Screw The Cat, Save The Film

Have you noticed that most films are starting to feel eerily similar? There’s a reason for that. Some years back, a man named Blake Snyder wrote a book about screenwriting called “Save the Cat”, and many people blame that book. This has resulted in a specific problem that drives me nuts. Let’s discuss.

From the things I’ve read, “Save the Cat” proved to be an incredibly successful screenwriting book because it took a novel approach. Whereas most screenwriting books talk about things like how to develop characters, how to weave themes into your story, and the importance of crafting a climax, “Save the Cat” was different. “Save the Cat” laid out the specific formula the writer could follow to make a competent movie, everything from what elements each film must include to the order of the events and the number of pages each element should take in the screenplay.

Many people say this book caught fire in Hollywood and most films since 2006 have been written using the formulas and models include in the book... everything from romances to action films to science fiction films. Hence, many people blame this book for the increasing formularization of films.

Anyway, one of the ideas buried in this formularization is that the writer should always increase the challenge to the hero at every possible step. Unfortunately, while this sounds like good advice, it rarely is. In fact, what you end up with are films filled with scenes like this:

Step One: Villain escapes hero, runs into street, carjacks a car, and drives away.
Step Two: Hero chases villain. Hero also carjacks a car to catch villain.
Step Three: Hero discovers that the person he threw from the car took the key. Hero must stop and hotwire car.
Step Four: Hero starts driving. Now hero discovers that he has a flat tire. Hero must fix tire or steal another car.
Step Five: Luckily, the villain is held up in traffic.
Step Six: Hero fixes tire issue and starts moving. Engine starts smoking. Hero opens hood and see engine is dead. Must now get another car.
Step Seven: Villain now delayed by some new event.
Step Eight: Hero races after villain, but drawbridge goes up. Hero cannot jump bridge and must steal a boat.
Step Nine: Hero races boat out into water, but boat is out of gas. Hero must now swim. Hero reaches other side of river.
Step Ten: Villain sees hero and drives on sidewalk to get away from hero.
Step Eleven: Hero chases villain on sidewalk. Two guys with pain of glass walk in front of him, as does woman with baby carriage, and three nuns on a mercy mission, and falling meteorite.
Step Twelve: Villain barely escapes.

Exciting, right? Ha. Hardly. This is crap. Observe the audience’s thought process. They are excited by the chase to come. They love the idea that both have carjacked cars and will now race through the streets of Paris. They expect an exciting chase. Now the hero runs into “the key issue.” This actually adds to the suspense because it causes the audience to worry that the hero can’t make it.

Then it starts to go wrong. The hero has the flat tire. Suddenly, a hint of unbelievability enters the audience’s mind. Rather than seeing this as a tension raiser, they realize that it is highly unlikely that the key and the flat tire will occur at once. Now comes a real sin: the villain is held up in traffic. We know this was a fake decision by the filmmaker to keep the hero competitive in this race.

And that’s not the end. Nope. It keeps coming. Now we have the engine trouble. The odds of adding engine trouble to a missing key and flat tire are unbelievable low. And having the villain now delayed by some new event is simply not credible. Then the hero runs into the drawbridge issue and you suddenly realize, “This is nonsense. This is just the writing throwing up any challenge they can think of for the hero, whether it makes sense or not.” And it doesn’t stop there, it just keeps coming and coming.

By the time this sequence is over, you feel like the writer thinks you’re an idiot. You are bored to tears by the banality of the obstacles and you’ve completely lost your suspension of disbelief because the odds of this sequence of events happening is close to 0%. It feels like an unfunny comedy routine.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a theoretical issue either. I’m seeing more and more movies that feel this way. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was a huge offender in this regard, as was A Good Day To Die Hard. In both movies, you had these never-ending chase scenes where the writer simply threw up one obstacle after another at every single step. I’m sure they thought they were making it more dramatic, but after the first couple obstacles, it just became torture.

Let me reach into a different “genre” to complete the point. The greatest audience tease in the history of the world was Hulk Hogan. Hogan did the exact same routine in show after show, yet you fell for it every... single... time. And having seen him live, I can tell you that I’ve never seen another human being having more control over an audience than Hogan. What he understood, i.e. why this worked, was exactly how much abuse the audience could watch him take to get the maximum anguish from the audience without losing them to boredom. THAT is what filmmakers need to grasp. They need to understand that there is a point with an audience where all the frustration reaches its peak and you must let the hero prevail. If you don’t, then you go from an asskicking moment to a moment where the hero feels bumbling.

The problem with the formula is that it ignores this vital point. It just wrongly assumes that the more obstacles you can create, the higher the tension. That’s just not true, just like it’s not true that all stories can be told using the same formula. Hollywood needs to stop relying on theory and start relying on feel. No more stupid chase scenes where random things keep happening. No more final fights that last so lost most people are praying for it to end. No more wedging every round and oval and star-shaped peg into the same square hole.

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Why World War Z Is Probably Doomed

There have been quite a few articles warning us that Brad Pitt’s World War Z will be a dud... a bomb... a flatulent schnauzer. It wouldn’t surprise me. What’s interesting though is the reason they think it will be a bomb compared to why I think it will be a bomb. They are, of course, wrong.

WWZ is a zombie movie. It’s based on a novel by Max Brooks and the story is basically about the UN trying to stop the outbreak. Yeah, I know there’s more to it... ask me if I care and you can find out all you want about it here => LINK. Seriously, aren’t we done with zombies yet? There’s a million fricken zombie movies already and they’re all the same! A retarded chimpanzee with a camcorder can made a zombie movie these days! Why make another one? &^#%$%$! I am looking forward to it.

Anyhoo, Brad Pitt is producing this turkey and it’s been a mess. In particular, the ending as originally shot was considered abrupt and incoherent and it left the studio in shock. Paramount Studio President Marc Evans described it thusly, “It was like, ‘Wow, the ending of our movie doesn’t work!’” So they went about re-shooting it. They spent between $15 and $20 million to re-shoot the ending and now production costs have blown past $200 million into Battleship and John Carter territory (another $125 million will be spent on marketing). Sadly for them, most everyone apparently agrees that they made the ending worse.

As an aside, they say they needed to re-shoot “the ending,” but they apparently re-shot 40 minutes of film. That’s more than just the ending, that’s a whole new film!

So now Wall Street thinks the film is doomed because it had production problems which caused cost overruns. Hence, no one will see it. Hollywood types think the film is doomed because it now has a reputation for being a bad film. Hence, no one will see it. Personally, I don’t buy it. The public doesn’t care about production management, they just care about the quality of the film. As for the perception of the film being lousy, that won’t kill the film either... if it’s good. What that will do is cause audiences to move slowly and to wait to hear word of mouth. If the film passes that test, it will do well. If it doesn’t, it will bomb. In fact, they can probably save the advertising money because studio ads won’t matter at this point.

Anyway, I think the film will probably bomb. And what tells me that is this one idea that keeps popping up about why they needed to re-shoot the ending. Said one insider on the topic:

“The original ending was meant to launch a trilogy, but it took Pitt’s character down an obvious hero path — battling zombies mano-a-corpse in Russia — and it was implausible and unsatisfying.”

Do you notice any key words of doom in that? How about “was meant to launch the trilogy.” Yep. Screwed. When you set out with the idea of using your current product as a means to sell people more stuff in the future, you are asking for trouble. People go to movies because they want to see stories, they don’t go because they want to be prepped for future shakedowns.

This reeks of Golden Compassism. That was a film that (putting aside all its other garbage) failed at a fundamental level because the story never engaged the audience because it was constantly setting up sequels. . . sequels that never came, mind you. It constantly felt like they were showing you things and telling you, “Ok, well, that doesn’t matter now, but remember it for the sequels, will ya?” Forget it! Audience want everything in a movie to wrap up in that movie. Yes, your villain can escape in the sequel and start over again, but he needs to be stopped in this film. Yes, sometimes like in Empire Strikes Back, your resolution can call out for a sequel. But you can’t treat a film as a primer for future films. Audience’s don’t want to feel like they just paid to see part of a film. And if that’s the case with WWZ, then audience will stay home.

