaving his own bedroom, going past his mother (Elizabeth Wilson) to the pool for a swim and diving onto Mrs. Robinson in bed.
I would’ve posted this sooner, but I got hit by a bus.
Yes, I’m fine, thank you.
The bus company is paying for all the damages to my beloved sports car. Just so you know, in the world of insurance, you can’t cause an accident by avoiding an accident. Just as an FYI.
Okay, let’s talk Dark Knight. Seen it twice. I went to a special Imax screening and saw it over the weekend in Digital Projection. Imax is the way to go. This movie’s too damn big for a regular screen.
THE KILLING JOKE
I also managed to read The Killing Joke. What a fabulous comic book. I’ve always had mixed feelings about comics because the crappy dialogue drives me crazy. Everything is so on-the-nose and everyone’s always stating the obvious. But The Killing Joke’s dialogue was simply electric. Not only that, and I never thought I’d say this about a comic book, it had sensational transitions between scenes.
While Joker’s origin story wasn’t used nor would any other aspect of Killing Joke’s story be found in the film, the Joker’s character, on the other hand, the point behind his terrorism, Joker’s philosophical views about humanity, were absolutely incorporated. Listen to what he tells Batman as he’s being chased in a fun house in the third act. To set this up, Joker had murdered Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, kidnapped Gordon, and tried to make him go insane. And he says all these things as Batman races through this fun house narrowly escaping booby traps while passing giant mirrored reflections of Joker’s face...
“You see, it doesn’t matter if you catch me and send me back to the asylum… Gordon’s been driven mad. I’ve proved my point. I’ve demonstrated there’s no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell you had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress like a flying rat? You had a bad day and it drove you as crazy as everybody else… only you won’t admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense that there’s some point to all this struggling!
“God, you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that… Something like that happened to me, you know. I… I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha!
[Which explains why he had different stories about his scar.]
“By my point is… My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can’t you? I mean, you’re not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation... Do you know how many times we’ve come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! HA HA HA HA HA! It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for… it’s all a monstrous demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?”
I love it. You can almost hear Ledger’s voice behind those words.
BATMAN BACKLASH
As with anything popular, there will be a backlash.
The Dark Knight is Dirty Harry stripped of Don Siegel’s ambivalence and ambiguity. Here again, one madman (Christian Bale’s Batman/Clint Eastwood’s Harry) is posited as the only effective way of combating another (Heath Ledger’s Joker/Andy Robinson’s Scorpio). The two figures are identified as morally equivalent (”You complete me,” says Ledger to Bale, nastily referencing Jerry Maguire), but where Siegel’s camera literally recoils in horror at the moment Harry leaps into madness (when he steps on Scorpio’s wound in the football stadium), Nolan seems to embrace, and even romanticize, his hero’s obsessive, abusive behavior. Is the Dark Knight just George Bush with a better outfit, demanding that he be allowed all of the available “tools” to combat terrorism, even if they include torture and eavesdropping? Like Bush, Batman has his own warantless wiretapping program, but Nolan is kind enough to assure us that, once his goal is accomplished, the superhero will blow it up. Is he suggesting that we can count on the Dark President to do the same?
Now you see it, now you don’t. That about encapsulates the depths of feeling and artistry in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan and company’s sordid exercise in avert-your-eyes sadism, a work at best inelegant and at worst inept. The film would have us believe it’s about dualities and polarities, the so-called Dark Knight of Gotham (Christian Bale as billionaire Bruce Wayne and vigilante alter-ego Batman) compared and contrasted with White Knight—soon-to-be literally two-faced—Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), both of them joined in messily chaotic battle with the facially-scarred villain known as The Joker, whose mid-film “You complete me” declaration to Batman is less Jerry Maguire-jest than Matrix-like pseudo-philosophy.
Yes, we’re back in the realm of “awesome!” anagrams and pothead palindromes that the Wachowski Brothers popularized nearly a decade ago, only now they’re spoken with a solemnity and verbosity borne of a beat-down Western warrior spirit, and lent gravitas by a cast only stellar in theory. But then it hardly matters if The Dark Knight’s dispiriting view of a city at war with itself doesn’t hold together, not when you have Morgan Freeman (as Wayne Enterprises liaison Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (as stalwart manservant Alfred) spouting gloomy old man platitudes about the culture of surveillance, and everyone else monologuing ad nauseum about various and sundry long, dark teatimes of the soul…
Dawes returns in The Dark Knight (this time the paramour of Dent and in the form of Maggie Gyllenhaal), but now she’s little more than bait, a damsel-on-the-railroad-tracks plot device. I’m certain Nolan thought he was being transgressive by killing Rachel off, but her death packs zero punch because it’s so blatantly a screenwriter’s contrivance—mainly to motivate Dent’s split-personality revenge—and one executed with the same amount of “Gotcha!” shallowness as an earlier fake-out murder featuring not-yet-Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman).
Dave, the point was, know your limits. I would respond to Keith, but I think the 310 angry comments said it all. On a lighter note, DK Holms, in his article in the Vancouver Voice, brought up an interesting point about “The Curious Case of the Dogs on the Knight.”
“How did there get to be so many canines in this movie? I can’t think of another recent film in which dogs figured in the plot so much. Though here, they don’t figure in the actual plot so much as they add more texture. The vigilantes at the beginning have dogs; The Joker has three dogs (a mythological reference?), and in the dreamy time-shifting ending Batman is pursued by police dogs through an industrial section. Bruce Wayne even has a chat with his “Q” (Morgan Freeman) about improving the bat suit to withstand dog attacks (which inspires an allusion to a possible Catwoman presence in a third film, as various talkbackers have ejaculated). These dogs are vicious but controlled, synecdoches of the ideal Gotham, creatures who are loyal, unlike cops and gangsters, and not subject to corruption except by those who train them, the corruption lying on the next level up of power.”
The dogs are a great allusion to the gangsters, certainly. In various mythologies, they were the guardians of the Underworld. The dog-headed deities in Ancient Egyptian art had the duty of “imprisoning and destroying the enemies of light” and of standing guard at the gates of holy places. Ancient Germans had a terrifying hound, Garm, which guarded the entrance to Niflheim, the realm of the dead, a land of frost and darkness. The Vikings had the myth of Garmr, “the greatest monster,” who was bound before Gnipa's Cave.
But from a storytelling perspective, I think it’s all simpler than that. You have to start from the ending and work your way back. When Harvey Dent shoots Batman, you want the audience to gasp and feel “Oh no.” Well, how do you do that, because the suit would protect him? You have to setup that moment properly with a discussion about the suit. He has to want to change his suit, which means, he’ll want it to be lighter, and thus, someone will talk about how he’ll be more susceptible to bullets. So what would give him problems to make him want to change his suit and be more flexible? Dogs. This also solves another problem, that is, how can Joker get the upper hand in a fight against Batman in the third act? He can’t use drugs, because we saw that in the last film. He can’t really take him in a fight, either. We’ve seen Batman take down multiple tough guys all throughout the film, so how can you show something different? Dogs. You setup first how much dogs give him trouble, and thus when he has difficulty because he’s being attacked by Joker’s three dogs, we buy it, and we know he’s in trouble.
DK’S SCREENWRITING LESSON
Ya know, one could point to so many strengths of the film, especially the characters and their distinct voices in the dialogue, the superb tension, the bravura filmmaking, the twists, the action sequences, etc. For me, there is one great screenwriting lesson in DK that’s above all its other strengths, that really sets it apart, and that is the power of inner conflicts.Nolan saidhe wanted to “push these characters and test them in new ways.” How do you do that? Inner conflicts. And not just any inner conflict but GREAT inner conflicts. I think this is what shaped the story overall, that is, the desire on the part of the filmmakers to give every character an inner conflict of some kind. By doing that, you can easily come up with a lot of material that might push a story toward 2 ½ hours. And (I know this is an unfair blanket statement, but) I get the impression from all the scripts I read that too few writers actually care about or even try to master inner conflicts.
Seeing that film made me regret not having blogged more about inner conflicts. A great inner conflict is the heart and soul of high-quality dramatic writing, isn’t it? This heightens emotions in scenes beyond the norm. It’s what keeps a story consistently compelling from scene-to-scene. It’s what adds tension in the sense that this thing could go wrong in so many ways. It’s what gives actors the opportunity to shine even if they don’t have a lot of face time on screen. Plus, to a large degree it’s what makes an ending more satisfying, because it is make or break decision time for all those conflicted characters.
So what inner conflicts did we have in DK?
Bruce: Reveal himself to Gotham or endure the terror? And that’s a conflict rooted in his origin story, too. Because we understand now his dark, inner needs to put fear into the hearts of the criminals. I think he knew the truth about his unlikely future with Rachel, too, but he couldn’t face it. And there’s also Harvey Dent. Should he fight or support him? He's a good guy, yet he'd love to knock his teeth in. Later, should he save Rachel or Harvey? Well, that wasn’t much of a conflict. He told Gordon he was going to save Rachel, but the Joker had switched the addresses. There were conflicts about Bruce’s limits, too, his physical and moral limitations as Batman. And we also sense that he was conflicted about his one rule – should he kill the Joker?
Rachel: Bruce or Harvey? Accept the proposal or not?
Harvey: Should he work with or against the Batman? Should he arrest him? He, too, faced his own inner conflicts about staying within the ethical limits of his power. Remember that scene where he tried to interrogate one of Joker’s minions? He wanted to go too far and Batman stopped him. And later in the third act, shoot or not?
Gordon: Should he work with or against Harvey Dent?
Alfred: Share or destroy Rachel’s letter?
Lucius: Help eavesdrop on the city in a way he doesn’t approve?
Lau: Cooperate with Harvey or face the Joker?
Salvatore Maroni: Work with or turn in the Joker?
People on ferries: Turn the pins or not?
It’s amazing how many characters had inner conflicts and also how many inner conflicts existed in the main protagonists, like Bruce. Even that little accountant that wanted to blackmail Wayne Enterprise $10 million a year had his own inner conflict: reveal Bruce Wayne or face the wrath of a notorious, brutal, and wealthy vigilante?
The only one who didn’t have an inner conflict was the Joker, because he had no rules, although he seemed to be of two minds about the Batman. He first hated him and wanted to destroy him and reveal to the city what a farce he really was. But then he changed his mind. He wanted to prove his point to him, practically convert him, and perhaps bridge a partnership. I loved the fact that the ending was rooted in the characters. The idea about the two ferries not only had great tension but it was rooted in the Joker and what he was trying to prove about humanity, that when the chips are down, “these civilized people will eat each other.” And in that moment when the people choose to not blow each other up, we see a brief inner conflict in the Joker.
Harvey, of course, proves the Joker correct. As a society, we can rise above this, but individually, we can fall so easily from a bad day.
