No protagonist is an island, entire of itself

In a previous post, I described a common failure in the scripts I am asked to read – the script crammed with compelling supporting characters that features an oddly unfocused protagonist. I have since decided that an opposite problem also exists.

I recently read a script in which the protagonist was a beautifully detailed creation with a gaping hole in his life and choices looming ahead. But despite all that lovely story-engine work, the script remained stuck in place. There were needs, but no real obstacles. There were choices, but no real costs. The writer was only interested in the protagonist and had only bothered to develop the protagonist's story. Without equally needy and choosy supporting characters, the story lacked all conflict.

I would say this is an obvious point, but this is not the first such script I've read. Not by a lot. Perhaps it's obvious to me from my years as an actor. There's an old joke about the actor who played the doctor in the first production of Streetcar Named Desire. The character is barely a cameo role – the doctor only appears in the final pages to lead Blanche DuBois off to the nut house. Before the opening, a reporter who knew nothing about the play asked this actor what it was about. "It's about this doctor, see," the actor earnestly replied, "and he meets this lady who wants to depend on him. And he really wants to help, but he's torn, because..." and so on. You get the joke. There are no small parts, only small actors, blah, blah, blah. Trust me, when you're in one of those small parts, this joke is funny. But like many an old cliche, it's also true.

There are no small parts for writers, either – and we have to play ALL the parts. Every character must need something and must face choices. They must be the stars of their own little movies, so when the protagonist's movie gets in their way – hello, conflict!

And... I'm back.

Been a while, huh?

As a follow-up to the last post, my computer did not die permanently – but it was an expensive can of Fresca. My multiple keyboards and I soldiered on and the impossible deadline turned out to be possible. The draft is finished. The trusted readers have returned their verdicts. One more quick buff and polish and I get to put this baby to bed.

But first, THIS baby needs to go to bed. Tomorrow I will post something nice and long to make up for the drought. See you then.

When troubles come, they come in pretty blue cans

I haven't posted in a few days as I'm under an impossible deadline – which caused me to knock over a can of Fresca and soak my laptop keyboard, because that's the sort of crap that happens as soon as you have an impossible deadline. I do not blame the Fresca. I blame the deadline.

It is every bit as hard as you might think to write a script without functioning DELETE and RETURN keys. The nice boys at the Mac shop were out of keyboards, of course. They swear a new one will be in tomorrow. In the meantime, I am the rock god of writing, with one keyboard plopped on top of another and hands everywhere. It's a terrible way to write, but I bet it looks cool.

I will be happy when this is over. And I may have news, to boot.

Darlings, dead

Way, way back in the day when I first spun the idea that turned into the script I'm currently re-writing, I wrote a single scene. I don't usually start that way: I'm more of a beat/outline/draft writer. But the scene came to me in an insistent rush while I was out for a run (and did not have a piece of paper handy – why does that always happen?) and it seemed to contain the beating heart of the movie I wanted to write. I raced home and scribbled it on a sheet of paper. That scene became my favorite thing on the beat sheet, my favorite thing in the outline, and my favorite thing in every draft since.

Guess what I just cut?

Here's why I don't need that scene anymore: yes, it still contains the beating heart of the movie. But now, SO DOES THE REST OF THE SCRIPT. That once lovely scene is now freakin' obvious. Goodbye.

Oo – this feels good. Let's see what else I can cut...

Tour de narrative

If one can recognize – and sympathize with – the protagonist as the person who gets dumped on in Act One, then Andy Schleck is now the protagonist of the 2010 Tour de France. Stage 15 is a little late for Act One, but at least I know who to root for in the stages that remain. Ride, skinny boy – ride!

Of course, the dumping upon is merely the situation that helps establish the protagonist’s status. We still need a story… what will Andy choose to do next? Will he dig in and claw back those precious eight seconds? Will he accept former friend Contador’s hotel room apology? Will he whine about it and drop further back – in which case, I'll stop rooting for him.