Indeed, I am hard-pressed to think of a single time when this model has worked where a film is merely a set up for future films. Perhaps, the only time it’s worked is Back to the Future II and that not only angered many people, but it was already a sequel working with characters the audience had learned to love in the first film, so it wasn’t as jarring to be told there would be more. The Lord of the Rings worked too, but that seems like it’s a special case as that’s a widely beloved trilogy of books that just contain too much to do as a single film. I don’t see WWZ having that kind of cache with the public, nor do I see what can’t be done in two hours in a zombie film.

If Team Pitt set out to make a third of a film and pass it off as a complete film (with two sequels coming) then he’s a fool. He should have made this a television series where people look less for a complete story and instead look for relationships with characters.

Thoughts? Zombies, sequels?

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How To Outsmart Your Audience

Modern audiences have become too sophisticated to be surprised. They know all the clichés and they understand the mechanics of storytelling on film too well. But there are some tricks you can use to create genuine mysteries which will keep your audience interested.

Here’s the problem. Audiences understand movie mechanics. If you see something, it matters at the end. A gun in the first frame means someone dies later. When a character tells you something, it will become relevant. If the hero’s father vanished when he was young, you know there will be a mystery old guy who just happens to be the father. Characters also have stereotypical motivations. A businessman will always go for money. A mother will always go for family. Ghosts want their remains given a proper burial. Cocky jocks are cowards or gay. And if a character has a flaw, they will need to overcome that particular flaw to win the movie. . . every single time. This is how films work and audiences know it. That makes it hard to surprise audiences because they can pretty much outline your movie the moment they see the setup.

So how do you get around this? The most obvious solution is to create something new that audiences haven’t seen before. Most of the great films of recent vintage involve new storylines that haven’t been done before. But originality is tricky and dangerous. Audience cling to the familiar even as they claim they want originality. So how else can you surprise your audience? How about this:

● A Genuine Twist: Probably the best way to turn a predictable film unpredictable is to give the film a genuine twist. I don’t mean a stupid twist. . . “the bad guy is really your boss! Oh my!” No. Instead, a genuine twist is something that fundamentally changes the nature of the narrative of the story.

Think about what made the twist in Sixth Sense or Fight Club or Usual Suspects so effective. In each instance, the twist change the way the story needed to be viewed at a fundamental level by changing the nature of the character through whose eyes we saw the film. Basically, everything we knew up to that point was suddenly cast in doubt and a whole new meaning was attached to every minute of the film. So long as the story works under both realities (pre- and post- twist), this is the perfect way to create a genuine surprise.

As an aside, the problem with lousy twists like making the main character’s boss be the bad guy is that this does nothing more than solve the supposed mystery. It doesn’t change the narrative in any way that requires a re-examination of what the audience believed to be true.

● Twist the Mystery: Unfortunately, coming up with a genuine twist can be difficult, especially in less fantastic genres. So a second alternative would be to start out creating a particular mystery, but then twist that into a second mystery. And example of this might be uncovering a larger force behind the one your characters are initially investigating.

The benefit here is that this adds a surprise to the film right at the point where the film normally has worn out its interest factor. It also lets you raise the stakes, which always helps. Moreover, because this happens later in the film, you can introduce the evidence to support this mystery quicker because you have less run time to fill, which makes the story feel faster paced.

All in all, this doesn’t have anywhere near the power of the genuine twist, but it gives you a way to mislead your audience into thinking they didn’t see the ending coming because they will perceive both mysteries as the same mystery even though the second doesn’t actually begin until late in the film.

● Delay: A related version to the idea of twisting the mysteries involves delaying the introduction of the mystery. This is probably best done in comedies where you can roam for a while before you need to start zeroing in on the storyline; in other genres, you run the risk of making the story feel rudderless. Alternatively, you can keep a mystery fresher by delaying the most obvious clues until very near the reveal. This will keep the audience from piecing everything together too quickly, but it runs the risk of making the feel audience cheated because they will feel they weren’t given a fair chance to figure out it.

● Twist the Clichés: Finally, we come to one of the easiest ways to make a story feel fresh: embrace the clichés that normally fill your genre, but twist them. An example of this might be to use the gun from the first frame in a completely unexpected way, like having the characters discover that it has no bullets and that they need to find some other solution, or having the obnoxious jock turn out to have the heart of gold, not the hooker. This works because it takes the expected and makes it unexpected. It unsettles the audience’s ability to rely on things they’ve seen in the past as a way to judge how this film will turn out and it puts them in uncharted territory right at the point where they feel they’ve solved the film and will lose interest.

This is one that surprises me that more films don’t do it. It’s a really easy way to both give an audience something familiar but then to surprise them in the end.

Anyway, if you ever do some writing or you want to think about how to improve films that just don’t quite get there, here are some ideas.

Thoughts? What would you add?

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A Fateful Moment In Star Wars

Since we're doing Questionable Star Wars these days, I decided to revive this article.

Today, I want to talk about one little scene at the beginning of Star Wars. It’s not a scene most people remember, and the two characters involved don’t even have names. But it presents us with an amazing “what if” scenario.

As I'm sure you know, the movie opens with an Imperial Star Destroyer attacking a rebel ship, supposedly a diplomatic shuttle from Alderaan. On board this ship is Princess Leia with stolen plans for the Imperial Death Star. On board the Star Destroyer is Darth Vader. After stopping the rebel ship, Imperial Stormtroopers board the rebel ship and capture the crew. During these events, Leia puts the plans to the Death Star into R2D2, and he and C-3PO head for an escape pod. Our scene takes place right after they launch the pod.

As the pod leaves the rebel ship and heads toward Tatooine, an unnamed Imperial trooper notices the escape pod and asks his commander if he should destroy the pod. The commander, in a decision that will bring down the Empire, decides that they don't need to bother because they scan no life signs in the pod.

If those two bozos had destroyed the pod, R2D2 would have been destroyed along with the plans that eventually allow the rebels to destroy the Death Star. Even more significantly, had R2D2 not reached the surface, there would have been no reason for Stormtroopers to kill Luke’s family, giving Luke no reason to leave Tatooine or to fight the Empire. Moreover, there would have been no reason for Ben Kenobi to begin training Luke -- seeing as how he never bothered to contact Luke until he tried to take R2D2 to Anchorhead to have his memory erased.

Thus, by not destroying the pod, these two unnamed troopers allow to be set into motion a series of events that will eventually bring down the entire Galactic Empire.

What’s even more interesting is that if Vader had not pursued Leia in the first place, there also would have been no reason for them to go to Tatooine and to bring Luke into the story. And since Luke is the one guy in the universe who can destroy the Death Star and ultimately bring down the Empire, Vader essentially sets into place the chain of events he's trying to prevent.

Cool huh?

Lots of movies have little moments like this that often go unnoticed, moments where some minor action on the part of an insignificant character either causes a series of events or fails to prevent a series of events that have galactic importance to the story, or moments where a character’s actions bring on the very events they are trying to stop.

I think it’s a clever bit of writing that inserts these sorts of moments into films because it adds a sense of irony and raises questions of fate. How would things have gone if these two troopers had fired? What if Vader hadn’t decided to chase Leia? What if these weren't the robots you are looking for? I think these are interesting questions for us because we are very good at seeing our mistakes in hindsight, but we're very bad at seeing the future consequences of our actions. Seeing this in film is a way to live vicariously. . . to wonder if we shouldn't have shot down a few more pods in our lifetime, or if maybe we aren’t causing our own problems?

Thoughts?

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Is Science Fiction A Genre?

Let’s play the semantics game. Should science fiction really be considered a genre? Or is it just a setting? I know science fiction fans are probably gasping right now or grabbing their pitch-lasers, but hear me out. I think this is important.

Here’s my thinking. Before we call something a genre, it should be able to stand on its own terms. For example, a romance film/book is about a romantic relation. A war film is about a war. Dramas are dramatic. Comedies are funny (though the original definition of comedy was basically just a drama with a happy ending). And so on. The point is that each of these genres is capable of defining itself and it does not need help from any other genre to create a complete story. In other words, a drama does not need to rely on a romance or a war or an action story to come up with a complete story that is dramatic. Romances, action films, even Westerns need not piggyback on any other genre either.

But science fiction is different. Most of what passes for science fiction does in fact need to piggyback on other genres. Indeed, in most science fiction movies, what you really get is a standard drama, romance, war film, action flick or some other genre being acted out with science fiction trappings. And when you think about these films, you quickly realize that the film could easily be de-science fictioned with little change.