Okay, so, for all the newbies out there (and those in the middle east, eastern Europe, and Africa reading my blog), let me ask the question: what is an inner conflict? It’s not simply putting a character into a position where they have to make a very difficult decision, although it is that, and we saw a lot of that in The Dark Knight. In great characters, though, it is also designing that tragic flaw and putting them in a position where they are forced to face that flaw. In non-tragic contemporary terms, this could be weaknesses of heroes, the internal obstacles of characters that keep them from achieving their end goals. You can read more about inner conflicts here.
“A character's inner conflict is not just being in two minds about something, not just being torn between obvious incompatibles (“I want to be a priest, and yet I love her”) but is about being in a new situation where old attitudes and habits war with and hinder the need for change. For instance, a man who drives himself to succeed because he doesn't want to be like his happy-go-lucky father is suddenly confronted with a situation where he isn't winning. Or an executive discovers that her ambition to be vice president of her company is being thwarted by her own self-doubt. This war inside each of your characters makes them act and react in complex ways.
“You show these internal conflicts not by means of internal dialogue (which is a cop-out and is dull), but by showing your characters responding to their own inner compulsions. She, for instance, decides to confront her own self-doubts by taking on a no-win project where the local people are opposing a development. She is determined to be hard-nosed, prove she's vice-president material. He is always confrontational, fearing that one minute of negotiation would be the first step to becoming a wimp like his father. You have a grade-A opposites-attract situation here, yet it is believable because we understand why each of them is acting the way they do, why they are foolishly stubborn, by it's important for each of them to win.”
I know I’m late talking about this, but I like to wait a couple of weeks before seeing a Pixar film (so all the little kiddies won’t bother me).
Okay, three points I’d like to make about Wall-E.
1) WORDLESS INFORMATION
As far as I’m concerned, the first 20 minutes of that film are worth the price of admission. It’s magnificent the way they created this story with very little dialogue. These guys at Pixar truly understand the language of film, too, the way you tell stories through images. Of course, the finished result always looks so deceptively easy. You better believe, though, that every shot and every moment was carefully conceived, discussed at length, and at times redone.
But consider all the information that’s told to us without words. What happened to Earth and why. The way they impressed upon you how Wall-E is truly alone on Earth. The point of Wall-E’s job. How people got off Earth. How they establish the cruise ship. Wall-E’s fascination with Earth. Wall-E’s inner needs, that is, his desire for companionship and love, human-style. This was especially true when he repeatedly reached out for Eve’s hand, which brings me to…
2) SETUPS & PAYOFFS
There is a simple motif throughout the film in which Wall-E continually tries to hold hands with Eve (or as he calls her – “Eeeevaa!”) This motif illustrates the point of great setups and payoffs, which is crucial in screenwriting. The setup: he wants to hold hands. The payoff: they hold hands. Simple, right? The holding of hands is a great choice for this story, because it visually and externally illustrates Wall-E’s inner needs about Eve. He wants to connect with her, like humans. Plus, we know that when the moment comes that they actually hold hands, they will have connected and Wall-E will be happy.
There are billions of setups and payoffs to choose from for stories. So, on the one hand, what you choose as a setup and payoff is important because it has to be essential to your story. On the other hand, what you choose as a setup and payoff isn’t enough. It’s how well you handle the setups and payoffs in your script that determines how effectively you’re communicating with your audience. One of the big unspoken aspects of screenwriting is that half the battle is mastering the fine art of setups and payoffs and making them work, which takes time, practice, and lots of feedback.
Sometimes I think amateur writers I’ve reviewed in the past tried to have too much in the way of setups and payoffs in order to impress people. It’s as if it’s beneath them to work in SIMPLE setups and payoffs. But, hey, that’s screenwriting. If you have too many setups and payoffs, they’ll just fly by the screen and won’t be effective. You need to stick with fewer setups and payoffs in order for them to be fully felt, which means you have to choose wisely and make them work. Less is more. What’s more impressive in this medium of films is how well you handle a few, simple setups and payoffs like Wall-E.
How did they do it?
* Wall-E repeatedly reaches out to hold Eve’s hand, which fails. * Eve rejects him. She doesn’t understand what he wants. * At a crucial moment, Eve is made to understand. She cares. * She tries to hold hands with him, but it’s too late. * Then, as they hold hands, Wall-E comes back to his old self. * They finally connect, and it’s happily every after.
On paper (or mysterious blog article) that sounds too simple for a great film. But it’s not so much WHAT happens but HOW that happens and WHEN that happens that creates an emotional impact. He had to reach out for her hand at just the right moments to be effective. It’s like what Ebert says: “It’s not what it’s about but how it’s about it.”
COLORS
I also wanted to talk about the colors of this film, but Jim Emerson beat me to it. I’m glad, too, because Jim pointed out a great interview with Wall-E director, Andrew Stanton, onFresh Airin which he talked about a lot of the brainstorming that went into Wall-E:
"I geeked out at the idea of being able to do a much more monochromatic palette. That's not usually associated with animated pictures because there's this stigma of it being a babysitter or family fare and it has to have every color of the rainbow in it, and all that stuff -- which really makes me want to go in the other direction when I hear that. And I loved that just the natural setting [Earth as a big dump] required a monochromatic bent to it, at least in the beginning of the film. So it's dealing with a lots of yellows and tans and browns. It made anything primary, like even the chipped-away red circle of Wall-E's "E," or the one time you finally see something real like a plant, really stand out. It's almost like having the restraint of using a close-up and not using it until the very right moment. It suddenly has a huge impact when it's used.
Jim wrote, “How cool is that? An animator who understands the psychologically effective uses of color... and close-ups!” I would just add that the contrast of the monochromatic exterior of the Earth made the rich interior colors of Wall-E’s home feel that much more special, just as special as it must’ve felt for that little robot.
As the world watches and debates this weekend how great is The Dark Knight, let us consider those films that, as the kids say, “suck ass.” I mentioned in myFatal Flawsarticle that I had read Roger Ebert’s latest book,Your Movie Sucks, which is a collection of reviews from the last decade or so of films that had fewer than one and a half stars.
It’s so easy to point to the strengths of a great film, which can be many, but I’ve always felt that you learn more from a film (or script) that fails. I always take those lessons of failure with me when I sit down to write, more so than the successes of great films.
Oh, the things that would drive Ebert crazy! I took notes. Whole preposterousness. Ridiculous stupidity in execution. A workable concept completely miscast. The lack of verisimilitude. Crushed by the weight of bankrupt clichés. Cardboard characters. Characters betrayed by the needs of the plot. Failing at its own objectives (i.e., a comedy that’s horribly unfunny). An indecipherable chaotic mess of a plot. Unfinished and unfleshed-out story, and thus, inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions, and unfinished characters. Suspension of belief and intelligence. Total implausibility.
He would sometimes cite Gene Siskel’s method of judging value: Is the movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?
And so, I’d like to share highlights from the book, little golden nuggets for aspiring screenwriters, that I thought would be of interest. Screenwriting is tough. What’s at stake with every script is not only your career and your future but also the possibility of public humiliation. If you, as an aspiring screenwriter, are not insecure, paranoid, and worrisome about almost every story decision you make, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something wrong with you.
Be Cool John Travolta became a movie star by playing a Brooklyn kid who wins a dance contest in "Saturday Night Fever" (1977). He revived his career by dancing with Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction" (1994). In "Be Cool," Uma Thurman asks if he dances. "I'm from Brooklyn," he says, and then they dance. So we get it: "Brooklyn" connects with "Fever," Thurman connects with "Pulp." That's the easy part. The hard part is, what do we do with it?
"Be Cool" is a movie that knows it is a movie. It knows it is a sequel and contains disparaging references to sequels. All very cute at the screenplay stage, where everybody can sit around at story conferences and assume that a scene will work because the scene it refers to worked. But that's the case only when the new scene is also good as itself, apart from what it refers to.
Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" knew that Travolta won the disco contest in "Saturday Night Fever." But Tarantino's scene didn't depend on that; it built from it. Travolta was graceful beyond compare in "Fever," but in "Pulp Fiction" he's dancing with a gangster's wife on orders from the gangster, and part of the point of the scene is that both Travolta and Thurman look like they're dancing not out of joy, but out of duty. So we remember "Fever" and then we forget it, because the new scene is working on its own.
Now look at the dance scene in "Be Cool." Travolta and Thurman dance in a perfectly competent way that is neither good nor bad. Emotionally they are neither happy or sad. The scene is not necessary to the story. The filmmakers have put them on the dance floor without a safety net. And so we watch them dancing and we think, yeah, "Saturday Night Fever" and "Pulp Fiction," and when that thought has been exhausted, they're still dancing.
A Dirty Shame There is in show biz something known as "a bad laugh." That's the laugh you don't want to get, because it indicates not amusement but incredulity, nervousness or disapproval. John Waters' "A Dirty Shame" is the only comedy I can think of that gets more bad laughs than good ones…
To truly deal with a strange sexual fetish can indeed be shocking, as "Kissed" (1996) demonstrated with its quiet, observant portrait of Molly Parker playing a necrophiliac. It can also be funny, as James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal demonstrated in the film "Secretary" (2002). Tracey Ullman is a great comic actress, but for her to make this movie funny would have required not just a performance but a rewrite and a miracle.
Fetishes are neither funny nor shocking simply because they exist. You have to do more with them than have characters gleefully celebrate them on the screen. Waters' weakness is to expect laughs because the idea of a moment is funny. But the idea of a moment exists only for the pitch; the movie has to develop it into a reality, a process, a payoff. An illustration of this is his persisting conviction that it is funny by definition to have Patty Hearst in his movies. It is only funny when he gives Ms. Hearst, who is a good sport, something amusing to do. She won't find it in this movie.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood There is not a character in the movie with a shred of plausibility, not an event that is believable, not a confrontation that is not staged, not a moment that is not false. For their sins, the sisterhood should be forced to spend the rest of their lives locked in a Winnebago camper. The only character in the movie who is bearable is the heroine as a young woman, played by Ashley Judd, who suggests that there was a time before the story's main events when this creature was palatable…
The movie marks the directorial debut of Callie Khouri, author of "Thelma and Louise." She seems uncertain what the film is about, where it is going, what it hopes to prove apart from the most crashingly obvious cliches of light women's fiction. So inattentive is the screenplay that it goes to the trouble of providing Vivi with three other children in addition to Sidda, only to never mention them again. A fellow critic, Victoria Alexander, speculates that the secret in Vivi's past may have been that she drowned the kids, but that's too much to hope for.
Double Take "Double Take" is the kind of double-triple-reverse movie that can drive you nuts because you can't count on anything in the plot. Characters, motivations and true identities change from scene to scene at the whim of the screenplay. Finally you tire of trying to follow the story. You can only get the rug jerked out from under you so many times before you realize the movie has the attention span of a gnat and thinks you do, too.
