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November 17, 2008

Biopics

Man, biopics must be hard to write. It’s one thing to write a biography book, even with a sort of novelistic “creative nonfiction” approach. Among other things, a book with an unlimited page count can create a much richer portrait of an entire life. It can also, if done with that creative nonfiction approach, play more with the fluidity of time. An important, well-known incident in the subject’s life can spur remembrances of insignificant, unknown moments that might have led to the event. Biopics are almost always framed with a flashback structure, but cinematic flashbacks can (and often do) make things cumbersome. They pose the question, “What led to this moment?” but it takes anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours to answer the question. In a book, it doesn’t have to be more than a paragraph or two. “Remember this? It reminded her of that.” The end.

Biopics have the more difficult task of trying to encompass a person’s entire existence into feature length. I had similar problems with The Final Cut, but at least a screenwriter can just take an overview of a life and condense it down in some way or another. But if someone’s led a ridiculously eventful life, you don’t have many options in crafting a screenplay. As I see it, you can either try to dramatize each of these moments, or you can concentrate on one important moment and try to use that as an emblem of the full life.

The former strategy runs the risk of information overload, with no dramatic thrust, so it feels like we’re watching a series of scenes rather than a story; at worst, it makes us feel like we never get to know the subject despite it being a movie about the subject. I felt this way about recent critical darlings Ray and Walk the Line — good performances aside, both felt more like watching a greatest-moments reel than a dramatic story. The latter tends to have a solid story, but it runs the risk of not even qualifying as a biopic; it also might still leave the central character as an enigma because the filmmakers assume we can fill in our own blanks about the subject’s life before or after the incident in question. I had this problem with Capote, which actually works better as a biopic of In Cold Blood than Truman Capote, who remains a mystery until some painfully on-the-nose dialogue near the end (despite giving us some insight into the character, the clumsy handling makes the movie worse, not better). Becoming Jane takes this same general idea while making a significantly better (albeit not great) movie by concentrating on her early romantic life and illustrating how it impacted her writing.

The only recent biopic I’ve liked as a pure movie experience was La vie en rose. Although it spans the bulk of her life, it never feels like it’s breezily moving from one moment to the next without taking the time to get into the character’s head and let us understand her. It also plays with time in ways that are more effective than the standard “present-day reflections on an eventful life” — the filmmakers wisely make the structure as frazzled and frenetic as Piaf’s life/mind. Yet, it plays so loose with Édith Piaf’s life, it barely qualifies as a biopic and would be better off as a fiction inspired by Piaf.

In order to really understand what’s wrong with most biopics, first, I think, we need to figure out what the hell a biopic is. As I said, some of the best movies about real-life figures aren’t exactly biographies. For instance, I love American Splendor, but does it even qualify? It consists primarily of adaptations of Harvey Pekar’s comics, which Pekar even admits on the film’s audio commentary were idealized or, in some cases, pure fiction. I love Quiz Show, too, but despite having such vivid characters and such a solid story, it’s not a biography of Charles Van Doren, Herb Stempel, Dick Goodwin, or anyone else involved in the scandal. Like Capote, it’s a dramatization of a brief moment in time.

I’d qualify the typical “reflective flashback” structure as a hallmark of the genre, but some biopics don’t have that at all (Capote), while Oscar-magnet Amadeus employed it despite being almost as fictitious as La vie en rose. Even when you win, you lose. It’s also hard to argue that Capote or Amadeus don’t want to be biopics — they have the subject’s name in the goddamn title — despite only showing a few years in their lives.

For me, the bottom-line qualifications are these:

1. It must encompass the subject’s life.

   I don’t mean showing the entire life, beat by beat, although that qualifies. It’s a biopic even if the filmmakers take a snippet of the subject’s life but are using that snippet to symbolize the life as a whole. Arguing whether or not this is the filmmaker’s intent is admittedly subjective, but usually signs are there (does it employ a flashback framing device? does it have a series of title cards at the end explaining what happened to the people involved?). From my perspective, if you walk out of the movie saying, “Wow, I really feel like I get that person’s life,” it’s a biopic; if you’re saying, “Wow, I really get the Cuban missile crisis,” it’s…not.

2. It must purport to be a true story about an actual person’s life.

   Let’s deconstruct the sentence! “Purport” is the key word there since, as mentioned, films like La vie en rose and Amadeus qualify as biopics, yet they’re riddled with omissions, half-truths, and outright lies. “A true story” as opposed to “the true story,” which to me suggests only the broad, birth-to-death portrait of a life rather than the calmer, five-years-to-encompass-a-life structure. And, of course, it must be true. The Cat’s Meow, for instance, can’t qualify as anything because it’s a work of fiction about real people, based on a real incident, yet Peter Bogdanovich has said in no uncertain terms that it’s a work of speculative fiction that has little basis in reality. Conversely, a biopic must tell the story of an actual person — fake biopics like Citizen Kane and Forrest Gump don’t count. Shocking, I know.

Of course, these two are mutually inclusive: if you only have the former, it suggests that the subject is fictitious or that it’s an untrue story of real people (like Dick, a great but completely untrue comedy about Watergate, or Day of the Jackal, about a fictitious assassination attempt on real French president Charles de Gaulle); if you have only the latter, it must be something like Quiz Show or Thirteen Days, true stories with actual people that aren’t actually about the people so much as the events they took part in. Make sense? I hope it does, because my own head is spinning.

What’s all this leading up to? Well, at the beginning of October, the Brian Wilson biopic landed on my desk, and I sneered at it. I expected it to be the bottom rung of biopic crappiness, scraping the dregs of Ray or Walk the Line or Great Balls of Fire, all the way back to Yankee Doodle Dandy, mining every cliché of the genre without coming close to illustrating why Wilson is interesting enough to warrant a biopic. Selfishly, I had that jealous-screenwriter mentality that only I can write the true, great Brian Wilson biopic, because only I really get him, maaaan. I also had a bit of concern because I knew of Wilson’s own involvement with the project — I assumed it’d gloss over the bad vibes and be overly self-indulgent, or it’d just be terrible because the man is still fairly gone.

I was absolutely wrong on all accounts. To my surprise, screenwriter Michael Lerner did exactly what I think a good biopic should do: he showed the man, warts and all, but covered a section of Brian’s life that — while significant — might not be quite as well-known. Lerner ignores their garage days, their rise to popularity, the drug experimentation (often alluded to, sometimes shown), Brian’s musical development (both as songwriter and producer). Instead, he concentrates on the more mysterious, “nutjob” section of Brian’s life.

Most people know the man went nuts; they don’t know he spent many years under the iron fist of therapist/exploiter Eugene Landy. Lerner doesn’t portray Brian as perfect, and he doesn’t portray Landy as a cartoonish villain (he reserves that for a deserving Mike Love). Everybody is a few shades more complex than what I’m used to seeing in both biopics and psychological thrillers (a genre the story, at times, resembles). Brian manages to come across as sweet and disarmingly funny, despite his clear psychological damage. He’s also shown as a tormented genius, often lapsing into a haze of musical insanity. His ex-wife wants nothing to do with him (and neither does his band, after several high-profile flops), he terrifies his children, he looks and smells like a bum, and by the end, Landy actually has helped him — just enough for Brian to get away from him. Landy comes across as deeply troubled himself, a man who’s torn between a genuine desire to help Brian and the easy exploitation to live out Landy’s own musical dreams. (Not surprisingly, Landy is largely responsible for “Smart Girls,” likely penning the lyrics and mixing it himself.)

