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Posts Tagged: Understanding Screenwriting

Understanding Screenwriting #79: The Help, The Whistleblower, Fury, and more

by on August 29th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: The Help, The Whistleblower, Red-Headed Woman, Hold Your Man, Fury, They Won't Forget, but first…

Fan Mail: Rob Humanick is thanking me for making sure I got the period at the end of the title of Crazy, Stupid, Love. I would love to accept kudos, but I only put in the commas. It was Keith Uhlich, our eagle-eyed editor, who picked up on the period business. This is not the first time, nor the last, that Keith has saved me from looking like a total idiot in print. Or rather in pixels.

I am afraid I am way too straight to see what David E. calls the "gay envy" in straight films. In the case of Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love. (see, I got the period right this time) Gosling's character seems to me to be a living embodiment of a guy obsessed with Hugh Hefner's 1950s Playboy ideal. As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a straight guy is just a straight guy.

The Help (2011. Screenplay by Tate Taylor, based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett. 146 minutes)

The Help

Yipee, it's August, take one: That means there is finally a film in the multiplexes without stuff we have been inundated with all summer:

There are no comic book heroes.

There are no comic book characters from other Marvel comics that are only in this film to help promote future comic book movies.

There are no explosions, other than dramatic ones.

It is not, in any theater, in 3-D.

Nor is it in any Imax theaters.

There are no aliens.

It is not a tentpole for a future film series.

It is not the next, nor the last, tentpole from a previously established series.

There is not a single teenager in the film.

No actors change bodies in the course of this film.

There are no couples that are trying to have sex without emotional complications.

Except in reference to a certain pie, there is no use of bad language.

There are no fart, dick, or homophobic jokes.

There are no pirates, talking animals or talking cars in this film.

The African-American characters are not just in the film to be killed off so the white hero can get revenge.

However, just to let you know this is indeed a film from the summer of 2011, Emma Stone does appear in the film, but in a serious role. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #78: Friends with Benefits, Crazy, Stupid, Love., Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, & More

by on August 15th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: Friends with Benefits; Crazy, Stupid, Love.; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2; Point Blank (2010); Mr. And Mrs. Smith (2005); The Great Escape; MGM: Hollywood's Greatest Backlot (book); The Fox Film Corporation, 1915-1935: A History and Filmography (book); Covert Affairs, but first…

Fan Mail: Contrary to what David E. thinks, I love films that are poetically structured. If you can find it, look at the great British documentary Song of Ceylon (1934), one of the most poetically structured films of all time. In my History of Documentary film course, the classes were always split: there were those who loved it and those who hated it because it didn't tell a story. That gave me a chance early in the course to let them know that all films do not have to tell stories.

"Pippa" appears to be upset with David and me for taking things to "the Nth degree of irrelevance." Then, alas, she goes on to provide a link to the "film structure in a circle" site that I wrote about in US#76. She ought to go back and read my comments on it. The problem I have with so much writing about screenwriting is that it is often only about structure (Syd Field's plot points; the Hero's Journey, etc) without a lot of understanding of the nuances of character, tone, et al involved. As in some of the films in this column…

Friends with Benefits (2011. Screenplay by Keith Merryman & David A Newman and Will Gluck, story by Harley Patton and Keith Merryman & David A Newman. 109 minutes)

Friends with Benefits

Haven't we recently seen this? Take one: No, actually we haven't. In US#70, I wrote about No Strings Attached (2011) which has a similar plot: Two friends agree to have sex without any emotional attachments, but one of them naturally falls in love with the other and complications ensue. It was not particularly well done, for reasons I will come back to as we discuss this one. Friends is much better in a variety of ways. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #77: Super 8, Cars 2, Larry Crowne, & More

by on August 1st, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: Super 8, Cars 2, Larry Crowne, Page One: Inside the New York Times, Follow Me Quietly, Desperate, The Malta Story, Some Late Spring-Early Summer Television 2011, but first…

Fan Mail: David Ehrenstein, to no one's surprise, objected that I said that in The Tree of Life "The poetry overpowers the characters and story." His point was that there should be room for a Cinema of Poetry. I agree there should be. The problem I had with the film is that Malick did not structure his poetry in as compelling a way as he could have. With a little more attention to connections via not only characters and story, but visually and thematically, the film would have been better.