Enough It is possible to imagine this story being told in a good film, but that would involve a different screenplay. Nicholas Kazan's script makes the evil husband (Billy Campbell) such an unlikely caricature of hard-breathing sadistic testosterone that he cannot possibly be a real human being. Of course there are men who beat their wives and torture them with cruel mind games, but do they satirize themselves as the heavy in a B movie? The husband's swings of personality and mood are so sudden, and his motivation makes so little sense, that he has no existence beyond the stereotyped Evil Rich White Male. The fact that he preys on a poor Latino waitress is just one more cynical cliche…
In the movie's headlong rush of events, Slim and Mitch are soon married, buy a big house, have a cute child, and then Slim discovers Mitch is having affairs, and he growls at her: "I am, and always will be, a person who gets what he wants." He starts slapping her around. Although their child is now 3 or 4, this is a Mitch she has not seen before in their marriage. Where did this Mitch come from? How did he restrain himself from pounding and strangling her during all of the early years? Why did she think herself happy until now? The answer, of course, is that Mitch turns on a dime when the screenplay requires him to. He even starts talking differently.
The Girl Next Door The nature of their film is yet another bait-and-switch, in a movie that wants to seem dirtier than it is. Like a strip show at a carnival, it lures you in with promises of sleaze, and after you have committed yourself for the filthy-minded punter you are, it professes innocence… "Risky Business" (1983) you will recall, starred Tom Cruise as a young man left home alone by his parents, who wrecks the family Porsche and ends up enlisting a call girl (Rebecca De Mornay) to run a brothel out of his house to raise money to replace the car. The movie is the obvious model for "The Girl Next Door," but it completely misses the tone and wit of the earlier film, which proved you can get away with that plot, but you have to know what you're doing and how to do it, two pieces of knowledge conspicuously absent here.
Head Over Heels "Head Over Heels" opens with 15 funny minutes and then goes dead in the water. It's like they sent home the first team of screenwriters and brought in Beavis and Butt-Head. The movie starts out with sharp wit and edgy zingers, switches them off and turns to bathroom humor. And not funny bathroom humor, but painfully phony gas-passing noises, followed by a plumbing emergency that buries three supermodels in a putrid delivery from where the sun don't shine. It's as if the production was a fight to the death between bright people with a sense of humor, and cretins who think the audience is as stupid as they are.
Monica Potter and Freddie Prinze Jr. star in another one of those stories where it's love at first sight and then she gets the notion that he's clubbed someone to death. The two characters were doing perfectly well being funny as themselves , and then the movie muzzles them and brings in this pea-brained autopilot plot involving mistaken identities, dead bodies and the Russian mob.
Why? I wanted to ask the filmmakers. Why? You have a terrific cast and the wit to start out well. Why surrender and sell out? Isn't it a better bet, and even better for your careers, to make a whole movie that's smart and funny, instead of showing off for 15 minutes and then descending into cynicism and stupidity? Why not make a movie you can show to the friends you admire, instead of to a test audience scraped from the bottom of the IQ barrel?
The Hills Have Eyes It always begins with the Wrong Gas Station. In real life, as I pointed out in my review of a previous Wrong Gas Station movie, most gas stations are clean, well-lighted places, where you can buy not only gasoline but groceries, clothes, electronic devices, Jeff Foxworthy CDs and a full line of Harley merchandise. In horror movies, however, the only gas station in the world is located on a desolate road in a godforsaken backwater. It is staffed by a degenerate who shuffles out in his coveralls and runs through a disgusting repertory of scratchings, spittings, chewings, twitchings and leerings, while thoughtfully shifting mucus up and down his throat.
The clean-cut heroes of the movie, be they a family on vacation, newlyweds, college students or backpackers, all have one thing in common. They believe everything this man tells them, especially when he suggests they turn left on the unpaved road for a shortcut. Does it ever occur to them that in this desolate wasteland with only one main road, it must be the road to stay on if they ever again want to use their cell phones?
No. It does not. They take the fatal detour, and find themselves the prey of demented mutant incestuous cannibalistic gnashing slobberers, who carry pickaxes the way other people carry umbrellas.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love. The premise is fundamentally unsound, since it subverts every love scene with a lying subtext. Characters are nice when they want to be mean, or mean when they want to be nice. The easiest thing at the movies is to sympathize with two people who are falling in love. The hardest thing is to sympathize with two people who are denying their feelings, misleading each other, and causing pain to a trusting heart. This is comedy only by dictionary definition. In life, it is unpleasant, and makes the audience sad.
Unless, of course, the characters are thoroughgoing rotters in the first place, as in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988), in which Steve Martin and Michael Caine make a $50,000 bet on who will be the first to con the rich American played by Glenne Headley. They deserve their comeuppance, and we enjoy it. "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" is not, alas, pitched at that modest level of sophistication, and provides us with two young people who are like pawns in a sex game for the developmentally shortchanged.
Invisible Circus Adam Brooks' "Invisible Circus" finds the solution to searing personal questions through a tricky flashback structure. There are two stories here, involving an older sister's disappearance and a younger sister's quest, and either one would be better told as a straightforward narrative. When flashbacks tease us with bits of information, it has to be done well, or we feel toyed with. Here the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance.
Jeepers Creepers 2 To call the characters on the bus paper-thin would be a kindness. Too bad, then, that we spend so much time on the bus, listening to their wretched dialogue and watching as they race from one window to another to see what foul deeds are occurring outside. Speaking of outside, Scott is the obligatory obstreperous jerk who is forever speculating that the creature has gone and won't return; he keeps suggesting they leave the bus to trek to a hypothetical nearby farmhouse. He's a direct throwback to the standard character in Dead Teenager Movies who's always saying, "Hmmm ... all of the other campers have been found dead and eviscerated, Mimsy, so this would be an ideal time to walk out into the dark woods and go skinny-dipping in the pond where dozens of kids have died in the previous movies in this series."
Despite Scott's homophobia, the movie has a healthy interest in the male physique, and it's amazing how many of the guys walk around bare-chested. The critic John Fallon writes "at a certain point, I thought I was watching soft gay erotica," and observes that when four of the guys go outside to pee, they line up shoulder to shoulder, which strikes him as unlikely since they are in a very large field. True in another movie, but in a film where the Creeper is likely to swoop down at any second and carry someone away, I would pick the tallest guy and stand next to him, on the theory that lightning will strike the tree and not you.
Just A Kiss Consider, for example, a sequence in which one character on an airplane uses his cell phone to tell another that he loves her. His phone emits lethal transmissions which cause the plane to crash. Everyone in first class lives; everyone in tourist class dies. I smile as I write the words. This would be a good scene in "Airplane!" What is it doing here, in a movie where we are possibly expected to care about the characters' romances and infidelities? To admit farce into a drama is to admit that the drama is farce.
But is it a drama? I haven't a clue. The movie seems to reinvent itself from moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts. There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei, as a bartender whose psychic gifts allow her to find meaning in the rings left by cold beers. She is a crazy homicidal maniac, but, hey, at least that means that nothing she does is out of character.
Just Married Sarah and Tom have nothing to talk about. They are a pathetic stupid couple and deserve each other. What they do not deserve, perhaps, is a screenplay that alternates between motivation and slapstick. Either it's character-driven or it isn't. If it is, then you can't take your plausible characters and dump them into Laurel and Hardy. Their rental car, for example, gets a cheap laugh, but makes them seem silly in the wrong way. And earlier in the film, Tom is responsible for the death of Sarah's dog in a scenario recycled directly from an urban legend everyone has heard.
Would it have been that much more difficult to make a movie in which Tom and Sarah were plausible, reasonably articulate newlyweds with the humor on their honeymoon growing out of situations we could believe? Apparently.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Now listen carefully. M informs them that the leaders of Europe are going to meet in Venice and that the mysterious villains will blow up the city to start a world war. The League must stop them. When is the meeting? In three days, M says. Impossible to get there in time, Quartermain says, apparently in ignorance of railroads. Nemo volunteers his submarine, the Nautilus, which is about 10 stories high and as long as an aircraft carrier, and which we soon see cruising the canals of Venice.
It's hard enough for gondolas to negotiate the inner canals of Venice, let alone a sub the size of an ocean liner, but no problem; "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" either knows absolutely nothing about Venice, or (more likely) trusts that its audience does not. At one point, the towering Nautilus sails under the tiny Bridge of Sighs and only scrapes it a little. In no time at all there is an action scene involving Nemo's newfangled automobile, which races meaninglessly down streets that do not exist, because there are no streets in Venice and you can't go much more than a block before running into a bridge or a canal. Maybe the filmmakers did their research at the Venetian Hotel in Venice, where Connery arrived by gondola for the movie's premiere.
The Legend of Zorro Now come Banderas and Zeta-Jones again, with the same director, Martin Campbell, and of all of the possible ideas about how to handle the Elena character, this movie has assembled the worst ones. The sublime adventuress has turned into the kind of wife who wants her husband to quit Zorroing because "you do not know your own son," and besides Zorro comes home late, she never knows where he is, etc. We are inflicted with such dialogue as:
"People still need Zorro!"
"No -- you still need Zorro!"
"You're overreacting!"
Saints preserve us from Mr. and Mrs. Zorro as the Bickersons. And what are we to make of their son, Joaquin (a good little actor named Adrian Alonso), who dresses like Little Lord Fauntleroy but has developed, apparently by osmosis, all of the skills of his father, such as shadowing bad guys, eavesdropping on plots, improvising in emergencies and exposing a dastardly scheme to overthrow the government.
He's a bright kid, but not bright enough to recognize that Zorro is his own father. To be sure, Zorro wears a mask, but let me pose a hypothetical exercise for my readers. Imagine your own father. That's it. Now place him in a typical setting: Pushing back from the dinner table, cutting off some jerk in an intersection, or scratching his dandruff. Now imagine your dad wearing black leather pants, a black linen shirt, a black cloak, a flat black hat, and a black mask that covers his eyes. Got that? Now imagine him pushing back from the table. Still your dad, right? You can almost hear your mom: "Now don't you go getting any ideas about that whip."
The Man At Telluride over the weekend, I was talking to James Mangold, the director of "Walk the Line" and other ambitious pictures, and he said an interesting thing: Hollywood executives are reluctant to green-light a project that depends on the filmmakers being able to pull it off. They want familiar formulas in safe packages. An original movie idea involves faith that the script will work, the director knows what he's doing and the actors are right for the story. Too risky. Better to make a movie where when you hear the pitch you can already envision the TV commercial, because the movie will essentially be the long form of the 30-second spot. Go online, look at the trailer for "The Man," and you will know everything you could possibly need to know about this movie except how it would feel if the trailer was 80 minutes long.
Masked and Anonymous "Masked and Anonymous" is a vanity production beyond all reason. I am not sure, however, than the vanity is Dylan's. I don't have any idea what to think about him. He has so long since disappeared into his persona that there is little received sense of the person there. The vanity belongs perhaps to those who flattered their own by working with him, by assuming (in the face of all they had learned during hard days of honest labor on a multitude of pictures) that his genius would somehow redeem a screenplay that could never have seemed other than what it was, incoherent raving juvenile meanderings. If I had been asked to serve as consultant on this picture, my advice would have amounted to three words: more Tinashe Kachingwe.