The advantage of concentrating on (roughly) a 15-year period in Brian’s life lets Lerner have some breathing room to develop these characters. In addition to rounding out Brian and Landy, he does a great job at showing the difficult relationship Brian had with brother Dennis; like Brian, Dennis was a sweet but completely fucked-up guy, and although he wanted the best for Brian, he ended up as more of a corrupter than a helper. After such shitty Beach Boys biopics on TV, it’s amazing to find a rich, nuanced perspective on relationships like these.

Meanwhile, Brian’s relationship with Melinda Ledbetter (his current wife) is a little problematic. Narratively, it drives the second and third acts, almost turning the script into a love story, but I think there might be a little historical revisionism happening. I have no doubt that she had a big impact on Brian, but by the end, we’re expected to believe Landy had no positive impact on Brian — it was all Melinda! — when I’d argue that Landy helped Brian more than anyone’s willing to recognize now. Lerner plays this as deliberately ambiguous, possibly because it’s difficult to reconcile these two opposing perspectives and still give the characters the complexity they deserve. There’s a domino effect that Lerner puts into place, then tries to make us forget: Landy helps Brian enough to allow him to get out into the world, so he can meet Melinda, so Melinda can give him the final push to break him free of Landy, who’s no longer helping.

The closing Smile section also doesn’t quite work; I’d argue that if they cut directly from Brian having Landy’s medical license revoked to the Smile debut, the whole third act would flow much better. Lerner opts to show snippets of the intervening years, giving it an annoying “biopic” feel as he rushes through important scenes to get to the moment of triumph. I hope those scenes are cut before the film’s release.

Despite the flaws, this is what a biopic should be: the essence of a person’s life, omitting details average moviegoers will know in favor of what they don’t know, with a compelling dramatic story shaping it. The moments of a full life don’t tell a perfect, birth-to-death dramatic story. The only one I can think of is Oedipus Rex, who is inconveniently fictional. Heroes & Villains has a functional dramatic story: Brian Wilson is an insane loser who has alienated everyone he knows, so his family puts him under the experimental treatment of a doctor who may or may not be more insane. Landy gradually reveals himself to be an exploitative jackass right around the time Brian gets hooked up with Melinda Ledbetter, who helps him break free. If you want to get all symbolic and shit, both Landy and Brian’s non-Dennis family represent both the internal and external “villains” Brian spends the movie trying to escape.

Compare this to the biopic of a 75-year-old jewel thief, whose extraordinarily eventful life occupied another script I was forced to read. Sadly, while I do think this woman’s story is worth telling, it’s…not told well. At all. The problem, not surprisingly, lies in screenwriter Eunetta T. Boone’s decision to cover all 75 years of her life. (Okay, that’s not fair — the story actually starts with her at age 13, so it’s only 62 years.)

Trying to cram everything into a 126-page screenplay gives it that rushed feeling that irritates me so much. It’s especially bad because this woman is not Johnny Cash or Ray Charles; people will give those movies a pass because they know enough to fill in the quality gaps. Only Oprah watchers know who this woman is, so seeing a life story so glossed over benefits no one, least of all its subject. Even more strangely, what the screenplay tries to use as its dramatic hook — the notion that she steals because it’s the only thing she can do to support her kids — crumbles to pieces by the midpoint, when we realize (a) she has stolen more than enough to live a pleasant, upper-middle-class lifestyle and (b) we only get a few glimpses of her with the kids, and she’s never shown as a particularly caring or doting mother; also, the kids all but disappear from the story in the second half.

This manipulation of motivation fails the story because we never get to understand what really drives her. What really makes her steal? Even if she was just lying to herself by saying it was for her kids, shouldn’t she have to confront that denial and come to some realizations about who she is as a person? She doesn’t just steal, either — the scope and ambition escalate despite her relative wealth. It’s a fascinating mindset to get to know and understand, so it was really frustrating to see the motives so poorly simplified.

Worse than that, because Boone tries to cover so much ground, she essentially ends up telling three stories that, if fleshed out separately, would make good movie stories; when crammed together, they add up to something hovering around mediocre. First, you have the story of a desperate mother driven to extremes to support her kids; then, you have the story of two criminals — one an African-American woman, the other a white Jewish man — trying to maintain a relationship in the middle of the civil rights movement; finally, there’s the “international” portion of her thieving career, which plays a bit like Ocean’s Twelve, only worse. And I haven’t even mentioned the comically extraneous FBI agent who pops up randomly to say he’s tracking her, even though he doesn’t really do anything to catch her.

So what’s my wish for this script? Pick one story and tell it well. Since the desperate mother angle flops big-time, and the international stuff is pretty retarded, I’d go with the civil rights one — it’s the closest thing to compelling drama that this script has, but it moves at such a rapid gait, it loses the impact it should have had.

As a final note, I have to acknowledge that many of these biopic concepts are bought by producers and written by hired guns — meaning, they have to tailor the script to what the producer wants. So if a producer says, “I want the entire life story of this 75-year-old jewel thief,” poor Boone has to work within an impossible framework. I don’t know if this is how it worked in either situation (although I’m pretty sure it’s the case with both scripts), but it’s something worth taking into account.

Seriously, though, biopics are rough, even on spec, and I don’t envy anyone with the task of condensing the life of an interesting person into a 110-page movie story. Most biopics are total shit — aside from typically good performances — so while I have some hope for the Brian Wilson movie, this other one will be just as thunderously mediocre as most.

Posted by Stan on November 17, 2008 4:59 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

November 19, 2008

Slasher

Considering the obsessive deconstruction of the genre, slasher movies are remarkably simple. You have a disparate group of young people, mostly teenagers or college students, and a psychotic killer who borders on mythical picking them off one by one. I won’t deny the powerful subtext permeating these movies, but did we really need the dozens of movies from Wes Craven’s New Nightmare to last year’s (admittedly brilliant) Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon to beat us over the head with the feminism, the gynophobia, the antiheroes, the monsters, the Ahabs? Do we need people to delineate true slasher films from pseudo-slasher offshoots like splatter films and torture porn? Why does it matter?

Frankly, it doesn’t matter much to me now, but it probably would if I ever attempted to write a slasher script. That’s the problem with genre work: you have to understand the genre, even if your goal is to subvert or satirize… In ancient times, when I majored in music, I had a theory professor who would teach us things like symphonic form. He’d map out the structure of a symphony and then say, “Okay, now, here’s Beethoven’s third symphony — and here’s how he broke all the rules.” One day, a classmate asked, “How come we’re studying the perfect form of all this stuff, but all the memorable composers broke the rules?” His answer was a cliché, but a valid one: “You have to know the rules before you can break them.”

Which is exactly the problem with a little script I read the other day. Based on its title, I hoped it would be a remake of Bert I. Gordon’s moody 1960 Vertigo-wannabe, Tormented (or, as its lobby poster calls it, Tormented… By the She-Ghost of Haunted Island). The notorious B.I.G. made some terrible films, but this ranks as one of his least offensive, with a rational story, decent acting, and surprising psychological depth. It’s just sunk by things like a disembodied head on a wet bar, but the elements for a good remake are there. I don’t object to remakes, honestly; I just work under the theory that skilled filmmakers should redo pieces of crap with potential (like Ocean’s Eleven).

To my surprise, in this sad world of hollow remakes of and sequels to successful films, this script was an original work. It made a valiant effort to conform to the slasher genre, but it was definitely a project full of rule-breaking written by someone who didn’t understand the rules. It takes the rather bizarre tack of following a group of bullies — who, through teamwork, drive a student to suicide — without imbuing any of them with a shred of sympathy. The suicide victim rises from the dead to take his revenge, and suddenly we’re expected to… Well, I was never exactly sure. By the end, the writer shows his intention to create an “antihero” vibe from the killer…yet he spends about half the script trying to keep the killer’s identity a mystery. So who the hell are we rooting for here? The story opens with the funeral of the suicide victim/zombie killer, so we never get the chance to get to know him and, therefore, root for him.

