Principia Filmatica

...via friend and HH Nation reader Liz. Thanks, Liz.

This hilarious video should strike knowing and painful fear into the heart of anyone who's ever thought seriously about writing a movie.

But as funny as that video is, and as skillfully as it exposes the bland repetitiousness of many movies, I still think it's important to remember something that most people seem to want to reflexively disagree with: most movie formulas are good things.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. Back when I was living in Gainesville, there was a local band I saw a few times whose name I can't remember, so let's just call them Phantom Talent.

Phantom Talent were an example of a music style called "dischord," which gets it's particularly creative name from the fact that as a rule it eschews discernible chords and progressions, and from the fact that the "singing" generally consists, melody wise, of random yelling.

You see where I'm going with this. Here clearly was a band out as much to send a message as to make music. And their message was: fuck the conventions of chords, fuck the conventions of style, fuck the conventions of singing! Indeed, fuck you, audience!

The only reason Phantom Talent was even listenable was because it featured three of the best musicians in town, and because as much as they were trying to make a point about staid musical conventions, what they actually were was full of shit, since their songs still consisted of basic verse/chorus structure, and they were well rehearsed and tight through the changes.

There's an urge you've always got to fight as a creative person, and that's the urge to defy convention just for the sake of defying convention. Just because there's a formula out there that's worked for hundreds or thousands of years doesn't mean that formula is bad. Formula's are formulas for a reason. If you set out to break them for the sake of breaking them, more than likely you will be producing intolerable shit.

One of the first big things I discovered on my own as an adult was the Blues. Like a lot of kids who discovered it in the 60s, I was drawn in initially by the music of the English Blues Boom of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Clapton and the like, and from there immersed myself in the music of guys like Son House, Leadbelly, Freddie King and Howlin' Wolf. Especially Freddie King.

I learned to play the guitar because of the blues. And one thing you learn pretty much right away is that every blues song is essentially the same. From a progressions standpoint, from an on-the-paper standpoint, there is very little flexibility in the blues.

And there's nothing wrong with that. The Blues is fundamentally an interpretive art, rather than a creative one, if you get my meaning. Put another way, it's not really about what you're playing, it's about how you're playing it. And that how is really all that separates the dingy, talentless lounge bands of the world from it's Eric Claptons.

These same lessons apply directly to moviemaking. You do not have a movie without conflict. You do not have a movie unless people want things and obstacles stand in their way. You do not have a movie unless it has surprises. You do not have a movie unless certain things are resolved.

What separates the men from the unemployed men is how you accomplish those things.

A particularly useful example of what I'm talking about is something called "Kierkegaard's Narrative," a existential plot outline that's been followed in movies such as American Beauty, Harold and Maude, High Fidelity, Sideways and many more. Great films all, but different films. But different in the how, rather than the what.

For a more comprehensive look at Kiekegaard's Narrative, click here.

So maybe this is all just me being an old fashioned stick in the mud, but I'm firmly of the opinion that moviemakers are first and foremost storytellers, not innovators. The goal of telling the story well should always take precedence over any other factor. And if that leads to innovation from a technical standpoint (Barry Lyndon being filmed by candlelight), editing standpoint (Rashomon's repeated subjective realities), or any number of other standpoints (The Empire Strikes Back making a key character a puppet), so much the better.

But let's not take a dump on movie formulas because of those lousy hacks who follow them in ways that are completely without imagination. They've done us well so far.

The Trouble with Creating Harry

One of the first things you learn as you go through all of these books on writing is that there really are no rules. Some people will argue you've got to start with a hook -- the plot, the situation. Others say you've got to start with character -- the people, their motivations.

Some people even say that character and plot are the same thing, which sounds all well and good right up until you look at the blank page and realize this leaves you with nowhere to start.

Anyhow, at the end of the day the truth is you've really got to do a good job with both phases, since the results when you don't are... well, bad.

So the other day I stumbled upon this character checklist from Done Deal Pro, a movie business/screenwriting web site. Basically, it's a (long) series of questions that, according to them, you should be able to answer about any (major) character you're creating.

Go ahead, check it out. I'll wait.

Long, isn't it? It's 58 questions, with numerous sub questions ("numerous" being code for: I didn't feel like counting 'em).

And all sarcasm aside, it's actually a pretty comprehensive list, so I've started using it. And I can report that while some of the questions are valuable, some of them are just, well, stupid.