The Master of Disguise The movie is a desperate miscalculation. It gives poor Dana Carvey nothing to do that is really funny, and then expects us to laugh because he acts so goofy all the time. But acting funny is not funny. Acting in a situation that's funny--that's funny.
Monkeybone Downtown itself looks like the amusement park from (or in) hell, and there's a lot of "Beetlejuice" in the inspiration for the strange creatures, one-eyed and otherwise, who live there. But strangeness is not enough. There must also be humor, and characters who exist for some reason other than to look bizarre. That rule would include Whoopi Goldberg's Death, who is sadly underwritten, and played by Goldberg as if we're supposed to keep repeating: "Wow! Look! Death is being played by Whoopi Goldberg!" It is a truth too often forgotten that casting a famous actor in a weird cameo is the setup of the joke, not the punch line.
Monster-in-Law Eventually we realize that Fonda's character consists entirely of a scene waiting to happen: The scene where her heart melts, she realizes Charlie is terrific, and she accepts her. Everything else Viola does is an exercise in postponing that moment. The longer we wait, the more we wonder why (a) Charlie doesn't belt her, and (b) Charlie doesn't jump Dr. Kevin -- actually, I meant to write "dump," but either will do. By the time the happy ending arrives, it's too late, because by then we don't want Charlie to marry Dr. Kevin. We want her to go back to walking the dogs. She was happier, we were happier, the dogs were happier.
Mr. Deeds Frank Capra played this story straight. But the 2002 film doesn't really believe in it, and breaks the mood with absurdly inappropriate "comedy" scenes. Consider a scene where Deeds meets his new butler Emilio (John Turturro). Emilio has a foot fetish. Deeds doubts Emilio will like his right foot, which is pitch black after a childhood bout of frostbite. The foot has no feeling, Deeds says, inviting Emilio to pound it with a fireplace poker. When Deeds doesn't flinch, Turturro actually punctures the foot with the point of the poker, at which point I listened attentively for sounds of laughter in the theater, and heard none.
There's no chemistry between Deeds and Babe, but then how could there be, considering that their characters have no existence, except as the puppets in scenes of plot manipulation. After Deeds grows disillusioned with her, there is a reconciliation inspired after she falls through the ice on a pond and he breaks through to save her using the Black Foot. In story conferences, do they discuss scenes like this and nod approvingly? Tell me, for I want to know.
The One This titanic closing fight, by the way, may use cutting-edge effects, but has been written with slavish respect for ancient cliches. It begins with the venerable It's Only a Cat Scene, in which a cat startles a character (but not the audience) by leaping at the lens. Then the characters retire to a Steam and Flame Factory, one of those Identikit movie sets filled with machines that produce copious quantities of steam, flames and sparks. Where do they have their fight? On a catwalk, of course. Does anyone end up clinging by his fingertips? Don't make me laugh. The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture. In other words, it's sure to be popular. Seeing a movie like this makes me feel bad that I applied such high standards to last week's "Donnie Darko," which also deals with logical paradoxes, and by comparison, is a masterpiece.
The Promise Another difficulty is that the story is never organized clearly enough to generate much concern in our minds. The characters are not people but collections of attributes, and isn't it generally true that the more sensational an action scene, the less we care about the people in it? It's as if the scene signals us that it's about itself, and the characters are spectators just as we are.
I spent a fair amount of time puzzling over my notes and rummaging on the Web for hints about the details of the plot, and in the process discovered a new Movie Law. You are familiar with the Law of Symbolism: If you have to ask what something symbolized, it didn't. Now here is the Law of Plots: If you can't describe it with clarity, there wasn't one. I know someone will throw up "Syriana" as an objection, but there is a difference between a plot that is about confusion, and a plot that is merely confused.
Reign of Fire I'm wondering, why, if civilization has been destroyed, do they have electricity and fuel? Not supposed to ask such questions. They're like, how come everybody has cigarettes in "Waterworld"? Van Zan figures out that the dragon's fire comes from the way they secrete the ingredients for "natural napalm" in their mouths. His plan: Get real close and fire an explosive arrow into their open mouth at the crucial moment, causing the napalm to blow up the dragon.
He has another bright idea. (Spoiler warning.) All of the dragons they see are females. Many of them carry eggs. Why no males? Because, Van Zan hypothesizes, the dragons are like fish, and it only takes a single male to fertilize umpteen eggs. "We kill the male, we kill the species," he says.
Yeah, but ... there are dragons everywhere. Do they only have one male, total, singular? How about those eggs? Any of them male? And also, after the male is dead, presumably all of the females are still alive, and they must be mad as hell now that they're not getting any action. How come they stop attacking? I know I have probably been inattentive, and that some of these points are solved with elegant precision in the screenplay. But please do not write to explain, unless you can answer me this: Why are the last words in the movie, "Thank God for evolution"? Could it be a ray of hope that the offspring of this movie may someday crawl up onto the land and develop a two-celled brain?
Reindeer Games “Reindeer Games” is the first All Talking Killer picture. After the setup, it consists mostly of characters explaining their actions to one another. I wish I'd had a stopwatch, to clock how many minutes are spent while one character holds a gun to another character's head and gabs. Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise between them explain so much they reminded me of Gertrude Stein's line about Ezra Pound: "He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." Just a nudge, and the movie would fall over into self-parody, and maybe work better. But I fear it is essentially serious, or as serious as such goofiness can be.
Resident Evil Alice/J.P./M.T. or Rain (I forget which): "It's coagulating!" Matt or Spence (I forget which): "That's not possible!" "Why not?!?" "Because blood doesn't do that until you're dead!" How does the blood on the floor know if you're dead? The answer to this question is so obvious I am surprised you would ask. Because it is zombie blood.
The characters have no small talk. Their dialogue consists of commands, explanations, exclamations and ejaculations. Yes, an ejaculation can be dialogue. If you live long enough you may find that happening frequently.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse We pause here for logistical discussions. In a scene where several characters are fighting zombies inside a church, the renegade scientist comes to the rescue by crashing her motorcycle through a stained-glass window and landing in the middle of the fight. This inspires the question: How did she know what was on the other side of the window? Was she crashing through the stained glass on spec?
My next logistical puzzlement involves killing the zombies. They die when you shoot them. Fine, except Umbrella Corp. has developed some mutants who wear bulletproof armor. Zillions of rounds of ammo bounce off this armor, but here's a funny thing: The mutants do not wear helmets, so we can see their ugly faces. So why not just shoot them in the head? Am I missing something here?
Romeo Must Die It is a failing of mine that I persist in bringing logic to movies where it is not wanted. During ``Romeo Must Die,'' I began to speculate about the methods used to buy up the waterfront. All of the property owners (of clubs, little shops, crab houses, etc.) are asked to sell, and when they refuse, they are variously murdered, torched, blown up or have their faces stuck into vats of live crabs. Don't you think the press and the local authorities would notice this? Don't you imagine it would take the bloom off a stadium to know that dozens of victims were murdered to clear the land?
Never mind. The audience isn't in the theater for a film about property values, but to watch Jet Li and other martial arts warriors in action. “Romeo Must Die” has a lot of fight scenes, but their key moments are so obviously filmed via special effects that they miss the point. When Jackie Chan does a stunt, it may look inelegant, but we know he's really doing it. Here Jet Li leaps six feet in the air and rotates clockwise while kicking three guys. It can't be done, we know it can't be done, we know he's not doing it, and so what's the point? In “The Matrix,” there's a reason the guy can fly.
Running Free I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real. This movie might have been more persuasive if the boy had told the story of the horse, instead of the horse telling the story of the boy. It's perfectly possible to make a good movie about an animal that does not speak, as Jean-Jacques Annaud, the producer of this film, proved with his 1989 film "The Bear." I also recall "The Black Stallion" (1979) and "White Fang" (1991). Since both of those splendid movies were co-written by Jeanne Rosenberg, the author of "Running Free," I can only guess that the talking horse was pressed upon her by executives who have no faith in the intelligence of today's audiences.
Rush Hour 2 There is a belief among some black comics that audiences find it funny when they launch extended insults against white people (see also Chris Rock's embarrassing outburst in the forthcoming "Jay and Silent Bob"). My feeling is that audiences of any race find such scenes awkward and unwelcome; I've never heard laughter during them, but have sensed an uncomfortable alertness in the theater. Accusing complete strangers of being racist is aggressive, hostile, and not funny, something Tucker demonstrates to a painful degree in this movie--where the filmmakers apparently lacked the nerve to request him to dial down.
Say It Isn’t So A comedy character can't be successfully embarrassed for more than a few seconds at a time. Even then, it's best if they don't know what they've done wrong--if the joke's on them, and they don't get it. The "hair gel" scenes in "There's Something About Mary" are a classic example of embarrassment done right. "Say It Isn't So," on the other hand, keeps a character embarrassed in scene after scene, until he becomes an embarrassment. The movie doesn't understand that embarrassment comes in a sudden painful flush of realization; drag it out, and it's not embarrassment anymore, but public humiliation, which is a different condition, and not funny.
Silent Hill Now here's a funny thing. Although I did not understand the story, I would have appreciated a great deal less explanation. All through the movie, characters are pausing in order to offer arcane back-stories and historical perspectives and metaphysical insights and occult orientations. They talk and talk and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain, if my brain has synapses and they're supposed to light up, and if it doesn't and they're not, then they still don't make any sense.
Simpatico It happens that I've just seen a complicated noir, Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," which also involves sexual misconduct in the past and blackmail in the present. One reason it works so well is that the characters seem to drive the plot: Things turn out the way they do because the characters are who they are. The plot of "Simpatico" is like a clockwork mechanism that would tick whether or not anyone cared what time it was.
Slackers There is a kind of one-upmanship now at work in Hollywood, inspired by the success of several gross-out comedies, to elevate smut into an art form. This is not an entirely futile endeavor; it can be done, and when it is done well, it can be funny. But most of the wannabes fail to understand one thing: It is funny when a character is offensive despite himself, but not funny when he is deliberately offensive. The classic "hair gel" scene involving Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz in "There's Something About Mary" was funny because neither one had the slightest idea what was going on.
Tomcats The men in "Tomcats" are surrounded by beautiful women, but they hate and fear them. That alone is enough to sink the film, since no reasonable person in the audience can understand why these guys are so weirdly twisted. But then the film humiliates the women, and we wince when it wants us to laugh. Here is a comedy positioned outside the normal range of human response.
Waiting The characters in "Waiting..." seem like types, not people. What they do and say isn't funny because someone real doesn't seem to be doing or saying it. Everything that the John Beulshi character did in "Animal House" proceeded directly from the core of his innermost being: he crushed beer cans against his forehead, because he was a person who needed to, and often did, and enjoyed it and found that it worked for him. You never got the idea he did it because it might be funny in a movie.
Wolf Creek “I like horror films. Horror movies, even extreme ones, function primarily by scaring us or intriguing us. Consider "Three ... Extremes" recently. "Wolf Creek" is more like the guy at the carnival sideshow who bites off chicken heads. No fun for us, no fun for the guy, no fun for the chicken. In the case of this film, it's fun for the guy.”
