Kill Him!!!

Hollywood and our dystopian future

2008-07-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

So I really like watching apocalyptic (28 DAYS LATER; DAY AFTER TOMORROW; THE CORE), post-apocalyptic (THE POSTMAN; WATERWORLD), and Dystopian future (THE MATRIX; JOHNNY MNEMONIC; CHILDREN OF MEN) movies, even when they're bad.
I can watch them over and over and over... probably has something to do with my fascination with history and politics... there's always some fun little detail to pick out that reflects a fear or belief specific to the politics or history of the time in which the movie was made (note the detail in DAY AFTER TOMORROW where a female newsie gleefully points out that Americans are now illegally crossing the border into Mexico, rather than the other way around).

But in the end they rarely move me in a deep and meaningful way because they always seem overwrought. I mean if global warming turns out to be manmade and real, then the Earth is going to very VERY slowly warm up and winters will slowly disappear, farmable land will VERY slowly wither away, and populations will EXTREMELY gradually migrate elsewhere, they will not pack up all their things and become instant refugees, literally overnight. And we're not going to wake up one morning to an ice age that deposits 500 feet of glacial ice on New York City in a single afternoon.

Likewise, I don't see us becoming slaves to a race of machines, or spending the majority of our lives jacked into computer terminals interacting in a made-up world, or living in burned out cities where rich people inhabit gleaming apartments a thousand feet above the slums that have been left at ground level for "everyone else." I just don't think it's going to be as dramatic as the movies need their stories and visuals to be in order to get butts into theatre seats.

That said, I was shocked last night to find that a movie I have consistently made fun of over the years (even though it occupies a special place in my heart because of it's fun goofiness), showed me what I find to be the most plausible dystopian future you'll see in any modern movie.

I watched DEMOLITION MAN (DM) last night.

Most dystopian future worlds you see in the movies are immediately terrifying. If someone dropped you into the world of THE TERMINATOR or THE MATRIX or THE CORE, you would instantly shit your pants. Not so in San Angeles (the city where Sly finds himself in DM circa 2032).

If you woke up in San Angeles tomorrow, your first impression might be "hey, this is kinda nice." The streets are clean, the cars are electric and make almost no noise, the buildings are beautifully designed and built, there are plenty of trees and grass and there are no fast food joints, liquor stores, or billboards. Everyone is polite and nice, no one curses or fights, clothing is relaxed and attractive, as are the people. It looks like a utopian dream.

But San Angeles 2032 is ruled by a government made up of officials that I might call "benign fascists." At some point, it was decided by (presumably rich, well-educated progressives) that the behaviour of average Americans must be legally restricted "for their own good." Sandra Bullock explains the world pretty succintly when she points out to Sly that anything considered "bad" has been outlawed... everything from gas, smoking, guns, and salt, to cursing.

But I say these are "benign" Fascists because there is no secret police force that whisks "criminals" off to the gulag. This fascist government is much smarter than that. Physical threats, jails, and executions breed revolutionaries. If the only thing that happens when you curse or eat salt, is that a machine tells you that you've been "fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statute"... well that's no so bad, is it? We can live with that... right?

Maybe, but the world in DM is not static, it's still evolving... and maybe today it's a fine of one credit, but governments that seek control MUST maintain that control at any cost. What happenes when one credit is not enough to dissaude cursing... it becomes two credits, then one hundred, and if people are still ignoring the statute, maybe THAT'S where the gulags and the executions come in... remember, when we join the story in DM, the leader of this utopian world has just re-awakened a dangerous criminal whom he hopes will assassinate the leader of an underground movement seeking to restore basic freedoms that have been given up or lost, and he doesn't seem to care how many people die as a result, as long as his goal is achieved. That's a pretty aggressive escalation.

And so, here in 2008 I look around me and I see helmet laws, cigarette laws, CAFE standards, and campus speech codes, and I hear politicians pushing laws to tell you what kind of lightbulbs you can buy (I buy Compact Flourescents but I don't think you should be forced to if you don't want them), or wether or not we should start taxing candy bars and soda... or I read an article like this one, where one side of a political debate on Affirmative Action points out that the only way to win is to keep the issue off of ballots because even though they'd lose in the court of public opinion, they're right and that's all that matters... or note how with each new election cycle, politicians manage to convince us of one more thing the government should have control over in our lives (now it's health care and mortgages... tomorrow it may be whether or not you can have a child and raise it on your own) and I start to wonder if, of all the dystopian future movies ever made, DEMOLITION MAN might be the most prescient, the most plausible, and ultimately, the scariest such movie ever made.

If Americans ever lose our freedoms, it will not be overnight, to force of arms... we will give them away, voluntarily and perhaps happily, over the course of many years, to people who consider themselves "our betters", and we will do so with the best of intentions... and while some things might seem nicer, or safer in the aftermath, we will have made ourselves slaves... make no mistake about that.

In response to which, I can do no better than to quote Denis Leary from DM...

"You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener". "

I had no idea HIGH NOON is commonly regarded as a brave liberal counter-attack on McCarthy-ism....

2008-06-10T15:17:00.000-07:00

But according to Kyle Smith, apparently it is... at least among film enthusiasts on the Left, anyway. Oh the things you learn if you manage to live long enough.

You'll note that The Commander made almost exactly the opposite argument a year ago. Interesting fact, that. I guess it just goes to show that part of what's great about movies is that everyone can take something different away from them.

Ultimately Smith is making a similar argument to the Commander's, though from a slightly different perspective.

Still... interesting.

Where have you gone Indiana Jones? PART ONE

2008-06-03T14:45:00.001-07:00

WARNING: These will be riddled with spoilers.

I'm not going to bother with the preamble... we all saw RAIDERS when we were young, we all loved it, we can all quote the movie chapter and verse, we all wore our Indy Costumes to work on the Thursday CRYSTAL SKULL finally opened (OK, that may have been just me), we all know where we're all coming from, so I'm just gonna pick up my Louisville Slugger and start swingin'.

ISSUE NUMBER ONE: C.G.I.

Think about the famous truck chase from RADIERS... Indy is riding a white horse along the cliffs above and behind the truck convoy. He comes to a stop at an impossibly steep ramp and pauses... Spielberg seems to be saying, hang on, cuz you're about to see some shit.

And we did... see some shit. A lot of it. And it was all happening in a real world, OUR world, and even as a 36 year-old Adult (Kid), I have no trouble believeing that someone (even if it wasn't Harrison Ford) did everything that happened on that screen.

Not so with THE CRYSTAL SKULL. Forget about the refrigerator tumbling end-over-end through a nuclear cloud for a second, hell at least that was interesting to look at... let's talk about the moment where my shoulders finally sagged in defeat and I said to myself "damn... I hate this."

Two boat-jeeps are careening through the jungle side by side and Shia LaBouf is straddling them, one foot on each, sword-fighting with Cate Blacnhett... except he wasn't. Not really. He was in a small bright green room standing on two bright green boxes, while, somewhere off camera, Steven Spielberg (or, hell, maybe even some random second unit flunkie) shouted things like "OK now she's over here" and "Now DUCK, here comes a tree branch."

EVERY SINGLE OTHER thing you saw on screen in that moment was created out of whole cloth, inside a computer, and digitally inserted into that shot long after Shia and company had gone home for the summer.

And that sucked. What's the point!? If I want to see a movie that only exists in a computer, I have Roland Emmerich and Tim Story and Stephen Sommers and Pixar making those movies and pumping them out one after the other each and every day. The market is positively LOUSY with them.

The beauty and charm of the Indiana Jones series is that it's based on Saturday afternoon serials that Spielberg and Lucas loved when they were kids... the kind of movies where you had to put a little extra thought into the how and the where and the when because you couldn't just run back to the studio and get another 10 million for computer generated F/X shots.

Even if they HAD had access to the kind of F/X budget they clearly had access to during the making of CRYSTAL SKULL, I firmly blieve they would not have used it because... well because that was the WHOLE GODDAMNED POINT of making the movie in the FIRST goddamned place!

Which brings me to the Alien...

Seriously... a goddamned Alien... right there on screen, smilling and blinking and pointing and eventually flying off in his goddamned space ship.

What the hell was THAT!?

And fer crissakes it didn't even LOOK very good.

And that's what's fascinating to me... there's really only about a half dozen F/X shots in RAIDERS altogether, and because they are practical effects, they fit much more seamlessly into the movie as a whole. OK sure, you can probably tell after a dozen or so viewings that they used a stop moion effect used to make the German version of Peter Lorre melt before the power of the Ark... but as far as special effects go, I'll take that sequence over what was, essentially, the exact same gag (except not done on a computer) that had Donovan ageing a thousand years in 5 seconds after drinking from the false Grail in THE LAST CRUSADE.

And let's talk about THE LAST CRUSADE for a minute, which despite the fact that I HATE HATE HATE what was done to some of the characters in that film (Sallah and Brody to name just two) has some fantastic action sequences built-in that are done almost exclusively through the use of practical effects and stunt work...

And when they do jump to CGI effects, which thankfully is rare, it's almost always immediately noticeable and off-putting... as it is when the CGI Messerschmidt, green and shiny as it attemps unsuccessfully to contrast with the background onto which it's been fused, crashes into the mountain tunnel.

There is almost no sequence in KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, including by the way, going over a waterfall in a boat (something that was done MUCH more spectacularly, AND with ACTUAL stuntmen in the shot, in ROMANCING THE STONE), which is not created primarily, or totally, within a CGI world...

And that's just a shame.

I'm not even going to get into the CGI Army of Monkeys, or the goofy CGI grins pasted on the prairie dogs in the opening sequence. Those crappy shots are not even deserving of our scorn.

More to come in future installments.

Perfect movies

2008-05-23T18:06:00.001-07:00

Yeah I know... it's been a while. Not that this is any excuse since you don't get traffic without posting regularly... not to mention posting well, but it didn't look like too many people had been missing the ole Commander anyway, so I went on ahead and took me a little break.

I guess I was goosed to get back on the horse by Indy 4, which I've been grappling with for about the last 24 hours. The bottom line is I didn't like it... not at all... and that's been pretty hard for a man who came to Hollywood because of Indiana Jones to take... but there we are.

A buddy of mine and I used to play a game we called "Perfect Movies." The only criteria for making the list was that we both had to agree. In our game, "perfect" did not mean a "good" or even a "GREAT" movie. There's plenty of those in the world. A "perfect" movie is just that... nothing wasted, not a single bit of useless dialogue, no untied strings, no extraneous characters (a score on which Indy 4 fails miserable by the way), no dumb or meaningless tangents (again... Indy... my man... whattup wit dat!?!?)... in short, a flat-out, no bullshit, perfect movie.

You know them when you see them.

In all the years we've been playing... going on 15 now... we've only agreed on 3.

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark
2. Back to the Future
3. The Hunt For Red October.

Well luckily for my sanity, here I am, depressed, sitting on the couch wondering how Indy 4 could have gone so wrong, and here comes Red October on Universal HD.

If there is a better written and at the same time less well-known and certainly unappreciated scene than the one where Ryan briefs the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the situation surrounding the Red October, I can't think of what it could be.

"I'm a politician... which means when I'm not kissin' babies, I'm stealin' their lolipops" is just about as good a bit of dialogue as you're ever going to hear. No one will ever mention it in the same company as "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" or "I asked for a mission, and for my sins they gave me one"... but damned if they shouldn't.

I Hollywood fighting a rear guard action against World War II ?

2007-10-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

I saw this post pop up on a couple of blogs I read last week and I thought it worth talking about. The argument is that current Hollywood is being run by Liberals so incensed by the war in Iraq that, retroactively, they have begun to see ALL war as unnecessary, including previously agreed upon "good" wars like the war against Nazi and Japanese Fascism in World War II.

Driscoll quotes a Mark Steyn piece where Mark argues that this movement began with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN...

"Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing'. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing'. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa."

In a minute I'm going to give a couple of examples to show that Steyn and Driscoll may be on to something. But first I want to argue that their interpretation of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is not completely accurate. Here's the point. I don't think there's ever been a sane, rational, professional soldier who enjoyed war. I'm sure that in their quiet moments many of them reflect on the rightness or wrongness of the cause they are fighting for and they may experience pride or shame depending on how they come to feel about the value of their mission. But in the heat of battle, especially during World War II, which was brutal and often not fought by professional soldiers, my guess is that most GIs were concerned with doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, and not getting killed.

So, when you think about what a guy like the character played by Tom Sizemore might have gone through at the moment he's inspired to utter that fateful phrase that Steyn keys off on, most of it was, in fact, a "godawful mess." I would think a man like that might start to think less about the larger goals of winning the war, and start focusing more on what individual good he himself might have done. Up to that point, Sizemore's character had engaged in a long series of brutal and awful mortal combat. And I can certainly see why he might think... y'know, getting this kid home to his mom would be something I could do and remember and be proud of, rather than going to bed every night thinking about all the Germans I had to ram my bayonet into so that I could survive and get back home to my loved ones.

Isn't it possible THAT'S what he meant... that Saving Private Ryan is the one positive individual achievement that Miller and his men might be able to bring back with them to the real world?

I think so.

But that said, I think Driscoll is right that Hollywood is anxious to find stories set in World War II that they can use to fight the current ideological debate about Iraq. Let's face it, the movies they've made so far that were actually SET in Iraq are getting creamed at the box office, so you can understand why they might wish to continue this fight in a different setting, one to which audiences have historically been much more receptive.

... something like the "good war" in Europe in the Pacific.

I think the real war on World War II began with Clint Eastwood... and you have no idea how much it pains me to write that sentence.

I hated, hated, HATED FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. First of all it's the most boring war movie ever made. Second, I just don't understand the argument. With the vast majority of Americans in, y'know, America, and therefore removed from the fighting, the Government HAD to figure out ways to keep the American public engaged in the War effort. Let's not forget that this was not the big bad USA versus tiny little Iraq. There was a significant possibility that we would lose that war. We needed every American focused and engaged in the effort, not just fighting, but saving precious resources like oil and steel and food. And Americans get war weary, as do all right-thinking human beings... by the time of Iwo Jima, it's easy to understand why many Americans might have been tired of war, and why something like the picture of those men raising the flag above Mt. Siribachi might have been crucial to the war effort. Someone needs to explain to me what the hell could be so bad about using a heroic photo to give the folks on the home front a swell of pride so that they would stay engaged in the greatest battle against evil and totalitarianism that the world had ever seen!?