Speaking of which, someone should have offered Lance Armstrong a rewrite after his early stage disasters. He could easily have been the protagonist, but he ignored the clearly heroic choice laid before him. Lance might be out of contention, but teammate Levi Leipheimer clings to a spot near the top. How wonderful would it have been if the great Lance Armstrong had declared, as his farewell Tour slipped away, "This one is for all the teammates I've had over the years." The world would have set aside any reservations they ever had about the guy if Lance Armstrong had pulled a Bull Durham during his remaining two weeks in the sport, and sacrificed his own glory to drag Levi onto the podium in Paris. Of course, that hasn't happened. And perhaps the sort of man who can win seven championships in a row is not the sort of man who will EVER sacrifice himself for a teammate. But hey, it would have been nice.

Slate has an interesting article on our deep-seated desire to root for the underdog. Though the article offers several semi-scientific reasons, the writer suggests that part of our tendency to root for the guy who isn't winning actually traces back to the narratives all around us – a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy for us writers:

When you think about horse racing, which comes to mind first: Seabiscuit's underdog victory in the 1938 Pimlico Special or Cool Coal Man's unremarkable loss at the 2008 Kentucky Derby? … And consider all the other underdogs in our culture—from the Bible, from literature, and from every sports movie ever made. It's no accident that we remember the Titans...

Charitable horn tooting

I'll be helping out with the annual Los Angeles Rabbit Foundation yard, gift, supply and bake sale this weekend, Saturday July 17, 10am - 3pm in West Los Angeles at 2499 S Barrington Avenue (on the corner of Pearl Street). Swing by, grab a cupcake, buy a MacGuffin or two, and chat about rabbits, scripts, or anything else.

It's not too late to donate to the sale! Designer clothes, small appliances, furniture, DVDs, books, jewelry, whatever you've got is welcome. Please contact larabbits@earthlink.net to schedule a donation time before the sale. (Los Angeles Rabbit Foundation is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to house rabbit welfare in the Los Angeles area. All the proceeds from the sale go to help the bunnies.)

If you would like to know more about house rabbit pets, please visit the website or come meet the bunnies at Centinela Feed Adoption Days, 3860 S Centinela Ave, LA 90066 every Saturday afternoon from 12:30pm - 3:30pm. See you there!

My day as a six year old

I played hooky like a six year old yesterday and watched Toy Story 3 in the morning, Despicable Me in the afternoon and The Princess And The Frog on DVD at night. I would say my brain went on vacation for the day – but, dang, those are some thoughtful kiddie movies.

Now I'm going to make things worse by blogging about it all. So much for vacation. Minor SPOILERS ahead...

Despicable Me is a hoot through and through and features a funny and moving performance by Steve Carell as protagonist super-villain Gru. The performance is so good that... well, I'm not sure how much movie is left without the performance. Perhaps that's unfair. The end of the film is predictable – but there's nothing wrong with that. Macbeth is predictable, too. We know where most moral lessons are headed, and most moral lessons are still valuable.

Here's the real problem: ten minutes after leaving the theater, my mind was still churning over the movie I had just seen... three hours before: Toy Story 3. Perhaps if I'd reversed the order in which I watched the films, I might appreciate Despicable Me more. But not to worry: the target market for both films, Precious Nephew (age almost 5), was so thrilled by Despicable Me he never touched his popcorn. So there.

I enjoyed The Princess and the Frog as well. It has a nicely nuanced moral message -- neither fully pro wishing-on-a-star, nor fully against -- and the film is beautiful. I should have caught it in theaters. I will have to remember that for Tangled – Disney's upcoming Rapunzel reboot. Tangled trailers played in front of all three movies yesterday, though the version that played in front of Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me was an oddly male-centric cut. Hm.

The animation of Frog's Tiana and the few glimpses of Tangled's Rapunzel, make clear that Disney animation still does better than anyone else the thing it has done better than anyone else since Beauty and the Beast: animate female faces that are attractive, interesting and funny all at the same time. Those girls might be drawings, but they are d*mn fine actresses, too. Nobody does female faces like Disney.