Example:

What animal would they (the character) choose to be?

Now, I can understand how this might be an important question to answer if the character you're trying to create is, you know, Bambi (or a 12-year-old girl, in which case the answer is almost certainly "pony"). But it's pretty clear that certain questions appear suited to only the most specific kind of character, while to everyone else they're just goddamn irrelevant.

For instance:

When and where was their first sexual experience?

Good character to ask this of: John Holmes

See what I mean? The first time Holmes got his wang some action is a particularly important part of his character. Did the woman run away in sheer horror, afraid of internal injuries? Or did she, you know, keep a line of erotic bowling pins under her bed and was unimpressed?

Either way, it contributed significantly to his life and character, and if you're going to write about him, it's probably something you should know about him.

On the other hand...

Bad character to ask this of: Ellen Ripley (from the Alien series)

Right. I mean, who gives a shit? When you think about it, Ripley really isn't much of a character, particularly in the first movie. Her function is to be practical and resilient (meaning she lives), and to just be stupid enough to search through a spaceship that's about to explode for a fucking cat.

But her first bang? Does it matter? No. And the writers didn't, either.

How do I know that? In the initial drafts of the script (and I'm not making this up), the character of Ripley was a man (baby).

Are they smart? Intelligent? Savvy? Slow witted?

Good: Forrest Gump

I mean, this is the whole goddamn banana. Forrest may not be a smart man, but he knows what love is, right? His I.Q. is so low his mom has to bang a horny school administrator so he won't have to ride the short bus. The whole story is about this good and decent (and stupid) man whose goodness and decency trump his complete inability, for example, to comprehend the rules of football.

Bad: Topper Harley

Or, you know, any character in a broad spoof like Hot Shots!. Topper is a fighter pilot with daddy issues and a history with an Air Force psychiatrist. Everything else is just for fucking laughs. I mean, it's sort of like that scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when Roger gets out of his handcuffs.

Eddie Valiant: Do you mean you could get out of those handcuffs at any time?

Roger Rabbit: No, not any time. Only when it was funny.

The characters in spoofs are very much like cartoons. The only rule that matters is if it's funny. If need be, Topper could do calculus. Or he could accidentally take a dump in the sink. Either way.

What is their health like?

Good: Kanji Watanabe

Ok, this one requires a bit of explanation. Watanabe is the lead character in the great Akira Kurosawa movie Ikiru -- the story of a bureaucrat who discovers he has a fatal stomach cancer. The prognosis makes him realize how valueless his life has been, and he sets off to on a journey to find some meaning. This hokey sounding story actually becomes quite powerfully meaningful as Watanabe first tries hedonism, but finding that lacking, is inspired by a woman he meets who makes toys for children.

So, getting back to the question. His health, as you can imagine, is pretty important to the story. It's what sets him off. Like the rest of his life, he's been ignoring it, going day to day in a kind of mindless fog. The sudden diagnosis that his life will soon come to an end brings his day-to-day life to an end, and sets him upon the story of the movie.

Bad: Everyone else

The truth is that the health of a main character very rarely is an issue in a movie, and when it is, it's usually for the plot rather than character.

Consider this cliche:

The main character, a talented but troubled youth, spins his wheels in frustration until one special day, when he meets a wise and powerful master of the talent the youth has. The master mentors the main character for a while, teaching him life lessons. When the main character has almost fully matured, the mentor starts to suffer from headaches.

Uh oh, right? We know what's coming. The mentor is going to die, leaving the main character to use what he taught him to defeat his Archenemy and dedicate himself to the pursuit of truth, justice and the American Way (credits roll).

So all in all I think it's still a fairly good questionairre. Except for one particular question:

What is the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them?

Oh, man. As a writer, whether it be for the screen or stage or whatever, you're in the job of creating conflict. A movie without conflict is totally impossible (or totally boring). And if that's true, the answer to this question -- especially for the main character, if not everyone of value in the story -- better be "THIS MOVIE!" (or play, or radio show, or mime act).

If it isn't, my friends, you'll probably find that you're writing the wrong story. And if you're doing that, shame on you. You asked us to pay attention. We deserved better.

A Few Words About Inglourious Basterds

So last weekend I went out to my local megaplex and watched Inglourious Basterds, the new Tarantino movie.

And I've got to tell you, the movie didn't surprise me one bit. Every plot twist, every nuance. Shit, even most of the dialogue.