Now it’s true that not all science fiction falls into this category. For example, some science fiction stories are specifically about science fiction events, like the effects of time travel or cloning or alien visitation or films about the exploration of black holes, wormholes or other natural but not common phenomena. But those films are surprisingly rare and often inject subplots from other genres to make them watchable. So should science fiction be considered it’s own genre?

Why does this matter, you ask? Well, I think it matters in particular to writers who may be considering writing science fiction. Unless you’re writing a specific science fiction plot, like a time loop, then you really should learn the rules of the other genres you need to piggyback upon. I think it also gives us another way to look at science fiction and to consider why so many science fiction films fail.

Interesting, huh?

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Great Scene: Poltergeist

Every once in awhile, a movie scene really stands out. Today I want to talk about such a scene. This is a truly brilliant speech from the film Poltergeist, where Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) the medium explains what has happened to Carol Anne. This speech is incredible. In fact, it makes THE film.

(I’ve reproduced the entire speech below, so you can read it.)

Up to this point, the film has set the viewer up perfectly for the climax to come. The film starts by introducing the family through a series of fun and insightful scenes. We are also told something supernatural is going on inside the house. At first, this involved comedic or mischievous moments, such as stacked chairs. But we also saw a more sinister side the family hadn’t, as a spectral arm reached out for Carol Anne one night. Then the force kidnapped Carol Anne.

At the time of this speech, we don't know yet what this force is or how malevolent it really is. We have hints. For example, kidnapping Carol Anne is not a good thing -- though it could just be she walked into another dimension and is lost as happened in a Twilight Zone. But we also saw the force put horrific images into the mind of one researcher. Yet, at the same time, the lead researcher explained to us that death is a beautiful experience and she gives a vision of tranquility, happiness and continuing life beyond. So is it evil? We don’t know yet, but we're about to find out.

As the speech begins, Tangina has just examined the house, telling us it has “many hearts,” meaning many centers of psychic activity. Now she gathers the family together.

She begins by telling us authoritatively the film’s philosophy of death. “There is no death, it is only a transition to a different sphere of consciousness.” This opening line is so layered and full of things to consider that it could actually form the basis of an entire movie. It also brilliantly puts the audience at ease and opens the part of our brains which do deep, philosophical thoughts. In other words, this line makes you receptive to profound thoughts, which will cause the horror to come from much deeper within your psyche than if she started with “there’s a monster,” which makes your brain defensive. It is also calming, which creates a greater contrast (i.e. more emotion) as we transition to horror.

She then explains how Carol Anne is alive and how she doesn’t belong where she is. In fact, she’s a bit of a road hazard because she’s distracting dead souls from a guiding light where happiness awaits. Tangina also subtly shifts the afterlife from happy to sad by telling us these souls “desperately desire but can’t have anymore” things like “love and home and earthly pleasures.” The writer has now triggered happiness, peace, reflectiveness and sadness within the audience. In effect, the writer is forcing the audience to become highly emotional. This shuts down the logic center of your brain and turns on the emotional part, which primes you to feel fear.

Then we get our first hint of horror, as Tangina tells us this state of death is actually “a nightmare from which [these souls] cannot awake.”

Now comes the key line: “Now hold onto yourselves.” This line changes the entire feel of the movie. Up to now, everything has been vague. It’s been more about curiosity than it has fear and it’s only offered suggestions of apprehension. This line screams: get tense! I honestly cannot think of a more effective line to cause the audience to stop breathing and brace themselves for the reveal.

With the audience set up, the reveal better be huge. It is. But it’s huge because the writer doesn’t actually do the reveal right away. He could have said, “It’s the beast!” And you would think that was cool, but you'd be disappointed. Instead, he teases the audience and builds the reveal up bit by bit. It is “a terrible presence,”, telling us to fear it. It is “so much rage, so much betrayal.” At this point, you still have no idea what it is, but you can already imagine it's horrible and evil. There is no doubt this is a scary thing.

Then Tangina tells us how strong it is by saying both that “I’ve never sensed anything like it,” meaning this is truly unique, and “it was strong enough to punch a hole into this world and take your daughter.” How strong must something be to “punch a hole” into our world? This is a freak out moment and you still don't know what it is. And she’s not done. She tells us we’re helpless against it by telling us “it hovers over the house,” i.e. it’s been here the whole time watching you and you can’t see it or stop it. Scary!

So it’s finally time for the reveal, right? Not quite. The writer now strikes even deeper. First, he tells us “it keeps Carol Anne very close to it,” which gives us images of some vile dead thing wrapping itself around this child. And then the writer plays on the fear of all parents, that someone will exploit their child’s greatest weakness -- their inability to reason like adults: “it lies to her. It says things only a child can understand.” This is a brilliant line because the writer never has to come up with any specific lies, which would inevitably disappoint. It also adds to the creature’s menace because how do you fight something that knows your child better than you?

Then Tangina ups the stakes by telling us that it is using Carol Anne to “restrain the others.” Think about this for a second. It has punched a hole into our reality and taken Carol Anne for the purpose of using her to keep souls from finding their way to God. That is an incredibly dark motive!

Then we get the reveal: “To her it simply is another child. To us it is the beast.” Wow! Now we know we're up against a chilling, unbeatable foe. But interestingly, we still don't really know what it is. This is fantastic writing because the biggest disappointment in horror films is the reveal of the nature of the horror. Here, the horror is never really revealed. We know its traits and what it wants, but we never really get told what it is -- all we get are suggestions of a monster and we are left to fill in all the details. This is brilliant.

Then the speech finishes with a fascinating fake-out. Tangina says: “Now let's go get your daughter.” This is a fake out because it implies the climax to the film has come. They will fight the beast, defeat it and all will end happily. . . as it appears to do. But the credits don’t start rolling. Instead, much worse is suddenly unleashed into our world and the end of the film provides a completely unexpected second climax. And the only reason it’s unexpected is because Tangina just built up the first fight into a climax with that one line.

This is incredible writing. This is the kind of scene writers should examine to see how to build suspense and change the tone of a film. The writer here does everything right and then some. Bravo!

There is no death. It is only a transition to a different sphere of consciousness.

Carol Anne is not like those she's with. She is a living presence in their spiritual, earthbound plane. They're attracted to the one thing about her that is different from themselves: her life force.

It is very strong. It gives off its own illumination. It is a light that implies life and memory of love and home and earthly pleasures something they desperately desire but can't have anymore.

Right now, she's the closest thing to that and that is a terrible distraction from the real light that has finally come for them. Do you understand me? These souls, who, for whatever reason are not at rest are also not aware that they have passed on. They're not part of consciousness as we know it. They linger in a perpetual dream state a nightmare from which they cannot awake.

Inside this spectral light is salvation. A window to the next plane. They must pass through this membrane where friends are waiting to guide them to new destinies. Carol Anne must help them cross over. And she will only hear her mother's voice.

Now hold onto yourselves.

There's one more thing. A terrible presence is in there with her. So much rage, so much betrayal. I've never sensed anything like it. I don't know what hovers over this house but it was strong enough to punch a hole into this world and take your daughter away from you.

It keeps Carol Anne very close to it and away from the spectral light. It lies to her. It says things only a child can understand. It has been using her to restrain the others.

To her it simply is another child. To us it is the beast.
Now let's go get your daughter.

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Villains?! We Don't Need No Stinking Villains!

We’ve spoken a couple times about the need to create conflict in stories. The easiest way to create conflict is to introduce a villain. A villain is a character who acts maliciously and spends the film either trying to destroy the hero or doing something evil which the hero must try to stop. Lately, all Hollywood films have villains. But you don’t actually need a villain.

In fact, if you look back at AFI’s Top 100 films, you will see something amazing. The list is dominated by films without anything that we think of as a true villain. For example, Citizen Kane has no villain, nor does The African Queen, Lawrence of Arabia, The Graduate, My Fair Lady, 12 Angry Men, The Jazz Singer, Gone With the Wind or dozens more. Sometimes there are jerks who happened along, like in Easy Rider or Grapes of Wrath, but these are hardly “villains.” Similarly, sometimes the “villain” is just something nebulous without true villainous motives -- like the government in E.T.. And honestly, who is the real villain in The Caine Mutiny?

Interestingly, these films are all older. As you come to the modern era, most films suddenly have villains. I’m not sure why. Maybe this is bad writing or maybe the public mood has changed. . . maybe they think we’re simpletons? In any event, few films today go without a villain.