Olaf Barthel raised several interesting points, specifically in regard to my references to Kubrick. He pointed out that the unreality of certain films, and it is true not only of Kubrick, is part of their artificial style. That's true, but if the artificiality becomes distracting, then there is a problem. He suggested that the only way to solve the problem is for the filmmaker to do everything. I'd suggest the opposite. Kubrick tried to do everything, and it meant that he probably was not getting the collaborative input that can be so crucial to making a film.

A note for my Portuguese-reading fans. My book Understanding Screenwriting has now been translated into Portuguese. It was published in Brazil in May by the Zahar publishing company under the title Por Dentro do Roteiro. Erik de Castro, a former student of mine who is now a writer/director in Brazil, helped with the translation and tells me that one line is funnier in Portuguese than it was in English. I was making fun of Lucas's silly names and wrote of Count Dooku "try saying that name out loud and not laughing." In Portugeuse Dooku means something really dirty. In Brazil the name was translated in the subtitles as Dookan, but people heard it anyway and laughed.

This is the first official translation of one of my books. In the early '90s there was an unofficial translation of Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing. I found out about it from a student of mine. Maguy was a French woman who went back to Paris during one of the vacations. She was talking with some friends of hers from the Ecole Lumiere film school. When she mentioned she attended Los Angeles City College, one of her friends asked her if she knew me. She said she did, but asked how they happened to know of me. The friend said they were reading Storytellers in class. She asked if they were reading it in English. Many were, but the teacher had provided a French translation. Maguy asked to see it, so they went off to the library where it was on reserve. She read about five pages of it and later told me it made no sense at all. So that's the French: they love Jerry Lewis, Sharon Stone, and me in a bad translation.

Super 8 (2011. Written by J.J. Abrams. 112 minutes)

Super 8

The Tree of Kaboom: I saw this one two days after I saw Tree of Life (see US#76) and because of the similarities I was struck immediately at how much more textured this is than Tree. We are in small-town America, with a bunch of pre-teen boys, one of whose father is not perfect, and right away we are dealing with death. In this case, it is the mother of Joe Lamb, who will turn out to be our main character. She has died, and we see the ways people are grieving. The actions and emotions are much more specific than anything in Tree, as are the physical details of the town, the houses, the rooms, the streets. Film is a concrete medium not an abstract one, and the details here are very particular. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #76: The Tree of Life, Bridesmaids, Too Big to Fail, & More

by on July 10th, 2011 at 8:20 pm in Film

Coming Up In This Column: The Tree of Life, Bridesmaids, I Died a Thousand Times, Screaming Eagles, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Too Big to Fail, but first…

Fan Mail: I really want to thank "Lorraine" for giving us the link in her comments on US#75 to a site that has the best satire I have ever seen on screenplay analysis. Each bit takes on a given film by having a guy's arm draw a circle on a dry erase board, divide up and explain a given film's structure at about 300 words per minute. The specific one Lorraine linked us to was for Pirates 4. The guy gets a lot wrong about the movie (the stuff he puts in the first quarter of the film takes a lot less time; the ending of the film is not a closed circle but very open ended, etc), but goes so fast you can hardly tell. It will have you on the floor, even if you take "Hero's Journey" more seriously than I do.