And then there's Toy Story 3.

I can't say I walked out of this film happy, but at a full twenty-four hours later, I'm still thinking about it. It's clearly a great movie. Is it too deep and tragic for kids? Maybe... though I loved deep and tragic as a kid. Perhaps the folks at Pixar have simply decided to make great movies, and don't care if we call them kiddie movies or not. They've earned that right – and proved they can do it, too.

The end of the film is absolutely the right end, but it's a tough one for me. I gave away my vast, beloved Breyer horse collection when I went to college, and I still feel terrible about it – though I know I made two little girls insanely happy. I certainly don't know what I'd do with a room-sized plastic horse collection now. But here comes Toy Story 3 to make me feel even worse about my decision since I kept my Woody – my very first Breyer horse, who has spent many years now in a cardboard box in my dad's guest room. I hope he isn't too lonely. Eesh. I suck. Thanks, Toy Story 3!

Anyway, I found an early moment in the film particularly stunning. Teenage Andy must decide what to do with his old toys before he leaves for college. He scoops the entire collection into an attic-bound plastic bag. At the last moment, he pulls Woody alone from the pile and places him in a college-bound cardboard box. This is the moment that pays off Woody's extra burden of moral responsibility through the entire series. He secretly believes he's special – because he IS special. And as the special one, he will be called upon to make a sacrifice before the series can end.

I am reminded of sci-fi/horror gem Pitch Black. At the start of that movie, a space pilot played by Radha Mitchell punches a button to jettison her sleeping human cargo. The entire movie waves its hands around for the next hundred minutes to make you forget that you know Ms. Mitchell needs to balance that pushed button with a major sacrifice before the end. Toy Story 3 waved its hands around admirably. I really did not know how the movie was going to end – even though it ended where it had to end.

And I'm STILL thinking about it. In fact, I'm starting to tear up again. Crap. I need a tissue. And then, back to work.

Show and tell

Show don't tell, show don't tell, yeah yeah yeah – we are all good little writers. We know this. We have it tattooed on our wrists for easy reference.

But here's a twist. Much of the time, when I watch television, I don't watch it. It's on, and I'm listening. I look up every now and then to check in, but I'm also sorting mail, washing dishes, reading magazines, or even – as right now – tapping away at my computer.

I read an article once that had statistics on this sort of thing. The article claimed lots of people don't watch watch television, they only sorta watch. I tried to find that article for your reference, because I hate it when people say, "I read an article once" as if that meant anything, but when I googled people who listen but don't watch television I got a lot of people bragging about how they don't watch television. I hate that, too.

Anyway... where was I?

Right. Watching television, mostly with my ears. The television in question is the Tour de France daily coverage on Versus. Lance Armstrong's new ad for the Nissan Leaf electric car plays heavily during the commercial breaks. Here's the voiceover script for the ad:

In twenty years of cycling, even when I was ahead, I was always behind. Behind cars. Behind trucks. Behind... those guys. Tailpipe after tailpipe, after tailpipe. Until now. The one hundred percent electric, no tailpipe, Nissan Leaf. Innovation for the planet. Innovation for all.

The ad is quite clear – when you see it. Tailpipes spew smoke and Lance coughs and one understands that "until now" refers to the tailpipes and the smoke and that Lance is still behind the cars, they're just not spewing smoke in his face anymore. But the first time I saw the ad, I didn't really see it – I only heard it. And I heard something quite different.

THE AD QUITE CLEARLY STATES THAT THE NISSAN LEAF IS SO DANG SLOW THAT A GUY ON A BICYCLE WILL NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT RIDING BEHIND IT AGAIN.

I think this is not what the good folks at TBWA/Chiat/Day had in mind. These are the people behind the Justin Long/John Hodgman MAC ads. These are good writers. And the Leaf ad is a good ad, as long as you watch it. Which I didn't. And according to that article I couldn't find, a lot of other people won't either.