The writer fails to understand the idea that we have to either sympathize with the characters’ plight or empathize with why they’re so unsympathetic. Did that make any sense? Let me put it another way: if we don’t understand why they’re a bunch of fucknuts, nobody’s going to care when they die. If nobody cares about the victims or the killer, what’s the point of watching the movie? I felt like a more interesting approach would be to play on the perceptual problems. Remember that Buffy episode, “Earshot”? (For those who don’t: an encounter with some unusual demons leaves her hearing the thoughts of everyone around her. There’s a whole subplot about these thoughts overwhelming her, blah blah, but the important thing is she overhears one students (apparent) intention to gun everyone down. She has to stop him, but in the end she realizes he’s going to kill himself (with a sniper rifle…in the school bell tower — yeah, not one of their most well-thought-out twists), and she has a whole monologue that basically makes him realize it’s not that nobody likes him, it’s that nobody cares. Everyone is too wrapped up in their own shit to pay any attention.) That’s what I wish this script had been like: this kid kills himself because he feels he’s being tormented (hence the title), but when we get to know these kids…we realize he’s wrong. What he perceived as cruelty was just nobody giving a damn about him.

So there you go, two solutions: either show us more of the killer before he offs himself so we can get behind his spree, or make the kids less malicious and more apathetic to this kid they’ve supposedly bullied. But, see, it’s hard to come up with solutions like that when you don’t quite grasp the genre.

If anything failed the genre test, I figured the remake of The House on Sorority Row would fit the bill. For reasons unknown, Mark Rosman’s 1983 original has become somewhat of a revisionist classic. Here’s the problem: it’s fucking terrible. You know how you watch old, low-budget slasher movies and you cringe or laugh at the awkward pacing, terrible acting, and terrible gore effects? This flick is a laughfest, not a shockfest, but as I mentioned, it falls under my favorite category of remakes: remakes of crap by competent professionals. I’m not wrong in assuming a director known mostly for Budweiser commercials is a competent professional, am I?

This script actually disregards the original’s plot in favor of a clever, funny riff on the slasher genre. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever read, but its economical character development, quick pacing, and inventive plotting made it more fun than I expected. One of the key things the writers utilize is the setting. About 75% of the story takes place in the sorority house, and the writers do a great job of establishing the space and using it effectively. It has some major problems near the end — including a laugh-out-loud stupid “set the stage of a sequel” stinger — but nothing that can’t be fixed in the editing room.

The plot this time around revolves around a bizarre but clever scenario: annoyed by a sleazy nerd (brother of one of the sorority sisters), the girls play a prank on him by making him think he killed the girl he was trying to roofie. They drive out to the middle of nowhere to dismember the “corpse” and toss the parts into an old mineshaft. Just when our heroine — reluctant to go along with the prank to begin with — convinces her sisters to admit the prank, the grief-stricken and panicking impales her with a tire iron, killing her for real. They freak out and decide to go ahead with their prank plan for real.

Cut to: graduation day, one year later. That’s when the slashing begins, and as the sisters’ numbers dwindle, they slowly piece together who’s killing them (mainly because by the end, there aren’t many left to accuse) and why. It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s loaded with clever dialogue and a great use of both the setting and the ol’ common household items. The only thing I object to is overuse of a fire axe — I know most Greek groups live in rickety, old houses, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fire axe anywhere but an apartment or office building. Otherwise, the whole thing just hums along and, barring some unforeseen horrible performances or incompetent production, could turn out to be the best non-Behind the Mask slasher movie in years.

Why does an original idea fail where a remake of a terrible movie succeeds? These writers clearly understood not only the conventions of the slasher genre but have a good idea of what’s preceded them; they’re reinventing the wheel by putting a digital clock in it or something. On the other hand, Tormented tries hard to twist tradition without fully grasping what makes slasher movies effective, or how to make unlikable characters compelling enough to watch.

Posted by Stan on November 19, 2008 10:44 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

November 24, 2008

Action, Jackson

In a post-Matrix/Fight Club/Shyamalan world, apparently everything in the action genre is about upping the narrative ante to the point that nothing makes a goddamn bit of sense. You want to know how fucking terrible action scripts have gotten? I read a script, Hyperreal, about a group of thugs and assholes involved in some kind of… I don’t even know; it was half terrible noir, half fetishistic valentine to Japanese culture (by that, I mean it’s the type of script some pasty white guy would write after watching a bunch of anime and yakuza movies and assuming he’s an authority on Japan), centered around the kidnapping of the daughter of…someone.

See, it got confusing because the lynch-pin of the twisting and turning plot is a somewhat interesting concept involving a portable machine that allows people to swap minds. It’s like Face/Off, only with minds instead of faces and stupidity instead of goofiness. This could lead to good confusion — something intriguing and unusual, maybe even a moderately thought-provoking meditation on the nature of existence or mind vs. body vs. soul. But fuck it, it’s an action movie — let’s just keep character development to a bare minimum so it’s more surprising when one person’s body turns out to be occupied by another dude’s mind. That’s right, everyone gets the short shrift this time around, because if any character had a definable personality, we’d know the instant they swapped bodies with someone else.

But, okay, so it has thin characters and plot twists. It’s an action movie — that’s not so bad, right? Wrong. Here’s the kind of story this is: two women who bare a passing resemblance to one another get an elaborate series of plastic surgeries so they look like twins, then the main character — a male — switches bodies with one of the twins and has lesbian sex with her. For no other reason than “Whoa, man. Twins.” Remember the lack of character development? I understand the guy’s motivation, but what about the other “twin”? Narcissism? Doesn’t cut it. Past sexual abuse? Usually causes women to seek out something a little less healthy than a mirror image of themselves — maybe she abused herself as a child, but that’s meeting the writer more than halfway. It’s also the kind of story where the mind of a child is trapped in a random, unnamed body guard in the ultimate deus ex machina; the kind of story where the voiceover narration is spoken by one character whose body, it turns out, has been occupied the entire time by a different character — and even that wouldn’t be so retarded if not for other voiceover sequences where we hear the thoughts of characters’ minds in other bodies, only it’s their “real” voice, not the voice of the body they’re occupying. It’s only written this way to give us a Shyamalan-style twist, but I’ve said this a thousand times: don’t use a twist if it undoes everything that came before it. Christ!

It’s a complete disaster, pilfering some elements of The Matrix and Fight Club without understanding why people like these movies. Kind of like what the Wachowskis did with the Matrix sequels, only less boring and way more retarded (and trust me, that is a bold statement). Still, on some level, it’s understandable why the writer elected to do some of the things he did — it’s a sci-fi actioner, and Japanese fetishism is real in with the nerd crowd. It’s pretentious The Matrix, wannabe-gritty like Fight Club, it has Guy Ritchie/Quentin Tarantino-style nonlinear storytelling, and it’s completely moronic like The Fast and the Furious movies. What studio wouldn’t greenlight it?

It gets worse, though. There’s a mediocre action video game called Kane & Lynch: Dead Men that, before its release as a game already had a movie adaptation attached to it. Since then, Bruce Willis has gone down another notch in my book by signing on to play Kane, a grim, gravel-voiced ex-CIA agent sentenced to death for treason. Lynch, a murderous schizophrenic scientist of some sort, is also sentenced to death, so they have a terrible Defiant Ones-meets-Lethal Weapon buddy situation going when they’re busted out of a prison transport bus to decrypt some MacGuffin or another.