Stopping fascism by any means necessary is suddenly a bad thing? So they had to re-position the guys and shoot the picture twice... so a couple of the guys didn't react well to being called heroes because maybe in the heat of battle they did things that didn't feel very heroic in retrospect. Sorry, but boo-friggin'-hoo! There's a goddamned war on! It wasn't just that winning was important, it's that losing would have been a planetary catastrophe.

So that becomes, in my opinion, the first salvo in an assault on our collective memory of World War II. The template is, find a heroic World War II story and tell it in such a way that what should have been heroic becomes cynical and manipulative. The incredible assault on Iwo Jima suddenly goes from one of the most incredible acts of collective American bravery to a sham cynically abused by the powers that be to drum up support for a war to, what... seize European oil for Halliburton, I guess.

And there's more to come. Just off the top of my head I can think of two other movies in development that fit the same template. One film centers on the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, which resulted in the deaths of as many as 20,000 POWs, many of them American soldiers. Apparently, argues the movie, General Homma wasn't such a bad guy after all, and he got railroaded by the court that accused and convicted him of war crimes...

What's the point of making this movie? I mean really? Do we need to spend several million dollars to go back and resuscitate the reputation of a man who presided over the deaths from torture and starvation of thousands of human beings? Why!? What good could possibly come from doing that!?

Disgraceful. I wonder, if an American general forced a march that killed 20,000 Iraqis, would Hollywood treat him as kindly?

But getting back to the FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS template (Heroic effort becomes cynical sham)... Hollywood is also intent on making the true story of a particular operation behind enemy lines late in the war in Europe. In this story, a US General orders a small task force to assault and liberate a POW camp guarded by a much larger garrison of Nazi soldiers. It's an interesting story, no doubt, but the against-all-odds, for-our-boys heroic aspects of the movie are not what is motivating Hollywood in this case. I've heard this movie pitch a half-dozen times and it's always the same. They tell basically the same story I just pitched in the sentences above and everyone in the room kind of ho-hums... yeah yeah another mission movie about soldiers going behind enemy lines in World War II... been there, seen that.

But when the person telling the story gets to the punch-line and you can see everyone's eyes light up, as if to say ah-HA... you see it turns out this particular General's son-in-law was one of the prisoners being held in the camp! He sent 300 men on a suicide mission just to rescue his son-in-law!

And suddenly everyone gets why this is a movie that HAS to be made. Because there really is no heroism in war, no valiant struggle against the forces of evil... there are only victims (dullard US soldiers tricked into signing up) and cynical manipulative bad guys (US generals, Presidents, etc.) who send those victims off to die for their own enrichment, or amusement, or whatever.

And that's why Hollywood loves this story, because they can tell their own prevailing narrative of the war in Iraq, but couch it in the framework of WW2. Americans, Hollywood knows, like to see WW2 movies because it makes them proud of their nation. So they'll come in droves to see heroism, and get a dose of Hollywood "gotcha" instead.

Talk about cynical and manipulative.

Elah crashing and burning?

2007-09-18T10:12:00.001-07:00

Don't take it from me... how's Variety work for ya?

UPDATE: Jesus! a week later and the movie doesn't even show up at all on world wide box-office.com!

Similarly, the IMDB has no business information on the movie at all. I don't know what it takes to register on these two sites, but not being there 10 days into release is a decidedly bad sign.

Time for some movie reviews

2007-09-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

Gotta catch up on a ton of movies I've seen over the last few months... so here goes:

SHOOT 'EM UP:

AWESOME awesome movie. Simply put, if you miss this in the theatres you WILL be kicking yourself. Just a great example of what can happen when someone sits down to make fun kick-ass action movie with absolutely no loftier aspirations beyond making you feel like the money you paid was well worth the good time you got in return. It didn't do very well at the box office so it probably won't be around long, but do yourself a favor and run out to catch it before it slinks off to home video.

THE BRAVE ONE:

I kinda liked this one. It has a lot of problems... for one thing, Jodie Foster stumbles onto more violent crime in the course of one week than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes... but I'm willing to let that slide for the purposes of moving the plot forward. She has to become a vigilante, and if she's running all over the city for two hours unable to find criminals on whom to lay the smack-down, well then that's going to be one boring vigilante movie, isn't it? That said, the movie drags ass in the middle and I think maybe one less vigilante mission in the second act would have helped move things along a little better.

The performances save this one. Jodie is great as always. Terrence Howard is fantastic. I'm becoming a huge fan of his. I liked Nicky Katt a lot, as well. I think without his laugh-out-loud quality comic relief the movie would have been in constant danger of taking itself way too seriously. What with the maudlin Sarah McLaughlin songs running tediously underneath every scene, the movie is already in much more danger of that than it would otherwise be, in the frist place.

There's an interesting political point to make about this movie too. It doesn't seem to be arguing that vigilante violence is bad. Jodie never faces any serious consequences for her actions. And she never really seems to suffer any emotional effects from having murdered half a dozen people except for one very brief scene towards the end where she admits to a cleaning lady that she's killed a man and cries a little bit. Oh and by the way it's not like she's just killing people who are in the course of committing violent crimes, at one point she goes after a businessman who she's only been TOLD is a drug dealer, without EVER seeing any actual evidence of that fact. That's more than vigilantism. That's outright murder, plain and simple, and director Neil Jordan doesn't seem to have much of an opinion on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. He almost seems to be hoping we'll let it slide because of society's tendency to want to call violence committed by women against bad men in movies more like empowering acts, rather than actual crimes.

But whatever, you're never going to see me complain about assholes in movies getting what they deserve. I'm a gun owner and I have no problem with the concept of using guns to defend myself from criminals, up-to-and-including using deadly force. That's not to say I approve of vigilantes... I don't. But I find it interesting that this movie has nothing to say about whether what Jodie does is right or wrong. In fact towards the end of the film she is actually aided and abetted by the Police department in finishing off the bad guys... what exactly is Neil Jordan trying to say here?

Here's an interesting point of view from one of the guys over at Ain't I Cool...

quote:
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THE BRAVE ONE certainly does not condone Erica's actions. In fact, I think it's safe to assume filmmaker Neil Jordan (THE CRYING GAME; IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER) intended this to be an anti-violence, anti-gun film of the highest order.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

See, I think it DOES condone Erica's actions, certainly it doesn't work very hard to tsk-tsk them. But I love that he says "I think it's safe to assume this is an anti-violence, anti-gun film of the highest order." No it isn't. You may WANT to assume that because that's what you HOPE it is, but you you're going to have to show me some evidence before you can make a categorical claim like that. Cuz it ain't there. Certainly there's not enough evidence to make a "safe assumption" about anything.

But that's fine, people always try to shoe-horn ambiguous messages into the narrative they expect based on their own biased point-of-view. AICN is a Leftie site, and so they naturally assume that the filmmakers they admire share the same worldview. As for me, I'm sure Neil Jordan IS in favor of gun control and anti-vigilantism, but I'm also sure he doesn't effectively make that case in this film.

Also I found it odd to be watching this movie with a left-wing, Hollywood crowd (all agents, producers, and executives) and to hear them cheer Erica's every kill. This audience was more blood-thirsty than the one I saw SHOOT 'EM UP WITH. Moreover, this is the same crowd that calls me a right-wing kook when I suggest that 9/11 might have been prevented if the pilots had been armed, or that the Virginia Tech psycho might have killed fewer people if there'd been just one other person on that campus carrying a gun.

Ah well.. par for the course in this town... jam-packed with hypocrites and limousine liberals, it is.

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (ITVOE):

Let's start with a quick two word review: JUST AWFUL

As for the rest of it... man, where to start? I guess with the movie itself, rather than the politics, which are so reprehensible that they should be enough to damn the movie all by itself. A friend of mine who was at the same screening, and who is NOT a conservative, said "I loved the performances, but HATED the message. Nothing good can come of that movie being made."

So what's good? Well, the performances. Tommy Lee Jones is fantastic. Doesn't matter what he does or how or when, he's just great. There are few better. End of story.

What's bad? Christ, I could go on forever.

But I want to start at the end. I remember when I was in film school it seemed like all my classmates were pretentious blowhards who wanted to make "important" films about poverty and AIDS. Fortunately I was always able to sniff out the action movie fans in my classes and hook up with them for assignments. I remember we were seniors making a short, heavy-on-the-action, chase film and just to thumb our noses at our high-minded classmates, we put a Jean-Paul Sartre quote over the final fade-to-black at the end, just as a joke. I'll never forget how hard we laughed when, after the screening, our professor told us he thought it was a very profound moment.

At the end of ITVOE, over the final fade to black, Paul Haggis superimposes the words "FOR THE CHILDREN." I shouldn't need to tell you I nearly threw up in my mouth. It's one thing to go for the "self-important" final scene quotation, but to decide on the most hackneyed, cliched tagline in the history of cheesy political taglines goes a long way towards showing how at its heart this is an amateurish film.

Yes, I said "amateurish." Everything is about "the message" in this movie, and it comes at the expense of good film making. Nothing seems to make any sense in this film, it's just a bunch of political dominoes set up to fall a certain way and storytelling be damned.

I made two predictions to the people I was with in the first ten minutes. The first came after Tommy Lee Jones pulled out of his driveway and drove past a school where he was shocked to discover the American flag flying upside down, the international symbol for distress. Now of course Haggis makes no effort to explain why the flag would be hanging upside-down in a neighborhood he has taken great pains to portray, through use of a long overhead tracking shot, as a neighborhood full of veterans and families of veterans. Yellow ribbons, American flags, and "support our troops" signs appear on every lawn. So who in this neighborhood flipped the flag over, and why? Doesn't matter. After TLJ got out to fix the flag I turned to my friend and said "before this movie is over, he's going to come back and re-hang that flag upside down."

I hardly need to tell you that at the end, he did just that. What was funny about that final scene though, was how Haggis kept the flag out of view the whole time, wanting to keep it a surprise so that he could slowly pan up and reveal the upside-down flag as the end music swelled. Like anyone in the theatre was like "Whoa man, you totally BLEW my miiiiind! I totally didn't expect that!"

Second prediction. When we first meet Charlize Theron she's talking to a pretty young woman who has come to ask for help because her Army husband killed the family dog and she's worried about him. I leaned over to my friend again and said "ten bucks the husband kills her before this movie is over." I hardly need to describe to you the scene in the third act where Charlize goes to the woman's home and cries over her dead body, drowned in the tub by her back-from-
Iraq soldier husband who just couldn't get the mental help he needed from the VA... oh boo-friggin' hoo.

Which brings me to the most offensive element of the film. The soldiers. There is not a single honorable, professional, moral soldier in this entire movie. Every soldier in the film is on drugs, drinks way too much, is psychotic, a liar or cover-up artists, a murderer, a rapist, or all of the above. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

Couple of laugh-out-loud moments. TLJ asks one of his son's buddies if his son was on drugs and his friend replies "no more than everyone else." EVERYONE else... OK so all the soldiers in Haggis' world are drug addicts.

Also early in the movie, suspicion falls on one particular soldier. The cops pull up his rap sheet which is FILLED with drug dealing arrests and convictions, so much so that when she sees it, Charlize actually gasps and says "oh my god." Charlize asks how he was able to get in the Army and her boss says "oh they've been lowering standards every year since this war started." ........

Yeah, they're letting in drug dealers now. Come on!

And then there's the line that is destined to become the most often quoted line in the film. If the movie gets nominated for an Oscar, this will be the scene they show. A soldiers tells TLJ that "they shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq."

What the hell does that even mean? Where should we send them, Paris!? We send our soldiers to shitty places to do shitty things because, news bulletin Haggis, you jerk, IT'S THEIR JOB!!!! It's been 6 years now since 9/11, everyone who got tricked into joining up because of 9/11 has had at least 3 chances to get out by now, can we please drop the fiction that the Army is full of dolts who got conned into joining by George Bush telling them that Saddam pulled of 9/11?

These are professional, VOLUNTEERS who have chosen to live this life. Isn't it time we started respecting their choice rather than treating them like victims of some giant conspiracy?

Ugh, I could go on and on, but this is getting way too long... one final word about amateurism, though. The whole movie rests on a few videos contained in the digital camera of TLJ's son. TLJ finds the camera early in the first act and at the very moment he finds it, you know, you just KNOW, that the answer to the mystery is contained in those videos. But you can;t just have TLJ wantch the clips and end the suspense in the opening act, So what does Haggis do to draw out the drama? Well of course the computer tech TLJ brings it to says "oh these files are corrupted, but I have a special program at home that I can use to fix them. Oh but I'm really busy at work so this is going to take a while, but what I'll do is e-mail them to you as I fix them."

So now we have to spend the whole movie waiting for TLJ to get the latest installment of his son's Iraq video, and of course the answer to the mystery is at the very end of the very last one. I'm sorry but that's just lazy.

To sum up, in Paul Haggis' world, all soldiers are drug-using psychopaths who could, at any moment, stab their best friend 42 times, chop his body to pieces, burn the pieces, then calmly lie to their friend's father without a single sleepless night. All cops are lazy mysoginists who assume that any female officer must have gotten her job by fucking her boss. And the only honorable people in small town America are the strippers.

Here's what I learned from watching In The Valley of Elah... Paul Haggis' America is a very depressing place to live.

Needless to say after CRASH and ITVOE, I'll be skipping Paul Haggis' third effort.

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM:

I actually enjoyed this movie quite a bit. The settings bounce from Moscow to New York to Turin to Madrid to Paris to Tangier and back to New York again, which was great in that it made me want to get back on a plane and go traveling again. Action was great but I do have to say that I am more than ready for the hand-held camera era to end. Frankly I think it's lazy and directors use it to cover up an inability to effectively choreograph action. Yes I realize it was a reaction to directors like John Woo who relentlessly choreographed every single minute of every single scene. But frankly, I enjoyed Woo's action choreography, and I don't much appreciate being made to feel like I might puke at any moment.

I'll skip the politics of the movie since we're all more that used to the concept, by now, that every government official in a spy thriller like this must be, by definition, an evil bastard. David Strathairn plays the cliche in this one, and except for the hilarious affect of running around shouting things like "this is a level one priority!!!" and "this is a level four NSA priority!!!", he's mostly effective in a thankless role.

Although I do have to mention the one line that made me laugh out loud. During one of the scenes where Strathairn and his guys are tracking Bourne, Strathairn suddenly realizes they are in the wrong place and shouts "this is a Code 10 Abort!!!"

Doesn't Abort just mean stop what you're doing immediately? I mean how can there be ten different ways of telling your men to stop doing what they're doing!?