So let’s look at some films which don’t have clear villains and see if you’re surprised:

● Goodfellas: You would think Goodfellas would have a villain. After all, it’s crawling with killers who keep turning on each other. Plus, there is the constant threat the cops will come swooping in or that a rival mafia family will go to war with our heroes. But there is no true villain who is actively plotting throughout the film to do in the hero. . . there are just a lot of dangerous people in his life.

● Apocalypse Now: I’m kidding right? Of course Apocalypse Now has a villain, we can even name him: Kurtz. But Kurtz is no villain. Kurtz is the object of Willard’s mission. Kurtz doesn’t even know Willard exists until the end of the film and then he really doesn’t care. Moreover, Willard doesn’t see him as a villain, only as something mystical. The closest you get to a villain here is the sense that the North Vietnamese Army is out there somewhere ready to kill Willard if they run across him, but they are irrelevant to the plot.

● Pulp Fiction: This is a fascinating film because while almost every scene is crawling with very bad people and they are all opposed to each other, we actually like most of them and none of them fit the villain mold. The only character(s) who truly come to mind as villains are the hillbilly perverts, but again, they only appear in one scene near the end of the film and they only matter because the heroes stumble into their store. They did not spend the movie trying to bring down the heroes, nor was the hero's film-goal to stop them. What is more interesting though is that some of the characters, like Ving Rhames’s character Marsellus Wallace and Samuel L. and John Travolta, are villains in some scenes but heroes in other scenes.

● Close Encounters: The closest this film comes to having a villain is the military, which tries to keep Dreyfuss from getting to Devil’s Tower. But they aren’t villains. Their motives are decent, they don’t want to hurt anyone, and all they want is a little privacy. If Richard Dreyfuss leaves them alone, then will leave him alone. That does not a villain make even though they are presented ominously throughout the film. Equally interestingly, once Dreyfuss makes it to the landing site, they actually don’t even try to punish him.

● The Sixth Sense: This movie is incredible on so many levels and one of them is the absence of a villain. In fact, the closest we come here is just the boy’s fear of the ghosts he sees. They don’t want to hurt him. In fact, they need his help. So what starts out as a film seemingly about a supernatural villain turns into a non-villain film.

Finally, a twist. . .

● Inception: This is the one most people point to as a film without a villain. Yet, it has one: Mal. She’s not a great villain because the plot doesn’t center around her, but her purpose throughout the film is to disrupt everything Cobb tries. . . that makes her a very modern villain. Frankly, I think the idea Inception doesn’t have a villain is PR, much like the claim that Seinfeld “was a show about nothing” -- it was actually like every other sitcom (indeed it was basically Friends) only with unlikable people.

It’s interesting that so many modern films rely on easy villains. Maybe this is why so many modern films aren’t very good, because they aren’t good at creating conflict and need to fake it by adding an evil nemesis. There is a lesson here: great stories don’t have villains. And I think the reason for that is that they have something real to say about human conflict.

What other films without villains can you think of?

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How Not To Create Conflict

Drama derives from the decision-making process. More specifically drama derives from the conflict that must be resolved in the decision-making process. The greater the conflict, i.e. the more difficult the choice, the greater the drama. This isn't a difficult concept. Yet, so many films fail right at this point because they don’t grasp how to establish the legitimate competing interests that make the decision difficult. Let’s look at two recent SciFi films that failed in this regard.

The first film was on the SciFi Channel (yes, I refuse to acknowledge the lame name change) a couple weeks ago. In Morlocks (a rip off of the BBC show Primeval), Robert Picardo plays a Colonel who has been tasked with using a time travel machine to steal technology from the future to help American competitiveness. . . I guess Steve Job’s death was more serious than we thought.

Picardo sends a team a few years into the future, who learn both that humanity has been destroyed by evil creatures and that Picardo will create these evil creatures using DNA brought back from the future. Sounds like fixing this is a no-brainer, right? Just don’t breed the creatures and everything will go fine. Except, Picardo’s son is dying and that DNA could be used to treat his son. That’s the conflict. Oy.

We’re supposed to believe Picardo becomes so blinded by the possibility of saving his son that he’s willing to destroy the planet. But this isn’t a genuine conflict for two reasons. First, whether Picardo acts or not, his son will die. If Picardo does nothing, then his son dies of cancer. If Picardo breeds the creatures, then everyone including his son dies and gets eaten. That’s not a genuine conflict because both choices lead to the exact same result: a dead son. Will he have broccoli OR broccoli? Ooh, the suspense!

Secondly, the writers completely fail to grasp another critical aspect of creating a conflict: the choices need to be the only choices. Unless Picardo is entirely retarded, he will try to find some third alternative, e.g. destroying the DNA to change the future and then continuing with his mission. So the conflict here isn’t even between death by cancer or death by mauling, it’s between death v. death v. trying something else. That makes the whole set up false and robs this choice of any legitimacy.

The other film was called Doomsday (it’s since been renamed Annihilation Earth). This movie features Star Trek TNG’s Marina Sirtis doing one of the worst southern accents ever... it will make your ears bleed it's that bad. The basic premise was that some evil company built a series of reactors around the world using some new technology. The reactor in France blows up, goes all black holey and wipes out southern France. If the hero can’t solve what has caused this glitch, the other reactors will blow in a chain reaction and will destroy the planet.

To solve what happened, the hero must venture to southern France. As he goes, he comes across a dirty little French girl who has skinned her knee and lost her mommy. Here comes our conflict. He’s under a severe time limit, yet he and the other characters fight over whether they should stop and help the girl or continue with their mission. Baaaah!! This isn’t a legitimate choice because the two options are so ridiculously unbalanced that only an idiot would have any problem making this decision. His choices are either to comfort the girl until the planet explodes or to save the planet. How can there be any question? This is like debating if you should stop to buy a Band-Aid for a paper cut while you’re rushing to the hospital to get your massive heart attack treated.

This moment was meant to inject drama into what was otherwise nothing more than a travel scene. It was also supposed to give us the character’s bona fides as a caring hero. But what it really tells us is the filmmakers are clueless. They can’t distinguish true dilemmas from fake dilemmas and they have no idea how a hero would (or should) act at a key moment of crisis. The fact they chose this to create drama is pathetic.

I see these kinds of stupid choices strewn throughout films. Fake conflict is created by characters inexplicably being unwilling to speak the truth when asked despite there being no negative consequences to doing so, or inexplicably being unable to reschedule dates or meetings, or somehow thinking their only choices are fight or flee when they really have a plethora of options. If a decision doesn’t make sense, it’s not dramatic. And if there are better options out there, you need to explain why those can’t be chosen by the character. Moreover, you can’t simply set any two choices against each other, the choices you pick for your character to agonize over need to be the kinds of choices that would actually force some indecision.

So often we focus on how bad writers and bad directors use deus ex machina or happy coincidences as a way to solve their characters’ problems, but the real fault begins with the inability to construct legitimate conflicts in the first place. If your characters are facing legitimately difficult decisions, then you won’t need to rely on coincidence or divine intervention to solve your crises.

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Writing Crutch: The Crooked Friend/Partner!

The other day I watched a film called The Confessor staring Christian Slater. As murder mysteries go, it was an ok film that started well, but lost momentum with every major decision the writer made. But what killed me was the ending when the writer reached for one of the worst writing crutches in the book.

** spoiler alert. . . yada yada yada**

To give you a quick thumbnail of the plot, the story involves a priest who is accused of murder. He asks to see another priest, Christian Slater, who has very little faith and spends his time handling church public relations. When the accused priest apparently kills himself while in jail, the church becomes intent on burying the whole thing because the priest was gay and suicide is bad for business. But Slater doesn’t want to let it go because he believes the priest was innocent and he doesn’t believe the priest killed himself.

Naturally, Slater somehow convinces the skeptical church to let him take over the parish. Once there, he tries to solve the murder and himself becomes a suspect in a follow up murder. Then the killer reveals himself by trying to kill Slater and. . . this is the part that just annoys me to no end. . . the killer is Slater’s best friend!!! Argh.

I am so sick of this.

In dozens of movies, the bad guy turns out to be the cop’s partner or the hero’s best friend or the guy’s boss. I think it was even a girlfriend once. It’s so common now that it's become a horrible cliché, and it’s sloppy, lazy, incompetent writing at its worst. Indeed, the main reason writers choose this path is because they don’t know how else to surprise the viewer. They don’t know how to introduce the killer among the list of suspects without the audience spotting them immediately. So they select the one person you can’t logically suspect.

And why can’t you logically suspect this person? Because it makes no sense.

Consider the standard bad cop scenario. The hero spends 12-14 hours every day with their partner because that’s what cliché Hollywood relationships require -- you’re either at work with your partner or at a bar with your partner after work. And when the hero isn’t with the partner, we’re told the partner has a wife and child, with whom they spend more time. That doesn’t leave enough time in the day to become a city drug lord or get involved in these massively complex criminal enterprises.

Moreover, how stupid does this make the hero? In all the time the hero spends with this guy he never sees anything? Not one odd phone call, not one off the cuff comment, not one bad guy identifies the partner as the city's biggest drug lord or pimp, the partner/friend doesn’t seem to suddenly be awash in cash or bling? Nothing, huh?

Or consider Schwarzenegger in Eraser, where his boss turns out to be the bad guy. Schwarzenegger and the rest of the Witness Relocation Program are losing witness after witness and the only person who knew where each witness was happens to be Arnies’ boss, but brilliant Arnold can’t see it even though he could decipher vast global conspiracies with the smallest of hints? How could he have missed the obvious?

This is just wrong.

What's more, the writers who do this never provide any clues to the audience that the friend/boss is crooked until they reveal themselves? Why? Because the writer doesn't know how to provide such clues without giving the whole thing away. But in real life, these people get caught all the time because they give off clues left and right. . . creepy behavior, too many coincidences, a pattern of disappearance, errant phone messages, failed polygraph tests, snitches, spending money they shouldn’t have, etc. But not in Hollywood. In Hollywood they are entirely beyond reproach until they are ready to reveal themselves -- then everybody knows about it except the hero. That's cheating by the writer and it's pathetic.

Mystery writing is difficult if you do it right. This is doing it wrong. This is cheating. This is the same as introducing the villains ten seconds before the reveal. Writers need to stop doing this. And if you find you can’t do that, then you should rethink your whole story because it’s obviously crap.

What other writing "short cuts" (to be generous) drive you crazy?

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Rules for Writing Fiction

Last week, I mentioned that I’ve been writing a couple books. In that discussion, I said that part of what inspired me to write was to see if I could do it while following a set of rules to avoid what I considered cheating by other authors. A couple people asked to see these rules, so here they are.

The first set is designed to avoid the things I consider “cheating”:

(i) No changing the reader’s “access” by letting the reader see everything the main character is thinking and then withdrawing that access at critical moments to generate tension or deceive the reader. It’s either all or nothing. I chose “nothing” because tension comes from uncertainty, i.e. not knowing what people are really thinking or how they will ultimately act.

(ii) No deus ex machina moments and no coincidences to move the plot. If a character tosses a jacket into a dumpster, that jacket does not somehow get to the cops five states away for use at trial for a crime no one even knows about yet.

(iii) Cause and effect. There can be no effect without a cause, and no cause without an effect. Every effect must be a logical consequence of the cause AND every cause must suffer its logical effects.

(iv) Characters must act consistently with their own values, beliefs and interests. They cannot act out of character to move the plot, and they cannot act in ways humans won’t. Also, characters have a full range of motivations, e.g. their own happiness, morality, job requirements, pride, greedy, guilt, etc.; nobody acts according to one motivation only. Characters also evolve over time as the consequences of their actions come home to them.

(v) Use real trial procedures, not Hollywood trial procedures. No breakdowns on the stand, no last minute surprise discoveries or hidden witnesses, no fake trials that last weeks and take breaks after critical witnesses to give the characters a chance to investigate their testimony, and no “this is highly unusual, but I’ll allow it” rulings.

(vi) No supermen. Nobody is all knowing or all powerful, and nobody can read minds. Average people don’t kill in cold blood, can’t climb buildings, and can’t bend people to their will Jedi-style.

(vii) Everything important needs to be foreshadowed at least twice.

(viii) NO Star Trek TNG Deanna Troi moments: “I sense he has the following personality....” Character traits are revealed through the character’s actions, not by stating them.

Beyond the “no cheating” rules, I also set some stylistic rules that may interest you:

(ix) No filler. No wasted words, no irrelevant discussions, and no scenes that don’t develop the plot or an important character traits.

(x) The reader should be able to understand each scene from the dialog alone, i.e. what the characters are doing and thinking, and where they are.

(xi) Avoid long blocks of text, and avoid information dumps. Specifically avoid describing characters by giving blocks of physical description. Whenever possible, describe characters through something they are doing and/or in relative terms rather than absolute terms, e.g. “Unlike George, Bill was too short to reach the light bulb.”

(xii) Every character needs to be real enough that people think they know what the character is probably doing when they aren’t on the page, and that the reader can tell if they are acting out of character.

(xiii) Each characters needs their own dialog style, word choice, and beliefs.

(xiv) I also got the truly excellent advice of dropping as many adverbs (quickly, angrily, etc.) as possible, as they are meaningless.

Finally, there were three things I wanted to do within the story.

(1) First, I wanted real-realism, not Hollywood realism, particularly with regard to the choices the characters face and how courts work. I really wanted people to get a sense of how it felt to go through a trial, and what it would be like dealing with people you can’t trust. Interestingly, I found this made the plot move in interesting ways and it let me exploit clichés by twisting expectations. It also made the characters more real -- several of my readers even reported strong reactions to different characters I hadn’t expected.

(2) Secondly, I wanted to infuse a lot of philosophy, but to do it in subtle ways throughout the story so the casual reader wouldn’t notice.

(3) Finally, I wanted to leave the characters’ physical descriptions as minimal as possible (without appearing to do so), so readers could insert their own preconceptions. Nothing kills a story quicker for me than having a character described in ways that don’t fit how I expect them to look: “What do you mean the President looks like that guy from ZZ Top?”

So what would you add to the list (or subtract)? Thoughts?

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Writing The Great American Novel(s)

I’ve been doing a little writing lately. Specifically, I’ve written a legal thriller, and I’m in the middle of a second. I’ve got one more to go, and then I plan to switch to science fiction for a while.

It seems that every American is working on their own novel. Indeed, it’s the rare person I’ve met who hasn’t got at least a basic idea of what they’d like to write, and interestingly, everyone has a different reason for wanting to write. Some have a story they want to tell. Some want to understand themselves. Some want to strike it rich as writers. Some just have the writing bug, or they love the idea of creating something.

I started writing the first novel because I wanted to see if I could do it. I’ve read a lot of books and seen a lot of films in the past, and several things kept bothering me. Too many authors cheated. They let their readers into a character’s mind right until they needed to generate tension, then they cut the reader off. Others created characters whose sole purpose was to push the hero through the plot. Ron Weasley falls into this category in Harry Potter; he acts according to the demands of the plot rather than according to his own interests and beliefs. Other authors routinely rely on deus ex machina or incredible coincidences to make their plots work. This bothered me.

But criticism is one thing and creation is another, so I drew up my complaints as a list of rules and I set out to see if I could write a book without violating these rules. Yep, I did that thing.

By now I’m writing because it’s addictive to create worlds and immerse characters into them, though I find I still need to set challenges for myself. Besides my list of rules, I challenged myself to include some pretty big philosophical points in the first book, but not so that casual readers would notice. The second book needs to give a realistic portrayal of how much attorneys work in the dark about the true motives and intents of their clients and of the other side, and how little they can be sure of about what really happened. Plus, I’m trying to build a genuine mystery where all the clues are constantly there, but the reader just won't assemble them until the end. Another challenge I’m looking forward too will be making one of the science fiction stories into a comedy, without it being a wacky comedy or slapstick (which I also find to be cheating).

The more I've written, the more I’ve discovered some interesting things. I found, for example, that my characters became independent, sometimes annoyingly so. As the stories progressed, they took on real personalities, and I found they wouldn’t always do what I wanted them to do. That meant new plot twists and actually kept me guessing how things would turn out. Indeed, strangely, I found my opinions about several characters changing. Some became more sympathetic, some less so. Some I even felt probably deserved their own books.

I also discovered that the more time I spent building these characters, the easier it became to see how other authors built theirs. Did they just toss them into the story to satisfy the plot (JK Rowling)? Were they designed to hit certain plot points (Stephen King)? Were they all the same character, presumably a projection of the author (Grisham)? Or were they real people with independence. At the same time, I started to hear film dialog a lot more clearly, and I realized I could almost see the dialog printed on the page. This showed me some of the real beauty in the writing in certain films, and the utter lack of it in others, and it gave me total disdain for formulaic pabulum.

So what I’m curious about today is how many of you have written something or want to write something, whether you finished it or not. What was it? What was it about? What did you learn or what did you find fascinating? And most importantly, why did you start? Do tell!

(Let’s put the issue of publishing aside for now, that’s a discussion for another day.)

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How To Remake A Movie/TV Series

Hollywood loves remakes. On the surface, they appear intellectually easy because all the work of creating characters and situations has already been done, and done in such a way that it proved to be a success. Indeed, these movies/TV shows tend to come with ready-made audiences because they have long-term fanbases. Toss in a few new things to add to that audience and you have guaranteed success, right? Not quite. If it was that easy, then remakes would never fail, and most of them do fail. I think the reason is a lack of love for the subject matter.

What Doesn’t Work

Hollywood has tried all kinds of things for remakes and most of them have failed. The types that have failed generally fall into three categories:

(1) Frame for Frame Remakes: These films basically remake the prior movie almost exactly or with slight differences. The idea behind this type of remake is to sell the movie to an entirely new generation by including new actors. The classic example of this was the scene for scene remake of Psycho starring Vince Vaughn. Other examples include things like the remake of Final Destination, which uses different ways to kill characters but follows the same plot point by point.

The problem with this type of remake is that it’s pointless and it risks killing what made the original so interesting. If the film offers nothing new other than new actors, what is the point in seeing it? Moreover, movies are more than the combination of their plots. They are defined by their camera work, the chemistry of the actors, and the quirks of their time. When you start removing any of these elements, the quality of the film suffers. Thus, these types of remakes are rarely as good as the original and their appeal tends to be limited to fans of the new actors.

(2) Remakes In Name Only: These films are not really remakes, though they claim to be. The classic example of this type is Starsky and Hutch, which had nothing to do with the original series. Instead, this was just a generic modern cop-buddy comedy with the names from the original series laid over the characters. In fact, if you removed the character names, no one would have been able to tell what was being remade. The problem with these films is that they insult the fans’ intelligence, because it’s easy to see that Hollywood is trying to exploit them. Further, these films often turn off non-fans who fear that they would need to know the original material to enjoy the remake.

(3) Provocative/Angry Remakes: This is the type of remake where the person who has gotten their hands on the rights to the original, apparently has no love for the original work. A classic example of this would be the remake of Battlestar Gallactica. It was clear to fans of the original series that Ronald Moore hated the original series; you could see this in all of his interviews where he was condescending to every aspect of the original material, from the storylines to the characters to the production values. And this came across in the first season of the series, where he made needless changes to the characters that insulted fans, and seemed to revel in attacking the original work at every turn. Another example of this was the first year of Star Trek The Next Generation, where the show seemed more interested in repudiating the universe created in the original series than it did in creating a watchable television show. In both instances, it wasn’t until they moved beyond this anger that these shows really found audiences. In films, a good example of this was The Stepford Wives which added an intense amount of anger at the original material, which made the movie unpleasant rather than morally provocative, as the original had been.

The problem with this type of remake is that it has no good will. It turns off fans of the original almost before they’ve seen it, and it keeps non-fans away, just as strangers tend to avoid sitting between squabbling family members. Moreover, it wastes its creative energy attacking the original rather than creating an entertaining new product.

What Does Work

So what does make a good remake? In truth, it’s probably just the avoidance of the three problems above. First, if you’re going to remake material, don’t ever do just a frame for frame or plot-point by plot-point remake. You need to find some new spin on the material and present a full story that stands on its own. Secondly, don’t try to pass off a regular film as a remake just because you include the character names or some references to the original story, you need to capture the essence of what the fans liked about the original.

But the third point is the most critical: not only should you not despise the original material, but the best remakes are made by people who clearly loved the original material. Consider for example The Brady Bunch Movie or The Addams Family films, these were excellent films that struck a chord with the public and continue to get play today. What made these films so special was that the producers clearly loved the original material and intended to keep the essence of the original alive in the remake. They didn’t try to change the characters and they didn’t set out to punish them or to settle scores. And when they did poke fun at the original material, they did it in good humor (not nasty), and the jokes tended be the sorts of things fans might sit around joking about when the original shows were on the air. It’s the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them.

The remake of Ocean’s Eleven is another good example where they took the overall premise of the original film, kept the hip spirit of the movie and characters, and then set about making a good film that stood on its own, but which simultaneously honored the original material. Indeed, it was clear that whoever remade Ocean’s Eleven understood what made the original so loved, and worked hard to keep that essence in the remake even as they were offering something new to the audience. To give you a sense of what could have gone wrong, the writer could have tried to make the characters edgy, rather than hip, or they could have tried to insert the standard liberal criticisms of the 1950s being a time of racism, wife beating and alcoholism. . . but they didn’t. They stayed true to the spirit of the original.

The problem with this, of course, is that it takes a lot more brain power to understand something and then to expand upon it, than it takes to just steal some character names, make a few references to the original and otherwise just write a generic modern film. Apparently, it’s also hard to find people in Hollywood who don’t hold grudges against older material. But this is something Hollywood should think about asking the next time someone suggests a remake: do the people involved really love the original material or do they just see it as easy material to exploit?

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What Makes Us Like Characters?

Have you ever wondered what makes us like certain characters and dislike others? Of course you have. There seem to be a lot of possible explanations offered, everything from our opinion of the actor to the morality of the character. But in the end, I think it comes down to one thing: we like characters who display personality traits we wish we had, and we dislike those who display traits that annoy us.

Let’s start with the idea that our opinion of a character will be determined by our opinion of the actor. Hollywood bets heavily on this, and there is some truth to it. Indeed, our goodwill to an actor can translate into goodwill toward the characters they play. But few actors generate much goodwill. Moreover, while this can translate to the character, that isn't always true. For example, our goodwill toward Harrison Ford may make us inclined to like Han Solo, but it likely would not improve our opinion of Humbert in Lolita, should Ford play that role.

Further, the fact that different actors can play the same character tells us that the identity of the actor actually isn't all that important to the character. Indeed, in general, unless the choice of actor interferes with our perceptions of the character, e.g. they are physically inappropriate like Truman Capote as Rambo or they bring negative baggage like Michael Moore, then any actor should be able to play almost any character. That means it is something other than the actor which decides our views of the character.

So what is it then about the character that matters? Liberals suggest that we like those who are most like us, and fear those who are different. Thus, they would (and do) suggest we like characters who are similar to us, e.g. whites don't like black characters. Of course, this goofy theory of oppressionology falls apart once you realize that movies don’t attract audiences that are identical to the demographics of their characters, and that whites have accepted actors like LL Cool J and Ice Cube, and Americans have accepted foreign actors, and even males and females seem to like each other.

Traditionalists argue that we like characters based on morality issues. Thus, we like characters who act morally and dislike characters who act immorally. But that falls apart right away as well. We like Darth Vader, and he’s hardly a good guy; even before the lousy prequels, Vader was evil, tyrannical, and also a lapdog for a truly unlikeable Emperor. We liked Max von Sydow in Needful Things, even though he played the devil. . . a generally difficult character to like. And there are a bunch of characters who are paragons of moral virtue that we just can’t stand.

Heist films present an excellent example to consider. We like Danny Ocean, even though he’s immoral, and even though we would vote to convict him if we sat on a jury. Indeed, we love all the bank robbers, the schemers, and the fraudsters, but only on film. . . not in real life. And even on film, there is a fine line: the moment they cease being hip or cool, and instead become murderous or rotten, we suddenly stop liking them. Tony Soprano was cool, Phil Leotardo was not, even though both did the same acts. And what is the difference between these two?