Is it just me, or does this sound like it could be good? You’ve got the reliable buddy formula, some mildly interesting characters with mildly interesting conflicts that could generate a ton of whiz-bang action sequences… Not a bad start, but it gets worse.

The script opens with a video of Kane’s surly daughter, who’s being held hostage by the men forcing Kane and Lynch to do their bidding. You’d think, considering this is the opening scene of the movie, that she’d factor into the plot. Nah. Aside from using her to threaten Kane, she’s never mentioned. Kane doesn’t give a shit about her, seems motivated more by a desire to kill people than a desire to keep his daughter alive (that’s giving the writer a lot of credit by implying there’s real motivation to the things these characters do). She literally disappears from the story — not even a mention in passing — for 60 full pages (of 111), then comes back for an irrelevant 10 pages, then disappears again without any mention or resolution. It’s like the writer noticed that a lot of action movies have some kind of domestic stakes, so he tossed in this subplot. Even better, you might be surprised to know that Kane’s wife is also being held hostage. This is mentioned very briefly, very early in the script, but it has even less impact on Kane than the daughter, yet there’s no mention of divorce or any other kind of bad blood. In fact, late in the script she’s killed right in front of him, and that’s the first suggestion he cares about anyone in his family. Throughout, Kane doesn’t care because the writer doesn’t care.

Hands down, though, the script’s biggest cross to bear is its atrocious, embarrassing dialogue. I’ve read plenty of bad scripts, including one by a kid who was born and raised in Oregon but wrote like he only spoke Portuguese but was attempting to translate Russian into English, but this is hands-down the worst dialogue I’ve ever read. Every character — ranging from a 16-year-old girl to middle-aged Japanese men — sounds like a sex-obsessed 13-year-old. Well, not every character — Lynch is crazy but “brilliant,” so he sounds like a 13-year-old who uses big words he doesn’t fully understand to make himself sound smarter. I wish I were kidding.

When I decided I’d start blogging about the shit I have to read, I told myself I’d never post excerpts from the scripts themselves, but you have to see it to believe it:

Was that not bad enough for you? Try this:

Man, does it bug me that a goddamn brilliant scientist doesn’t know what a klick is. But wait, we haven’t met any of the other characters…

Problems aside, in certain ways this is the type of movie that does mirror an ’80s- or ’90s-style action movie. The characters aren’t exactly rich or multilayered, but they’re efficiently introduced and thrust into the plot; the plot itself is unnecessarily convoluted, but if they dialed down the pointless twists and turns and just made it about people kicking the shit out of each other to get a fancy microchip, it’d be good, mindless entertainment — the kind I grew up with.

I’m going to use Death Wish as the ideal model for the modern major action movie, ignoring its 1974 release year in favor of the fact that I just watched it a few weeks ago. It pretty much set the mold for revenge actioners for decades, but in terms of plot, pacing, and economical character development, it’s about as close as one can get to perfect.

What do you need to know about Paul Kersey to get behind Death Wish? Pretty much two things: (1) he’s a successful — but not too successful — architect, which suggests analytical skills and cleverness, and (2) he’s a doting family man. The latter plays into the motive for revenge, but the former allows us to believe he’s capable of carrying it out while eluding the authorities. The first movie even includes the unusually mythic section where Kersey goes to Arizona — the heart of the desert west — to chill out, hooks up with Angel from The Rockford Files, and spends his time learning everything he can about guns. Writer Wendell Mayes adds a few peppers to the pot by tacking on a physical antagonist — the cop out to catch the vigilante — to create tension and dramatic thrust, but the plot is simple as can be: man’s family gets raped and/or killed, man takes brutal revenge on society in general.

You don’t need much more for an action movie — a few intriguing morsels about the protagonist that drive his or her (usually his) motives for ass-kicking, followed by a simple plot that allows maximum ass-kicking with minimum complication. Some movies — Die Hard, early Seagal, and most of James Cameron’s non-Titanic crap — actually do a reasonable job of layering complexity onto the proceedings. Chandler-esque plotting, layered conspiracies, and deep (for an action movie) character relationships and motivations can definitely raise the bar for the genre when done well.

The problem is, they’re no longer done well. Writers have taken the phrase “bad action movie” to heart and served up steaming piles of shit that play like a terrible cover song: it’s the same chords, melody, and lyrics, but they just don’t get it. There even seems to be the same basic philosophy behind these two phenomena: it’s either “Fuck it, people don’t care if it’s good as long as it has action” or “Fuck it, people don’t care if the band sucks as long as we play ‘What’s Up?’ by 4 Non Blondes!” They want to please the crowd, but they have no idea how.

There’s hope, though. There’s a script floating around with the awful title The Cold Light of Day that — I hesitate to use the word “brilliant” when describing an action script, but it comes about as close to it as anything I’ve read since my friend Ryan’s mythological action-adventure (which, considering a lot of the shit I’ve read, would definitely sell for top dollar in the current, post-300, pre-300-ripoff-failure market).

The Cold Light of Day has one of the great misleading openings. I’m not even sure I want to give away all the details, because it’s good enough that it’ll likely be worth seeing and here I’ll be ruining it all a year or two in advance. Let me just say it starts out with the feel of a dysfunctional-family drama before turning into an action movie. It plunges the main character into genuinely Hitchcockian “ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances” territory, reminding me in many ways of North by Northwest. So it’s not exactly original, but it does a great job working its formula.

More than anything, perhaps my favorite element in the script — probably the one thing that elevates it from “pretty good” to “approaching brilliance” — is the total lack of a shoehorned love interest. I’m just so goddamn tired of love interests and love triangles. I blame not only the amount of television I watch — where it’s become the one and only technique for sustaining interpersonal drama — but the fact that TV writers seem to do it so poorly. I still love the moment in Hard to Kill when Seagal, after having adrenaline-fueled sex with Kelly LeBrock, gazes mournfully at the wedding ring he still wears. An otherwise Three Days of the Condor-esque far-fetched romance subplot suddenly works, because that subtle moment acknowledges the problems most movies (and especially TV shows) neglect.

Now, there is a beautiful, young woman in the script, and again I don’t want to reveal all the surprises — I just want you to know she’s there, but there’s no romance. A guy who can keep it in his pants in an action movie?! Shockingly original! (To their credit, Kane & Lynch also lacks a love story, and Hyperreal’s is as laughable as the lesbian scene.) I only had a problem with the main character’s tenuous arc — it seems like the writers want to make a statement about learning the importance of family, but they don’t quite get there. It’s so good, though, that fixing this problem only requires a few tweaks.

And then there’s The Book of Eli, which has some problems but just about blew my goddamn mind. I’ve probably read around 200 scripts, and I can count the number of times one has moved me — simply through the words on the page — on one hand. I can count the number of times this has happened in an action script with no hands. Sometimes the symbolism is overwrought, sometimes the characters bluntly state exactly what they’re feeling, but overall, it tells a wonderful story.

There are various news snippets floating around about the movie, and all of them point to it as a “post-Apocalyptic western,” which I suppose is true, but it veers much closer to the action end of the western genre. The grim hellscape in which these people live reminded me a lot of Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, only more disturbing* — vividly rendered by the writers. The central conflict occurs over the world’s last remaining Bible, possessed by the hero, sought by the villain. I’m pretty much anti-religion, but the significance of the book — and the reasons each character wants it — got to me. It also has a Shyamalan twist — but it’s one that enhances the script instead of ruining it.

Both The Cold Light of Day and The Book of Eli execute their plots in a Death Wish style — all the setup happens in the first act, and the rest is pretty much wall-to-wall action. The characters have a bit more pathos, the plot has a little more coherence, but all that makes these scripts are really fucking good action stories instead of utter shit.