At least I'm assuming it's satire…

The Tree of Life (2011. Written by Terrence Malick. 138 minutes)

The Tree of Life

Pure cinema, like Meek's Cutoff: Sometimes in my Screenwriting class at Los Angeles City College, I ran a film in segments over the semester, and we discussed the screenplay as we went. Sometimes I did not decide on the film before school started. Once I had a student ask on the first day why he had to learn screenwriting, since he did not want to tell stories, but "create pure cinema, like Hitchcock." I instantly knew I had to show Rear Window that semester. I did, and the student never uttered the words "pure cinema, like Hitchcock" again. I always found it odd that a director working in the mystery-thriller genre, which depends so much on suspense created by narrative, would claim he was making "pure cinema." The student believed the term meant making films with less focus on narrative and character. There are other directors who can more legitimately claim they are attempting pure cinema. Terrence Malick is one of them. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #75: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Midnight in Paris, The Wooden Horse, & More

by on June 14th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Midnight in Paris, The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story, Helen of Troy, but first…

Fan Mail: My comment in US#74 that Lance Loud was "the first gay character on American television that viewers of the time spent more than a minute-and-a-half with" upset David Ehrenstein. He thought I was using "character" as in "what a weird person" rather than as a person in a work of art. This led to a three-way debate between David, Matt Maul and me. You can read the comments at the bottom of that column. In his last comment, David suggested several films I could show in my course. As far as I can tell, most of those films are fiction films, and I was talking in my comments about my History of Documentary Film course.

However, the issue of showing films in my courses is now moot. As of this month I have retired after forty years of teaching film history and screenwriting courses at Los Angeles City College, so I will not be scheduling any more course screenings. It has been a terrific forty years, teaching at what is as far as I know the only community college film program whose former students have 12 Academy Award nominations (with five wins), 27 Emmy nominations (with at least three wins, but we are not done counting yet), and at least 2 Grammy nominations (we are not done counting all those either). And since the campus is located a block and a half away from the former site of the only film studio built for a woman director (Lois Webber in the '20s), it should not be surprising that we are the only film school, college or university, anywhere I know that had two films given wide releases in one year, each directed by a different woman alumnae.

Just because I am retiring from teaching, however, does not mean I am giving up this column. I intend to keep doing it as long as they will let me, since I don't want my brain to atrophy. Although David Ehrenstein may sometimes think it already has atrophied.

Now, onto this load of films, and even though I am not yet dealing with The Tree of Life, I assure you I will eventually. I believe that is a legal requirement for writing for the House.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011. Screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, screen story by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, based on characters created by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert, suggested by the novel On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers. 137 minutes.)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Johnny Depp is an ungrateful miscreant: When Elliott & Rossio pitched the idea to Disney in the early '90s of doing a film based on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, they were told Disney was not making movies based on their rides. But Disney eventually rethought it and hired Jay Wolpert to come up with a story. Wolpert made a crucial decision: that the movie should be fun. There had not been a great pirate movie since The Crimson Pirate in 1952. There had been several B-movie pirate movies, but the big-budget ones, such as Swashbuckler (1976) and Pirates (1986) were ponderous. The producers of those seemed to have forgotten that the pirate movies of yore were written by Hollywood wits like Ben Hecht (The Black Swan [1942]) and Herman J. Mankiewicz (The Spanish Main [1945]). Wolpert was replaced by Stuart Beattie, who worked out the story and named the characters after birds (Swann, Sparrow, etc). Then Disney approached Elliott & Rossio, who by then had been nominated for an Academy Award for their screenplay for Shrek (2001). The boys went in and made the same pitch they had made ten years before: it will be a Gothic swashbuckler. When Disney hesitated, the boys said, "Hey, the ride starts with a talking skull." The deal was on. When they were writing Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), neither they nor anybody at Disney had any notion of doing a sequel. So when Disney later wanted two sequels, to be shot at the same time, Elliott & Rossio had to decide: 1) do we make them totally separate adventures, like the Bond movies?, or 2) do we pretend we had a trilogy in mind all along? They went the latter route and came up with the best written film trilogy ever. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #74: The Princess of Montpensier, Source Code, Meek's Cutoff, & More

by on May 23rd, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: The Princess of Montpensier, Source Code, Meek's Cutoff, Devil's Doorway, Hangman's Knot, Mildred Pierce (2011), Cinema Verite, but first…

Fan Mail: I am so sad that the discussion of my incompetence to deal with Uncle Boonmee and its ilk did not continue. But you may be able to take another shot at it on my comments on Meek's Cutoff below.