So definitely show, but make sure you aren't telling something completely different at the same time.

Weekends? We don't need no stinkin' weekends!

I dropped scripts off at the agency this morning. I dropped a friend in Manhattan Beach later this afternoon. At both locations, people wandered about in t-shirts and flip-flops with happy smiles on their faces. The sun shines brightly – June Gloom ended right on schedule – and everything seems in place for a glorious three day weekend.

During which, I will be chained to my desk trying to make the words happen good and stuff.

I have never experienced weekends and holidays the same way other people do. All the way up to high school, I toured with a children's theater company. We worked over the holidays – who doesn't want to see a puppet show on Easter, Purim, Halloween or Christmas? In college, Thanksgiving break got reserved for building sets and costumes. That happened a lot after college, too. I opened a Christmas show on the last weekend in November once and was stunned to learn that the other actors planned to skip dress rehearsal to head home for some kind of meal or something. Hello, priorities?

And now of course, free days are writing days. But you know what? I like writing. I also liked the puppet show, and building sets, and even dress rehearsals. Looks like I'm taking my holidays just the way I want them.

I hope you all have a wonderful July 4th as well!

Yo-ho-ho and a really good point

Here I go linking to John August again. I was planning to comment myself on the not-exactly-upside but not-entirely-downside of Hollywood's rush to develop non-narrative property titles, be they board games, toys or theme park rides.

A title is not the most binding straitjacket around. A title might specify a genre or setting, but the story remains wide open. A movie based on a toy might seem silly, but it will only BE silly if the creators make it so.

For a master class on how not to make silly movies, listen to the writers' commentary track on the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl DVD. The final pair of writers explain their process in great detail and one understands why the movie turned out so well – and how it could have gone wrong so easily.

Even if you aren't interested in why it was the superior choice to make Commodore Norrington a priggish good guy – but still a good guy – listen to the track anyway. Seriously, how freakin' awesome is it that a movie based on a theme park ride includes a writers' commentary track?!

[I've linked above to the Blu-ray edition. Amazon no longer lists the 2-disc DVD version on which I listened to the commentary track. Anyone know if the Blu-ray version includes the same tracks?]

Ouch

I just realized I took the same easy road I've inveighed against time and again. The original sketch of my current project called for the hero to make a disastrously wrong choice at the end of act one. I backtracked almost immediately from that I idea. In my defense, I was encouraged to remove the disastrous choice to make the hero more "likeable." Screw that; I have no defense. I know better. Woody in Toy Story is not likeable because he's a good guy; he's likeable because he does something terrible – and fights like hell to fix it.

Every comment on my script since the change has involved some form of, "I don't get what the protagonist is fighting for." Of course you don't. He's fighting to fix the idiotic mistake he was supposed to make in act one.

I have now fixed the outline and I feel so much better... now that my protagonist feels so much worse.

Crying all the way to the bank

Short and sweet, via John August: "The protagonist is the character that suffers the most."

I'm going to add my own footnote: emotional/existential suffering counts more than physical. A lot more – though it is nice to give your hero a good Indiana Jones-style beat down every now and then.

I've commented before that many otherwise talented writers seem unable to apply this to semi-autobiographical protagonists. In the latest flurry of script reading, I've noticed a corollary. Many otherwise talented writers seem unable to apply this to characters written for stars.

I recently read a buddy cop script in which one of the two leads was written for a particular attachment. The star role was clearly intended as a weightier, showier, more memorable part than the second lead – Riggs, not Murtaugh. Unfortunately, unlike Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black, who dumped piles of crap on Riggs, this writer tiptoed daintily around his star. The character got all the great lines and stood up bravely for all the right things, but nothing ever got to him. The villain threatened the star with a gun, but never with deep, heartfelt, I-just-can't-go-on-style loss. The guy got beat up a few times, but he never really suffered.

Go ahead and hurt your stars. Give Mr. or Ms. Above The Title something to love, then take it away. Be merciless. They won't hold it against you. Heck, actors love that stuff anyway.