*For those who haven’t read it, Dr. Bloodmoney also takes place in a grim, post-Apocalyptic hellscape. It includes scenes like the one where a character has a pair of horses dragging him in hollowed-out car body, and when he returns from an errand — leaving the “carriage” parked — a group of people have killed both horses and are gnawing at one, raw. When I say “more disturbing than Dr. Bloodmoney,” it means something. [Back]

Posted by Stan on November 24, 2008 10:16 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

November 26, 2008

Sci-Fi Metaphors & Wasted Potential

On Monday, I talked a little about how much I liked The Book of Eli. I’ve also mentioned, on occasion, my disappointment about wasted potential. This seems to happen much more with sci-fi than other genres, but I’m not sure why. I’m not what you’d call a huge sci-fi fan, but I do enjoy imaginative forms of unreality — bleak futures, alternate Earths, alien worlds, etc. The problem comes when a writer creates a vivid, unique world…and tells a shitty story within it. The Time Machine was pretty great until he travels into the future, which is problematic since nobody but me will see a movie called The Time Machine that’s about a 19th-century tinkerer trying to rescue his slain girlfriend. The Final Cut isn’t what I’d call great, but it had good ideas and could have made some very interesting statements about paranoia and the “Big Brother” culture. Instead, it settled for ripping off The Conversation and delivering a shockingly stupid ending.

More often than not, the problem with sci-fi stories — the reason they let audiences (i.e., me) down — comes down to the metaphor. Obviously, symbolism is one of the most important tools of the writing trade. It turns a bland conversation where people shout exactly what they’re feeling into a conversation where people shout about linoleum tiles to avoid confronting exactly what they’re feeling. It makes a moment where someone overhears a meaningless conversation into a moment that makes them realize their entire life is a lie. Symbols allow writers to express their unique views about the world.

In sci-fi, symbolism is incredibly important — especially the metaphor that forces you to say, “This story has to be sci-fi.” Want to tackle racism without facing controversy? Make it about humans and robots, or humans and weird-looking alien detectives. Want to write about the Cold War and Vietnam when NBC doesn’t even want to use the word “war” on primetime television? Meet the Klingons and Romulans. Like horror, it’s a great genre for expressing anxiety about where the world is headed or what secrets currently lurk under the surface.

It’s such a slippery damn slope, though. What if the metaphor is too on-the-nose? Or maybe it’s effective when subtle but horrible when repeatedly beaten over the heads of readers/audiences? What if the anxiety is ham-fisted or misguided? Although it’s a comedy, Idiocracy had the best sci-fi premise in years because it took a rational, real-world anxiety to its absolute extremes, delivering a satire that — if it hadn’t been dumped direct to video by a terrified 20th Century Fox — might have made people actually stop, think, and make changes. One can only hope.

Because it’s relevant to what I’m preparing to ramble about, I’ll also toss out a recommendation for Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca. It’s by no means a perfect film, but if you move past the gorgeous Danish modern aesthetic, it’s a quiet but solid meditation on the notion of class systems and supposed “perfection.” In a world where genetic abnormalities are bred out of the upper class, roguish Ethan Hawke is born without any sort of engineering and suffers the consequences. He buys the identity of “perfect” fuck-up Jude Law so he can enter a program that will let him fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling into space — the forbidden fruit of any non-“valid” humans.

The plot is about Hawke trying to hide his fake identity long enough to get into the rocket, but at its core, it’s about Hawke and Law. The latter has everything going for him except for, you know, the kind of deep-seated emotional trauma that comes from experience, not genetics. The former manages to succeed despite various hobbling factors. It’s basically the bleak opposite of Rich Man, Poor Man, but even the heavy-handed symbolism of the “brothers swimming” sequence manages to work because Niccol wisely downplays everything, letting us come to conclusions instead of spelling everything out. (The DVD, of course, has an awful deleted scene describing various notable figures — Abraham Lincoln, Vincent Van Gogh, Stephen Hawking — who would have never been born under a eugenics program like the one featured in the movie. But hey, Niccol — or someone involved in the movie — was wise enough to realize it was both redundant and pandering, so they get props from me for cutting it.)

So a few months ago, when Niccol’s new script, The Cross, landed on my desk, I got what I like to call a “reading boner.” This doesn’t often come (no pun intended) as a result of just seeing the author’s name on the title page. Look, I know there are all these horror stories about how no reader will read past page ten if he hasn’t been grabbed, but every shitty reading job I’ve had has required me to read the entire script. It probably works differently at bigger places, where they get more scripts, but these smaller places have emphasized to me that if they’re going to turn someone down, they want a reason why. And, bad as it is, you can’t glean that from ten pages. No, the first ten are important because they grab you. I didn’t know the writers of The Book of Eli from Adam, but it grabbed me on page one. (Despite what the gurus tell you, there isn’t a single line of dialogue until page four — but it still hooked me. It’s all subjective, though, so other readers might have gone out of their minds from the lack of precious, precious yammering.)

Like a gentle prostate massage*, the grab is what causes the reading boner, nine times out of ten. The other time, it’s a familiar name or title. “Ooh, I’ve heard about this one — should be good.” “Oh, this is based on a shitty book I read — I wonder if the script is better.” I loved Gattaca and liked Lord of War and The Truman Show**, and I got even more excited when I flipped to page one and read a long description of a futuristic society. Excellent, I thought, Niccol is back to sci-fi — we’ll have another Gattaca on our hands for sure!

How wrong I was.

Unlike Gattaca, which takes a plausible but theoretical sci-fi concept and turns it into the basis for a human story, The Cross takes a real concept and, like Idiocracy, pushes it to its absolute extreme. And, like Idiocracy, The Cross might improve significantly if played for laughs; instead, it’s written as a ponderous, impossibly heavy-handed melodrama about a futuristic bordertown. Although Niccol refuses to name the countries — to the point that he specifically mentions the flags of each country as not resembling any known flags at all. The names of the countries are not important, declares a title card. Every border is alike. Especially borders separated by a giant, winding river! And one country being exceptionally squalid and poor, with nearly every character having a vaguely Latin name, while the other is a TV-obsessed paean to wealth and technology. It’s as similar to Finland and Sweden or Kenya and Ethiopia as it is to the U.S. and Mexico!

I won’t deny, I found some of the characters intriguing to a point. Despite the protagonist’s inexplicable, laugh-out-loud funny “futuristic” name (Mylar — yes, like the stuff in spacesuits), his drive to overcome his roots and escape to a better world makes him compelling. His border-crossing ideas are clever enough to make him seem smarter by association, and aside from a disastrous third act, the similarities between Mylar and Gattaca’s Vincent Freeman are apparent but don’t feel redundant. Thematically, the class discrimination and the American-dream drive to better one’s position in life resonate as much today as in 1997. Some of the supporting characters — really, all of them except the Big Villain (who isn’t much of one) — are well-drawn archetypes who either hinder or help Mylar’s progress.

The metaphor — or lack thereof — kills it, though. Niccol creates a very obvious portrait of a post-border-fence U.S./Mexico border in the “not-too-distant” future (so not-too-distant that people are still using cumbersome CRT monitors, for instance), but he offers neither a viable solution nor any compelling “food for thought” arguments either for or against the illegal immigration problem. His “solution,” which makes the third act such a nightmare, revolves around the idea of the river being the arbitrary borderline — let’s go plant some explosives to reroute the river around our little bordertown. That’s great for the 14 people living here — but what about the rest of the country? Beyond that, how do you even extrapolate such a “solution” into real life? Is Niccol proposing that the U.S. simply annex Mexico, then Belize and Guatemala, then El Salvador and Honduras, and on and on until the U.S. occupies all of Central and South America?