On the other hand, I am so happy that I get a chance to correct David Ehrenstein, a rare occasion. He mentioned I did not include the most famous line of dialogue in White Savage, "How are you today, Tamara?" The reason I did not is because it's not in the film. It showed up in a review of the film, and everybody has always assumed it was in the film. That character's name is Tahia, not Tamara. "How are you today, Tahia?" is pretty silly, but just not as silly as the frequently quoted line.

The Princess of Montpensier (2010. Screenplay by Jean Cosmos, François-Olivier Rousseau and Bertrand Tavernier, based on a story by Madame de La Fayette. 139 minutes.)

The Princess of Montpensier

The Son of Intolerance: There are just not a lot of movies that deal with the civil war in 16th-century France between the Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots. You can see why: you'd piss off the Catholics or the Protestants in the audience or both. There is the 1994 French film Queen Margot, about Marguerite de Valois, but most cinephiles know about the period from the French story in Griffith's 1916 Intolerance. What, you forgot there was a French story in Intolerance? Not surprising, since it is not nearly as compelling as the Babylon story and the Modern story. It also suffered the most in the cutting of the film, probably because Griffith realized it just did not stand up to the other two. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #73: Certified Copy, Win Win, Potiche, and more

by on April 28th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up in This Column: Certified Copy, Win Win, Potiche, The Lincoln Lawyer, White Savage, Key Largo, The Starter Screenplay (book), The Escort (play)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Fan Mail: As I suspected, my comments on Uncle Boonmee pissed off some people. Both the ever-vigilant David Ehrenstein and "JF" felt I was not appreciating the complexity of the film. The problem I had was that it was not complex enough. I was ready, willing and able to deal with those elements. As I made clear in my opening comments, I was greatly looking forward to seeing the film precisely because of the elements critics have liked. What bothered me is that "Joe," as Apichatpong Weerasethakul likes to be called in the West, had not done enough of that sort of thing. As for David's comments on many people finding Imitation of Life (1959) emotionally overwhelming, I know that they do, and for a great variety of reasons. The script problems I pointed out make it difficult for the film to work that way for me. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #72: Of Gods and Men, Rango, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and More

by on April 13th, 2011 at 11:29 pm in Film

Coming Up in This Column: Of Gods and Men, Rango, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Crusades, Imitation of Life, Some Late Winter/Early Spring Television 2011.

Of Gods and Men (2010. Scenario by Etienne Comar, adaptation and dialogue by Xavier Beauvois. 122 minutes.)

Of Gods and Men

A great train movie: Religion is a very difficult subject to make a film about. Movies are a very concrete medium. We photograph things and record sounds. Religion is very internal: what we believe and what we feel. How do you show that? With Hollywood it usually involves people looking up into the light with beatific smiles on their faces (see below for a notorious example), which hardly does the job. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #71: Cedar Rapids, Unknown, Just Go With It, and More

by on March 14th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up in This Colum: Cedar Rapids, Unknown, Just Go With It, On the Beach (2000), The Magnificent Ambersons (2001), but first…

Fan Mail: I was recently emailing back and forth with Ed Gonzalez, the capo di tutti capi of Slant Magazine, about our readers. I made the point that I really appreciated the readers of Understanding Screenwriting because compared to readers who write into other blogs, etc, the comments from my peeps—unless of course they are flogging the Hero's Journey—are never less than interesting.

Exhibit A is David Ehrenstein's putting La Dolce Vita (1960), which I dealt with in the last column, in some historical perspective. I did not know about the incident he mentions that foreshadowed the final scene. I was also taken with his comment on the connection of that period in Italy to the Berlusconi years. How true.

Olaf Barthel, along with David, made some perceptive comments about The Illusionist.

Matt Maul took me to task "in a friendly way, or course" (see what I mean about the readers) for not mentioning Ricardo Montalban's performance in Mystery Street. I was going to throw in a word or two about Montalban, but sometimes I at least try to restrain myself about actors. As readers know, I do get into performances, sometimes more than I should in a column on screenwriting, but you can see the connection, as in several films I deal with this time around. Montalban of course is terrific in the film, as in several others he did around the same time. Look at him in Border Incident (1949) as well.

Cedar Rapids (2011. Written by Phil Johnston. 86 minutes.)

Cedar Rapids

Mr. Deeds goes to Cedar Rapids: Well, it sounds like something Robert Riskin might have whipped up for Frank Capra. Tim Lippe, a small town Wisconsin insurance salesman, is assigned to attend a convention in Cedar Rapids after the death of the agent who usually goes. Lippe, who has never been out of his small town, gets involved with a lot of strange people at the convention, such as the freewheeling Dean "Deanzie" Zigler, who does his best to loosen Lippe up. There is also the very straight black salesman Ronald Wilkes, and a "one of the boys" saleswoman Joan Ostrowski-Fox. They introduce him to the wild convention life, and help him outwit Orin Helgesson, the corrupt leader of the convention. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #70: The Illusionist, No Strings Attached, From Prada to Nada, & More

by on February 25th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: The Illusionist, No Strings Attached, From Prada to Nada, The Company Men, Mystery Street, Le Amiche, La Dolce Vita, The Write Environment, Downton Abbey, Fairly Legal but first…

Fan Mail: First, I want to thank "Biglil," who wrote in on US#68 to correct some factual errors in Pirate Radio. In today's world I'm all for getting one's facts straight, since there is so little of it going around.

Second, David Ehrenstein got the impression in my comments on The Dilemma in US#69 that I somehow had a beef with The Kids Are All Right. I don't, as my comments in US#54 make clear. My point was that The Dilemma did not handle the mixture of comedy and drama as well as Kids and other films.

Third, in today's bullets can't kill it category, "Samm" insisted in a comment on US#69 they (and I am not sure what "they'" he was talking about) are all Hero's Journey films. Sigh. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #69: Barney's Version, The Dilemma, Modern Family, and More

by on February 7th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: Barney's Version, The Dilemma, Watching the Detectives, Friendly Persuasion, Harry's Law, The Good Wife, Modern Family, Hot in Cleveland, Retired at 35, but first...

Fan Mail: David Ehrenstein did not believe me when I wrote that Lee Garmes's cinematography on Shanghai Express (1932) was better than Bert Glennon's on Blonde Venus the same year. All I can say is look at the two films. The ideas for the cinematography may be von Sternberg's, but the execution is the cinematographer's, and you can see the difference. As for David saying that von Sternberg thought of the script, the words, the characters, and the plot as only partial elements (David's italics), that explains why I have trouble with a lot of von Sternberg's work. I like directors who show a little more respect for at least the idea of the script.

Barney's Version (2010. Screenplay by Michael Konyves, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler. 132 minutes.)

Barney's Version

Great actors in great scenes do not necessarily a great movie make: I haven't read Richler's novel, but after seeing this movie I did what I did after It's Kind of a Funny Story (see US#63) and went into the Barnes & Noble next to the multiplex and skimmed the book. Even just skimming I can see its appeal, as well as its structure. Richler writes it in the first person, so the novel really is Barney Panofsky's version of his life. His entire life. You can see the problems Konyves faced. Richler sets it up that a friend of Barney's has written a novel based on Barney's life and Barney wants to set the record straight. That gives Richler a reason to let Barney wander all over his life, since in a novel you can have all kinds of digressions. Many years ago a friend of mine who had been writing screenplays decided to attempt a novel. I had written a couple of books by then, and after she had been writing a while, she said to me, "How come you didn't tell me writing a book was so much easier than a screenplay?" You have no length limitations, you can get inside people's heads, and it does not have to be dramatic. Richler takes advantage of all of those. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #68: The Fighter, Somewhere, Shanghai Express, and more

by on January 24th, 2011 at 1:53 pm in Film

Coming Up in This Column: The Fighter, Somewhere, The Other Boleyn Girl, Pirate Radio, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, Slave Ship, Two and a Half Men, but first…

Fan Mail: "Asher" raised a whole lot of very good, thought-provoking points on my comments about The Tourist and its relationship to Hitchcock. He is baffled that I seemed to think it was better than Rear Window (1954). I don't think it is, but I do think The Tourist makes its point about voyeurism a lot quicker than the Hitchcock film. I brought that up to show how the filmmakers are going beyond what Hitchcock did, which includes doing things more quickly than in earlier films. Like the Coens speeding up the opening of their new True Grit, filmmakers now use for their own purposes what has been done in the past. By the way, I think Rear Window is infinitely better than The Tourist, mainly because the script is better.

What provoked my thoughts most in Asher's comments was his standing up for Hitchcock dealing more with the emotions of the characters than I said he did. I do think that Hitch is not generally as interested in character as such directors as William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann and George Stevens, to name three of his contemporaries. Hitch is most interested in getting great scenes. John Grierson, the father of documentary and an early film critic, made this point about Alfred Hitchcock in the early '30s, before he became ALFRED HITCHCOCK. But Asher makes a very good point that in some films Hitchcock does get into some emotional depths. Asher mentions Vertigo (1958), which I wouldn't in this discussion, since while we do get Scottie's emotions, one of the great limitations of the film is that we get nothing about the emotional life of the girl. I have for years encouraged screenwriters to do a remake of Vertigo from the point of view of the girl. But Asher is right on the money about Notorious (1946), which is as much a character study as a suspense film. The same is true of Shadow of a Doubt (1943). I am not convinced about Marnie (1964), which never quite goes as deep as it thinks it's going. So thanks, Asher, for changing my mind, at least a little, about Charles Bennett's Fat Little English Friend.

The Fighter (2010. Screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson, story by Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson and Keith Dorrington. 115 minutes.)

The Fighter

If you are going to do this movie, this is the way to do it: I must admit I have never been a big fan of boxing or boxing movies. The sight of two sweaty guys in their satin underwear beating each other to a bloody pulp does not appeal to my brand of testosterone. Charlie Chaplin's 1915 Essanay two-reeler The Champion treats the subject of boxing will all the seriousness it should be treated with, which is to say, not much. The original Rocky (1976) is interesting less for its boxing than for how inventively Sylvester Stallone steals from On the Waterfront (1954) and Marty (1955). Raging Bull (1980) is repetitive and over-directed. On the other hand, the great 1996 documentary When We Were Kings is about a lot more than just boxing, and Million Dollar Baby (2004) is a wonderful character study (with a sweaty girl for me). The Fighter fits in that "on the other hand" category. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #67: True Grit, The Tourist, and Black Swan

by on January 5th, 2011 at 9:30 am in Film

Coming Up in This Column: True Grit, The Tourist, Black Swan, but first...

Fan Mail: I'm sorry David, but Ryan's Daughter is "all that bad."

True Grit (1969. Screenplay by Marguerite Roberts. 128 minutes; 2010. Screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen. 110 minutes. Based on the novel by Charles Portis.)

True Grit

How is this movie different from the other?: Charles Portis's novel came out in 1968 and everybody, and I mean everybody, knew that the role of "Rooster" Cogburn, a fat, one-eyed marshal dragged by a tough 14 year-old-girl into tracking down her father's killer, was perfect for John Wayne. Wayne knew it and bid for the film rights. He was outbid by producer Hal Wallis. Wayne called Wallis to complain, and Wallis told him there was only one actor he wanted for the role: Wayne. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #66: The King's Speech, Tangled, Get Him to the Greek and more

by on December 23rd, 2010 at 9:19 am in Film

Coming Up in This Column: The King's Speech, Tangled, Get Him to the Greek, In Love and War, but first…

Happy Holidays

Fan Mail: Well, I spoke too soon, didn't I when I said the prospects of a "lively discussion" of the Hero's Journey "sort of fizzled." I am sorry it developed into a hissing contest between David Ehrenstein and "Juicer 243," but they both made some good points first. As you know, I am more in tune with David's view of the HJ than Juicer's. Juicer seems to think it can apply to any movie, but he picked the three I mentioned that might fit, while ignoring the longer list of ones where the HJ does not seem to apply. Juicer seemed to assume that the writers of Citizen Kane (1941), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Fellini's 8 ½ (1963) were all students of the HJ, but none of them probably had ever heard of it. They were simply trying to make the most entertaining films they could. They succeeded, of course.