And if you need extra incentive, remember how much they're going to earn from all that suffering you endured writing the thing.

Power elbows

In an interview on the Prime Suspect 7 DVD, Dame Helen Mirren thanks a senior policewoman who advised her against smiling or folding her arms while in character as Jane Tennison:

"You can watch all 22 hours of Prime Suspect and I never fold my arms. It's a defensive act and while you might think folding your arms looks strong, you're actually putting up a barrier to defend yourself... For Tennison to have used such basic body language in her own incident room would have betrayed her instantly."

Michael Shurtleff gave us similar advice in class once, though with less nifty psychology and more straight-up ego. "Keep your damn elbows from touching your body," he said. "It makes you look small. On stage, you want to look big – so people will look at you."

I wish someone had given Joseph Fiennes that advice before he starred as an FBI agent in FlashForward. I like Joseph Fiennes. I'm one of the few people in Hollywood who thinks Shakespeare In Love deserved to win over Saving Private Ryan – and will say so out loud. But I hated Mr. Fiennes' performance in FlashForward. Dude had his arms clamped in front of his body – elbows touching shirt – in every scene. I wound up rooting for the slimy guy from Pirates Of The Caribbean to run off with Penny from Lost. That can't have been right. Joseph Fiennes' character was the series lead; I should have been rooting for him. I'm not blaming Mr. Fiennes for the death of the series... but these elbows didn't help.



Okay readers, where are your elbows right now? Think about it – then MOVE THEM. Do this in interviews. Do this any time you want people to take you seriously. And if you've got an actor on whom the survival of your entire precious series depends, tell him you want to see daylight inside those elbows, now!

Mixed company

Many recent films about friendship take as a given that the friends will be all male or all female – think Sex And The City, The Hangover, Grown-Ups and the whole Apatow-esque genre. While I have enjoyed some of these films, I find the single-sex friendship assumption strangely old-fashioned.

I'm not talking about the dang kids with their mixed sex preteen sleepovers and such. I'm talking about me and everyone I know. I went to a co-ed school. I live in a co-ed neighborhood. I belong to co-ed clubs and work in a co-ed office. It would be weirdly anti-social to befriend only women, or for the guys I know to befriend only men. And it's not just my generation. My dad's book club seems pretty well mixed, and they're all closer to the Greatest Generation than X or Y, or whatever we're up to now.

Still, these movies make money. Some of them make A LOT of money. Maybe my life and my dad's book club are weirder than I think. Or maybe we all secretly long for a bunch of guys to do guy things with or gals to do gal things with, even though most of our friend activities do not involve bachelor parties and shoe shopping.

Or maybe – and this is the reason I find most likely – we are so well programmed to expect romance when two attractive actors meet in a movie, that a writer who wants to focus on friendship has to set up an artificial locker-room world to keep things on target. Friends fall into romance off screen, as well – and it does play hell with the storyline.

That last reason explains why television shows seem to feature more realistic mixed-sex friendships. Television characters hang around for years; we don't expect them to pair off every ninety minutes. Sure, nearly everyone at the end of Friends wound up in a couple. But it took two hundred and thirty six episodes to get there – plenty of time for the writers to explore other themes.

Speaking of friends – and Friends – I enjoyed the first season of Cougar Town. I loathed the name and had to be coaxed into watching it, but I enjoy the show and its depiction of mixed-sex friendship, romance and everything in between. And that friend who convinced me to watch it? A guy. We went shooting a few years back for my birthday. With like, guns. 'Cause when you hang with me, it ain't all shoe shopping.

Though, some of it is.

Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu

IT has arrived. The smartest-looking desk chair on earth. By the end of the week, I expect IT to be writing my scripts for me.

Anyone else think this looks like Captain Kirk's chair?



A little, right? The wide armrests, if nothing else. By the way, the original Kirk chair sold at auction for $304,750. Which makes IT seem almost cheap. Almost.