Does it sound like I want to have it both ways when I say I want a human story that somehow encompasses both sides of the full illegal immigration argument and uses the prism of science-fiction to reflect on viable, practical solutions? If The Cross isn’t going to do this, why make it such an obvious parallel? Why not set it on two lunar colonies, one old one that’s falling apart and abandoned by its country (who no longer support the expense of the space program) while the other thrives? Why not set it at a border that has no obvious Rio Grande-type river splitting the two countries? Niccol chose this obvious parallel for clear reasons, but his reasons pay off neither thematically nor dramatically. “Let’s blow up the river” is as cheesy a deus ex machina for the story of these characters as it is a goofy suggestion to ease the illegal-immigration burden.

The obvious metaphor also kind of destroys the resolution. Being accepted as citizens of this nation because they’ve changed the border is stupid enough, but when you know one country is clearly the U.S. and the other is clearly Mexico… It’s not really an uplifting message. I know I won’t win any fans among the Sean Hannity-style nuts who believe the U.S. is the greatest, best, most free country on God’s earth, ever. I’m a much bigger fan of the tough-love approach I use with my obnoxious extended family: at the end of the day, I still love them, but I accept that they have many, many problems (just like I do) and will continue to ridicule them until they make an effort to change.

So how great is it for these Mexifuturists to live in the U.S.? How great is it for illegal immigrants now? Will amnesty make it better for them? The Cross leaves us on a triumphant note in the same way Gattaca does, but in Gattaca, he’s going into the unknown. Mylar and friends are going into someplace that, no matter how hard Niccol protests, is very, very known. At the very least, I would have given a few bonus points for a bleak acknowledgment that all this effort hasn’t led to any sort of improvement in their lives. It’s probably not exponentially worse, but it’s not the ideal life Mylar rants and raves about for most of the script.

I don’t want to continue to sing The Book of Eli’s praises too highly, but it’s hard not to. They have similar settings — tiny towns in bleak, dystopian futures — and protagonists fixed with OCD vigor on a single goal, but there’s one big difference: The Book of Eli is much less heavy-handed in its metaphor. Surprising, considering the entire script is about the importance of the Bible as a foundation for either enriching or corrupting the lives of ignorant heathens. Ironically, I think the writers may have downplayed their symbolism accidentally. They recognize it as an unpretentious action movie, and the Bible essentially operates as a MacGuffin — but it’s one hell of a MacGuffin. As an important object that everyone wants but nobody (except Eli) quite knows why, it works better than most because even the most atheistic asshole in the audience knows something about the Bible — its content, its historical impact, its general importance as a document (even if you disagree with the radical, retarded interpretations of its content). Leaving it as a generic book, as Niccol tries to do with his countries in The Cross, may have worked, but it would have given the story much less emotional impact (even if the resolution is kind of a hybrid rip-off of the different endings of the Fahrenheit 451 book and movie — The Book of Eli is better than both, so I’ll give it a pass).

Sci-fi writers have a tough time. It’s all just a plate-spinning act — if you can’t present a unique world, an emotionally resonant story, and some sort of theme or idea the allows contemporary society to reflect on themselves without realizing it, you’re going to end up with something bad. Maybe not Matrix Reloaded bad, but not Gattaca great, either.

*For those keeping score, that’s a metaphor. Sort of. [Back]

**Ironically, I read the widely circulated “early draft” of The Truman Show that’s set in New York. It’s actually pretty similar to the shooting draft, aside from the location switch, and while I enjoy the creepiness of a place as huge as New York turning out to be a gigantic soundstage — it’s a bit more effective for the paranoiac in me than the idyllic but clearly fake place created in the movie — the script is actually pretty bad. Whatever changes occurred between that and the shooting draft definitely improved the final product. [Back]

Posted by Stan on November 26, 2008 9:51 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

November 21, 2008

Funny on the Page

I tend to go harder on comedies than I do on other genres. After 15 seconds of soul-searching, I came up with three reasons why. The first is obvious: I like to pretend that comedy is my genre, so I fiercely protect from folks willing to pound out lazy clichés in place of actual humor. As they sit back, nodding and chuckling to themselves, I burst through their window and impale them on an indescribably deadly object. I take comedy seriously, and I’ve worked my ass off trying to assess something as subjective as humor in the most objective way possible. It all goes back to the golden age of The Simpsons: not everyone will laugh at every joke, but every single viewer will find at least one joke funny; if they don’t, they simply don’t have a sense of humor. Most “comedy” writers don’t have the ambition to utilize such field depth in their writing (admittedly, it’s a huge pain in the ass for someone to do alone), but even that’s okay as long as they work well within the limited styles of humor they choose.

After awhile, certain people — and I like to think I’m among them, although you may disagree — become so attuned to what makes humor work, it goes beyond whether or not they subjectively find something funny. Personally, I have an intense dislike of broad farces — but I can understand, objectively, how they work in terms of story structure, character development, and style of humor, and I can identify whether or not the script does well within what it wants to be. It’s the same as judging any genre. With comedy, like horror movies, you’re pretty much dealing with a bunch of subgenres that have to be considered on their own merits, whether I find them subjectively funny or not. I could say Farting Farce is a bad comedy because it doesn’t make me laugh, but that’s like saying Big Sloppy Action Movie is a terrible script because it doesn’t read like a Merchant-Ivory costume drama. I can divorce myself from what I find funny and say, “Yeah, somebody who likes farces would probably love this.” Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s a better-educated guess than you’d get from somebody with no sense of humor.

So I’ve honed that skill. I’ve done some of the worst stand-up, improv, and stage acting in the history of time, because there’s nothing like the sound of 300 people not laughing (I swiped that from probably the only insightful line Aaron Sorkin penned during his Studio 60 reign of terror, and he probably swiped it from somebody much better than he is). I’ve forced the most impartial people I could find (e.g., coworkers or classmates but not friends) to read my writing, because who cares what my friends think? Any asshole can make their friends laugh, and 90% of the time, they’re doing it with inside jokes that aren’t objectively funny. The trick is making other people laugh, which is something many “comedy” “writers” fail to do.

At long last, here’s reason number two: ignoring the issue of whether or not I find something funny, too many comedy writers tend to coast on important dramatic principles like character development and plot coherence because they think, “Hey, it’s a comedy! As long as the characters are wacky and the jokes are funny, who cares if the plot makes sense or the characters’ actions are clearly motivated?!” This philosophy is, for lack of a better word, fucktarded. Take a moment, if you like any comedy at all, to think about your favorite moments in comedies. If you’re not a chuckleheaded idiot, whatever came to mind was probably a moment that’s funny because of who the character is rather than what he or she is doing (or what’s being done to them).

The third reason is a little simpler and more personal: I’m a bitter asshole. Juno was terrible, but I only took it personally because it got made and its terrible screenplay won a fucking Oscar. I’m really, really hard on my own work, and I’d wager I probably make it worse by tinkering constantly instead of just leaving well enough alone. I’ll read through something I wrote and ask myself why I ever thought it was funny. It always shocks me — and should shock you — that when I read these “comedies,” I think, “Holy Christ, my shit is better than this.” It’s not an ego-driven thought, and I’m only pointing it out here because it illustrates how fucking bad this shit is.

That said, I have something to say to all the budding comedy writers out there: your shit isn’t funny until it’s funny on the page.