Below are two vids that encapsulate HBO’s "First Look" of The Dark Knight. I love it! This has all the markings of great drama. Consider, too, the words of James Berardinelli from his new4-star review:
Consequences. In real life, these ramifications emanate from every action like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. Often in movies, especially those that feature characters who don't play by the rules, such penalties are suspended. However, in Christopher Nolan's Batman universe, decisions and actions have consequences. The Dark Knight, arguably the moodiest and most adult superhero motion picture ever to reach the screen, illustrates this lesson in ways that are startling and painful. This is a tough, uncompromising motion picture - one that defies the common notions of what is expected from a "superhero" film. While there are plenty of action sequences and instances of derring-do, The Dark Knight's subtext has a tragic underpinning that would intrigue Shakespeare or the Greeks. It's about power and impotence, sanity and madness, image and reality, selfishness and sacrifice, and - yes - consequences...
For all of the heavy lifting done by the movie’s screenplay, dealing as it does with substantive issues and existential questions, there's still plenty of the meat-and-potatoes content of any superhero movie: action sequences. There are numerous fights, chases, and races. The Batmobile gets its share of screen time as does a new Bat-cycle. Batman takes on bad guys singly and in bunches. And there's a heart-pounding sequence in which the Caped Crusader must race against time to save a life, where the price is almost as terrible if he succeeds as if he fails. Nolan's inherent sense of how to transform a relatively mundane fight scene into something involving is in evidence here, much as was the case in Batman Begins. He avoids flash editing and allows the action to evolve in a coherent manner, drawing the viewer in rather than keeping him guessing what's going on…
One thing I like about the movie reviews of James Berardinelli is that he digs into the craft more so than other critics and if he has major issues with a story that he can’t reveal because it would be a spoiler, he’ll give you a link to clink for more details. And such was the case for what he considered two large problemswith Heckboy II.
If you’ve seen the film, tell me what you think about his complaint:
From a plotting perspective, the film makes two large missteps during its denouement. Polished screenplays shouldn't have such readily identifiable flaws, which makes me wonder whether something important was deleted from the finished cut. Problem #1: Nuala's suicide kills Nuada. This is reasonable since the link between the two is well-established. But why wait until the end of the movie? If she's going to sacrifice herself, why not do it at a more meaningful time, like when her brother is about to kill the king? Or when he's about to take control of the Golden Army? Her ability to end his threat at any time with one well-placed knife thrust to her chest makes the entire movie seem kind of pointless. In reality, Nuada was never much of a danger. Problem #2: Liz turns the crown into slag. If she can melt the crown, why not offer this option to Nuala earlier? The elf princess could have turned over her piece to Liz, Liz could have destroyed it, and the Golden Army's threat would have been neutralized. Both of these instances represent sloppy screenwriting. It's hard to ignore such issues; they damage the integrity of the ending and that, in turn, makes the movie less special. Hellboy II is solid entertainment, but it's a shame such blemishes prevent it from achieving a higher level.
This kind of complaint reminds me of my first reaction to The Wizard of Oz. If all Dorothy had to do was click her heels to go home, why the hell didn’t the Good Witch tell her that in the first place in Munchkinland? I would’ve ripped that bitch’s wings right off!
I still remember my mother trying to explain it to me:
“That’s just the way it is.” “Why?” “Because.” “Because why? It makes no sense.” “Because otherwise we wouldn’t have a story, now would we?”
I hated that answer. And I hate that answer today. That will never be a good enough answer for any story. One must have a solid reason rooted IN THE STORY, rooted IN THE CHARACTERS.
Case in point with Heckboy II. In that moment when Nuada was making his move to kill the king, Nuala could’ve screamed “STOP!” He stops. He turns. Nuala has a knife pointed at her chest. She tells him that the moment he kills their father, the king, he will die, too. She won’t let this happen. Nuada’s intrigued. He confronts her and calls her bluff. He dares her to kill herself. She can’t do it. She drops the knife and runs away. Nuada turns back around and slays the king.
Problem solved. Nuala was capable of threatening Nuada with death, but she just couldn’t do it. Can you blame her? Suicide’s not exactly an easy decision. If we had a moment where we were made to see how difficult that choice was for her, we wouldn’t ask “why.”
I’m going to take a page from Scott the Readerand talk about the very same script he talked aboutwithout mentioning the title or the writer. Please do not give away the mystery. I’m sure you know the script to which I refer. It’s 165 pages, has five chapters, a handwritten title page, and made its rounds in Hollywood last week.
Let me first say that I agreed with every single word in Scott’s article. Here we have one of the most renowned, beloved, imitated, bad-boy screenwriters of our generation and he doesn’t even know the difference between “there” and “their.” Nor could he get “your” or “you’re” right even once. Or “to” vs. “too”. Of course, those are minor offenses, but this guy repeatedly misspelled “Boston” as “Bostin.” He doesn’t even know how to write “etc.” He kept typing “ect.” Instead of saying something like “an American,” he’d write, “a American.” Over and over and over. “Tiramisu” was, I believe, “Terri Mishu.” The one point where I actually wanted to put down the script and take a walk came when he kept writing in the action lines “germatic” this and “germatic” that. It’s GERMANIC. For God’s sake, you couldn’t run spellcheck? I won’t even talk about the format, as it was downright sloppy. Someone buy this man a copy of Trottier’s Screenwriter’s Bible. It was a chore to look past the mistakes.
What does this say about screenwriters today?
A writer ought to know how to write and a screenplay ought to look like a damn screenplay. PERIOD. If you have a problem, like you’re dyslexic or blind, fine. Get someone to help you polish your spec before sending it out. You must do whatever it takes to master the craft and turn in spotless specs forever and ever, amen. And don’t bother arguing with me about it, because I went to the mat on this issue in part one of my Hitman review. A spotless spec is one of many steps necessary to impressing people, to building confidence in your work, and in you as a screenwriter. This guy turned in one of the sloppiest specs I’ve seen in ages and he’s coasting on his reputation.
With that said, I loved it.
This could turn into his second or third best film of his career. If the script comes across your path someday (sorry, I no longer have a copy), just consider how much this man labored to build tension into his scenes and his sequences. This wasn’t really about action as it was about tension and suspense. Consider the opening scene. Excessive dialogue in his other works were quite often pointless, but here, it was used effectively to build tension. The antagonist keeps talking and talking to make the tension unbearable. Very simple – an antagonistic forces arrives, a man seems innocent, something’s revealed, we realize what’s at stake, and then he raises the tension to a breaking point. Tension in other scenes were setup really well, too. They’d complain about how dangerous a certain location is, which raises the tension when they go into this location and things start to go wrong. We don’t want things to go wrong, because we know they’d be in a world of hurt. Otherwise, we could care less if they blasted everyone in the room. And so, the tensions are raised yet again to an almost breaking point before all hell breaks loose, and then we know they’re in serious trouble. The Third Act, by the way, was downright Hitchcockian, reminiscent of The Man Who Knew Too Much but more complex. Of course, you don’t really need to read this script to learn about tension. You’d get a far better education by studying Hitchcock. In fact, you’d probably admire the work more if you studied Hitchcock first.
The moments in the script that were, to me, most powerful had nothing to do with the sometimes obscene amounts of dialogue but rather when he tried to tell his story cinematically, visually, wordlessly, through close-ups, angles, camera moves, and series of shots. There is a moment where the camera suddenly drops in the middle of a conversation beneath floor boards to reveal a very important detail and then rises back up into the scene, which was thrilling. While we can’t write camera angles, we can just as easily imply all those same techniques in our own specs, which I pointed out in my Write the Shotsarticle. Close-ups were especially effective in the third act, which really delivered the goods. How do you write a close-up?Secondary Headings.
As you may know, there are two storylines, one of which goes on for WAY too long. We spend too much time away from the main characters (from which derives the film’s title). There was also an antagonist that turned sides toward the end of Act Two that I didn’t quite buy. He was setup to be this staunch crusader of this evil regime. He was their main obstacle to reaching their goals, and then he suddenly switches? Then why would he kill that certain woman before the show? Why not throw her in the truck, too? His betrayal was a dangerous decision, because this writer came close to Devil May Suckterritory in the sense that because of this character’s switching of sides, the protagonists had their goals handed to them on silver platter without having to do any real work. Protags should work to reach their goals. Luckily, there were twists, which put them back to work.
The conclusion of the film doesn’t exactly reflect historical accuracy. While that’s not usually a problem, this one’s a biggie. If this had been made in the ‘70’s, no one would complain, but not today.
Finally, let it be said that this story isn’t worth getting chopped up into two-parts. This should be one film at no more than two hours. If this writer cares about advancing to a level of true mastery, like a Hitchcock, he should develop the discipline to get his many excessively long scenes down to manageable proportions.
Below, from Anne Thompson’s Dark Knight Review, are highlights of a Q&A session with director Chris Nolan following a special Imax screening. I agree with every single word he says, especially his decision to avoid telling The Joker’s backstory. He said, “The more you find out about those fictional characters the less threatening they really are.” Amen, halleluiah! Preach it, brother! Hehehe…
For all the aspiring screenwriters out there, consider how articulate, insightful, and knowledged Nolan is about his approach to this world. You have to be just as articulate about your own stories.
-MM
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On the challenge of topping Batman Begins:
"...for us, the main challenge was to continue the story appropriately and keep it stylistically and tonally consistent. You want to move the story forward and make it somehow larger or more important without losing what worked in the first one."
On the ambiguity of the characters:
"As co-writer-director, I was very involved with script, which I began working on at the story stage with David S. Goyer. We wanted to push these characters and test them in new ways. We wanted to use The Joker as a catalyst, not as someone who has an arc or learns anything in the story. I like to say that he cuts through the film like the shark in Jaws. He's a force the other characters have to react to so he helped us push our returning characters forward and fortunately we were able to bring most of the cast back. Gary Oldman is an incredible actor who we first met with to play a villain in Batman Begins. But we found that he's very unlike the characters he normally plays so we were lucky to get him to play Gordon who is a good man with a great sense of integrity. He had to be very restricted and subtle in Batman Begins and he enjoyed that challenge but at times it was like watching a Ferrari in traffic. It was fun to bring him back and have him tested and pushed further. The whole ensemble was prepared to push those characters and advance the story…”
"It's quite a familiar trope, really, if you look at Hannibal Lecter or one of these movie monsters like Darth Vader in the first Star Wars. The more you find out about those fictional characters the less threatening they really are. Our decision with The Joker was to not deal with the origin story and to laugh at that convention. We wanted him to be absolutely threatening in what he represents as a force of anarchy and chaos," says Nolan. "That’s really the reason for Harvey Dent's prominence in the film. It's his story that has to provide the emotional backbone of the film. He's the character with an arc, with a rise and fall, who the audience hopefully connects with and follows."
On the writing process:
"We did it the same way we wrote Batman Begins. David S. Goyer and I spent 2-3 months working on the story, working out the main beats on index cards. We sent Jonah [Nolan, Christopher's brother] off to work on his own because I was working on another film so he had 6 months to do that first draft and he would show me stuff as he did it and I would look at it before he shared it with anyone else including Chuck [Roven] and the studio. After the studio read the first draft Jonah spent another couple months working on it and then I took it over when I finished the other film and over the course of 6 months in pre-production, Jonah and I still worked heavily on it through that time. One of the reasons the film is 2-and-a-half hours long is because we tried everything we could on paper to make the story shorter but that was the story we had. In the end we compressed it to the point where it was dizzying so then we had to flesh it out a little bit. We tried different versions and pulling out different story elements so we probably spent a year and a half working on the script.
On Maggie Gyllenhaal:
"Katie couldn’t do the film. She was unavailable. We offered it to her and very much wanted to bring her back but Maggie was someone I'd wanted to work with for years so when she offered to take on the role that was just delightful because I knew story-wise we needed the character to continue from Batman Begins. We very much needed that connection with Bruce Wayne that we could tie to the Harvey Dent story and as Paul Levitz, who is the head of DC Comics said over dinner one night, 'With Batman, it’s a question of what's the tragedy? What is it that moves Batman?' Obviously in the first film we were able to rely on his origin story which is the greatest tragedy for him, the death of his parents. But with a new tale you need new fuel for that character who does deal in angst and whose story does rest on tragedy, so we were always looking to her character and that relationship to give us a different take on that."
On shooting in Chicago:
"One of the fun things about shooting in Chicago, where I grew up partly and have a great love for, is that it's not as instantly recognizable as New York but it has this great architecture and all kinds of great geographical features in terms of underground streets and all kinds of amazing skyscrapers. When you see Christian Bale on top of a tall building, that’s really him. It's an amazing helicopter shot with a great view and particularly for the IMAX presentation we wanted to use the original camera negative shot. I didn’t want the visual effects guys to change a couple buildings to try to pretend it's a different city. That seemed pointless, really. A lot of people prefer that technological approach but I prefer to think 'Well what would you have done 20 years ago? Does it really matter?' It’s a great big city and we wanted it to feel very real and in doing that you're naturally going to expose more of the location so the people who know the city will recognize it but people seem to enjoy that, particularly people from Chicago. Hopefully Roger Ebert will."
On the film's political relevance:
"We try not to be particularly conscious of what we're doing. We try to write the story within this world and these characters and in the process, try to do something that affects us and the world we live in. When we look back at the finished product we see various parallels and relevancies but we try and just let that be a product of writing what moves us, what frightens and excites us. We trust that that will have some reality or some relevance but it would violate the terms of storytelling and the terms of the genre if you're too conscious of trying to make particular political points. I don’t think that’s what you're selling the audience I don’t think that’s what the ride is. I think ultimately if the film has relevance it's actually going to be more interesting to an audience but we like it to be subtext.
On the influence of "The Killing Joke":
"When I read 'The Killing Joke' I don’t read it as unrealistic. Everything we did in Batman Begins and tried to push further in this film is based on the principle that you don’t worry about the medium. I'm not attempting to represent the medium of comic books on screen here anymore than I would a novel that I was adapting or a stage play. It’s a different medium and when I read a comic book I'm able to interpolate a real world from the drawings, and particularly works like 'The Killing Joke' which are more stylistically contemporary to the time they were written and speak a little more directly to my generation. As far as the specific influence of 'The Killing Joke,' really we looked at the whole history of the comics and tried to absorb the highlights and commonalities from the evolutionary pool of artists and writers who've worked on the character for so long, looking at the common threads there. But I definitely feel the influence of 'The Killing Joke,' not so much in the specifics as in constructing some sense of purpose for an inherently purposeless character. That is to say The Joker is an anarchist. He's dedicated to chaos. He should really have no purpose but I think the underlying belief that Alan Moore got across very clearly is that on some level The Joker wants to pull everybody down to his level and show that he's not an unusual monster and that everyone else can be debased and corrupted like he is. If you look at the first two appearances of The Joker ever in the Batman comics, we were quite startled to look back at those and realize how close that character is to what Heath's done and what our story is. I think it's very close to the original incarnation of the character some 65 years ago."
There is in Hollywood a zeal-like mind-set about sympathetic protagonists, that all protags must be sympathetic and/or empathetic, which found its origins in the teachings of Mr. Robert McKee.
But that’s not what he said. Here’s what he said:
"The PROTAGONIST must be empathetic; he may or may not be sympathetic."
Empathy was the requirement, not sympathy. By empathy, he meant, a shared human quality that we can all recognize, that strikes a chord in all of us. Yet, Hollywood continuously tears down scripts if there are any traces of un-sympathy in the lead characters. What is overlooked, in the process, is one of the most beloved, fun ways of telling a story – the transformational character arc, such as we saw in my three favorite examples: Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, or Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others.
Those are great stories! They work so well!
Hancock should end the debate about unsympathetic protags. With the audience I sat through, the worse Hancock treated people, the more everyone laughed, because they knew a transformational arc was on its way, and he’d ultimately redeem himself.
TWO – WITH SPOILERS!
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Hancock is a script worth studying, because it’s not. I completely agreed with the critics that slammed this film for its poor execution. It’s not a good movie.
Hancock is two films. The first, the tale of the anti-hero learning to be a defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, is by far the more entertaining of the two. The movie's second piece is muddled and disjointed as the screenplay provides revelations about Hancock's origin. This aspect of the production has the scope of a Shakespearean tragedy and cannot effectively be addressed in the 45 minutes allotted to it. Both halves could have worked if properly expanded with the gaps filled in, but by compressing them into a single unit, the story as a whole suffers…
Hancock's tone becomes more subdued, although not entirely downbeat, during the second half as the main character faces the sad truth about himself and his past. The ending is a complete mess. In order to achieve a balance between tension, tragedy, and smiles, the film doesn't play by its own rules. Much of what occurs during the climax makes little sense, and the supposed "villain," a thug named Red (Eddie Marsan), is about as intimidating as a warm cup of butterscotch pudding. Part of the inherent problem with Hancock's structure is the lack of a dramatically viable opponent. Since there isn't one, one has to be manufactured on the spot, and Red is the unfortunate result.
Let me just address one other aspect that no one else has mentioned. I love how they took a page from Mario Puzo’s Superman and aimed for a greek tragedy of sorts with Hancock and his love interest. Great idea. But the execution is piss poor. He doesn’t even remember her, so why should WE or even HANCOCK care? You know it’s bad writing when a superhero’s backstory is nothing more than a long-winded piece of verbal exposition in a hospital room. It’s NO FUN!
Hancock was also missing a clearly defined emotional logic to his behavior. Everything in this story was either coincidence or explained verbally as some untold mystery that keeps drawing them together. Ho hum. We would’ve cared more if Hancock had a solid reason to be bitter, he knew why he was bitter, and she was it. It was his feelings about her that defined his behavior and who he was and he knew it and she knew it. You don’t buy it that he doesn’t remember. You don’t buy it when it’s presented as a twist, because it’s too coincidental.
Kaleidoscope “In the mid-1960’s Alfred Hitchcock had reached a crisis point in his career, trying to bounce back from the failure of Torn Curtain with something different, an original screenplay which was eventually called Frenzy (and later Kaleidoscope). The unproduced project called Frenzy, which was to have been set in and around New York City, should not be confused with the 1972 film Hitchcock made in England. That Frenzy was adapted from Arthur La Bern's novel Goodbye Piccadilli, Farewell Leicester Square. Both stories involved a serial rapist-killer. But the original story Hitchcock developed through much of 1967 and early 1968 was something he had not tried before. From Sabotage onward, Hitchcock's villains had essentially fallen into two camps -- the suave, attractive anti-hero, and the vulnerable, sympathetic "mama's boys". With characters like Uncle Charlie, Bruno Anthony and Norman Bates, Hitchcock had given audiences a glimpse into the world of a psychopath or sociopath by allowing them to share the narrative with the protagonist. In his proposed Frenzy however, the story was to have been told completely from the point of view of a murderer who is both attractive and vulnerable.”
He never sold Hollywood on the idea of the unsympathetic protag. The end result in Frenzy was a sympathetic protag falsely accused of gruesome crimes who wasn’t completely innocent as a man.
When Hitch had his ideas registered with the WGA, he highlighted as source material one particularly gruesome fella:
(1) The case of Haigh, the acid bath murderer, who killed a number of people, including women, for personal gain; and disposed of their remains by immersing the bodies in baths of acid. Haigh, like the character in "SHADOW OF A DOUBT", was a very personable man and somewhat of a charmer which enabled him to gain the confidence of his female victims.
When Hitch shared his idea with a friend, Benn Levy, who worked with Hitch on Blackmail and who had directed Lord Camber’s Ladies, which Hitch produced, sunk his teeth into a story out of that idea:
Dear Hitch,
It's got to be Heath, not Haigh. Told forwards the Heath story is a gift from heaven. You'd start with a "straight" romantic meeting, handsome young man, pretty girl. Maybe he rescues her from the wild molestations of a drunken escort. "I can't stand men who paw every girl they meet". Get us rooting for them both. He perhaps unhappily married and therefore a model of screen-hero restraint. She begins to find him irresistibly "just a little boy who can't cope with life" -- least of all with domestic problems such as he has described. She's sexually maternal with him, she'd give him anything -- and we're delighted. Presently a few of us get tiny stirrings of disquiet at the physical love-scenes but don't quite know why. By the time we see the climax of his love in action and her murder, then even the slowest of us get it! Be we shouldn't know till then.
Next, the disposal of the body sequence. And next -- which should be the most bloodcurdling scene in your entire career -- the mere encounter, preferably not in too dissimilar circumstances, with a second girl. And drag it out forever. Will she? Won't she? At first she seems increasingly drawn to him, then she seems to be backing out, maybe because a former boyfriend appears on the scene. But then they have a row (yes, about the recent murder story in the papers!!) "I bet she asked for it" He disagrees, they fight.) So she phones Heath, who meets her, dries her tears, is infinitely understanding and comforting, takes her off to the scene of the crime (as near as maybe), makes love to her and does her in.
The mechanism of discovery and capture is to be devised but it should still be "told forwards", i.e. more from the angle of the pursued than the pursuers. And at one point, if I know my Hitch, I don't doubt but that Heath with his maximum of charms will accost a police woman!
The ultimate irony of his psychoses of course is that he truly is "just a little boy who can't cope with life". "Little Boy" might be a nice title…
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R.R.R.R. This was Hitch’s Italian Connection comedy:
“It was about a hotel like the Plaza,” explained Hitchcock. “The manager was Italian, his mother lived in the penthouse, and his relatives held different jobs in the hotel. They were all crooks, but he himself didn’t go in for this crookery so he was blackmailed by the rest of the family. When a woman like Sophia Loren arrives with a collection of coins she wanted to sell and took a room, of course all the family have itchy fingers. So he had to fight against his own family about stealing the coins.” The title was to be R.R.R.R., as Hitchcock explained, “Numismatists mark coins by the letter R. R, RR, RRR, RRRR.” No doubt, the title was to have a double-meaning, grading not only the coins to be stolen, but the leading lady as well.
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The Three Hostages “In the summer of 1964, shortly after the disappointing opening of Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock told the press that his next film would be a return to his British roots, with an adaptation of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages. The story concerns a plan of the government to apprehend the leaders of a criminal operation on a certain date. To circumvent this, the criminals kidnap three children, and Richard Hannay is brought in to locate and recover the hostages.
“No doubt, this was pleasing news for Universal Pictures, but Hitchcock’s announcement (as they often were during the mid-to-late 60’s) was premature. A year earlier, Hitchcock’s agents began negotiations to purchase the movie rights to The Three Hostages from Buchan’s estate, but failed to come to an agreement on the purchase price.
“Hitchcock told Truffaut that he ultimately dropped the project because of its reliance on hypnotism, a device he felt does not translate plausibly to the screen. Hitchcock described a scene from the novel where the villain, Medina, has his blind mother hypnotize Hannay. Hitchcock started a search for a suitable writer, and even had Universal’s research department ascertain whether or not it was possible for a blind person to hypnotize someone.”
With all the hype about Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday, and Sebastian Faulks’ new Bond novel, Devil May Care, which I showcased in one of screenwriting news articles, I thought I’d pick up a copy.
It failed to live up to my 100-page rule, that is, if a writer can’t get his act together by page 100, I put the novel down. This stab at Bond was, frankly, amateurish at best and brings up an important point, I believe, about protagonists, one of my biggest pet peeves.
One of the worst signs of amateurish writing is when you have a protag that coasts through the story without lifting one finger, without doing one ounce of work, without making one solitary decision, and over the course of 3 acts has EVERYTHING handed to him/her on a silver flippin’ platter. If your protag is, say, a detective, he must do detective work. If your protag is say, I don’t know, A SPY, he should do some SPYING and figure things about for himself. And he should go through hell!
What did we have? Bond on a sabbatical at first trying to decide if he wants to retire. He decides he will. M calls him to return immediately for an important mission, which he has no choice but to accept. So what was the point? It was a setup to a conflict that never happened. As soon as Bond arrives at the appropriate location, a sexy woman by the name of Scarlett is OH-SO-CONVENIENTLY conveniently sitting in his hotel room and OH-SO-CONVENIENTLY sets up a tennis match with the villain, Julius Gorner. They go to this exclusive club. She makes ALL the arrangements for him. He plays tennis, beats him, and then he’s off to have drinks with Scarlett where she OH-SO-CONVENIENTLY explains to Bond Gorner’s entire backstory. Since when does James Bond need to be hand-held through a story? Are you kidding me?
Shouldn’t Bond – JAMES BOND – be DOING something, like, I don’t know, figuring this out for himself? Or establishing a relationship with Gorner over tennis? Try to get information out of him? Couldn’t they at the least make it to the club, and Bond figures out a way to get a match with Gorner, perhaps even engaging Gorner himself and talking his way into a match, thereby, establishing a combative relationship?
SOMETHING?
The most basic element of writing - a detective should detect. A doctor should doctor people. A spy should, well, SPY. They should be DOING THEIR JOBS, which is what pushes the story forward.
“In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialog only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
“It seems unfortunate, that with the arrival of sound, the motion picture, overnight, assumed a theatrical form. The mobility of the camera doesn’t alter this fact. Even though the camera may move along the sidewalk, it’s still theatre.
“One result of this is the loss of cinematic style, and another is the loss of fantasy. In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialog from the visual elements and, whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialog. Whichever way you choose to stage the action, your main concern is to hold the audience’s fullest attention.
“Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.”
Greenmantle (1939 – 1942) Hitchcock very much wanted to direct a follow-up to The 39 Steps, and he felt that Greenmantle by John Buchan was a superior book. He proposed that the film would star Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, but the rights from the Buchan estate proved too expensive.
Escape (1940) Hitchcock desperately wanted to direct Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, and Conrad Veidt in one of the first World War II dramas, Escape (1940). Hitchcock, a long-time admirer of Shearer's acting, had waited for years to find a project with her. However, Hitchcock was shut out of the project when the novel Escape by Ethel Vance (pen name of Grace Zaring Stone) was purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Hitchcock knew he could never work for the notorious tyrant, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, who selected Mervyn LeRoy to produce the film. Years later, Hitchcock made the statement about the lack of true Hollywood leading ladies with the quote, "Where are the Norma Shearers?"
The Three Hostages (1964) In 1964, Hitchcock re-read another Richard Hannay novel by John Buchan, The Three Hostages, with a mind to adapting it. Again, the rights were elusive. But also the story was dated, very much rooted in the 1930s, and the plot involved a villain whose blind mother hypnotizes the hero. Hitchcock, in interviews, said that he felt that the portrayal of hypnosis did not work on film, and that films that attempted this portrayal, in Hitchcock's opinion, turned out poorly.
The Bramble Bush (1951) An adaptation of a 1948 novel by David Duncan about a disaffected Communist agitator on the run from the police, forced to adopt the identity of a murder suspect. The story would be adapted to take place in Mexico and San Francisco.
The politics and high budget made it a difficult project. Ultimately, Hitchcock did not feel that any of the scripts lifted the movie beyond an ordinary chase story, and he got permission from Warner Brothers to kill the project and move on to Dial M for Murder (1954).
Flamingo Feather (1956) This was to be a big-budget adaptation of Laurens van der Post's novel of political intrigue in Southern Africa. James Stewart was expected to take the lead role of an adventurer who discovers a concentration camp for Communist agents; Hitchcock wanted Grace Kelly to play the love interest. After a disappointing research trip to South Africa where he concluded that he would have difficulty filming, especially on a budget – and with confusion of the story's politics and the seeming impossibility of casting Kelly, Hitchcock deferred the project and instead joined Stewart on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
Mary Rose (1920 – 1980) Hitchcock had long desired to turn J. M. Barrie's1920 play Mary Rose into a film. in 1964, after working together on Marnie, Hitchcock asked Jay Presson Allen to adapt the play into a screenplay. Hitchcock would later tell interviewers that his contract with Universal allowed him to make any film, so long as it cost under $3 million, and so long as it wasn't Mary Rose. Whether or not this was actually true, Lew Wasserman was not keen on the project, though Hitchcock never gave up hope of one day filming it.
No Bail for the Judge (1958 – 1961) An adaptation of the thriller novel by former judge Henry Cecil about a barrister who, with the assistance of a gentleman thief, has to defend her father, a High Court judge, when he is accused of murdering a prostitute. In a change of pace from his usual blonde actresses, Audrey Hepburn would have played the barrister, with Laurence Harvey as the thief, and John Williams as the Hepburn character's father. Some sources, including Steven DeRosa (see website below) say that Hitchcock's interest in the novel started in the summer of 1954 while filming To Catch a Thief, and that Hitchcock hoped to have John Michael Hayes write the screenplay. Hepburn was a fan of Hitchcock and had long wanted to appear in a film by him.
Samuel A. Taylor, scenarist for Vertigo and Topaz, wrote the screenplay after Ernest Lehman passed on it. The Taylor screenplay included a scene, not in the original novel, where the heroine disguises herself as a prostitute and has to fend off a rapist. Hepburn left the film, partly because of the near-rape scene but primarily due to her discovering she was pregnant. Harvey, who add signed on to the film primarily because he wanted to work with Hepburn, also left the project. Without Hepburn, the project didn't have the same appeal for Hitchcock. Changes in British law concerning prostitution and entrapment -- changes which took place after the novel was published -- made some aspects of the screenplay implausible. Hitchcock told Paramount Pictures it was better to write off $200,000 already spent on the film's development than to spend another $3 million for a film he no longer cared for. In the fall of 1959, a Paramount publicity brochure titled "Success in the Sixties!" touted No Bail for the Judge as an upcoming feature film starring Hepburn and Harvey, to be filmed in Technicolor and VistaVision.
The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959) The novel was optioned by MGM with the intention of having Alfred Hitchcock direct and Gary Cooper star. Hitchcock had long wanted to work with Cooper, but after developing the script with Ernest Lehman for several weeks, they concluded that it couldn't be done without turning the movie into "a boring courtroom drama". They abandoned the idea and started a new story which eventually became North by Northwest. The Blind Man (1960) After the success of Psycho, Hitchcock re-teamed with Ernest Lehman for this original screenplay idea: A blind pianist, Jimmy Shearing (a role for James Stewart), regains his sight after receiving the eyes of a dead man. Watching a Wild West show at Disneyland with his family, Shearing would have visions of being shot and would come to realize that the dead man was in fact murdered and the image of the murderer is still imprinted on the retina of his new eyes. The story would end with a chase around the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. Walt Disney purportedly barred Hitchcock from shooting at Disneyland after seeing Psycho. Stewart left the project, Lehman argued with Hitchcock, and the script was never shot. Village of the Stars (1962) Hitchcock bought the rights to the Paul Stanton novel Village of the Stars and planned it as his follow up to the canceled The Blind Man project. The book follows a plane that is given an order to drop a nuclear bomb, only to have the order aborted. Unfortunately, the bomb has been let partially loose from its compartment, and the problem is that fuel is low and it has to be dropped somewhere. Trap for a Solitary Man (1963) Trap for a Solitary Man was scheduled to be directed by Hitchcock in Cinemascope for Twentieth Century-Fox. The story, based on a French play by M. Robert Thomas, follows a young married couple on holiday in the Alps. The wife disappears, and after a prolonged search the police bring back someone they claim to be her; she even says she is the man's wife, but the man has never seen her before. The play was adapted as the film Vanishing Act (1986).
R.R.R.R. (1965) Hitchcock approached Italian comedy-thriller writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli (Age & Scarpelli), writers of Big Deal on Madonna Street, to write a screenplay around an original idea Hitchcock had carried in his head since the late 1930s. A New York City hotel run by an Italian immigrant and his family who, unbeknownst to him, are using the hotel as cover for crimes, including the theft of a valuable coin from a guest of the hotel. (R.R.R.R. is the highest value of coin.) The Italian screenwriters struggled with the story, and were not helped by the language barrier. Universal Studios wasn't keen on the idea and persuaded Hitchcock to move on to something else.
Kaleidoscope (1964 – 1967) An original screenplay about a necrophiliac serial killer in New York City. Hitchcock approached many writers including Samuel Taylor and Alec Coppel, but in the end engaged an old friend, Benn Levy to flesh out his sketchy idea.
The story would have revolved around a young, handsome bodybuilder (inspired by Neville Heath) who lures young women to their deaths. The New York police set a trap for him, with a policewoman posing as a potential victim. The script was based around three crescendoes dictated by Hitchcock: the first was a murder by a waterfall; the second murder would take place on a mothballed warship; and the finale, which would take place at an oil refinery with brightly colored drums.