Hilarious. Sometimes too much of that goofy spy speak can ruin an otherwise fantastic action sequence. Just a quick note to all you would-be spy thriller writers out there, from Commander Shears to you.

Until next time! Cheers from Shears.

Indulge me in a little board topic abuse if you will...

2007-09-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

Strictly speaking this doesn't have anything to do with the movies, but it IS a media related topic, and it's about guns, and I love action movies above all things, so if you absolutely MUST have a Hollywood connection in all of your KILL HIM! posts, hopefully those will tide you over.

I think the big wire services ought to start hiring crime reporters who know something about guns, because this article is a bit of a disaster... full of scary words like "spraying bullets" and "AK-47", but nearly empty of actual helpful information.

First of all, the article goes back to the old assault weapns ban canard...

quote:
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Another issue potentially at play is the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, 10 years after its passage. The legislation outlawed 19 types of guns, including the semiautomatic AK-47.
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That last sentence is absolutely false. It did not outlaw the semi-automatic AK-47... the fully automatic AK-47 was illegal before the ban, and remains illegal now that the ban has been lifted. I must have typed these words a million times on this board but the assault weapons ban made illegal certain types of attachments that could be ADDED to weapons like the CIVILIAN version of the AK-47, which were always LEGAL to purchase, even DURING the ban. Again those are bayonet lugs, fire supressors, folding stocks, xtra large magazines, and grenade launchers.

But again, the author SHOULD know that, and if he's going to accuse the lifting of the Assault Weapons ban, then he HAS to provide evidence that one or more of those previously banned attachments are THE thing that is increasing the lethality of these weapons. Has he done that? No. In fact, he doesn't even seem to be aware of the reality of what the ban actually DID.

Also, There is a very important piece of information that he is leaving out of this piece that could tell us almost definitively whether or not the lifting of the AWB is to blame here.

I'll give you a second to try and figure out what that might be...
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That's right, we need to know if the Assault Weapons they are seeing on the streets are AUTOMATIC or not. Again, fully automatic weapons have ALWAYS BEEN ILLEGAL, both before, during, and after the ban, and they continue to be illegal now. Are we seeing these AUTOMATIC weapons on the streets now more than ever, or not? This is a crucial point. But not only does the article not answer the question but in several cases they use wording that further obscures the issue.

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The spray of bullets that killed a police officer and hurt three others this week came from something increasingly common on this city's streets: a high-powered assault weapon
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and

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if you just spray the general vicinity you're going to get innocent bystanders
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These quotes suggest that what we are seeing on the streets of Miami are Automatic Weapons that can put out a spray of gunfire with one pull of the trigger. A reporter writing a story about guns ought to know this but I'll say it again... if I shoot a semi-automatic "assault rifle" as fast as I can, meaning I have to pull the trigger once every time I want the gun to fire, and you fire a semi-automatic handgun as fast as you can, the rate of fire will be NO DIFFERENT. So are we REALLY seeing bullets being "sprayed" or is this a euphemism being used for political effect?

If these criminals who are "spraying bullets" are firing automatic weapons, then that sentence makes sense. If not, then they are not "spraying bullets" any more, or more dangerously, than similar criminal firing a handgun, and therefore it doesn't really matter WHAT kind of gun they are using to commit these crimes... in which case you'd want to know why they wrote the piece in the first place.

If, on the other hand, they are firing automatic weapons, then we have a different problem altogether... but more importantly, it's a problem that CANNOT be solved simply by re-instating the Assault Weapons Ban (which did not need to address automatic weapons because they were already illegal), and mentioning the AWB in the article has been done for shock/political effect in a callously calculated way.

Or, put another way, is this just honest bad reporting, or does this guy have an agenda/bias?

The really sad thing is that it occurs to me that what's most unfortunate about this mediocre reporting effort is that at the heart of this issue is a really interesting story. We know that two big reasons why gangs and criminals tend not to use assault style weapons is that 1) they tend to be very expensive, while a decent handgun can often be had for 1/4 of the price. And 2) because gangs in parrticular want something they can carry and assault-style weapons are very difficult to conceal.

So if Miami has suddenly been flooded by Semi-automatic assault-style weapons, then I'd want to know what has changed. The reporter might want to look into the possibility that someone, perhaps Mexican drug gangs running them across our porous border, has been flooding the market with cheap models... or maybe the local police departments are so outnumbered and overwhelmed that they have decided to abandon gang interdiction altogether and the criminals no longer are worried about being seen on the street with a rifle.

Either question might have resulted in a useful and interesting story... but I guess that's too much to expect fromt he modern-day investigative journalist.

Favorite summer movies?

2007-08-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

I've been asked by a few people to talk about my favorite films of the summer thus far. I think I'm going to have to say that coming in at Number One is LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. Yes a lot of it was cheesy, some of the action was over-the-top, and the crime was lame, I REALLY enjoyed spending 2 hours with John McClane. He's one of the best action heroes of our generation and it's been too long since we've seen him on screen.

We had fun watching TRANSFORMERS, but the second we walked out of the theatre, we looked at each other and said "Jesus, that was dumb!"

There's a lot of holes in my summer movie schedule though and it's quite possible that any of the following could overtake DIE HARD, but I've been really busy this summer and my movie-going hasn't been as stellar as I'd like.

I haven't seen THE SIMPSONS, RATATOUILLE, RUSH HOUR 3, BOURNE, HAIRSPRAY, or STARDUST. So take that.

Oh wait, one more. I didn't mention it because it hasn't been released yet, but if you're an action fan, SHOOT 'EM UP is one of the best movies you'll see this year.

Martin Scorsese's "favorite films" Doc.

2007-07-14T18:58:00.001-07:00

Just watched the two-part four-hour documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, which I gather was made in 1995... I think this is being re-broadcast now because they've since produced a Part 3.

Really interesting stuff, although the interviews with Martin get a little visually tedious, done as they are in extreme close-up on Martin's not-very-expressive face. But the insight he imparts is invaluable to anyone who wants to better understand the evolution of the American film director and the Uniquely American art form to which they aspire. At least as valuable as any four hours I spent in a film class during college.

It's particularly interesting to watch as Martin points out tricks and techniques that were truly revolutionary at the time, for without someone specifically pointing that out, it's often difficult to look back and know that something had never been done before. I was particularly struck by his analysis of a DW Griffith film that pioneered the art of cutting back-and-forth between action happening simultaneously in two different locations... Martin tells us that Griffith had to fight tooth and nail with the studio who were convinced that audiences would have no idea what the hell was going on. Think about how crucial that device has become in modern films... I kept thinking about that great sequence near the end of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS which plays with our expectations about intercut scenes to make us think the FBI is about to kick in the bad guy's door when in actuality, it's Clarice who has found the killer and the FBI are barking up the wrong tree. When Jame Gumb opened that door and Starling was standing there instead of the FBI agent with the flowers I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating for a second.

Also note Martin's analysis of the final scene in THE PUBLIC ENEMY which, despite being a climax that the audience has been waiting for, for quite some time, happens entirely off-stage such that we don't know what's happening until Cagney walks back into the view of the camera, which is situated outside in a static master shot. All we have to go on are gunshots and screams... brilliant way to build tension.

DVD review: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING

2007-07-13T22:56:00.001-07:00

Goddamned brilliant!!!

Best opening twenty minutes in comedic film since KISS KISS BANG BANG... before that? Hell I don't know... FIGHT CLUB? I can't remember when I've laughed so hard.

You must see this movie. Seriously... I'm going to find a way to get Jason Reitman on the phone Monday and tell him he's a genius. Not kidding!

And the most amazing thing is the film is politcally neutral. Most highly charged politcal film I've seen in years and I'll be damned if I can figure out what side it comes down on. In the same way they used to say Don Rickles was great because he was an equal opportunity insultor, this one takes jabs at literally everyone.

If you really hate government, and with Bush at 29% and Congress at 24%, realistically, who doesn't? Then this is the movie for you!

Politics and the summer blockbuster

2007-07-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

I generally shy away from assigning intentional political motivations to popular filmed entertainment. Movies like A MIGHTY HEART, JFK, or THE KILLING FIELDS obviously DO embrace a particular political point of view and I'm happy to point them out when I see them, but those aren't the kind of movies I want to talk about in this post… no I’m more interested in the big summer blockbusters that, after the fact, attract the attention of political pundits in the Mainstream Media and blogosphere alike because of perceived political leanings that go this way or that.

Take 300 for instance. In the days after 300 shocked the world by knocking over the box office like a wave of impotent Persian infantrymen, the debate raged on the web as to whether the filmmakers meant for us to think of George Bush as Leonidas or Xerxes. Was the Battle of Thermopylae served up by the filmmakers as some methaphor for a brewing disaster in Iraq? Or was it a treatise on valor and heroism and a call to stay the course against the Al Qaeda horde in Mesopotamia? The very fact that both sides could muster up equally convincing arguments made the discussion seem all the more irrelevant and amusing to me, but director Zack Snyder’s bemused reaction to the debate was the nail in its coffin. He found it fascinating that audiences might ascribe contemporary political motivations to a movie that sought to replicate as faithfully as possible a graphic novel written before George W Bush was elected President, and which described events that happened well over two thousand years ago.

In a related dust-up, I also quite enjoyed the argument that sprang up between John Rogers (one of the writers of TRANSFORMERS) and the Libertas guys after Libertas wrote a review suggesting that TRANSFORMERS was pro-military and that the writers might have been espousing conservative values. Rogers took exception to that and wrote an angry rebuke, which is not really all that surprising. There's history in them thar hills.... Somewhere out there on the Web you’ll find a famous letter he wrote to the guys at Ain’t-It-Cool after a reviewer there had the unbelievable gall to suggest that THE CORE was not believable. I loved Rogers’ letter responding to the criticism… it really was a brilliant rebuttal, but dude, come on… if the guys at Aint-It-Cool aren't believing what you're selling, that's a You Problem, not a Me Problem. Yelling at the reviewer is missing the point. It's the writer's responsibility to sell the movie's, ahem, core concept to the audience... and in the case of THE CORE, I think Rogers failed to do that. I thought the movie was ridiculous the first time I saw it, too. And I don't care how many theoretical physicists told you your script made perfect sense, none of them were in the theatre with me when I saw the movie.

And in any case, let's not forget what Kevin Costner said in JFK… “Theoretical physics will tell you an elephant can hang from a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy.”

Now, enter HARRY POTTER: AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX …

I just got through arguing that big studio blockbusters almost never set out to make an overt political point... the very idea of being political is anathema to the concept of a "four quadrant" summer movie spectacular... every potential audience member you scare off with an overt political message puts you one step further away from breaking even. So I'd be crazy to reverse myself now and tell you that the new HARRY POTTER movie DOES make a political point... so I won't. But if you sat down to write a treatise on Libertarian philosophy, you could do worse than to liberally quote examples from this film.

There's a lot going on in the film but the main plot thrust concerns the attempts by a new Headmistress who represents the Ministry of Magic to micromanage everything the students at Hogwarts are learning. There comes a point in the middle of the film where she has added so many rules and restrictions to the curriculum, hanging framed versions of them one after the other on an imposing wall, that the students are effectively learning nothing at all. Rather they seem to spend the bulk of their days endlessly preapring for a series of standardized tests that test nothing about their ability to survive in the real world, but rather their ability to memorize a standard set of facts and figures. She sucks the life out of the school.

The nanny-state creep starts out simply enough with seemingly reasonable and well-intentioned rules about curfews and such... after all, she's only concerned about the safety of the students, who could be against that!? But by the end of the movie, the rules have been expanded to include serious breaches of civil liberties including bans on public assemblies of more than two students at once and outright physical torture for rule breakers. Soon an army of Hogwarts brownshirts, students conscripted into the power structure of the nanny-state, roam the halls informing on students they once called friends.

I read this as a not-so-subtle warning against the slow creep of popular but civil-liberty abusing laws like anti-smoking regulations... sure it's nice to hang out in a smoke free bar now, but what happens when government decides that because candy bars, or cell phones, or left turns, or radios in our cars are dangerous to our health, they should be banned as well, under the same theory. Having given the Government that inch, it will be that much harder to say no when they ask for a mile.

Not 24 hours after I made these comments while walking out of the premiere, I saw this piece, which perfectly crystalized my thoughts on the matter. So let that be a lesson to you, the Commander is all-seeing and all-knowing.

Now where I think the Libertas guys got into trouble was when they assumed that Rogers not only made the same point in TRANSFORMERS that they took away from the film, but that he did so intentionally out of a desire to make some political point. So to be fair, I want to point out that my interpretation of the new Harry Potter movie springs from my own political pre-conceptions... in fact, to show you how open minded I am, I'll give you an alternate interpretation of the same storyline, just for kicks.

The filmmakers dressed the headmistress in a classic, pink, high-collar wool outfit that was very reminiscent of the classic 50's conservative, middle-America, bible thumping, rock-n-roll album-burning mom. We also see her use magic to do things like force apart two students she spots kissing in the halls. Furthermore, the torture she uses to punish students looks an awful lot like the kind of turture we're used to seeing sadistic Nuns use in the movies when students do BAD things, usually relating to natural sexual impulses. So you could just as easily argue that the movie is a warning about right-wing ultra-conservative oppression, and not busybody left wing nanny-statism.

I guess the bottom line is that movies are what you make of them, and what you bring to them. But be careful when assuming that the people who make the movies you see are espousing one particular poilitical point or another. You're probably reading too much into it.

Structure is key

2007-07-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

M*A*S*H was on the Fox Movie Channel this past weekend and was introduced by Tom Rothman who runs the studio. As he told the story of the movie's journey from book to screenplay to film, he pointed out that simply having great source material is not enough... that great material has to be put into the three-act screenplay structure by a talented writer (in the case of M*A*S*H it was Ring Lardner Jr., who won an Oscar for his efforts)... failing that, even the best book ever written will result in a crappy film every single time.

I've said this before on this site, but don't take it from me, Tom Rothman has been running a studio very successfully for a decade. If "structure first" is the message he's sending downstream to his executives, then you'd better be sure you're getting it right in your screenplay before you send it out to be read. Structure is what they'll critique first. If the movie doesn't work from a structural point of view, all the great dialogue and action in the world won't save it from getting a "pass."

Down and dirty character development...

2007-07-08T09:57:00.001-07:00

Moviemaking is all about finding ways to give your audience constant clues about the character motivations of the people in your films. Lots of ways to do that of course, some obvious, some more subtle and clever.