Juicer is also upset that I used the term "doctrinaire" about the HJ and uses the three films mentioned above as showing how creative the writers can be while seeming to fit their work into the pattern. The problem I have with a lot of screenwriting advice is that it is given and, worse, accepted as doctrine. Having taught screenwriting for forty years, I cannot tell you the number of students I have had that insisted they had to follow either the HJ, or Syd Field's structure, or some other system. If the HJ helps you (and I was just talking this past week to a former student of mine who felt she learned a lot from Christopher Vogler's book about it), then fine, but let's not assume that is the only way to go.

While David and I agree about the HJ, we obviously disagree on Morocco (1930). He quotes the Fritz Lang line about how a screenplay is writing and a movie is pictures, as in, "Moving pictures they call them." Well, yeah, but they need something more than just pretty pictures that move. If it were enough that you have beautiful pictures nicely cut together, Ryan's Daughter (1970) would be the best movie of all time, hands down.

"Torontomovieguy" says he finds the column entertaining, "but I can't say I better understand a damn thing about screenwriting because of it." I suspect he is looking for the kind of truths the gurus like Field and Campbell et al provide, as in "The First Plot Point Should Be Between Pages 25 and 27." This homey don't do that. My approach is to see what we can tease out about screenwriting from watching films. So my tendency, as Juicer discovered, is not the Great Truths category but in looking at scripts and films with subtlety and nuance. I do agree with Toronto that the column, as all criticism is, is subjective. Guilty as charged on that one. Continue Reading »




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Understanding Screenwriting #65: Hereafter, Fair Game, Morocco, The Good Wife and more

by on December 6th, 2010 at 12:05 am in Film

Coming Up In This Column: Hereafter, Fair Game, Morocco, Casanova Brown, Yellow Sky, The Good Wife, but first…

Fan Mail: What we all hoped would be a lively discussion of the Hero's Journey sort of fizzled out. As always David Ehrenstein had a couple of good zingers about the Journey's use in Hollywood, and I loved "Joel"'s logic on why it makes all movies good. But "Juicer243" really let the side down. Rather than engaging with the issues I raised, he simply repeated his ad for a website and then resorted to the old, "if you don't like it, it's probably that you don't really get it." The other possibility is that I really get it and that's why I don't like it. As we have all discovered in politics, religion and film, it's hard to have an interesting discussion with a True Believer.

The problem I have with any doctrinaire approach to screenwriting (or the creation of any art for that matter) is that it limits the creative mind. I mentioned three films in my rant that you could maybe fit into the Hero's Journey: Citizen Kane (1941), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Fellini's 8 ½ (1963), but what makes those films interesting is not the Hero's Journey pattern, but all the details the writers of those films use to fill out the patterns (yes, that's plural) of the film. Look at them if you don't believe me.

Hereafter (2010. Written by Peter Morgan. 129 minutes)

Hereafter

Will somebody around here please call rewrite?: I am afraid I have beaten you over the head (in US#11, 18, 40, among others) about how Clint Eastwood tends to shoot first drafts, even when the scripts need work. Well, here's another one that needed a lot of revision, and Peter Morgan knew it, as he told an interviewer in the November 6th Creative Screenwriting Weekly. He had done a first draft and passed it to his agent, just to gets notes on it. The agent passed it on to producer Kathleen Kennedy, who passed it to her producing partner Steven Spielberg, who passed it on to Eastwood. Who wanted to do it and did not go along with Morgan's request to do revisions. Continue Reading »




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