I didn’t think I’d need to explain this concept, but I’ve read too many comedies where the idea of making something funny on the page does not appear to enter the writer’s mind. It’s pretty simple: someone reads your script and laughs*. They’re not attending a table reading or a staged reading or listening to you read it because hey man, they just gotta understand that it’s funny the way you say it. Before your comedy goes out, it has to be vetted by as many people as possible — an even mix of people who know about writing, know about comedy, have a good sense of humor, or have no sense of humor at all. If you have any kind of self-awareness, you can take their feedback and figure out the strengths and weaknesses. Maybe it does read funny, but the people who know story are frustrated by the flaccid narrative arc. Maybe it has a strong story but not a single laugh. The only way you’ll know is if you have people who aren’t you read it.

What disturbs me about these scripts is that I’m running around saying it has to be this way or that way, but I haven’t taken into account that these are greenlit shooting drafts. Maybe they started out funny and the development wringer churned out another piece of trash. I don’t have any insider information about these shit heaps; I just get paid to read them. Whatever the story, though, this has been read by people — dozens of people — and these are the shooting drafts? These are the funniest scripts, with the best stories and most compelling characters? Are you fucking kidding me?

The most memorably bad of the bunch isn’t inherently the worst. Unlike the real dregs, this one has mildly interesting story and character arcs. Its biggest problems are (1) not a single goddamn laugh on the page, yet it’s written in an irritating, brash style that leads me to believe the writer is in love with his nonexistent wit, and (2) it’s about the wrong goddamn character. How does that even happen? How do you sell a script, have it read by a dozen or more people in various producerial capacities, a director, actors, whoever else — how do they read this and not realize the “protagonist” doesn’t do shit while the “sidekick” actually does the narrative heavy lifting and has the only character changes? Worse than that, how do they not realize the only funny moments are purloined from much better movies?

Here’s the plot: a loser with an absurd name sleeps with a woman he quickly discovers is married. The husband finds out and, for reasons too stupid to even contemplate (I know the writer didn’t spend any time trying to make it believable, so why should I try to figure it out?), he moves in with the loser because (a) he’s angry at his wife and (b) he now has a “gift card” to sleep with another woman, but his problem is that he doesn’t really want to. If I said he just wants to get in touch with his 20s, a decade he missed because he married too young and was too career-minded, I’m actually imbuing the character with more depth than he ever gets from the writer. However, by adding such depth, a compelling character and potentially interesting story forms.

The writer chooses not to tell that story, so an Odd Couple-type festering pustule of a rom-com ensues. The “loser” “protagonist” is just along for the ride. Here’s something people should know about drama, dating back to (at least) Aristotle: protagonists must be compelled to action. This loser just sits around until the husband grabs him and drags him to bars, clubs, parties, and double-date one night stands. Even in the third act, which revolves around getting husband and wife back together, the loser doesn’t do a thing — the wife’s personal assistant badgers the loser into helping stage some meet-ups to get the couple back together. Then, for no other reason than plot conventions, he and the assistant get together at the end. The loser has no internal motivation — no voice inside of him saying, “I want this obnoxious lout of my apartment now” — to make him take action; he doesn’t even have a bland external force like a dying grandmother whose only wish is to see her grandson get married. He’s totally inert.

Meanwhile, the husband is suffering. We don’t get to realize much of his depth until an on-the-nose scene at the end that spells it out, but everything he does in the script is a result of his pain, yet his actions just cause more pain. He doesn’t want to sleep with a college student — he wants to know why his wife would cheat on him, and through his experiences, he comes to realize exactly why, which is really the thing that gets them back together. This isn’t the most original plot for a romantic comedy, but at least it’s something to sink your teeth into. So why do we spend about 80% of the script paying attention to the absurdly named loser who does nothing?

Why would anybody make this script into a motion picture? It’s a reach, but I can think of one reason: it contains a variety of funny situational ideas. On the page, there are no laughs, terrible characters, a poorly structured mess of a plot that follows the wrong “main” character, but I could imagine some producer (even stupider than the writer) saying, “Sure, we get a few good improv actors in there, and this thing’ll be dynamite.” “Dynamite” might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I can’t disagree that the situations lend themselves to improv, and even the world’s worst improv comic (me, circa 2002) on his worst day will blurt out something funnier than what’s on the page.

This script had a couple of redeeming qualities, but to me it remains a memorable disaster because of the damn smug tone. I’ll get into this more in a future post, but a general note to writers: confidence is good, but cockiness is bad. It just makes people want to criticize you, so the thing better be hot shit or else the coverage will be more hostile than usual. (I’m sure it’s coincidental, but the scripts I’ve read with the cockiest attitudes have turned out to be among the worst, and not just because I’m looking for more to nitpick — it’s just another way people try to overcompensate.)

The really bad stuff started when I had to read the latest venture from the people who brought us The Hottie and the Nottie. (Now seems like a good time to point out that, unless it’s an obvious remake, adaptation, or sequel, I try as hard as I can to not seek out information about these scripts until after I’ve read them and written the story analysis. I made that mistake early on, and nothing colors judgment like reading a mediocre script that seems worse because you’re picturing the actors in their parts and it doesn’t quite work. At the end of the day, it’s a subjective opinion, but I still want to arrive at that opinion with maximum objectivity.)

It’s another romantic comedy, but this time around it has a somewhat clever premise: a loser boyfriend (I’m noticing a theme here) is at a turning point with his longtime girlfriend. He can either propose or let her spend a few years in Japan as part of a job reassignment. As he’s about to make his decision, he discovers that a version of himself from five years in the future has traveled back in time to keep him from making the wrong choice. After generating a small amount of goodwill with this premise, the script undoes it all within mere pages of Present and Future’s first meeting. The writer forgets that, even though they’re technically the same person, one has five years’ worth of experience and growth. Instead of mining that for comic possibilities, they become interchangeable, their dialogue stops having any conflict — it’s so bad that at a certain point, he starts to introduce random, new antagonists because Future (who should remain the true antagonist) no longer stands in the way of Present’s goals. Then, Future’s motivation does an inexplicable 180 and he resumes being the antagonist. It’s sloppy and annoying.

Let’s see: messy story, misshapen characters… Did anyone notice I haven’t even mentioned the love interest? Yeah, that’s because she has nothing to do with the story. It’s a bold move for a romantic comedy, and the gamble doesn’t pay off. As expected, the script pairs a loser with a woman ridiculously out of his league. It’s hard enough to believe they’d go on a single date, much less stay together for years, with the girlfriend desiring a marriage proposal from somebody she already describes as a “commitment-phobe.” “Gee, there’s no reason to discuss his commitment problems and try to work through them. I’m sure he’ll just figure it out one day and then marry me!” Because both Present and Future are varying degrees of asshat and Girlfriend gets no development, we never get any kind of picture about (a) why she’s so great or (b) why she’d put up with him for so long.

This is a common problem with romantic comedies, especially recent fare targeted at adolescents instead of adults. If these characters were 15, some of their less restrained antics would make sense; instead, they’re 30-year-olds trying to pander to teens, and the result is off-putting to anyone over the age of 17. I disliked There’s Something About Mary pretty intensely, but at least it attempted to examine real, adult relationships while throwing in fart and semen jokes for the kiddies. Producers want to hit that 18-34 demographic, but 18 is the bottom of that demographic — why would they want to alienate all but a very limited number of their demo viewers?

Despite their many narrative flaws, both of these comedies above had more than their share of smile-worthy moments. Nothing made me laugh — and I’m not particularly hard to make laugh — but they had faintly amusing moments despite their myriad problems. On the other hand, the final comedy I plan to rake over the coals this morning was a disaster from beginning to end. Aiming at religious and class satire (but missing both marks by a wide margin), the story rewrites the birth of Jesus Christ in late-’60s small-town Maryland, painting Mary and “Joe” as hippies clashing with the conservative denizens of Mary’s hometown.