Couple things I noticed with regard to the kinds of clues I'm talking about here while re-watching some classic of the 80's and 90's this weekend. I've argued in past postings that action movies often skimp on character development in favor of driving the action forward faster and with more regularity. I still believe this is true, but I also think it's worth clarifying that this does not absolve the action movie writer from the responsibility of developing great characters. You simply gotta pick the right moments in which to skimp.

Let's take a look at two classic military thrillers of the 80's and early 90's... TOP GUN and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. One major screenwriting challenge these two movies both have in common is a TON of characters to service throughout the story. By the time Cash and Epps got around to fully developing Maverick, Goose, Charlie, Iceman, Hollywood, Slider, Viper, Jester, and Carole, there was very little time left to develop that one thing every single movie needs... an antagonist... otherwise known as, the villain.

Now true, the main antagonists in the film are Maverick's inner demons... but inner demons don't make for very photogenic movie villains, and so in TOP GUN, the main enemy faced by Maverick and his band of brothers are Russian fighter pilots... and they are literally faceless.

TOP GUN is about a lot of things, and really, aerial combat is among the least of them. We don't need to get to know the Russian adversaries in order to enjoy the story, in fact, I would argue the less we know about them the better. And so, with that in mind, in order to create intimidating villains that we would instinctively want to root against without the filmmakers having to spend a lot of time explainging WHY we need to root against them, the filmmakers employed some clever techniques. For one thing, all the American pilots wear individually colorized helmets with open face plates. In this way we are able to easily identify each pilot by his helmet, and by his eyes... the facial feature by which most humans first connect with one another.

Maverick's Russian adversaries, by contrast, have black reflective faceplates, unadorned helmets, and we never hear any of their radio chatter. The filmmakers basically turn them into flying robots with whom it would be virtually impossible for an audience member to connect or identify. They are a faceless, emotionless enemy... because that's really all we have time for, and in point of fact, those characteristics are exactly what we Americans spent most of the Cold War believing were the major hallmarks of our faceless enemies from Russia.

The writers of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (THuFRO for short) faced a similar problem as did the writers of TOP GUN... that of an absolutely huge cast of critical characters, plus one additional problem Cash and Epps did NOT face... an extremely complicated and detailed plot line involving the surreptitious theft of a Russian submarine. With all these characters and plot lines to service, THuFRO was going to need a lot of help quickly and efficiently crafting easy to understand Russian villains to pepper throughout the piece.

Fortunately for the writers, by the time THuFRO rolled around in 1990, the stereotype of the emotionless, truth-obfuscating Russian official and the bombastic, Folksy, vaguely Southern American policy official was firmly ingrained in the American psyche, and so building characters around that concept turned out to be deceptively easy.

The best example comes at about the midway point... Jack Ryan tries to explain to Admiral Painter (played by 2008 Presidential candidate Fred Thompson) that Marko Ramius intends to defect with the Red October and that it's simply a matter of helping him do that. Not so easy, says the Admiral... first we'd need to know what Ramius' plan is...

"Plan?" asks Ryan...

"The Average Russian don't take a dump without a plan, son."

And so one short, nicely crafted line instantly evokes the image of the scheming Russian.

But the writers of THuFRO were equal opportunists when it came to stereotyping their characters for quick and easy effect. There's a recurring series of scenes featuring an American National Security Advisor played by Richard Jordan, who does his own stereotyping for us... describing himself as the typical loudmouth, untrustworthy American politician by telling Ryan...

"Listen, I'm a politician which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open."

Later, that stereotype will be reinforced when, in a moment of frustration, Pelt shouts at his Russian counterpart...

"Mr. Ambassador, you have nearly a hundred naval vessels operating in the North Atlantic right now. Your aircraft has dropped enough sonar buoys so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet. Now, shall we dispense with the bull?"

Only to have the Russian parry with "you make your point as delicately as ever, Mr. Pelt."

These little reminders of the character traits we already expect based on our own stereotypes and preconceptions about American and Russian politicians and soldiers of the period are peppered throughout the movie. Watch it again and I'm sure you'll find literally dozens that I missed.

One other thing about the movie I find interesting is the filmmaker's use of set and lighting design both to evoke mood, as well us to remind us in subtle ways where we are from one scene to the next.

The thing about the insides of naval vessels is they all look the same... small, dark, gray, and full of anonymous men and machinery. Given that throughout much of the film, we will be quickly cutting from the inside of one Naval warship to another, the filmmakers needed a quick and easy way for the audience to visually recognize an American ship from a Russian one.

And so, you'll note that throughout the movie, whenever we are inside an American vessel, the overall lighting scheme is blue... contrasting that with the Russian vessels, most notably the Kenevelov, which are primarily red. This gives our brains a down-and-dirty visual clue as to where we are at any given moment. Blue is good, Red is bad. (I can think of at least one other series of movies that identified good and evil through the use of red and blue color schemes... see if you can guess which one I mean and I'll give you the answer at the end).*

Oh come on Shears, you're out of your mind, I can hear you saying... this goofy color theory of yours is a coincidence at best? Maybe, but take a look at the Red October herself. Throughout the first act, before we know for sure that Ramius intends to defect, the lights in the Red October are indeed red, as my theory predicts. Only after it becomes clear that he DOES intend to defect, and not to launch his missiles on the United States as so many other characters in the film are arguing, does the fake "nuclear accident" occur... from that moment on, after we know for sure that the Red October is no longer a threat, the lighting scheme within the Red October is neutral yellow.

* THE STAR WARS SERIES (Bad guys (Vader, Dooku) have red light sabers, good guys (Luke, Yoda) have blue or green)

Man, I love Westerns!

2007-07-06T18:37:00.001-07:00

Just finished watching HIGH NOON, which I caught for about the fiftieth time on AMC. Why are Westerns so damned awesome!? They're like pizza, even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. I think what appeals to us about Westerns is the way they strip away all those layers of stuff that separate modern humans from the realities of daily life and force characters to deal with things head on, and often all alone. Think about the lives we lead... has there ever been a more cushioned, protected, leisurely generation than the one currently ruling the roost? I don't say that as if it's a bad thing, in fact, I think this is what we've been striving for lo these 230 years... a peaceful easy life where we are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in all the ways we, as individuals, see fit. The harsh realities of life on the Western Frontier are things to be regarded from afar, like exhibits in a museum... not to be longed for like a lost treasure. Life on the Western frontier was cruel, difficult, and often tragically short... and even though it was crucial period in the building of our national character, we are well rid of it.

Now, of course, in modern America, every now and then, desperate problems DO enter into our lives... but we have doctors, and policemen, and soldiers to deal with things that get too crazy for us to handle individually. Not so much for Western heroes. Out on the frontier, law was what you made of it. There was a basic moral code that everyone instinctively understood... don't kill anyone unless it's in self defense, and keep your hands to yourself. Other than that, it was, well, the Wild West. But of course bad men were drawn to the anarchy of the lawless frontier, and as energetic, ambitious Americans made their way west, those predators followed. A soldier, or a real man of the law might be a hundred miles away when trouble started, and so early Westerners had to learn to take care of themselves in a way that no modern American ever has to.

I think John Wayne put it best in his tour de force performance in THE SHOOTIST...

"I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them."

But to be fair, Wayne's character was a gunfighter, and was quite used to living that sort of life and to backing up those words with decisive action when required to do so. In HIGH NOON, however, Gary Cooper faces a different reality... the reality of what happens when that Shootist philosophy runs smack dab into men who are more adept at killin' than you are, and who don't necessarily appreciate or understand the meaning of a "fair fight."

HIGH NOON is not about a gun fight, though that IS what ultimately ends it. HIGH NOON is a philosophical treatise on civic responsibility. Gary Cooper sends a man up for murder, and as a result, criminals far and wide get the message that law and order is here to stay in Cooper's town. Because of Cooper's sacrifice, putting his life on the line for his fellow townsfolk, women and children can once again walk the streets in peace. But a northern judge pardons the murderer who then comes back to town looking for revenge.

And yet Gary Cooper's life is not all that hangs in the balance... this is not just a battle over some long lost grudge... within this battle, and hundreds of others like it across the West, hung the very fate of the Western frontier itself. Would it be a land of justice and peace in the best spirit of a fledgling Democracy? Or would it descend into lawlessness... on this day, one man, Gary Cooper, will help answer that question one way or the other, and not the US Army, or the President himself, can help him. That's what's great about these stories... within this structure, one single man can hold the future of the country itself in his hands.

Of course, I'm no screenwriter, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Cooper's charcter's ex-girlfriend in the film puts it much more succinctly...

"Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody's gonna do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I'm going someplace else. That's all."

She knows the message Cooper's death will send back East... Cooper's friend Martin knows it too... he makes an impassioned speech to the Church congregation in which he talks about how the big money men back East are watching this town, trying to decide if they should invest money in stores and factories... and stories of death and murder will convince them to put their money somewheres else. Their town will die, and with it, the West itself.

In other words, Cooper has a civic responsibility... or to quote the current summer box office leader TRANSFORMERS... "There can be no victory without sacrifice."

Hollywood development executives always talk about these kinds of movies in terms of stakes... always asking the writers they work with to raise the stakes so that the audience will care about the story and engage itseif in the action that will determine how those stakes shake out. Harder to imagine bigger stakes, isn't it, than the very future of the entire western half of a developing nation?

It occurs to me that we have become a country that does not understand this simple reality anymore. Maybe that's why I like watching Westerns, because it reminds me of an America that people believed was worth fighting for. Now we expect wars to be over in a week and we don't want to see a single body bag on the news. Hell two soldiers wandered off during the bombing of Bosnia back in the 90's... WANDERED OFF mind you... they weren't captured, they weren't lost securing some beachhead or taking out some critical enemy position, they just got lost... and a local politician here in Southern California (where one of the men was from) named a particular day of the week in their honor.

I like to think that any of the characters John Wayne played during his storied career would be insulted at the very idea of being honored for what amounts to poor soldiering.

Watch most modern action movies and you'll see these themes hashed out over and over again, so desperate are we to be tested as men, women, and Americans that we go to dark movie theatres on Friday and Saturday nights to watch made up men and women sacrifice for what's right. John McClane, Indiana Jones, Will Kane...

But back to the western, for a minute... if you think it through, I think you'll agree with my assertion that DIE HARD owes it's basic structure to movies like HIGH NOON.

One man trapped in a skyscraper (small western town) facing overwhelming numbers of gunmen who struggles to find even a single competent individual willing to help him. And in the same way that Gary Cooper assumes it will be a simple thing to deputize 10 able-bodied men in a town full of them, and then spends two hours going from Justice of the Peace, to Churches, to saloons looking for help and getting turned down at every location, John McLane looks for help from 911 dispatchers, cops, SWAT, even the FBI before realizing that if this thing is going to be stopped, he's going to have to do it alone.

They say DIE HARD created a new genre... for years, agents, producers, and executives pitched movies as "it's DIE HARD on a plane" or "it's DIE HARD at the zoo" or "it's DIE HARD at the petrified forest"... but was DIE HARD's structure really all the revolutionary?

Most good action movies and thrillers (hell even the bad ones) follow the same pattern. Think about THE FUGITIVE, THE BOURNE TRILOGY, UNDER SIEGE, CHAIN REACTION, and IN THE LINE OF FIRE... what must you do in order to make your hero into someone the audience can relate to? First you must take away his safety net... you must strip him bare. Now none of those movies I listed above do anything as overt as trapping their hero in a tall building... but putting them in a dangerous physical location from which they cannot escape without confronting the villain is not the only way to utterly isolate a human being. Harrison Ford's Richard Kimble is a rich surgeon with the world at his fingertips, and so we must take that all away from him and set him out on his own in order to begin his journey... or Clint Eastwood is a Secret Service agent with 40 years of experience and an army of agents willing to die for him... but to make his character interesting, we must strip all that away and set him out in the wilderness... discredited and alone... only then do we get to see what he's really capable of.

Now I do not intend for this to be some neo-conservative "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" screed... though I certainly think that there's a lot to learn about our responsibilities with regard to Iraq by watching HIGH NOON... rather, it's worth noting that the best Westerns are melancholy about sacrifice... rather than revelatory. When they come to the house of an old friend looking for any escape from the expert mercenaries tracking them to Hole-In-The-Wall, Butch and Sundance (populist, Robin-Hoodian heroes that they are) are told...

"You know, you should have let yourself get killed a long time ago when you had the chance. See, you may be the biggest thing that ever hit this area, but you're still two-bit outlaws. I never met a soul more affable than you, Butch, or faster than the Kid, but you're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your time is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where."

When Chico tells Vin in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN that his gun has gotten him everything he has, Vin replies soberly...

"Yeah, sure. Everything. After awhile you can call bartenders and faro dealers by their first name - maybe two hundred of 'em! Rented rooms you live in - five hundred! Meals you eat in hash houses - a thousand! Home - none! Wife - none! Kids... none! Prospects - zero. Suppose I left anything out?"

There is no victory without sacrifice...

Westerns are great because they break that equation down to its simplest, starkest terms... They strip away all the layers of law, bureaucracy, and authority that protect everyday Americans from the harsh realities of life and force us to face responsibility and consequence without filters and without safety nets.

Because that's really what we fear isn't it... being alone at the moment of truth? Hearing the sound of someone kicking your door in at 3 am and knowing that by the time the cops get there it will all be over? What would you do? Could you protect yourself? Your wife? Your kids? Fortunately most of us will never find out... but the reason why we love watching Chris and Vin turn a village of Farmers into the defenders of their own freedom to live and prosper as they see fit, is because it gives us faith and confidence in our own abilities to do those things for ourselves.

I've often said that if you really want to connect with an audience, figure out what they're afraid of, and hit them in the face with it. Sometimes that happens accidentally... like when Steven Spielberg found out quite by accident that most humans have a fear of the things that hunt us in deep dark waters.

I think what keeps us coming back to westerns, action movies and contained thrillers is our basic fear that when the shit hits the fan... we're not smart enough, or tough enough, or resourceful enough to make it on our own.

But Gary Cooper and Yul Brynner and Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Steve McQueen and James Coburn and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman and William Holden give us hope that maybe, on the right day... we can be.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:
HIGH NOON
THE SHOOTIST
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
THE WILD BUNCH
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
THE PROFESSIONALS
SILVERADO
GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, FIST FULL OF DOLLARS, and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
OPEN RANGE
DANCES WITH WOLVES

Vareity's Top Ten Screenwriters to Watch

2007-06-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

This article makes for interesting reading for any wannabe writer trying to break into the biz. Each writer talks about their influences, their big break, and a little bit about how they pursue their craft.

Also note that as I argued in this post, all of these writers came to Los Angeles in order to begin their careers as screenwriters... even the playwright who'd had a dozen plays produced in New York realized that if she wanted to make it in the movie business, she needed to be here.

Hilarious Hollywood-related e-mail forward of the day

2007-06-26T20:23:00.001-07:00

Here's the backstory. A couple of weeks ago a company here in town bought a script that was described as a spoof of a popular TV series from the 70's.

Allegedly, an executive at the company which controls the rights to the original character decided to send a letter to an executive at the other company asserting his belief that this new script infringes upon rights held by the first company.

He wrote:

-----------------

Executive X-

Please give me a call about a spec script called XXXX. As you know, along with XXXXX, we control the rights to XXXX. My understanding is this spec includes characters we own.

Best- Executive Y
-----------------

Well the response he got is PURE comedy gold. Enjoy!

-----------------

Executive Y-

Good news. As you may know, The United States Supreme Court has affirmed the right of Parody as an unassailable First Amendment Right. This has enabled you to make movies like XXXX and XXXX in which you parody many films which (your company) does not own or control.

The script is a parody and if you have any problems I suggest you hire a Constitutional lawyer and file a brief with the US Supreme Court. This will be an uphill battle - the court voted 9 to 0 when this last hit the docket and those stubborn justices all believe in Stare Decisis!

And if you succeed at the Supreme Court - you will have to stop making XXXX and XXXX.

This will take about 5 to 7 years...and lawyers are an expensive breed but I wish you good luck on your journey to deny our First Amendment rights.

All the best

Executive X
----------------

Genius!

* Because I have no first-hand knowledge that these e-mails are real or even accurate, I have decided to remove all the names of the people, companies, and projects involved.

Sorry 'bout that, but this is a fledgling blog offering "how-to" information most Hollywood folks would rather you didn't have, and I don't need that kind of heat.

Minor screenwriting pet peeve

2007-06-24T16:14:00.001-07:00

Be careful with unnecessarily obvious exposition in your screenplay dialogue. Rather than have one of your characters just flat out tell us a crucial piece of information, I like to see writers get a little more creative about letting crucial information slip out naturally so that the exposition is as unobtrusive as possible.

It's pretty common, for instance, for action heroes to have a background as "a former something or other." It's gotten to be a pretty serious cliche. Now that's not to say you shouldn't use it, ever... because it almost always makes sense for a guy who's going to spend two hours kicking ass to have at least some training in the fine art of ass-kicking. But you have to be clever about it. Nothing makes me cringe more than when I'm watching a movie and some character or another describes the hero by saying... "oh that's Bob Jones... he's a former Navy SEAL who fought in Kuwait during Gulf War I and got kicked out of the Navy for punching out his commanding officer."

I mean come on...

It goes back to one of my earlier posts where I cautioned you to be sure you write dialogue that sounds like people actually talking. It's hard to imagine an actual human being introducing someone by spelling out his entire resume.

Find a way for that information to flow naturally. Maybe instead when that character introduces the hero, the person he's meeting could say something like "yeah we know each other from the Navy."

Rare will be the times when you'll hear the Commander cite Steven Seagal movies as examples of great writing, but I have to give UNDER SIEGE credit for coming up with a clever riff on the "former etc. etc." cliche... Even though Steven spends the first half of the movie performing ridiculous feats of derring-do, he continues to insist through out that he's "just a cook." But he does it with a smile on his face and the claim rings SO hollow that by the time his former Commanding Officer ends the suspense by listing off his seemingly endless list of military accomplishments, we're ready for it, and the result is more comic than annoyingly cliched.

Just be smart about it. Lazy writing is boring writing, and the quickest path I've found to get your script passed on by everybody in town.

Friday Night movie quote

2007-06-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

Jill: You saved his life!
Harmonica: I didn't let THEM kill him, and that's not the same thing.

- ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

Hey... I owe you some answers on a few first act breaks, don't I?

2007-06-20T22:49:00.000-07:00

OK, so as you read these, bear in mind that I'm doing this from memory... so if I remember some scenes out of order or if you think I've remembered the act breaks wrong, feel free to challenge me in the comments, as it quite possible that my memory has failed me on the order of a scene or two. Also, if the title of this post means nothing to you, check out this previous post on Screenplay Structure, where I discussed The First Act and left you with a challenge to try and identify where the first act ends in three popular movies.

Now that that's all out of the way, here we go:

STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF KAHN - Kahn forces Chekov to contact Carol Marcus on Regula One to let her know that the Reliant is coming to take possession of Genesis under the orders of Admiral James T. Kirk, knowing full well that Carol will try to confirm the order with Kirk. She does, but Kirk is unable to understand what she's saying because Kahn is jamming the signal. Unable to stop being the hero even for a second, and chomping at the bit to get back in the Captain's chair, Kirk takes it upon himself to re-assume command of the Enterprise in order to find out what the hell is happening... just as Kahn, and his superior intellect, knew he would. The First Act officially ends when Kirk gets on the ship-wide intercom and announces that he is assuming command of the ship, they are embarking on a combat mission, and that he's going to need this boatload of recruits to grow up a little faster than they'd planned.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN - Chris and Vin have accepted the contract to protect the village, but based on their tactical plan, they know they cannot get the job done with less than seven men. Nevertheless, as the deadline for leaving town approaches, their rigorous interview process has yielded only six reliable recruits. It's a tense ride to the village, as each man realizes they are probably riding to their deaths at the hands of Caldera's overwhelming manpower... and yet as they ride, Vin notices that someone is following them. It turns out to be Chico, who is determined to jon the group despite his humiliation at Chris' hands during the interview. Impressed with his pluck and determination, Chris allows him to join the team... as they ride on, Vin looks at Chris, smiles, and holds up seven fingers. The teams is set, and Act One has ended.

DIE HARD - John McClane arrives at Nakatomi. At this point we've met most of the crucial supporting characters... Argyle, Takagi, Holly, and of course Ellis. Nakatomi has mentioned the important tactical information we need to know about the building... no one is here but the party-goers on 30, several floors are under construction, etc. etc. John tries to be civil with Holly but his temper gets the better of him and the last words they say to one another are in anger. She storms back to the party, while he throws water on his face in an attempt to relax. Meanwhile the terrorists seal off the elevators, effectively blocking off any escape from the 30th floor, and then start shooting up the party. McClane peeks out into the hallway, sees he is hopelessly outnumbered, and only has time to grab his gun and duck into a stairwell before the gunmen check the office where he has been hiding. Now he's alone in the stairwell with a single gun, no shoes, and no way to call for help. Our story has begun, and act one has ended.

Where to I go to be a movie star?

2007-06-19T08:11:00.001-07:00

The title of this post is a line from Steve Martin's fantastic Hollywood satire BOWFINGER... Heather Graham, looking every inch like she just arrived from Muncie, Indiana, climbs off a Greyhound bus in Hollywood, plaid patterned suitcase in hand, and asks the very first person she sees, "Hi, where do I go to be a movie star."

That's a bit like how I felt when I got to town. My University film education had consisted mostly of running around campus with a 16mm camera shooting short films about guys slowly going crazy. It was fun, but there was a fundamental lack of education in the reality of what I would be doing in Hollywood, eight o'clock, Day One.

Because the reality is that you are not going to come to town and be a working screenwriter that same week... or a director, or an agent, or a producer, for that matter. A few do, but it's such a tiny percentage of the people who come to town looking for fame and fortune that it isn't even really worth fantasizing about. I once debated with a friend whether or not a particular actress would ever make it as a movie star, and when I argued that she was really talented, he replied "The road to Hollywood is littered with the bodies of talented actresses." He was kidding of course, but he had a point... if everyone who came to Hollywood bought a lottery ticket their first day in town, chances are that after ten years, twice as many would have hit the lottery jackpot than would have found the fame and fortune they were looking for without a good five years of hard work struggling up that ladder.

So, here you are. You just graduated from college, or you've quit your job at the widget factory in Muncie and you're ready to move out to Hollywood and give your dreams a chance. Chances are you're going to be working as an assistant until your big break comes... whether that break is selling a screenplay, getting promoted to agent, or getting hired as a creative executive by some producer... just about everyone does at least SOME time on some Hollywood big shot's desk as an assistant.

I'm not going to tell you it's fun. It can be exciting, sure... this is a really interesting, flashy, high-profile business and being a part of it, even a small part, is definitely a rush. But the hours are long, the pay is crap, and too many of the bosses can be complete A-holes... I don't know why these things are true, there are lots of theories... but I think it has something to do with the fact that there are a finite number of jobs available, and TONS of bright-eyed kids with stars in their eyes who want those jobs, and so the business feels a little more free to jerk people around, knowing that if a given employee gets frustrated or angry and storms off, there is a literal army of replacements standing just outside the door waiting to take over.

How bad can it get? Check out a film called SWIMMING WITH SHARKS... the writer/director George Huang worked for some of the legendary jerkweed bosses in the business and claims that he based a lot of the horrible things Kevin Spacey does to Frank Whaley's character in the film, on things that his bosses did to him when he was an assistant.

It may not be fair, but it's the way it is.

But there are some things you can do to prepare yourself for life as an assistant, and that's really what this post is about... I want to give you an idea of what you're in for so that you can make that big move with full disclosure under your belt.

First, before you get to Hollywood, spend some time reading Variety and the NY Times Sunday calendar section on-line where the major headlines are free. The best way to get a boost in this business, to start off just a hair above everyone else in town, is to know who's who and how they relate to the other who's whos. Who runs Warner Bros? Who is the President of Production and who is the Studio Head? What's the difference? What about New Line? What kinds of movies do the various studios seem to specialize in? Who's just had a great summer and who is about to get fired because every summer blockbuster flopped like a dead turkey? You're going to need to know this stuff eventually, so the earlier you get started, the better for your career.

But assuming you're here already, and are looking for that first assistant gig, what can you expect?

Agent assistants typically start their day between 8am and 8:45am. Producer assistants and assistants who work for Studio Executives typically begin their days a little bit later, say 9 or 9:30. Most folks who work in the biz "roll calls" from the car on the way in every morning and again on the way home... both returning phone calls from the night before and putting out calls they hope will generate business during the day. It's the assistant's job to keep track of what calls have been made, which calls need to be returned, and what needs to be done as a result of each call connected. Agents are typically calling producers and executives trying to find out what jobs they need writers, directors, or actors for, and then trying to sell those executives on the idea of hiring their clients for those jobs. If the executive is unfamiliar with a given client, it's the assistant's job to get the appropriate material to that executive so they can be educated on the artist in question. Producers and Studio folks do just the opposite. Generally they are calling agents or the artists themselves trying to get people attached to write, direct, or star in their movies.

As an assistant you'll also be responsible for making your boss' schedule, and for typing up letters, keeping up a Rolodex, booking lunch reservations, as well as various and sundry other annoying administrative....things....

If this sounds like secretary work, that's because it is. Yeah I know it's tough to swallow, especially when you could be sitting on a hundred thousand dollars worth of degrees or more, as I was. But there is an upside.

For one thing, if your boss grows to like you and trust your taste, they will often ask you to read scripts for them, and sometimes, to do "coverage" or a set of "notes." Believe me, if you want to be an agent or a production executive, you're going to need to know how to break down a set of notes, or analyze a script via a good piece of coverage. If you don't know what either of those things are, don't worry... no one taught me either. I'll try to take a crack at both in future posts.

Beyond that, something to know about the upside of being an assistant is that the business plays very fast and loose with the "rules" for moving up the ladder and it's more than willing to let really clever and industrious assistants figure out unorthodox ways to get ahead. You will be on the front lines and trusted with an awful lot of access to the inner workings of the business, so if you bust your ass, work hard, and do a great job, sooner or later someone will promote you and give you a shot. If you want to be an agent or an executive, working your way up from the assistant ranks is pretty much the only reliable way to get there.

On the other hand, if you want to be a writer, being an assistant will afford you plenty of time to write, as well as good access to the people you will need to know in order to get your career going. Most of the writers I know have gotten a helping hand along the way from someone they worked for as an assistant.

Whew... that's quite a brain dump for one post on what to do when you first get to town. I think I've covered most of the relevant topics, but if there's something missing, or if you have a follow-up question, feel free to leave a comment or, as always, I am available by e-mail.

Cheers from Shears!

Screenplay Structure - Part 1

2007-06-16T17:01:00.000-07:00

A whopping ONE reader left a comment saying a discussion of Structure would be helpful (Thanks "T")... now most people would probably argue that one person is not enough to spark a long detailed discussion of screenplay craft... but in Shears' case, one person could be as much as 50% of my total readership... so who am I to resist those kind of overwhelming numbers. Vlad Guerrero would kill for a .500 batting average after all...

Screenplays, ALL screenplays, must be written in three acts. Are there exceptions to this rule? Yes, of course, but they are few and far between and in 99% of cases, if you can't fit your story into a three act screenplay, it's either a bad or fundamentally flawed idea, or the story would work better in some other format.., a novel or short story, for example. Truth is, you give me a movie you think occurs in more or less than three acts, and I'll bet you a can of crisco I can prove you wrong... (now if THAT doesn't generate a flood of e-mails, nothing will! :-)).

So what are these three acts... well before we get into that I'm going to steal an idea from the Libertas guys... before you start writing, you need to be able to encapsulate your idea into one sentence... what we Hollywood eggheads call a "logline." For instance, the logline for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK might read something like "An adventure-seeking Archaeologist must track down a potentially dangerous Biblical artifact before the Nazis can use it to conquer the world." That one-liner, as the Libertas guys point out, will tell you exactly how your story breaks down into three acts.

Act one is where you'll introduce your characters and let the audience know what problem he (or they) will be forced to solve. In Act Two, your hero will go about the process of actually tring to solve the problem you've presented him with. Act Two typically ends at a low point in the hero's story... a moment where all seems lost. And finally, in Act 3, the hero re-engages the problem, gets his second wind, and ultimately comes out the other side victorious... or at least having come full circle in some way. I say that because it's important to remember that every movie doesn't have to have a happy ending, but if the ending IS a downer, you are still responsible, as a writer, for giving your hero some kind of character arc that justifies the story you've just asked your audience to spend two hours watching. As a quick example, in AMERICAN BEAUTY, Kevin Spacey's character is killed at the end (bummer), but having gone through the experiences provided by that story leaves an indelible impression on the other characters which makes their lives better for having known and interacted with him (whoo-hoo!)... the ending is ultimately uplifting, even though our hero is gunned down in cold blood.

Act One generally runs anywhere from 20-35 pages, where one page equals one minute of screen time, depending on the genre. Action movies tend to be short on character development and usually come with a requirement to get right to the action or risk losing the audience... in other words, action movie audiences require a certain amount of cutting to the chase, and are willing to sacrifice deep character development for it. As a result, you'll generally see the first act of an action movie run on the short side, say 20 pages or so. Dramas like THE GODFATHER, APOCALYPSE NOW or THE KILLING FIELDS may run longer because so much more is required of the screenplay writer in setting up the story and the characters who will go through it, and where so much less of the story will need to be filled up by action sequences.

Let's look at a couple of First Act examples.

RADIERS OF THE LOST ARK - I start with RAIDERS for a couple of reasons... 1) it's flat-out one of the best movies ever made, and a textbook example of the three act structure, and 2) Spielberg and Lucas were trying to make a movie that was an homage to the classic serials they went to see at movie houses when they were kids, and as such, they added interstitial scenes which effectively break up the 3 acts for us. Back in the 40's and 50's, folks would spend all day at the movies, sometimes seeing two or three episodes in long-running serials where stories played out over months rather than hours, and audiences were expected to get up and move around, or go to the snack stand every now-and-then, and thus needed clear act breaks to tell them what was going on from one minute to the next.

Before we start, we must agree on what RAIDERS is about? To do that, let's go back to the logline I wrote earlier... "An adventure-seeking Archaeologist must track down a potentially dangerous Biblical artifact before the Nazis can use it to conquer the world." OK, so if that's our logline, what do we need to do in Act One? We need to introduce our main character Indiana Jones and the world he lives in, we need to tell the audience about this dangerous Biblical artifact, and we need to start Indy off on his journey to find it. That's it. Pretty simple right?

So how did this work out in practice... well, right off the bat they tell us with a graphic that the movie is set in 1938. We watch as a group of men make their way through an impenetrable jungle. We see Indy find a poisoned dart and we learn from his compadres that the bad guys are, at most, 3 days away. We see one of his team attempt a double cross and we watch Indy disarm a gunman with a whip. Later, Indy disarms several deadly and ingenious booby traps using an extensive knowledge of archaeology. We then meet his arch-enemy, Beloq, a proper Frenchman who, rather than getting involved in the wet work himself, prefers to show up in a white suit after Indy has done all the hard work, and steal it for himself at the last minute. We watch as Indy teaches a class, badly, and see his female students swoon over him. It's at this point that his old friend Marcus Brody shows up with the news that Army Intelligence is looking for him. In the next scene, the Army guys ask for help finding something called the headpiece to the staff of Ra, which Indy interprets to mean that the Nazis are on the verge of finding the Ark of the Covenant... Marcus then explains that accortding to legend, the Army which carries the Ark before it is invincible. Shortly thereafter, Indy begins his journey by boarding a plane for Cairo...

Now, observant viewers would have already discerned that this is the end of the First Act... but even if we hadn't done it on our own, Spielberg did us a favor by putting in a musical interlude... A flying plane is super-imposed over a map of the world which shows us Indy's forward progress. Simple, no?

JAWS is much less simple, but still doable. Again, let's start at the beginning. We need a logline... how about, "A former New York City cop has his little slice of paradise shattered when a ravenous Great White Shark begins hunting off the coast of the small island where he has been hired as Chief of Police." Given this one-liner, in the First Act, we would expect the writer to introduce us to Chief Brody, tell us where he's from and why he's in Amity now, introduce us to the danger of the shark, and ultimately, to start Brody on his journey to kill it.

The problem with JAWS is that the end of Act One is much less cut-and-dried than it is in RAIDERS. We could debate where Act One ends for hours and never come to a consensus, and the reality is that we'd all be right. The details of where EXACTLY an act ends aren't so important as long as you quickly and efficiently move through the introduction of your characters and get them started on their journey to solve them... and that you don't spend 65 pages doing it.

However, just for fun, I going to tell you that I think the First Act ends when Quint screeches his fingernails down the chalkboard and offers the citizens of Amity a choice... "ante up, or be on welfare the whole winter." At that point, we've met our hero, we know the problem he faces, and between the Mayor and Quint, he's been presented with two very clear and distinct options for moving forward with a plan to deal with the shark.

That said, I would find it perfectly acceptable if you were to say to me, "no Shears, I think the First Act officially ends when they check the belly of the Tiger Shark, find no boy in it, and Hooper says 'You got a bigger problem than that Martin, you still got a hell of a fish out there, with a mouth about THIS big'."

I would even accept the view that the First Act truly ends when the shark kills the man in the Pond and the Mayor finally writes Quint the ten thousand dollar check that send the three men out on their final shark hunt.

I'd argue like hell that you're wrong, but I'd accept it. I think, by then, you're getting way late in the story for us to still be in Act One. In my opinion, by this point in the story, Marcus has already begun his journey to eliminate the threat posed by the shark. He's put shark watchers on the beach, he has Helicopters in the air, gun boats in the water, and he's forbidden his son from taking his sailboat out on the ocean. Just because his first efforts at neutralizing the shark are unsuccessful, I'd still argue that his jouney has begun.

For more practice, here's a few more movies that I have very definite opinions on as to where the First Act ends. Take a minute and see if you can figure it out for yourself. I'll post my answers at a later date.

STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KAHN
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
DIE HARD

In the meantime, happy writing, and I'll see you back here for a discussion of Act 2 in the near future.

Shears review: THE TRAIN

2007-06-13T21:47:00.001-07:00

This was recommended by those clever bastards over at Libertas (yes, them again) probably 8 months ago. I kept pushing it down my Netflix list but then last week, in a weak moment, I lost control of the list and THE TRAIN found its way to the top.

Definitely not what I was expecting because I had long since forgotten what Libertas said about it. I thought it was a standard WW2 mission movie, but it's not that at all. I'd say it actually has more in common with OCEAN'S 11 than with THE DIRTY DOZEN.

Really cool story, apparently based in truth, about French railway workers who cleverly sabotaged Nazi trains as they tried to smuggle French art out of Paris in the last days before the liberation.

Burt Lancaster plays the ringleader of a group of railwaymen who have to come up with increasingly elaborate schemes to sabotage the Nazis, all without arousing suspicion, getting caught and executed on the spot. That's what's so great about it, they have to shut the trains down and in every case, it HAS look like an accident. Incredible tension, clever schemes, and some great revolutionary directing genius from one of the greats, John Frankenheimer... with whom Shears has an interesting history... one I might eventually let you in on if I ever stop guarding my anonymity so jealously.

Anyhoo... THE TRAIN... set your Netflix to stun!

A great post on structure...

2007-06-12T09:33:00.001-07:00

The gang over at Libertas got a question about structure that I think reinforces the point I made in a previous post that those of us who work in the business and also try to offer advice to those who don't, often don't know what our readers don't know.

A Libertas reader e-mailed the site to ask why A CHRISTMAS CAROL is such a popular feature film story? The story, he argued, does not seem to lend itself well to the three-act structure, since there are four ghosts, plus the finale. This being the case, doesn't that make A CHRISTMAS CAROL a five act movie?

The short answer is no. The mistake the reader made was thinking that an ACT in a movie occurs everytime a new major event takes place in your film, while the truth is a little more complicated than that. Read the Libertas post for a full explanation.

To novelize or not to novelize... that is A question

2007-06-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

Roland from the UK had a follow-up question to the issue I addressed here, that I've been struggling with...

He asks: "Many of the movie ideas I have first come to me as longer stories more apt for the written page. Due to the time-intensive nature of writing long fiction, do you think it would be better to just write a long treatment and try to flog it for both screen and print at the same time, hope I get lucky with one aspect, and then make sure I get the rights for both? Or do you think it would be more ideal to focus my efforts on developing an idea through to the final product in one format, and worry about the other format later?"

I keep wrestling with this and coming back to the reality that it's hard to know what to tell you without knowing the idea or more about your process. Certain ideas lend themselves better to one medium than the other, and still others can be developed either way. As a wacky example of how this can play out in real-world Hollywood, the movie biz urban legend is that David Benioff first conceived of 25TH HOUR as a movie, then expanded it to a novel when he couldn't get it sold as a screenplay, and then later sold the book and got himself attached to develop it as a screenplay... which is what he'd wanted to do with it in the first place. Whether that story is true or not, it illustrates that even though the two mediums are so vastly different, writers have been moving back and forth between them succesfully for a long time. But since many of the best movies ever made were based on books, you didn't really need me to tell you that.

As far as securing the rights goes, it's fairly standard for novelists to get the first crack at adapting their book for the screen if they want to, so you don't have to worry about selling the book and then getting cut out of the process. If they want the book badly enough, they'll give you a shot at it first, knowing they can always hire a seasoned pro if you crap out on the first draft.

The two mediums are so different in terms of what you can do in them. Screenplay writing is SO much more constricting than novel writing... many times you can do things in books you could never do in a screenplay... like get inside a character's head, for instance. I've long suspected that this is why most Stephen King books result in terrible movies because so much of his stories are internal rather than external.

I guess what this is making me think about most of all is that we may need to do a general discussion of the screenplay format. Does everyone fully understand the three act structure, the hero's journey and all the basic academics of screenplay writing? Would anyone like a full-on lesson of those elements, or a refresher course?

If so, post in the comments and I'll give it a shot. It's possible that really getting into the nuts and bolts of what is required of you as a screenplay writer might make it more clear as to which format your idea would be most comfortable in.

UPDATE: One thing that occurs to me is that I haven't answered the question of whether or not a treatment is important. I do encourage you to write a treatment before typing the words "FADE IN." Often a treatment will reveal the landmines inherent in your story before you write yourself into a place where you can't help but step on one. I think of writing a screenplay like walking through a series of hallways filled with an infinite number of doors. As you open doors and move through them (i.e. make choices about directions your story and characters will go), certain other doors, or character and story options, become unavailable to you, and as you reach the end of your script you may find yourself in one final hallway with one single locked door that doesn't take you where you'd hoped to go. That's called writing yourself into a corner. There's a great script that's been kicking around Hollywood for a while now about a small-town man who has spent years performing an incredible task in hope of attracting the attention of the woman he loves. The story is told from the perspective of another character who has come to town to witness this amazing task. The story unfolds brilliantly, but as it reaches its climax, you find you have been boxed into a corner. For the movie to work, the woman must fall for the newcomer, and yet the audience would likely revolt if the young woman turns her back on the poor guy who has been, essentially, torturing himself for her love. It's a significant roadblock that I think has kept the movie from getting made. Great script, but just so damned hard to resolve that final landmine. I think treatments are a great way to minimize the chances of that happening and to give you a road map for your script that will be helpful when you're deep in the second act and have lost perspective as to where you are in the story and what needs to happen next.

More potential bad news for New Orleans

2007-06-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

I don't like the sound of this. My concern is that this will have a disastrous affect on the surging Louisiana film buiness, which has been one of the bright spots in the post-Katrina economy.

New Orleans, and the state in general, need these kinds of companies to survive and flourish... but I guess at this point there's nothing to do but cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Coming up with a great screenplay title... or...My Cat's Hairballs

2007-06-06T20:39:00.000-07:00

Roland from London asks: How important is a title? I know that many projects go through several names before the final cut is made, but is a catchy, dynamic title something that can elevate a script even if it's not that great, merely because it has a cool name? How many great scripts do you think get tossed on the mountain of garbage merely because they choose a title that resembles your cat's hairballs?

There are lots of different schools of thought on this issue... mine can best be summed up as "if someone calls you to pass on your script and says 'I just didn't like the title', it means they hated the script and are looking for an easy way out."

I think a great title can only help boost the general wave of good feelings that people in this town get when they read a great script... it adds to the overall package. I've never personally heard of a good script not getting read (much less made) because of a title. Titles are totally fungible. You can change them every ten minutes if you want. It's the writing that matters. So if someone refuses to read a script because they don't like the title, then quite simply, that person is a moron.

Likewise, I think most people in Hollywood are smart enough to recognize a bad script when they read one, even if they think the title is kickass.

On the other hand I know a few people who are known around town for their ability to come up with great titles for screenplays and they swear it makes a difference, but I maintain it will never be the difference between selling or not selling a script.

There's a project kicking around one of the studios that's been UNTITLED (it's literally referred to by the studio as "our untitled action movie") for a long time... it's an exciting project and everyone around town likes it. But recently, they decided to change the title to the name of a snappy well-known classic rock tune, and, well goddammit I know it shouldn't, but it made me just a little more excited about the project because the new title made me smile and say "cool!"

One person I know heard the new title and said "that's hot"... but I'm pretty sure they were being ironic.

But I think that's the most action you'll get out of a title one way or the other. For every title I've heard people call great, I heard just as many people say "It's a great script but the title is awful, so we're gonna have to come up with a new one."

And fortunately that's as easy to do as anything in the movie business besides divorce.

How to get noticed, if you're from outta town!

2007-06-04T22:29:00.001-07:00

James Whyle from Johannesburg, RSA (Officially the longest distance question yet received in the Commander's short blogging history... so congrats James!), writes: I'm based in Johannesburg, RSA, and would value any advice on how to get noticed as a "great writer" if one is not based in LA.

First, the good news... assuming you've written a great screenplay, getting noticed is the easiest part of becoming a successful screenwriter.

Now the bad news... the scale I'm working off of here (easiest to hardest) exists in a very rarefied world... that is to say that there is literally nothing easy about becoming a successful screenwriter. I once read an article in the Washington Post which suggested that more people have been made millionaires by the California Lottery than by screenwriting. I have no way of verifying that statistic, but having worked in Hollywood for as long as I have, I'm telling you that I believe it.

OK, so with THAT depressing reality out of the way, let's talk about how you, as a writer with a fantastic screenplay on your hands, get noticed in Hollywood... for the time being I'm going to focus on ACTUAL Hollywood, California... I know there are plenty of vibrant film communities around the world, but I'm not the guy to tell you how to break into the film business in Australia, Zimbabwe, or Prague, I'm sorry to say. I'm gonna stick to what I know.

So... as far as Hollywood goes, let's start with the Internet. The web is a tremendous resource for the budding writer. It's given millions of would-be writers access to affordable screenwriting software and great advice sites (like this one) where information that used to only be accessible by getting into one of the top two or three film schools, is now available to anyone with an Internet connection.

Of course the downside is that an awful lot of people are taking advantage of that fact and most of them are not visibly talented. As a result, the glut of mediocre and just flat-out bad scripts out there is clogging the system to a degree I've never seen before. This is going to severely impact your ability to get read. One agent confided in me recently that he gets up to ten unsolicited e-mail requests asking him to read a script every single day! Think about the logistics of that. A fast reader can finish a screenplay in about 45 minutes. But at ten submissions a day, no one could possibly keep up with all that reading and still be able to do their job. The consequence is that most agents just delete e-mail queries without reading them.

Managers are a different story, however. Most writers find managers to be much more receptive to the idea of reading an unsolicited screenplay. Part of that stems from the fact that managers are not supposed to engage in the process of soliciting jobs for writers and directors (which is what agents spend most of their workday doing). Many managers do it anyway, even though they aren't supposed to, but the majority will wisely leave that part of the job to the agents they work with.... which frees them up to read more scripts. Most of the managers I know made their bones and built their client lists by wading through piles of screenplays nobody else wanted to read, and picking out the diamonds in the rough. In fact, most good managers think of the business of weeding out the crap and finding the gems part of the service they provide to the industry, and often look at it as the very thing that sets them apart from agents.

The Internet also gives you unprecedented access to Hollywood's players and gives you the platform from which to "get noticed." The web is filled with resources designed to help you figure out who those management companies are as well as information on the best way to get in touch with them. Everything you need to know, along with insight from those who have tried and failed before you, is yours for the taking on the WWW.

When it comes to looking for the right manager to approach with your script, look for newer, smaller companies who represent writers you admire or whose work you think yours resembles (this point could spawn an entire blogpost on its own about researching the people you're asking to read your scripts... example: if you think your work most resembles Robert Rodat's, then for crissakes don't send your script to Judd Apatow's agent!). A lot of the well-established management companies may be too big to read truly unknown writers at this point (although you never really know) but there are plenty of younger/newer companies that specifically cater to that emerging market. The web will tell you who they are.

Another often overlooked path to getting noticed is the screenplay competition. Everyone in Hollywood, be they producers, agents, or managers, up to and including your humble host, reads the ten Nicholl Fellowship Award finalists every year... which means you don't even have to win to get read! And every year new competitions come and go. Again, go online... figure out what those competitions are, and enter every goddamned one of them. I guarantee that even if you win a screenwriting contest called "the contest whose winners never, EVER, get read"... your script will get read by somebody.

Relatedly, I'm a fan of blogging to get noticed. I know more than a few writers who have been discovered through blogging. It's a long-shot, granted, but this whole damned business is basically a crap shoot, and every now and then it does happen, so why not give yourself every opportunity to get read. Start a blog, update it regularly, and try to write about something interesting... no one wants to read endless posts about how great your script is, and oh woe-is-me why won't somebody READ IT!?!?

One final note on the business of writing. If you want to make it in Hollywood as a successful screenwriter, sooner or later you're going to have to move here. Best to wrap your head around that fact right now. Some hugely successful writers are able to maintain careers from New York or Boston, but the reality is, if you want to work in Hollywood, you have to BE in Hollywood. There are lots of reasons why, but the most important one is that this business is based on relationships, and you simply cannot maintain a relationship with Hollywood from 12,000 miles away. (for more on this issue, see Shears' related comments in this post.)

Quick story: good friend of mine has been kicking around town for ten years... working temp jobs, writing specs, and meeting with anyone who will take a meeting. It's been a long hard road, and he's really talented, but he's only now starting to see some results, a decade later! And it's not because he sold a spec, which most wannabe writers assume is the end-all be-all of a career-starter... no, instead, he worked a relationship he developed with an up-and-coming associate TV producer, and worked it hard. Eventually he was able to convince that producer to hire him to write a freelance episode for a TV show on the air, just to see what he could do... and the producer became so impressed with his work-ethic and his skill level, that when this producer created a new show and sold it to the networks, he brought my friend on as a staff writer.

Now THAT'S what I call getting noticed...

...and unfortunately, it's very hard to do that kind of thing from Johannesburg...

The summer bomb?

2007-05-31T17:25:00.001-07:00

The debate currently raging around Hollywood is what will be that one big summer movie that just bombs... the absolute turkey that hits the theatres like a Lead Zeppelin...

It's actually a fun discussion because for the most part, the big summer movies this year have appeared review-proof. SPIDERMAN 3, SHREK 3, AND PIRATES 3 all got mediocre to bad reviews, and yet they all made what we in the industry refer to as "an assload of money."

So what will it be?

My best guess is OCEAN'S 13... what do you think?

UPDATE: As a back-up guess (since OCEAN'S 13 was really the guess of a colleague of mine), I'll say that I wouldn't be surprised if DIE HARD 4 underperformed... I think it will probably do fine, I'm just saying I won't be shocked if it doesn't.

UPDATE: A reader responds with "FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE CGI GUY"... nice one!

E-Mail reminder

2007-05-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

Don't forget... it's often hard to give advice when you don't know what people don't know. So if you're looking to get a question answered, rather than logging on every day to see if I've finally gotten around to it on my own, send me an e-mail at Commandrshears@yahoo.com and let me know what you don't know.

Cheers from Shears!

UPDATE: I like to use readers' names... so if you'd rather remain anonymous, let me know in your e-mail and I will refer to you only as "A Reader."

Book recommendation

2007-05-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

I was reminded of EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS by Peter Biskind last weekend when I saw it sitting in a bookshelf while helping my sister move into a new house. I first read ERRG back when it first came out in hardcover because the reviews were so stellar, and because I was a big Hollywood geek at the time (I've since gotten much cooler and don't read books about Hollywood history unless really fancy directors recommend them to me personally).

I bring it up now... I read it long before I started blogging about Hollywood... (and yes I realize that pretty much anything I did before last Tuesday, was something I did before I started blogging about Hollywood... so shutit!) because it reminded me of a Hollywood observation that's been rolling around in my head ever since I said the following, to a colleague, 5 or 6 years ago...

"Man, I miss those days in Hollywood when you could get rich just walking behind Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, picking up the dollars bills that fell out of their pockets."

Nowadays, the studios are owned by corporate giants and so the basic concepts behind why movies get made or don't have been radically altered. Does a company like Time Warner or Viacom get excited when a 20 million dollar movie makes 40 million dollars? Not really... that's like 5 minutes of gross income on light bulbs for GE. Corporations want big potential franchise movies that result in HUGE grosses, follwed by fast food kid's meal tie-ins, big toy sales, massive DVD runs with the potential for "Special Edition" re-releases years later, big Pay-Per-View sales, gargantuan network TV license sales, and, if all goes well, a new ride at DisneyLand. They want PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and SPIDERMAN, not LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE or RUSHMORE... which is why you can't get anyone to read that script about a troubled poet in Soho slowing dying of AIDS you've been rewriting for ten years.

Now I'm not making any judgements here because movies like LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and RUSHMORE still get made, they just don't get made by the studios anymore. I'm just interested in pointing out how different things are now from the way they were when Hollywood was controlled by the artists, who often only had to convince one guy (a Frank Yablans or Robert Evans) that a movie was a good idea, rather than navigate a massive corporate strategy full of words like "product pipeline" and "ancillary markets."

I remember being struck by Biskind's story of Steven Spielberg lounging around an artist colony in Malibu trading "points" on JAWS for snippets of dialogue from John Milius and Margot Kidder. Can't do THAT anymore. If you're lucky enough to even GET points, and few are, they're pre-negotiated within an inch of their lives well in advance.

Anyway, this is starting to sound like a "things were much better when..." screed, which I don't want it to be. Things are as they are and that's the way it is. Besides, the only way we could ever get back to the 70's version of Hollywood would be if the bottom completely fell out of the movie business and all the big money left town... and no one wants that.

Long story short, pick up a copy of EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS... it's a great Hollywood history lesson and a fun read.

A quick dialogue note...

2007-05-23T11:12:00.001-07:00

If something horrific happens to one of your characters... he gets shot, or burned, or attacked with the Anal Intruder 2000*... there is no need to create a line of dialogue for the resulting scream. Just write "he screams in pain" in your stage description.

Writing something like....

OUR HERO

Aahhhhhh!!!!!!!

...is 500 pounds of silly, a tremendous waste of space, and will annoy the crap out of anyone who reads it.

That is all.

* (see: TOP SECRET!)

What makes a reader respond to a script?

2007-05-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

A reader asks: Lots of movies are fairly derivative, either of each other or other ideas floating around. What is it about a concept that can make you, as a reader, think "damn that's cool!" rather than "damn this sucks"? Does the subject matter have to appeal to you personally before you'll recommend a script?

Well the writing has to be top notch, first of all. That's almost always the difference. Everyone who's spent any time at all in Hollywood has read so many scripts over the course of their career that they can identify a talented writer even if they don't think the script will sell, or if it happens to be written in a genre that doesn't get them excited.

Everyone has certain genres of movie they prefer. I think most people in Hollywood, though they may not admit it in public, have genres they either hate or simply don't get at all. I'm like that, too. I don't really get broad comedies. I know it's totally my problem... if I'm the only one sitting in the theatre with a scowl on his face as the other 500 patrons howl with laughter at TALLADEGA NIGHTS, then I'm the one with the problem, not the 500 people having a good time.

But it does mean that if you're looking for someone to give you an opinion on your new grossout comedy about a D.A. who is cursed by a gypsie and finds he can't say the words "I Object" without letting loose a volley of what the Onion once described as "high pressure jets of frothy liquid feces"... well then I'm probably not your man.

However, if I'm the ONLY guy you know in Hollywood and it's either ask me to read it, or go unread... then your hope is that I will recognize the writing as competent and the idea as being big and appealing enough that I'll be motivated to pass it on to one of the people I know who loves that kind of thing.

It works the other way too... most of my best friends in the business know I respond to action movies, big historical dramas (particularly war movies), and good solid history. (I love WATCHING horror movies but I'm not sure what makes a good horror script... haven't figured that one out yet...too much depends on direction, I think...). And every now and then I get a call from someone saying something like "hey I read this Western... the idea is really cool, but I don't really get Westerns... can you read it and tell me what you think?"

That might sound counter-intuitive... in a competitive business, why would someone want to send a potentially hot new script to someone else? The answer is pretty simple... if someone sends me a great script that they think I'm better equiped to take advantage of than they are, it increases the chances that I will return the favor when that new young comedy writer sends me DISTRICT ASS-TORNEY...

Writers don't believe me when I tell them this... probably because most of them are having trouble getting read when I tell them... but the truth about Hollywood is that there are so many people reading so many scripts looking for the next hot thing, that if you've written a great screenplay... sooner or later, someone will find you.

UPDATE: Do readers take into account the budget of a screenplay they are reading?

Yes, because it affects the potential saleability of the screenplay. Think about two movies made by the same people, the Wachowski brothers. THE MATRIX was a huge 100 million dollar sci-fi action movie. In the vast majority of cases, a movie like that can only be made through the studio system where it can be released on 3,000 or more screens. And there are only a handful of producers that the studios trust to handle a movie like that. Joel Silver at WB, Imagine at Universal, Lorenzo DiBonaventura at Paramount, Bruckheimer at Disney... maybe a few others... but the point is that the number of outlets for a movie like that is greatly reduced. Most people feel more comfortable with a script like BOUND (Also by the Wachowskis). In Hollywood slang, BOUND is a "contained thriller." Few effects, not many sets, doesn't need stars, and can be released on a limited number of screens and allowed to build an audience. Those kind of movies don't have to be done through the studio system at all, they can be made and distributed by independently financed mini-studios like Summit or 2929.

Of course everyone wants to find that sure-thing 300 million dollar hit, but they are few and far between and it's always difficult to get this business to lay down a bet on that kind of a film. They'll do it, but it ain't easy. So of course, that reality gets reflected in the way people evaluate scripts.

Shears review: DISTURBIA

2007-05-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

See this movie for Shia LeBeouf... the kid is fantastic and makes the movie worth watching.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fun diversion and the writing is solid, but there's not one single surprise in the movie. If you've seen REAR WINDOW, or even the Episode of THE SIMPSONS where Bart with a broken leg becomes convinced Flanders murdered Maude, then you've seen this movie... right down to the scene where the villain buries something that turns out not to be a body.

But Shia... man that kid is good. Take special note of the opening scene. It's very well written and the acting between Shia and his father is so superb that when the scene takes its necessarily tragic turn I was hit with an unexpected wave of emotion... particularly interesting given that at that point I'd spent all of 60 seconds with these characters.

But Shia is funny when he can be, moody when he should be, and deadly serious when he needs to be... he's all around fun to watch. And young Sarah Roemer is pretty hot too.

Psychs me up for TRANSFORMERS, now.

100

2007-05-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

Great little movie quote compilation.

I can't think of too many great movies they left out... BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID is just about the only one.

Indoctrinate U

2007-05-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

I've met Evan Coyne Maloney a few times. Really smart guy and I think that were it not for his politics, he'd be a huge star in the documentary world. As it happens, he WILL be a star, it's just going to take some time and a lot of hard work.

Here's an article on his new feature length documentary INDOCTRINATE U. I've seen a good bit of the film and it's brilliant...

Great Concept or Great Writing?

2007-05-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

A reader asks:

"Is it more important to have a great concept/idea or a well-written screenplay?"

The easy, and most obnoxious answer, is you need both.

But that's just me being a jerk.

But it does seem a little weird to advise you as to whether you should pursue a good concept or great writing since the two are not mutually exclusive and, obviously, if your goal is to sell a script, the bigger your idea and the better executed it is, the better your chances of a sale. And anyway who wakes up one the morning and thinks "wow, I just had a great idea for a movie, I'm going to sit down and write the shittiest screenplay the world has ever seen!"?

So I'll approach this answer by telling you how the town generally responds to a great idea as opposed to great writing.

The sad truth is that in the short term, Hollywood wants the big idea. Here's the way they look at it. There are a million great writers in town... but very few really good ideas. So if a great idea falls into Hollywood's lap, no matter how poorly executed it is, someone will probably buy it. That's the upside... the downside is that they won't buy it for much money (probably the WGA minimum), and the original writer be immediately kicked off the project in favor of another writer that the buyer thinks can better execute the concept.

As an example, I spoke to a producer friend of mine the other day who told me she was looking for a writer to attach to a script she'd bought. It was a great idea, she said, but a horrible script. So they paid the original writer off and now they intend to bring in a new writer to develop the idea. Once the expanded concept is in better shape, the producer will take the writer out on a series of meetings to "pitch" it to the studios. If one of the studios sparks to the pitch, they will make a deal with the writer to do a certain number of drafts and/or rewrites of the script for a pre-negotiated amount of money.