Consider this. We like to live vicariously through films and books; they are our fantasy worlds. And in our fantasies, we want to see ourselves as better than we currently are. Thus, we prefer characters that have the traits we wish we did. We want Darth Vader’s power to terrorize. We want Danny Ocean’s cool. We want characters who are under control, funny, sexy, smart, strong, interesting, and a whole host of other things we admire or yearn to be. And when we find characters who have these traits, we like them. On the other hand, when we find characters with traits we find annoying either in ourselves or in our day-to-day lives, we dislike those characters. Thus, we don't like characters who are whiners or weaklings, who suffer from indecision, or who are vindictive, petty or arrogant. These are traits we see every day and which we want to escape.

I think this is what determines whether or not we like characters. It's not the morality of the characters or their actions or what they look like, nor is it the actor who plays them. What makes us like or dislike characters are the traits the characters possess that we either aspire to or which annoy us. In fact, I would go one step further and even suggest that these are the same reasons we like/dislike particular actors.

Thoughts?

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Modern Literary Fiction Stinks

Do you know what literary fiction is? Literary fiction is fiction that doesn’t fit into other genres and is somehow supposed to be above other forms of fiction. People believe this because literary fiction traces its roots through a line of authors like Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Updike, whose books did indeed change the world. Whether it was simply changing the way Americans saw each other, or sparking legislation to change the injustices identified in their books, these literary giants helped shape our country. But those days are over. . .

If modern literary fiction could be summed up in one word, that word would be pretentious: self-indulgent themes, a disdain for its audience and the public at large, the use of erudite sounding but actually quite poor analogies, and a continuing struggle to use larger-than-necessary words that don’t fit the meaning as well as they should. Those are the hallmarks of literary fiction today.

Though, in truth, I don’t think literary fiction can be entirely defined with one word. It takes two. And the second word is cliché. Most literary fiction offers little more than well-worn clichés masquerading as intellectual depth. Indeed, which of these stories isn’t about the repressed wife who puts on the happy facade as everyone around her dies of cancer?

The problem with modern literary fiction is that it has lost its focus. Old school literary fiction didn’t view the public as evil or corrupt and didn’t look down its nose at its audience. It wanted to elevate the audience. Today’s fiction wants you to wallow in the author’s imagined pain. Moreover, literary fiction used to look out at the world, hunting injustice and pointing accusing fingers at the indefensible. Today, literary fiction isn’t concerned with injustice, it’s concerned with the inner struggles of characters in the mistaken belief that this somehow tells us something about ourselves.

They even have an excuse to justify their own aim-low approach: “the American scene is just too complex -- and too aware of its own complexity” for the likes of an Updike to come along again. That’s loser speak.

Time magazine just did a story on the latest “greatest” in the field. His name is Jonathan Franzen and even the article about him is pretentious. His last novel “told the story of a Midwestern family that goes to pieces spectacularly as the father succumbs to Parkinson’s.” Uh huh. His new one is about a “superficially happy household” in the Midwest where everyone is really dissatisfied with their lives, especially the repressed housewife. Oh, and there’s an alcoholic father and a date-rape. Nope, no clichés there.

What really bugs me about the Time article, aside from horrible writing and the pointlessness of it all, is that the “journalist” completely buys into the rather stupid idea that this form of literature has any real meaning to us: “he shows us how we live” gushes the “journalist.” Really? Or does he show you how you coastal liberals want to think the rest of us live? Are we really all unhappy alcoholics in Hicksville just wishing we could be like you? Or is that just wishful thinking by liberals who tend to be horrified when they run into genuinely happy people in Mid-America?

The truth about fiction is that it’s fiction. It’s not real. To the extent that it includes facts, it can inform us. To the extent it teaches us reasoning or logic, it can educate us. But teaching us something about ourselves by looking at made up, clichéd characters? Nope. That it cannot do. All it can tell us in that regard is what the author thinks, nothing more.

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How To Un-Cliché Your Villain

A cliché is an artistic idea that has been so overused that it offends the patience of the audience. It’s the kind of thing that gets an audience rolling their eyes and saying, “oh no, not again! Can’t they think of anything new?!” And nothing ruins a movie quicker than a clichéd villain.

Examples of cliché villains include anything resembling a James Bond villain and the evil corporation as the bad guy motif. Other examples include the liberal boogeymen trinity: greedy corporate bosses, bloodthirsty military men and perverted religious leaders.

What is it that each of these have in common? Two things: simplistic, unrealistic motivations and melodramatic characteristics.

Humans come with a whole range of good and bad motivations. But this is too complex for Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood follows a formula where each villain they use has only one motivation, and that motivation is an amplified form of the most prominent characteristic of that character’s profession or role. Thus, for example, because business strives for profit, the corporate villain is always motivated by greed, and only greed. Because the job of soldiers is to kill the enemy, the soldier villain is always motivated purely by bloodlust (ditto on “the hunter"). The politician is always motivated purely by power. And so on.

But humans aren’t like that. Humans are complex creatures with many motivations. And this is where you need to begin your search for the non-clichéd villain. Indeed, the surest method for avoiding a clichéd bad guy is to employ a motivation other than the one Hollywood always uses. Thus, avoid the greedy businessman. Instead, consider a businessman who might act out of fear of being replaced. Avoid the power hungry politician and go for a politician with a pathological need for approval. Avoid the bloodthirsty solider. Instead, consider a soldier like Captain Stransky in Cross of Iron, who tries to send the heroes to die to keep them from reporting his cowardice.

Still, these are dangerously close to the clichés, so let’s dig a little deeper.

As I’ve pointed out before, it is a fact that real life villains never think of themselves as villains. They may recognize that they’ve done evil things, but every single one of them thought they were justified in doing so -- either to rectify some injustice done to them or to further some “noble goal” they wanted to achieve. For example, serial killers often report that their victims wanted to die or that they were doing the work of God. Hitler viewed himself as the savior of the German people, and he justified his evil as necessary to achieving that purpose. Ultimately, his justifications were insane, but they made sense to him, and that’s the key here: people just don’t see themselves as evil.

This translates into the story arena as well. Think of the best film villains and you will find a group that rarely sees themselves as evil. Darth Vader thought he was bringing peace to his Empire. The Borg in Star Trek were simply doing what came naturally, as did the Alien and Jaws. The Terminator was just following its programming. Captain Bligh was a sadist, but thought he was in the right. Bartholomew in Rollerball thought he was doing what had to be done to protect society. Dean Corso in Ninth Gate was just doing his job and following his curiosity. Even the guys in Rope thought they had the right (if not the duty) to murder their friend. These are all characters who would be shocked to hear that they were cast as the villains in their stories.

Here’s another great example of this. In the Star Trek episode “Conscience of the King,” the character Kodos was the governor of Tarsus IV. When a famine wiped out their food supply, he ordered the execution of half the colony to save the rest. He thought he was doing the right thing. Or look at the bureaucrat in Torchwood: Children of Earth (left), who makes the cold-blooded calculation that turning several thousand children over to a horrible fate is worth it to save millions more, and then goes about callously selecting them. Both of these characters did what they thought they had to do, even though it pained them personally.

What this tells us is that the easiest way to avoid a cliché is to remember this key fact: if your villain can’t legitimately explain how they’re justified in doing what they’re doing, then you’re probably on the precipice of a cliché.

Moreover, there isn’t always a direct link between the motivation and the end result. In other words, the villain need not always be motivated to cause something evil, sometimes it’s just a byproduct of their misbehavior. A perfect example of this would be a scientist who thinks he’s doing something great, but actually invents something horrible, or a bureaucrat who turns a blind eye to right and wrong because he’s unwilling to act outside of his assigned box, or even a prosecutor who pushes a little too hard even where they suspect the defendant might be innocent (see Breaker Morant).

If you want a great example of this evil by-no-design, look at the movie Cube, which had an incredible premise (ignore the sequels). The premise was that people awoke trapped inside a huge cube that is full of traps. Why? Who built it? Apparently, no one did. . . at least not intentionally. It was built by thousands of people, each doing their parts, without ever knowing exactly what they were creating. And the reason it was built? Again, no one knows. They speculate it was just some bureaucratic idea that took on a life of its own -- which happens more than you would think in the modern world.

Also, keep in mind, that sometimes the villain is simply someone who was put in a situation way beyond their competence, and they didn’t have the strength of character to admit that. So as things spin beyond their control, they get busy trying to cover their rear ends to hide what they’ve done or they try to fix things and only make them worse (see Brazil).