Hitchcock showed his script to his friend François Truffaut. Though Truffaut admired the script, he felt uneasy about its relentless sex and violence. Unlike Psycho, these elements would not be hidden behind the respectable veneer of murder mystery and psychologicalsuspense, and the killer would be the main character, the hero, the eyes of the audience. According to Donald Spoto's 1983 biography Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, a 1967 version of the screenplay portrayed the murderer as homosexual in a distasteful way that upset and distressed Universal executives.
Universal vetoed the film, despite Hitchcock's assurances that he would make the film for under $1 million with a cast of unknowns, although David Hemmings, Robert Redford, and Michael Caine had all been suggested as leads. The film – alternately known as Frenzy or the more "sixties"-esque Kaleidoscope – would not be made, but some of the ideas – and the title – would be recycled into his 1972 thriller Frenzy.
The Short Night (1976 – 1979) Hitchcock's last, unfinished project was The Short Night an adaptation of the spy thriller of the same name by Ronald Kirkbride. A British double agent (loosely based on George Blake) escapes from prison and flees to Moscow via Finland, where his wife and children are waiting. An American agent – whose brother was one of the traitor's victims – heads to Finland to intercept him but ends up falling for the wife. It would be Hitchcock's third attempt – after Torn Curtain and Topaz – to produce a "realistic Bond film". Clint Eastwood, Walter Matthau, and Sean Connery were possible male leads. Liv Ullman was asked to play the double agent's wife.
The first writer assigned to the picture, James Costigan, quarrelled with the director, who asked for him to be paid off. Then Hitchcock's old sparring partner Ernest Lehman agreed to work on the script. Lehman felt the story should focus on the American spy and left out the double agent's jailbreak. Lehman left the film, too, and Hitchcock asked old friend Norman Lloyd to help him write a long treatment (outline). Lloyd, like Universal, was concerned that Hitchcock's failing health meant that the movie might not get made. When Hitchcock suggested moving straight on to the screenplay, Lloyd objected saying they weren't ready. Hitchcock reacted angrily, fired Lloyd, and worked on the treatment himself.
After a while, Hitchcock accepted that he needed another writer to work with him, and Universal suggested David Freeman. Freeman helped Hitchcock complete the treatment and wrote the screenplay. He wrote about his experiences in The Last Days of Hitchcock, which included his completed screenplay. But it was felt that Hitchcock would not have the strength to shoot the movie with its location filming and action set pieces. Universal decided to kill the project and close Hitchcock's expensive office on the Universal lot. The director died a year later.
Another problem, I believe, is this relationship between Loofe and Claudette. I loved the characters! But what happens? They meet cute. Fall in love. Have sex. And all without hardly any complications or sense of impending trouble. You had this theme with Claudette in which a conversation with Marcel gives us a discussion about her being too obsessed about her work and how she needs to live life (which is so very tired and cliched nowadays). Well, when she finally broke that cycle and went on a date - then what? Where else can you go with that? It felt like you had to bring in Pascale in order to create some conflict because the plot about this couple was going nowhere. More impressive craftsmanship would be creating a conflict rooted in the personalities or lifestyles of Loofe and Claudette, which becomes an integral part of the mystery about the exploding frogs. I don't know why, but I'm reminded of a book I read recently, "Writing with Hitchcock." The first chapter was how John Michael Hayes handled "Rear Window." They knew they'd have Jimmy Stewart. They knew they'd have Grace Kelly. So what do you do with them? Before Hayes, early treatments had Stewart as a sportswriter and Grace Kelly as an actress. She wanted to act. He didn't think she'd ever make it, which was a source of conflict, and he couldn't commit to a relationship. In a pivotal scene where Kelly is caught in Thorwald's apartment, she "acts" her way out convincing Stewart she's a great actress and they get married. The evolution of the script was fascinating. Hayes changed Stewart's character to be a photographer who got hurt on a photo shoot, which is more dramatic and helps to more easily explain how he had met Kelly (on a fashion shoot). All of this gets established with the most beautiful piece of non-verbal exposition in the opening sequence where we see his broken leg, his broken camera, the photo that explains the accident, and Kelly on the cover of a magazine so we know how they met. All of this eliminates untold amounts of verbal exposition. Hayes changed the nature of their conflict to be more rooted in their characters and their lifestyles. Grace is high society while Stewart is middle class and happy with little money while riding jeeps in Africa and taking photos. Stewart felt he wasn't good enough for her, that his lifestyle would not make her happy. But as a twist, which Hitch suggested, she is actually chasing him. And so, over the course of this mystery, it was really about this couple being tested and her proving herself to him in a deeper way. She is so much more than a woman interested in a new dress, lobster dinner, and latest scandal. This time, when she's caught in Thorwald's apartment and wiggles her finger to Stewart to indicate that she had the big piece of incriminating evidence, that is, Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring, there was ALSO the implication, as Truffaut pointed out, that since she just proved herself to Stewart, this was her proposal to him. The two plots came together so perfectly in that one moment. Of course, at this moment when Stewart realizes how wrong he was, how great she is, how he can't live without her, the tables are immediately turned, the watcher becomes the watched, and his onetime dream of freeing himself from Kelly even at the prospect of "welcoming trouble," becomes his own very real nightmare. Do you see what I mean? I'm not saying do THIS exactly. I'm just saying you should engineer a conflict ROOTED IN THE CHARACTERS, who they are, what they do, create obstacles for them, a conflict that escalates and gets resolved (good or bad) within this mystery about exploding frogs...
Have you guys heard the Oscar talk yet for Heath Ledger?
First, “Heath Ledger gives a blockbuster performance in the new Batman movie. His work as The Joker will absolutely be nominated for an Oscar... Ledger offers perfect pitch, perfect tone...”
And then, Mr. Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone, in the Dark Knight’s very first review,wrote:
“I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to 'savor the moment.'
“The deft script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, taking note of Bob Kane's original Batman and Frank Miller's bleak rethink, refuses to explain the Joker with pop psychology. Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, 'What doesn't kill you makes you stranger…' Ledger's Joker has no gray areas — he's all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman torn between Bale's Bruce (she knows he's Batman) and Eckhart's DA, another lover she has to share with his civic duty. 'Hello, beautiful,' says the Joker, sniffing Rachel like a feral beast. He's right when he compares himself to a dog chasing a car: The chase is all. The Joker's sadism is limitless, and the masochistic delight he takes in being punched and bloodied to a pulp would shame the Marquis de Sade. 'I choose chaos,' says the Joker, and those words sum up what's at stake in The Dark Knight.”
Sara Stewart of the NY Postwrote, “If he had a soundtrack, it would be something along the lines of the Sex Pistols, whose singer, Johnny Rotten, was cited by the actor as one of his inspirations for the role, along with Malcolm McDowell's performance in A Clockwork Orange. His puckered grin of a scar and cracked, sweat-smeared makeup are a punk-rock take on the original, purple-suited archnemesis. Ledger developed a whole new body language for the character. His Joker's tendency to lick his lips and blink extra slowly gives him, at times, the appearance of a demonic lizard.”
I love it! I love his whole take on the Joker, certainly his laugh but also his lizard-like lip-licking. I especially love the rampaging id without any pop psychology explanation beyond his addiction to chaos. Why explain it all? Isn't the mystery of his wicked villainy far more interesting?
I don’t recall where I read this exactly, perhaps it was the NY Times, but Heath saw an uncut version of the film before he died, loved it, and asked Nolan to play it again, which he did for him, of course.
Here’s the brand new extended trailer if you haven’t seen it.
Quick question – is it possible to have a robot protagonist? I’ve always been intrigued by this question. Obviously, Wall-E’s weekend success answers that, doesn’t it? Perhaps a better question might be - Are there any limits to the idea of a robot protagonist?
Now there are, of course, many famous robots in cinema history. R2D2 and C3P0, naturally. There was Robby of the Forbidden Planet, Maria from Metropolis, The Iron Giant, Ash from Alien, Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek, The Terminator, The Transformers, perhaps the Fembots of Austin Powers, and Johnny 5 of Short Circuit.
None of them were protags, were they? I believe they were all supporting characters with the exception of one really cool antagonist. But can any of those characters actually carry a 90-plus-minute film in the lead role? How feasible is it to have a robot protagonist?
Infra-man (1975): Robots have always been a staple of cinema, but it’s a touch unnatural for moviegoers to follow around an artificial, non-carbon-based lead character incapable of real emotions. But it happened and it required baby steps—say, going to bionic hybrids first. Shortly after Steve Austin stormed America, Hong Kong was met with this colorful and cheerfully silly Shaw Brothers production—a proto-Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in which a part-robotic superhero smacks around alien invaders, including skeleton bikers and guys in rubber demon suits.
D.A.R.Y.L. (1985): Long before Haley Joel Osment was even born, there was Barret Oliver, star of The Neverending Story and this family sci-fi about an android boy adopted by Michael McKean.
Making Mr. Right (1987): Right up there with the Lea Thompson-Howard the Duck romance in the realm of creepy cross-species film hookups, this Susan Seidelman comedy romantically pairs scientist Ann Magnuson with a space-bound android, played by a young and arguably never more eccentric John Malkovich.
AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001): Osment was already robotlike even when he was Murphy Brown’s toddler, so casting him as an actual robot feels a bit redundant. Still, no film has so seriously treated an artificial lead with the sensitivity it would a human one, or played so intriguingly with audience identification figures. With a lead whose emotions are as artificial as the rest of him, AI—rather than such desecrations as Bicentennial Man or I, Robot—is the true filmic heir to Isaac Asimov.
Daft Punk’s Electroma (2006): Hand it to the French electronica duo to make their film debut with a painfully slow and wordless portrait of a world just like ours populated only by metal-headed robots.
I might be able to think of a few more. I hadn’t seen Bicentennial Man, but Robin Williams, the robobutler, WAS the protag in that film, wasn’t he? There was also Robots (2005), which had a robot protag called Rodney Copperbottom. Robert John Burke, aka Robocop, was the protag, too, wasn’t he? Not sure about that one. Of course, if they ever get around to making it, you can add to the list the Six Million Dollar Man (or Woman, whichever comes first – like the chicken or the egg). With respect to A.I., I used to be obsessed about the ideas (and the now famousKubrick legends) at the time regarding the creation of that story. When I sat through the finished film, though, I was never fully won over by Haley Joel Osment as a robot protag, and if Spielberg and Osment can’t win me over, it can’t be done.
Here’s my conclusion. Nowadays, robot protags are possible, but only if it’s designed to be an animated film or CGI. Hence the reason I felt very strongly that they should’ve made Optimus Prime andhis Transformersthe protags. People can easily buy into it if it’s CGI just as easily as kids bought into it when they were cartoons on television. There’s just something about humans playing robots that doesn’t work well enough to have that compelling lead you need for a film.
But then again, if you mix up the Six Million Dollar Woman with a bunch of Fembots... I don't know. That could be a really good show.
I'm famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. I'm a homebody who jetsets around the world. I'm brash and daring yet chilled with a twist. I also write for Script Magazine.
I've been patrolling around message boards, reading books and perusing magazine articles for many years now trying to soak up as much information as I could about the business of screenwriting.
