Coming Up in This Column: The Hero's Journey, Unstoppable, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Wild Target, Four Lions, Boxing Gym, Two and a Half Men, Burn Notice.

Fan Mail: In the comments on US#63, "Juicer243" put an ad in for a site where he says that to "really understand screenwriting" you have to get the site's take on the Hero's Journey. No, learning about the mythology of the Hero's Journey will not teach you a damned thing about screenwriting. It will only teach you what development executives think a movie has to have. The Hero's Journey pattern of narratives in various cultures began in Joseph Campbell's 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which is generally considered to be a ripoff of Sir James George Frazier's epic late 19th-early 20th century study of comparative cultures. Campbell's book would have been forgotten by now, except that George Lucas, trying to convince people that the first Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983) was more than just sci-fi movies for kids, promoted the film as being influenced by Campbell. Campbell, being something of a celebrity whore, bought into that and kept popping up on PBS with Lucas to explain it all for you. The Lucas films a) made more money than God, and b) established the teen-fan boy audience as the audience primarily aimed at by Hollywood. So it is not surprising that Campbell's ideas, especially as promoted in Christopher Vogler's 1998 book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, became the standard clichéd structure that Hollywood believes in.

The Hero's Journey follows a young man as he is called to adventure, resists the call, gets supernatural help, goes through a bunch of trials, is tempted by Woman, wins out in the end, and returns to his world. It is more complicated than that, and you can look it up on Wikipedia if you want to. Needless to say, it is a rather limited view of what a movie can be, especially with its patriarchal, teen-boy fear of women. You may be able, of course, to fit several classic films into the archetype. Just off the top of my head, you can do it with Citizen Kane (1941), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Fellini's 8 ½ (1963) without breaking too much of a sweat.

On the other hand. Again just off the top of my head, here are some great or at least good classic scripts that do not fit into that paradigm: It Happened One Night (1934), The Thin Man (1934), Nothing Sacred (1937), His Girl Friday (1940), Brief Encounter (1945), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Gunfighter (1950), The Narrow Margin (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), Some Like it Hot (1959), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Blow-Up (1966), Chinatown (1974), Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), Terms of Endearment (1983), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Thelma & Louise (1992).

And here are some more I have written about recently in this column: The Town, Easy A, The Concert, Life During Wartime, Get Low, The Kids Are All Right, Please Give, The Secret in Their Eyes…

And there are even more this time around, as you will see below. Continue Reading »