I saw it all coming.

Am I a psychic, you ask?

Surprisingly, no. I just... you know. I'd read the script already.

Anyhow, this was a new experience for me. Most of the time I read a script after I've watched the movie. A script, after all, is best described as the blueprint for a movie, and reading one before you've watched the movie is sort of like looking at a set of blueprints before you've seen the building.

But that's what I did with Inglourious Basterds anyway, to see what it was like, to see how different it would be and if my opinion of it would change. I'd heard the final draft of the shooting script had leaked so I secured myself a copy.

Then I sat down a read it, knowing I'd be sacrificing some of the joy of watching the movie for the first time in the process.

So what was it like, you ask patiently, hoping I'll move on to another topic?

Well, the truth is I probably should have picked a different script, because the Inglourious Basterds script, with few exceptions, was exactly like the fucking movie.

With the exception of an extensive beer pong sequence.

That is, of course, without all the typos. The goddamn script was riddled with them. Tarantino is apparently some combination of dyslexic, lazy and a bad speller. For instance: Adolf Hitler is spelled "Adolph Hitler."

At the end of the day, though, my experience of reading it was, like I said, almost exactly like my experience of watching it (sans the music, of course, and the smell of farts). And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense why.

A Tarantino movie is inevitably talky (and whatever you think about it, Inglourious Basterds is a very talky movie), to the point that many scenes essentially boil down to a few talking heads. The drama is carried out by the situation and the inventiveness of the dialogue (which I can report was nearly line for line), and all of that is in the script.

Thinking back over it, I actually think the movie would have worked just as well as a radio play, since you realize after doing what I did just how few of the scenes were carried primarily by the visuals (like this scene from Pulp Fiction).

And that's fine. Glengarry Glen Ross is non-visual, too, and it's one of my favorite movies.

In the final evaluation, I think it's a useful exercise. But the next time I do this it'll have to be something not quite so talky (that means you, Zach and Miri Make a Porno!)

Oh, and my grade on the movie (since I can tell you were all eagerly awaiting that): 3 stars out of 5.

The movie was only so-so, I thought. The first sequence is amazing and the rest sort of fizzles. The Hans Landa character really stood out in the script and I'm glad he was well played (though I honestly thought he read better).

I'd say it goes in the Death Proof file, though Inglourious Basterds, for all it's gung ho weirdness, wasn't nearly as playful as that movie.

Ah, those magical words!

FADE OUT:

It's the last words you type in a screenplay. The finish line. The thing that indicates the bastard first draft is over, and at least in some sense, you whipped it. 

Well, I reached that mystical landmark today. At, well, about 1:46 am Central Time, two months and five days after I started. 

And yeah, it feels good. As Al Pacino's character asks in Glengarry Glen Ross: "You ever take a dump that made you feel you just slept for 12 hours?" 

Well, this screenplay is that dump. Of course, it still needs a lot of work. Ernest Hemingway once said that "the first draft of everything is shit." So yeah, I've got a lot of polishing to do. Hopefully more polishing than Ernest did, since even his rewrites were shit. 

But man alive, at least it's lashed together in some form. In the midst of this swirling, ridiculous thing I call my life, here at last is an unmitigated triumph. 

Good day sir. 

Screenplay Writing Lessons from Hollywood Legend William Goldman*

So I've been writing my as-yet untitled screenplay now for two months and two days. So far, I think, it's been going pretty well. As of this minute I'm staring hard down on page 98 with the following staring back up at me. 

THIEF: 

Who are you?

BATMAN:

I'm Batman. 

No, wait. That's some other movie. Sorry about that. 

Anyhow, I'll have some title-less version of it finished in a week or two, ready for the vast and cool and unsympathetic rejection notices of Hollywood's crack talent scouts. But before all of that happens and just ruins the heck out of my day, I thought I would pass along a few things I've learned writing this fucker while it still at least sort-of looks like I know what I'm talking about. 

Lesson 1: Focus on what characters want, rather than on who they are. 

This is probably the most important thing about characterization that separates it from novel or short story writing. Whereas in a novel, the goal more often than not is to strip away layers until you reach the truth about a character or a situation, most movies (for better or worse) are by their nature superficial. 