Finally, there is one more thing that needs to be done to avoid the cliché: drop the melodramatic traits. The truly evil among us don’t go prancing around reveling in their evil and shooting henchmen for sport. And if you think about it, you’ll understand why: it doesn’t make sense in the real world. Could someone as unstable as the Hollywood “greedy businessman” ever make it to the top of a corporate empire? Would anyone promote the soldier who laughs maniacally as he gives insane orders to shoot his own troops? Would anyone work for the villain who shoots his henchmen when they get his coffee order wrong? No. It is the rarest of rare stories where something like this could make sense.

That’s my thinking.

Ultimately, the key to avoiding clichés is to avoid over-used motivations and the melodrama that always attaches to those clichéd motivations. Understand your characters. Make sure they would feel justified in every action they take, and avoid ever thinking that they would see themselves as evil. If you do this, you’ll also find that your story necessarily adjusts away from cliché storylines because those types of storylines can’t reflect the character’s more natural motivations and responses.

Or maybe it’s best summed up like this: realism kills clichés.

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Characters Who Are Too Stupid To Live

I’ve mentioned several times the importance of maintaining enough realism within a film that the audience can suspend its disbelief and accept the story as true. And there are many things that can kill the realism of films, everything from continuity errors to stunts that don’t seem real to plot points that don’t make sense. But the crème de la crème is the character who is too stupid to live.

The character who is too stupid to live is a character who does stupid, inexplicable and/or dangerous things apparently just to advance the plot. Examples abound. In fact, if you are a movie character, you might be too stupid to live if:

• You go skinny-dipping right after finding your friend chopped to pieces by the indestructible serial killer the radio keeps talking about...

• You knock down the evil kickboxer and then turn your back to do a victory dance, even as the crowd points to the villain as he rises up after grabbing a weapon...

• You hand over key evidence for safekeeping to the guy who is laughing manically...

• You and your ninja friends surround the hero, but then you all wait your turn to fight the hero...

• You are a villain who chooses the Rube Goldberg method for killing the hero and then leaves before the job is done...

• You overcome the first armed guard with an incredible combination of luck and stupidity on the part of the guard, but then you don’t think to pick up his gun to help you in the rest of your escape...

• You see your friend’s body ripped apart and covered in werewolf hair, but you decide there is no danger because there’s no such thing as werewolves. . . as if that somehow invalidates the fact that something used your friend as a chew toy...

• Ditto on those of you who think that zombie that used to be your friend Rick is coming to pick your brain, rather than eat it...

• You say the words: “let’s split up” for no apparent reason when people around you are disappearing...

• You’ve ever said the words: “Turn around? I’m not falling for that!” when there are dinosaurs or purple people eaters in the ‘hood. . .

I can accept characters with poor judgment and people who make mistakes in the heat of the moment. Indeed, stress causes people to do stupid things. Some get confused, others are overcome by fear; some freeze, some run, some do stupid things. Indeed, they have found that in true moments of crisis (like an airline crash) a small percentage of the population will do truly bizarre things like collecting their luggage or picking fights.

But when you’re talking about people in films who have time to think, you need to make sure the characters act with some sense of self-preservation. And if they don’t, then you need to explain why not and you need to lay the ground work for that.

In that regard, the one thing I have never bought into is “the jerk” as explanation. You know the guy, he’s introduced as the conservative businessman who yells and screams and talks about his worship of money from the opening frame. When he’s confronted with danger, he decides to ignore all good advice and do something incredibly stupid because. . . well, he’s a jerk. . . he’s like that. That doesn’t make sense. Even the biggest jerk has a sense of self-preservation.

An offshoot of this, which I also don’t like, can be seen in the Ron Weasley character in the Harry Potter books. By the third book, Weasley had really stopped acting like an independent human being with his own personality and life. Instead, he became a vehicle to move the plot. If Harry was too close to doing something that would solve the puzzle, Ron would appear, encourage him to act irresponsibly, and then leave. If Harry needed a push in a different direction, Ron appears, gives the push, and then leaves. Basically, whatever needed to be done to keep Harry moving forward with the story, Ron would provide it whether it made sense or not. Indeed, many of the things he did made no sense except as ways to move Harry through the plot.

I am a firm believer that every character in a movie or book should stand on their own. They should have their own motivations, their own desires, and they should act accordingly. If that means it takes a little more thought to get them alone with the werewolf or to get the hero to the next plot point, then so be it. Audiences see through characters who are merely plot convenience devices.

That’s my thinking.

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Making Books Into Movies

It may be obvious to say this, but books and movies are different. And turning books into movies is a tricky thing. You’ve got the problem of meeting expectations. You’ve got the problem of converting a written text into a spoken product. And then you have the question of how closely you should follow the book? That’s the one that has me bothered.

It is virtually impossible to be 100% faithful to a book when making a movie. For example, books and films work at a different pace. Books can be much more contemplative. They can be far less linear. They can delve into in-depth discussions, motivations, backgrounds, and even the thoughts of the characters, something that is very difficult for films. Indeed converting a book into a screenplay takes a specialized skill that requires the writer to force narrative into dialog.

And even when it is possible to stay entirely faithful to a book, it is still impossible to meet everyone’s expectations. Books rely on written descriptions, whereas films present complete imagery. Thus, while every reader of a book may see a particular image differently, film goers are all given the same image. Therefore, it is impossible to produce the same images that each of the readers expects.

However, before the filmmakers even face any of these problems, they face the question of how faithful they intend to remain to the book. Some films, like the first Harry Potter or Presumed Innocent or L.A. Confidential stayed fairly faithful to the books. But others don’t. For example, The Ninth Gate had almost nothing to do with the book Club Dumas, upon which it is based. Or you have Blade Runner which, thankfully, took almost nothing from Phillip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In fact, these films were so different from the books that you might not even know they were based on these books if they didn’t make this claim in the credits.

And “based on” is the key here. Blade Runner didn’t call itself Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and proclaim that it was turning the book into the film. It was upfront about taking only a few ideas from Electric Sheep and creating its own derivative work. Thus, nobody went to the theater expecting to see Electric Sheep and instead finding some bastardized, barely-recognizable version.

Other films are not so honest. I’ve been a life-long fan of The Lord of the Ring and I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve read those books. So when I heard that they were making LOTR, I cringed. I didn’t know what indignity they would do to this masterpiece, but I was prepared for almost anything. Then they sent out their actors, producers and directors to swear to us that they were going to be faithful to the book. A couple of them even claimed, “we all had copies of the book on set and whenever there was a question of how the book went, we looked it up.” That got my hopes up. But they were lying. “Faithful” in this case meant jamming a love-story into the book and discarding the one already in there, converting one character to comic relief, and other Hollywood gimmicks.

And LOTR is far from alone and it’s far from the worst. If you’re going to make a book into a movie, if you’re making “Book: The Movie,” shouldn't you do your best to remain faithful to the material? Fans of the book want to see it brought to life, they don't want to see it torn apart, twisted and recreated as something new. Don’t change the characters, don’t play with the motivations, don’t insert Hollywood gimmicks, and don’t add or remove plot points. If you just can’t help yourself and you feel hopelessly compelled to slap the book around, then stop claiming that you’re making the book into a movie. Give it a new title and tell us it's “based on” the book.

There is plenty of room for both kinds of films, those that try to faithfully bring the book to life and those that look to use the book as a base and create derivative work. But claiming that you are being faithful when you aren’t is misleading. . . it’s false advertising. It's also asinine. People loved the book for a reason. Who is the filmmaker to try to change the book? By all means, shoot it as creatively as possible, but stop trying to turn these things into something else and then pretending to the world that you stayed faithful.

It's time to stop abusing original material. If you don't love the book, then don't try to turn it into a movie. Leave that to someone who actually enjoyed the book. And stop listening to that whole industry of people who do nothing but look down upon any faithful recreation, i.e. most film reviewers. They claim that staying faithful is not "artistic." But that's just the weak thinking of a small mind. A film can be artistic whether it follows a book or not. The real challenge is bringing the book to life, which is incredibly difficult. Indeed, tinkering with a book does not make a film artistic. Artistic is writing the book in the first place, or bringing it to life on film, or using it as a starting point for something greater. But tinkering, as these small minds advocate, is not art. That's hackwork. It's the equivalent of putting a hat on the Mona Lisa rather than rendering her in 3D or taking da Vinci's style and creating a new masterpiece. . . that's art. Stuff your hat.

That’s my thinking on this.

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