So where does that leave you as the original writer? Well, you've sold your idea and made a bit of money, which is nice. But you're also back to square one. You've been cut out of the process and you're back at your desk facing the herculean task of coming up with another great idea. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won't. But even if it does, and you sell another great-but-poorly-executed idea... what then? Now you've begun to develop a reputation around town as a great idea guy who can't execute a draft.

That's bad.

It's bad because in order to be a working writer in Hollywood long-term you have got to be able to get writing jobs every couple of months. Jobs adapting books, rewriting existing scripts, or doing first drafts of other people's ideas. That's the day-to-day business of a working writer. No writer can survive writing nothing but specs. The spec market sucks. It seems like fewer and fewer of them sell every year, and frankly, they're just not an efficient use of your time as a business person.

Think about it this way, what's more cost effective, spending three months or more writing a spec that may or may not sell? Or spending a few hours coming up with a great way to rewrite a script or adapt a book, articulating that vision in a pitch meeting, and then getting the job based on that few hours work?

I can tell you how an agent would answer that question. No agent wants to represent a writer who can't get studio jobs. Agents are looking for writers who will one day command million dollar quotes and be in the "incoming call" business. That means the writer has gotten such a sterling reputation that studios and producers call their agents to offer them every new job that pops up, rather than the other way around. Brian Helgeland, Peter Morgan, Bob Gordon, Paul Attanasio, Bill Monahan, Charlie Kaufman, David Benioff, Billy Ray... these are the guys in the incoming call business in today's Hollywood. I've seen agents turn down clients who had very saleable spec scripts that were ready to go out to the town simply because they didn't think the writer was talented enough to have a long-term career... Why? Because whether that spec sells or doesn't sell, that writer will still be on your phone sheet every day asking "what's next?"

So, what about "great writing"? If I had to choose a fate for a writer, this is the one I'd choose because it suggests the potential for career longevity, even when it sacrifices the opportunity for short-term financial gain. Everyone loves great writing, and everyone wants to meet, talk to, and get to know great writers. If you're a great writer, even if you weren't quite able to write a script that everyone wanted to buy, Hollywood figures it's only a matter of time before your talent slams face-first into the perfect idea and magic happens.

You can always tell when Hollywood thinks a new spec script is "well-written", because even as producers and executives are calling the agent to pass on the script, they are ending the conversation by saying "but I'd love to meet the writer." If your script is not going to sell, especially if you're a newer or unknown writer, this is the best possible fall-back position because in this business, longevity, whether it's as a writer, director, producer, or agent, is about maintaining great relationships, and to do that you have to be able to get in rooms.

Great writing will get you into every room in this town. To me, that sounds like a pretty good start to a potentially long and lucrative career.

Read your dialogue out loud! (Part 2: Who's who?)

2007-05-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

Movies depend on well-drawn, distinctive, and interesting characters to fuel their stories. As a writer you really only have two tools with which to get that job done... Stage direction, and dialogue.

But stage direction can only take you so far. Let's say you want to show that one of your characters is a prankster. You can accomplish that by having him loosen the top of the salt shaker as he walks out of a diner. But what if you want the audience to know WHY he's a prankster... what is it about his past that makes him want to play pranks on people? You wouldn't bother to make him a prankster unless it was vital to his character and to the way the story will play itself out, so you're going to need to make the reasons behind his pranksterism clearly understood.

For that you're going to need outstanding dialogue.

The problem with a lot of the scripts I see is that, while the dialogue may do a good job of driving the story and keeping the action moving, it doesn't do enough to clearly draw and define the characters as flesh-and-blood individuals that I'm going to be asked to spend two hours caring about. In short, plot and action become the focus and the characters all begin to sound the same.

Reading dialogue out loud can help solve this problem as well... but you're going to need a trusted assistant. Try reading a few scenes to a friend. If your friend can't tell who's who... you might have a dialogue problem.

To give you a more concrete example of what I mean, let's look at some examples from my all-time favorite flick RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

First, here's the scene where Marcus tells Indy he has approval from the University to go after the Ark:

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Indy: "You did it, didn't you?"
Marcus: They want you to go for it!
Indy: "Oh, Marcus!"
Marcus: "They want you to get ahold of the Ark before the Nazis do, and they're prepared to pay handsomely for it!"
Indy: "And the museum...the museum gets the Ark when we're finished?"
Marcus: "Oh, Yes!"
Indy: "Ohhh....the Ark of the Covenant."
Marcus: "Nothing else has come close!"
Indy: "That thing represents everything we got into archaeology for in the first place!"
Marcus: "You know five years ago I would have gone after it myself. I'm really rather envious!"
Indy: "I've got to locate Abner...I think I know where to start. Do you suppose she'll still be with him?"
Marcus: "Possibly...Marion's the least of your worries right now, believe me, Indy!"
Indy: "What do you mean?"
Marcus: "Well, I mean that for nearly 3,000 years, man has been searching for the Lost Ark. It's not something to be taken lightly...no one knows its secrets! It's like nothing you've ever gone after before!"
Indy: "Oooh, Marcus....what are you tryin' to do, scare me? You sound like my mother! We've known each other for a long time, I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus! I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance, you're talking about the boogey-man! Besides, you know what a *cautious* fellow I am!"
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There's a lot going on in this exchange... the idea of a person named "Marion" who may or may not be a source of potential trouble for Indy, for one thing... but I'm more interested in how this exchange serves to clearly define Indy's character and use the aspects of his character that are clearly different from Marcus to tell us a little bit about what makes him tick.

So what do we know about these two men after this scene?

Well we know that Marcus is slightly older and has the seasoned look-before-you-leap attitude of a wiser older man. We also know he's the more politic of the two men. If you need someone to go before the board of directors and make an argument, you send Marcus Brody. But if you need someone to punch a Nazi in the neck, you call Indy.

We also get a sense of how long these two men have pursued this passion. Indy says the Ark is "everything we got into archaeology for in the first place." In fact, these two men will expound on this idea later, in the third installment of the trilogy. After Indy hands Marcus the cross of Coronado he asks "do you know how long I've been looking for that?"... Marcus replies with a semi-rhetorical "all your life?" Archaeology may seem like a dry subject for a man like Indiana Jones to dedicate his life to, but here we get a sense of how ancient artifacts can stir our hero's passions. We also get a sense of how a man who's seen so much, who just five minutes ago barely escaped alive from an ancient temple full of booby-traps with a ten pound golden idol in his hands, can still be wowed by something. Just a few clever lines of dialogue let the audience know that if the Ark of the Covenant can be the culmination of a dream for a man like Indiana Jones, well then it must be one hell of a treasure.

We also get a sense of melancholy over lost youth from Marcus, who seems sad that he can no longer join Indy on these kinds of adventures, perhaps remembering when he was the young buck with a whip and a mission. Though it's interesting to note that Indy never reacts to that line... perhaps Kasdan was trying to point out something about the tendencies of young men and women to be oblivious to the fact that they won't always be young, good looking, and full of piss and vinegar.

But the last four lines are by far the most important of the scene.

One of the most important elements of Indiana Jones' character is his inability, even in the face of the fantastic, to accept anything beyond what he can see and touch. His character is devoid of a capacity for wonder. In a sense, Indiana has lost the ability to really connect with what he does... his life in archaeology is all about the chase. The objects themselves have lost most of their value beyond the notches they represent on his belt. Indy wants to be the one who FOUND the Ark... not the one who studies it. So when Marcus interrupts his reverie to remind him that this isn't a matter of simply going down to the store to pick up a bottle of milk, that for thousands of years, people have believed the Ark capable of incredible violence, he laughs it off, throws a loaded pistol into his suitcase, and gives his wiser older mentor a condescending look.

A more powerful set-up for a hero's journey you will not find in the movies.

But good character moments are not a do-it-once-and-forget-about-it kind of thing, and Kasdan wisely continues to come back to this theme over and over again.

Later, Indy has this conversation with Salah:

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Sallah: The Germans have a great advantage over us.They are near to discovering the Well of Souls.
Indy: Well, they're not going to find it without this.Who can tell us about these markings?
Sallah: Perhaps a man I know can help us. Indy, there's something that troubles me.
Indy: What is it?
Sallah: The Ark. If it is there at Tanis, then it is something that Man was not meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it. It is not of this earth.
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Again note that the dialogue clearly defines the characters who are speaking. Ever-practical Indy ignores the craziness of Salah's family and his mischevous monkey and cuts to the chase... where can we get the markings on this headpiece decoded? Salah the Egyptian mystic is worried about the danger that the Ark's ancient magic might pose for his friend, and says so. What's interesting about this moment though, is that this time our agnostic hero is not so quick to dismiss a warning about the supernatural. Is this an example of a developing character arc? I like to think so.

Incidentally, all this character development does not happen in a vacuum. If your character development does not service the story, what good is it? In the case of RAIDERS, the writer is slowly setting us up for Indy's final heroic moment. Trapped on the island, tied to a post with his girlfriend, with 2,000 years of theological wrath bearing down on him, Indy is desperate for a way out. He can't fight his way out, he can't shoot anything, and his whip is somewhere back on that Nazi U-boat. All he's got left is his mind... his knowledge of ancient theology... and what he comes up with (we must not look upon the face of god or be destroyed), is so at odds with everything we know about this man up to this instant, that it creates an enduring moment of drama and the culmination of what we call in Hollywood, Indiana Jones' "character arc"... the moment where he abandons reason and finally gives in to belief.

"DON'T LOOK AT IT MARION, KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT!!!"

Goddamn that's an awesome scene!

And the payoff comes a few minutes later when we finally see something that would have seemed impossible two hours earlier... Indiana Jones on the other side of the argument. Joining with Marcus Brody to to plead with those "bureaucratic fools" that "the Ark is a source of unspeakable power and it HAS to be RESEARCHED!"

That's character development ladies and gentleman... all done brilliantly, and subtly, with dialogue that clearly differentiates and defines each character as an individual.

If you've failed to clearly define your characters, reading your dialogue out loud is the best shot you have of discovering your mistake before a studio executive discovers it for you.

Delta Farce represents Hollywood Evolution...

2007-05-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

No really...

From the review in Variety:

"DELTA FARCE is instructive. For one thing, it shows the evolution of Hollywood's relationship to the Iraq War through various movies, from support to critique to outright derision."

Gee... guess I musta slept through phase one.

Read your dialogue out loud! (Part 1: "You see, it seems that")

2007-05-13T14:57:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with a couple of prospective writers last week that bears repeating in a larger context.

What the point boils down to is "READ YOUR DIALOGUE OUT LOUD."

Until you've done that, your screenplay is not "done."

I read a LOT of screenplays, many of them bad... a few of them very bad. And one of the problems I see most often is that the dialogue just does NOT sound like words ever spoken by an actual human being.

I'll call the two recurring attrocities that annoy me the most, "You see... it seems that." As in...

"You see.... what no one realizes is..."

Or...

"It seems that... someone in this room is...

"Real humans just don't talk this way, and yet I see those phrases repeated in script after script and movie after movie. It's like the half-word "um"... would you ever actually type "um" into your dialogue? Of course not. It's a hiccup... a pause your brain takes before it decides what it wants to say next.

And that's what "You see, It seems that" is.

Worse, it's often the hallmark of that most objectionable refuge of the lazy writer... the talking villain. You know the scene, A vaguely European bad guy has his gun at the hero's head and says something like "Before I kill you in an uneccessarily complicated way, I'll do you the favor of putting all the puzzle pieces together and tell you both how and why I did it... you see, it seems that..."

GAH!!!

No movie character should ever say "You see... it seems that" unless they're wearing a long black duster, a black top hat, a handlebar mustache that they can't stop twirling, and the movie is set in 1890.

Don't believe me? Say the lines out loud with and without those phrases. Isn't it obvious? That, my friends, is the value of reading one's dialogue out loud. If it doesn't sound natural, like an actual human beaing speaking, reading it out loud will save you from that mistake, and your screenplays will be better for it.

Seriously, If I can stop even one writer from forcing their characters to start sentences with "you see... it seems that", my efforts will have been worthwhile, and I will die a happy man.

Rubber chicken, with a side order of Hypocrisy

2007-05-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

So as part of my job, I'm often required to attend these bizarre charity functions where five hundred or so Hollywood types are forced to sit around tables full of pre-made, sun-lamp warmed, dinner theatre-style entrees so that some organization or another can hit them up for donations while providing "entertainment" of varying quality. They usually last about three hours and you can hear the groans up-and-down the hallways when the call goes out that attendees are needed to fill the company table.

I don't really mind going to these. Once you get past the 45-minute valet line (I street park whenever possible), what's to complain about when it comes to a free meal and a few glasses of wine with the occassional interesting performance thrown in?Last night, for instance, Robin Williams did a chaotic but funny 30 minute set that had the audience rolling. And I once saw Jessica Simpson, Christopher Cross, and Randy Newman on the same bill... which is about as fantastic a mis-match as I've seen outside the casting of FREEJACK (go look it up).

But here's what annoyed me. One of the sponsors of the event was the National Resource Defense Council... and so, much of the night included platitudes from the likes of Leonardo Di Caprio, who assured us that we were all "good citizens of the planet" for supporting such a worthy cause.

Fine.

Come on out to the valet line with me Leo, and let's take a few minutes to watch the parade of Hummers, Ferraris, and Lotus lethal weapons zooming by on their way to this or that 10,000 square foot mansion.

I mean really, can't we have SOME level of self-awareness in this town?

What did Hollywood think were the root causes of Terrorism before 9/11

2007-05-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

Not that I think movies ought to influence our foreign policy, but amongst those who know me best, I'm a well-known fan of Ed Zwick's movie THE SIEGE and I enjoy watching it to see what Hollywood thought about terorrism before 9/11.

Watching it last night I was struck by the motives of the main villain, who reveals himself as the leader of the terrorist cell in New York City in the final scene.

What's his beef? I'll let him tell it in his own words...

"You left us there, in Iraq, like a piece of shit!"

This was set up earlier... Annette Bening points out that she was working for the CIA during Gulf War 1, where she was in charge of training and supporting the rebels we'd hoped would take out Saddam after we left Kuwait.

Well, it didn't happen that way, and they were slaughtered after we withdrew our support, and those who survived were pretty pissed off about it.

We're facing that in a much less dramatic way in Iraq today, with much of the moderate populace afraid to step up and assist the coalition because they were left hanging back in 1991, and are afraid it will happen again this time.

I'm surprised that now one seems to think that leaving them to hang again 16 years later, won't result in a much nastier long-term affect this time around.

Hollywood certainly seemed to think so when they made THE SIEGE.

I wonder what they think has changed since then?