For instance, what can we say about the essential character of someone as iconic as, say, James Bond? I mean, we know he's an orphan, and that he likes to chase a lot of tail. We know he's clever and can defend himself. But beyond that, uh... what? Do the movies ever reveal what Bond's birth parents did for a living, or where he was born? More specifically than an orphanage, where did he grow up? What was he like as a kid? Beyond being a somewhat amoral killing machine who is nonetheless loyal to England, what can we say about him? 

The answer, of course -- even after 22 movies -- is pretty much nothing. 

But what does James Bond want? Ah, that's much clearer. Bond wants women and martinis. He wants to stop Blofeld from, you know, blowing up the world. He wants information. He wants to break in to some kind of secret facility. He wants to break out of a holding cell. Etcetera etcetera. 

Bond makes a good example for this kind of thing because he's so straightforward in what he wants and so opaque about who he is. And the truth is, we don't really question it, because he's a spy, and we expect spies to be secretive. It's part of what in my opinion makes him to adaptable to the current age, since he hardly ever states his opinion about anything other than that bad guys should be stopped, whatever girl is standing in front of him should take off her clothes, and how his martinis should be served. It's part of why his line in Goldfinger about hating The Beatles is so out of place. Not only is it uncharacteristically opinionated, but we never imagine Bond just sitting around and listening to music for fun. 

This is not to say, of course, that movie characters can't have complicated backgrounds and character quirks. On the contrary, characters in movies should be interesting and conflicted and have both external and internal obstacles to overcome. But what a character wants is first and foremost the reason for them to go off and do the interesting things that we'll find worth watching. It can't be something like:

CHARACTER A:

My name is Alfred Derby Lepercolony. I was born in New Jersey in 1948 to Deborah and Scallawag Lepercolony. My childhood was very unhappy because I was born with only one leg. This led to the neighborhood children calling me "stumpy," but coincidentally made me an expert with a Pogo stick.

Uh, yeah. Don't do that. 

Lesson 2: Construct scenes so that the characters in them want different things. 

Aha! Here's where the fun begins. Let's say you've established that Character A really wants a piece of information in the possession of Character B, who really doesn't want to give it up.

Already, you've sown the seeds to an interesting scene. Every police drama, terrorist movie, mystery and courtroom movie is based on this kind of conflict. Character A will ideally have compelling reasons to want the piece of information (location of a bomb hidden somewhere in his scrotum) and Character B will have compelling reasons to want to avoid telling Character B (Character A's scrotum will one day lead the resistance to victory over Skynet). 

It sounds simple, but it's a very effective dramatic tool, and it always gives the characters something to talk about. Consider, for example, which of these scenes would be more interesting:

CHARACTER A:

I believe the Moon is made of cheese.

CHARACTER B:

Uh, I don't. 

Or,

CHARACTER A:

I want to convince you that the Moon is made of cheese. 

CHARACTER B:

I want to commit you to a mental hospital.  

The answer, sadly, is that neither of these scenes seem very interesting. But at least the second scene is going somewhere. The first one is just a set of declarative statements, which would probably be followed by Character B trying to sneak out of the room. In the second one, they would at least have a conversation.

In my own screenplay, I've written many scenes where, for one reason or another, characters are compelled to lie or deceive each other. I've found this a very effective device, as their reasons for doing so -- what they want -- becomes an effective dramatic underpinning to those scenes.  

Lesson 3: The rules of the universe of the movie can be whatever you want them to be, but once they're established, don't break them. 

In a world full of movies like Transformers, where by design nothing makes sense, it's hard to see this as a hard and fast rule, but to me it's ironclad. 

It basically works like this: Yes, you can have a movie where cars and trucks transform into sentient killer robots. But if you get to a point in the plot where a character needs money, you can't just have a transformer turn into a bank and start printing $100 bills. If you do, even good natured people will stomp on your face. 

By the same token, if you establish that your main character is a mild mannered chemical weapons expert, you can't have him kill a special forces guy in hand to hand combat in the third act. 

Movies don't have to make sense or even seem real in the context of actual life. Suspension of disbelief pretty much allows you to have any rules you want, but once you've established those rules, in the name of God: obey them. 

So with that, I bring this incredibly boring Syd Field impression to a close. Some other time, I'll get around to different little nuggets I've picked up on plot and structure matters. 

Or perhaps I'll do something a bit more interesting, like read you a bedtime story. 

Oh, well. How many celebrity birthdays in a row can one man do? 

*Note: Lessons not actually written by William Goldman, though he wishes.