The script contains two distinct and irritating joke types: “Gosh, the Bible’s silly!” and “Gosh, the ’60s were silly!” Seriously, jokes about low gas prices? Working the most convoluted possible series of narrative setbacks to get Mary and Joe into a barn? Tell me this doesn’t pass for actual comedy. But wait — it’s worse than not funny: nothing happens. Because the story of Jesus’ birth isn’t that analogous to present-day scenarios, the writer has to cut corners as he limps from one pointless moment to the next. The story is inexplicably told from the perspective of a local reporter who has no bearing on the story (other than representing one of the “three wise men”). An opportunistic hotelier is, I guess, supposed to be the local religious nut, exploiting Mary and Joe when she notices the vague similarities so she can make money from the tourists, but not even she generates any conflict or dramatic tension because she does everything in secret. The writer treats each character like a chess piece in his Bible-inspired story, but he never bothers to make any of them into real people.

I won’t even go into my irritation with the fact that, contrary to the usual depiction, the foretold Second Coming is not supposed to echo the original Jesus story at all; in fact, although I think it varies in different denominations, the usual take is that He will return after the Apocalypse, either leading the Rapture or establishing a new kingdom on Earth. That kind of shit frustrates me, and I’m not even religious.

No, the script’s biggest narrative/character problem is that it’s a Christmas movie and a satire but these people aren’t religious. Even the religious nut just uses it as a tool for exploitation (and, again, she can’t be that much of a nut since she doesn’t know what the Second Coming is), so it lacks the usual holiday themes of spirituality over mindless zeal, turning the other cheek, learning valuable lessons about not exploiting pseudo-religious tableaus for financial gain. I wouldn’t mind it not embracing these (mostly overused) themes if it embraced any others. There’s nothing here — no humor, no story, no characters, no conflict, no satire, no theme, not even a basic understanding of Christian mythology.

Just to create the illusion that I am not a seething cauldron of bile, I read one great comedy and two pretty good ones that give me some hope for the future:

• The great one is sports comedy about a drunken, ex-high school basketball star who takes a job coaching a girls’ team. It was astonishing — funny on the page, great characters (each of whom get enough face time to feel like real people and not genre archetypes), real conflict, not afraid to get dramatic. The narrative and character arcs are coherent and consistent, and did I mention it’s fucking funny? More than that, it’s kind of a spoof of the sports genre, but it works because the writeractually understands the genre he spoofs. Shocking!
• One is kind of a throwback to ’80s summer-vacation flicks like Summer Rental, One Crazy Summer, or any other movie with “summer” in the title. It’s basically a coming-of-age story with a beach-bum backdrop. Although it isn’t particularly funny, the story and characters work well enough to make me not care that it wasn’t gut-busting. (Sadly, this principle doesn’t work in reverse — the script still sucks if I laugh my balls off but it has nothing else going for it.)
• And then there’s the pot comedy, which follows two high school seniors on an epic quest to get the entire school high. Not a yukfest in terms of dialogue/jokes, but it had the situational humor of the bad scripts above, only with a story that makes sense and compelling, reasonably unique characters. The setup is pretty convoluted, but it’s surprisingly well-thought-out, as are the gags that litter the second and third acts. Is it sad that one of the best comedies I read this fall is aimed at potheads?

With that out of my system, I’ll shut up about comedies forever. Until February. March at the latest.

*Before I get a bunch of e-mails from idiots, I will point out that yes, there is certainly a difference between funny on the page and funny on the screen. In my experience, this is primarily the case with visual gags or ironic cutaways. It’s much more common to run across pure “funny dialogue” scenes that, no matter how many times you re-read it, no matter how hard you try to put inflections on different words or time the setup and response to derive some kind of humor from it, you come up short. You can’t fix that by going out and shooting it as-is — if something is funny on the page but not on the screen, you say, “Uh-oh,” and either cut or reshoot; if something was never funny on the page, but you try to go ahead and shoot it as-is, you wind up with Juno. [Back]

Posted by Stan on November 21, 2008 9:17 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

November 23, 2008

Flamer

After some dabbling, I’ve made it a policy to not post on messageboards. I’ve noticed three possible outcomes of posting as a newbie: you’re either totally ignored, flamed by longtime posters (especially if you have a dissenting opinion), or you end up saying something you think is totally innocuous but is taken way too seriously by other posters, leading to more emotional drama than you should need from people you haven’t met. But I’m getting old(er) and (more) curmudgeonly, so when I stumbled across a forum that references this old post, I got mad. And I decided I would flame, because I’m mean and petty and I was a little bored.

This was the forum post:

Taking the post on its own, without the context of the three previous pages of posts, I concluded that this dude was taking a potshot at me. I got a little hung up on starting it with “But,” because what the hell? I scrolled up, but none of the previous posts indicated any kind of context that he was responding to anyone — it came out of thin air, so when I glanced at the location (Skien, Norway), I figured, “Eh, maybe he’s just not great with English.”

And I was pissed. For reasons enumerated in the finely crafted flame below:

Quoting ‘jostber’ on Nov 13 2008, 11:04AM:

But these “Smart Girls” lyrics are a bit dubious:
http://www.stanhasissues.com/archives/2007…worst_song.html

Dubious they might be, but don’t say I didn’t warn you, jackass:

Quoting ‘Stan Has Issues&trade’:

Lyrics (approximated based on what I’m hearing; if you hear him saying something different, drop a comment and I’ll correct it):

It’s not like I passed this off as something I copied directly from Dr. Eugene Landy’s original, vomit-stained lyric sheet. I went back through and noticed a couple of misspellings (“plain” instead of “plane” — WHERE DO I GET THE BALLS?!), but I still hear all the words the same way. Why don’t you do what I ask rather than scoffing at me on some fruity jazz message board? I’m an asshole, but I hate being wrong. If I agreed with what you’re hearing, I’d change the lyrics without question, as I clearly stated.

Or maybe you didn’t read that part because you were too busy trolling for the MP3 I had to delete because too many fruity jazz message boards were direct-linking to it instead of referring to the post. In your infinite disappointment, you settled on linking to said post with a condescending remark about my ability to hear and transcribe slurred words nearly drowned out by a thunderous and terrible synth beat. I’m not putting illegal MP3s up out of the kindness of my goddamn heart. Learn how to read or keep your mouth shut about my ability to write.

I was ready to post this, man. I signed up to the forum, I pored through previous and later posts, and I knew it was absolutely the right move to make. I didn’t realize that his “dubious” remark was a callback to himself, from eleven posts and four hours earlier. In fact, I stumbled across them by accident, because not even his posting history clarified it: he had several posts — including one in this same thread — between an earlier remark (“I think those lyrics are pretty cool. :)”) and his later remark.

Such bizarre, weird separations exist between the two posts that I could be in denial and the two posts have nothing to do with each other. I do believe this to be the case, however, and now I have an affliction I can only call “flaming blue balls.” Hold on, let me check Urban Dictionary to make sure that isn’t some kind of homophobia-related disorder. Okay, looks good. “Flaming blue balls” — because I wanted to flame, I had a great one going, but at the last possible moment, the forum said, “No, baby. I’m not ready for this.” By which I mean, this jostber dude was spared by posting too many times on the same page and was lucky his initial, Jethro Tull-related post was on the same page as the “dubious” remark.

But one day, gentle readers, I will flame, and you will bare witness to the glut of traffic and comments I’ve secretly yearned for since bashing Juno lo, these many months ago.

Posted by Stan on November 23, 2008 4:26 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation