A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock. (Never mind that Hitchcock worked successfully in many different genres and that his true hallmark was absolute mastery of composition, camera movement and editing while Chabrol has no particular visual talent at all and largely sticks to psychological thrillers.) Unfortunately, his work is much more uneven than Hitch’s, and La Ceremonie does nothing to improve his batting average.

The film stars Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, a maid with a dreadful secret she’ll do anything to keep, namely that she’s illiterate. What sort of background did she come from that she never learned to read? Why didn’t she try to do something about the problem once she grew up? How has she managed to get by for so long, and what would happen if someone found out? The film leaves these pressing questions unanswered, and devotes no more time to sketching in any other aspects of her character either. She’s a chilly, unexpressive woman with no apparent goals or desires to help move the story forward, so most of the movie is effectively static. Her new employers, the well-to-do Lelievres, want her to cook and clean, so she cooks and cleans. The postal clerk she meets, Jeanne, played by Isabelle Huppert, wants to be her friend, so she hangs out with her and does whatever Jeanne feels like doing. She’s carried along like a leaf in the wind, and neither the leaf nor the wind prove to be particularly interesting.

Chabrol spends some time accumulating details of the comfortable existence the Lelievre family enjoys, but he never makes anything of the class contrast between them and Jeanne and Sophie, and he never connects any of it to the central conceit of the story, Sophie’s illiteracy, so both the class contrast and her illiteracy wind up just hanging in the air doing nothing. (If Sophie’s inability to read had actually posed any real danger to her, she might have at least become a somewhat more sympathetic character despite her aloofness, but as it stands, it’s clear that the Lelievres not only wouldn’t have fired her, they’d have been more than happy to pay for reading lessons.)  And then, at last, Sophie and Jeanne conduct the murderous ceremony of the title, but it means nothing and arouses no feelings whatsoever because it’s completely arbitrary and has no connection whatsoever to either Sophie’s inability to read or any kind of conflict, class or otherwise, between Sophie and the Lelievres.

There’s a very nice ironic plot twist at the very end, but it’s too bad it was wasted on this dud of a movie. There’s a lot of Chabrol I haven’t seen, but if you want a much better introduction to his work, check out The Bridesmaid. That actually has a point.

If for some insane (or maybe inspired) reason I were to kidnap Ben Stiller, I’d immediately ask him, “What the heck was Tropic Thunder about?”

His first response would probably be something along the lines of, “It’s a satire of Hollywood in which a bunch of shallow, self-involved actors who think they’re making a Vietnam war movie get tangled up with a real-life drug gang in the middle of the jungle and wind up having to actually become the heroic characters they’d only been pretending to be before.”  Then of course I’d draw a gun and force him to put on a terrible straw-blond wig and a lot of white makeup and perform a stage show as a mentally handicapped character named “Simple Jack” until he cracked and gave me a real answer.

To backtrack a little, Tropic Thunder starts off pretty decently. There are some good laughs, including an unexpected death and a really vicious and hateful — and extremely funny — performance by Tom Cruise as an evil studio executive named Les Grossman. The problem is that it runs off the rails and mostly stops generating laughs pretty quickly, because Stiller and his co-writers didn’t have a clue what they really wanted the movie to be about, thematically speaking. At first, it seems like they wanted to savagely lampoon the film industry. But then later, out of nowhere some of the actor characters begin to grow up and become better people, and in the end, all the death and misery caused by the aborted and disastrous production of the Vietnam war movie-within-a-movie gets “redeemed” when the footage is turned into a documentary which implausibly makes hundreds of millions of dollars at the global box office! You just can’t have your cake and eat it too, or in this case simultaneously tear down Hollywood and build it up. You have to pick an attitude, a viewpoint, a theme, and stick to it. You need to have the courage of your convictions.

I’m sure some of you will say, “Come on, lighten up, it’s only a comedy,” but theme is just as important in comedy as it is in any other genre. In fact, you could argue it’s even more important, because there’s such a thin line separating a joke that works from one that dies horribly, and because that line is drawn in large part by the theme of the overall piece and the attitude that theme generates in the audience.

For example, take the part of Tropic Thunder in which Stiller’s character, Tugg Speedman, has been kidnapped by the Flaming Dragon drug gang and forced to play Simple Jack, a role from a terrible film he’d done a few years before in the foolish hope of winning an Oscar. Suddenly, Speedman starts losing his grip on sanity and becomes committed to his new “gig” playing Simple Jack and the new relationship he thinks he’s forming with members of the drug gang. This isn’t even slightly amusing because it doesn’t make so much as a shred of sense. Speedman has been set up as a stupid and arrogant Hollywood celebrity who’s desperate to hold onto his wealth and power, not as a delusional fool who has difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality. The gag might have worked better if it had been assigned to Robert Downey Jr.’s character, Kirk Lazarus, who is regularly shown to be so absurdly over-committed to the craft of acting that he literally stays in character all the time and even undergoes plastic surgery in order to more convincingly play a black man. It also would have contributed to Lazarus’s ostensible character arc, in which he learns to let go of his pretentious and fundamentally fake dedication to his craft and acknowledge that he pretends to be other people because he doesn’t really know who he is himself underneath all the characters he plays. Speedman’s arc, if he’d even had one to begin with, should have been about getting over his greed and his lust for fame and box office clout, though of course that wouldn’t work as long as the movie’s happy ending was going to be the release of a documentary about a failed movie production somehow magically making staggering amounts of money and massively boosting everyone’s career as a result.

Why would Stiller & Co. make such an obvious mistake — and dozens upon dozens of others which I won’t bother going into here? Because they didn’t have the first clue about what they were trying to say.

Hold off for just a moment before you sharpen your pitchforks, knitting needles and miscellaneous other weapons of mass destruction so you can dice me up, boil me in the blood of failed screenwriters past and then eat my brains for daring to utter such outrageous sacrilege. I know perfectly well that directing on paper is the quintessential hallmark of the amateur and that nothing will get your script tossed in the recycling bin faster… except maybe for all the other things that will do the job just as well, including but not limited to poor grammar, boring and predictable plotting (or no plot at all), the lack of a good hook, misuse of the screenplay form, aimless characterization, painfully unrealistic dialogue, and bad breath. (And if you think I’m kidding about the bad breath part, think again.)

And you know what? In many ways, I agree with the conventional wisdom on this count. It’s no fun to read a bunch of crap like “THE CAMERA TRUCKS BACK FROM A MEDIUM SHOT TO A MEDIUM-MEDIUM-LONG SHOT” and “EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF AN EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF A WIDE SHOT”. And yet film, as we’re always told, is a visual medium, and screenplays without visuals — screenplays full of dialogue and nothing but, in other words — are sneered at just as much as scripts crammed with camera directions and explicitly called shots.

So how does the aspiring screenwriter reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable contradiction? Simply. By writing well. Great writing paints a vivid picture in the reader’s mind without conscious effort on the reader’s part. That’s why the stereotypical kind of directed-on-paper scripts don’t work. “THE CAMERA CRANES IN THROUGH THE WINDOW to a MEDIUM CLOSE-UP of BOB THE WANNABE SCREENWRITER staring at a rejection letter in stunned disbelief” doesn’t readily form a visual in most people’s minds. In fact, the more technical jargon you use, the more you’re going to pull your reader out of the story instead of pulling him or her into it, because technical terms requires mental translation and interpretation. So forget about the jargon. Just describe the image you want the reader to form, and make your description as vivid and effective as possible.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

First, the typical “directing on paper” version.

INT. POWER PLANT - DAY

EXTREME WIDE SHOT of Tom.

He rushes up to the immense hydraulics assembly at the base of the power plant.

And now here’s the jargon-free rewrite.

INT. POWER PLANT - DAY

Looking like nothing more than a man-shaped insect about to be crushed under the looming foot of a giant, Tom rushes up to the immense hydraulics assembly at the base of the power plant.

Which one has more impact? Brownie points if you say the second one, since it’s pulled from one of my own scripts. Extra bonus points if you notice that my version also takes up less space on the page, a more and more important consideration as the acceptable length for screenplays in both Hollywood and the indie world continues to drop.

Anyway, by now you’re probably wondering what the heck any of this has to do with Tell No One. After all, it’s been fantastically well-reviewed, it’s a cinch to end up on a whole bunch of critics’ Best of the Year lists come December, and I’ll even admit that it’s my co-favorite movie of the year so far, along with Wall-E. So what the heck am I complaining about?

Instead of getting all abstract and theoretical, I’ll give you an example.

First, though, a little spoiler-free story background — nothing you wouldn’t get from the trailer. Tell No One is a thriller about a doctor named Alex Beck, whose wife, Margot, is killed while they’re vacationing in the country. He loved her so much, and he’s so broken up by her death, that eight years later, he still hasn’t moved on. He visits her parents each year on the anniversary of her murder, he lives a mostly solitary, almost monastic life, he’s not in the least bit romantically involved with anyone… and then one day, he starts getting emails that seem like they might just be coming from Margot, and his whole, carefully shielded life starts to fall apart.

It’s a terrific setup, and Alex’s yearning for Margot generates much of the film’s genuinely immense emotional power. Unfortunately, though, the director (Guillame Canet) plainly had no idea of how to use the camera — the film is shot in a very generic, workmanlike fashion which utterly fails to do its part to focus and magnify the power of the story — and there’s one scene in particular, the flashback to Margot’s cremation, in which he completely dropped the ball.

Probably because he thought it would be more visually interesting, Canet shot the actual cremation from inside the furnace. In the most superficial sense possible, it might seem that it would be more exciting to see flames licking over a coffin than it would be to watch a bunch of people standing around on the other side of the furnace door. Alex Beck, however, is the protagonist, and his emotions and his experiences drive the story. Instead of showcasing a piece of burning wood, that scene should have been shot from his perspective to make the audience vicariously feel the ultimate pain of his final separation from his wife. We should have seen him watching her coffin disappearing into the furnace. We should have seen the furnace door closing, cutting him off from her mortal remains. We should have seen the flames from his perspective, muted and obscured by the glass window in the furnace door, forcing him to experience the last moments of her mortal remains just he experienced the last moments of his wife’s living existence, at a distance, cut off from her. And throughout, we should have seen the pain written on his face.

All of that could have (and should have) been written in the screenplay without a single called shot, not too differently from how I described it above. That’s because the kind of “directing on paper” I recommend is really a writer’s task — deciding what to emphasize, what to include, and how to present it all… which is to say, writing. It’s a sad irony that as well as directing Tell No One, Canet also co-write the screenplay. But hey, he was an actor first; directing the camera isn’t his home turf. Just don’t make the same mistake yourself. And go see the movie while you’re at it, because for all its flaws, the good parts are really great.

Never mind the stomach-turning minstrel stereotype of Ziro the Hutt, which was so bad that it snapped Harry Knowles out of a “shit-accepting stupor” and pissed him off enough to write a really scathing review of the movie.

Forget about the odiously false and superficial girl-empowerment caricature which is Anakin’s sidekick. Nowadays, that sort of thing is unfortunately just par for the course.

And heck, let’s just ignore the fact that making a buddy movie featuring Anakin Skywalker and his cute^* female sidekick is sort of like doing a remake of Bringing Up Baby in which all the light banter takes place between Adolf Hitler and pretty little Eva Braun shortly before Hitler went on to became, well, Hitler.

Though seriously, what’s with George Lucas’ Anakin obsession? How about focusing on some genuinely interesting and sympathetic characters for a change, like, oh, say, Han Solo? Or do we keep getting L’il Orphan Ani shoved down our throats because somewhere deep in his subconscious, George Lucas recognizes that he himself has become Darth Vader, and part of him wishes he could turn back the clock to a time before he started squirting out endless rivers of shit once he learned that that’s all that’s required to part suckers like me^** from their money?

No… no… must stop… I promised myself that today, I’m just going to point out that Clone Wars is an object lesson in how not to write a great buddy movie.

First, a little effectively spoiler-free background info to make sure we’re all on the same page. Clone Wars takes place between Episode II, Attack of the Clones and Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, so Anakin and Princess Amidala are married, but he hasn’t yet begun his final descent towards the dark side. He and Obi-Wan are still busy fighting against the separatists and their droid army, but when Count Dooku arranges the abduction of Jabba the Hutt’s only son in a plot to turn the Hutt clan against the Republic, they get sent halfway across the galaxy to rescue the Huttlet (yes, seriously, he’s really called the Huttlet in the credits) and avert a crisis. And yet in spite all this chaos, Yoda decides to give an outraged and protesting Anakin an apprentice, a young Padawan named Ahsoka, and much of the movie involves Anakin and Ahsoka getting into and out of various scrapes while quarreling and sniping at each other in a way that’s no doubt supposed to be spunky and endearing.

In theory, there’s nothing all that horribly wrong with this setup. Contrast and conflict bring out character, and giving the protagonist a buddy or sidekick and creating a lot of friction between them is a great way to ensure a steady supply of both. The problem, however, is that there’s no contrast between Anakin and Ahsoka; he’s always been reckless and impulsive, and surprise surprise, so is she.

As written, Ahsoka might conceivably have worked if Anakin had been repeatedly forced to rescue his feckless apprentice from messes of her own making. He could have finally recognized himself in her and gained a new appreciation for what his former master, Obi-Wan, had gone through in teaching him. The writers didn’t go there, however, and in a larger sense that’s probably just as well, because developing the virtues of caution and restraint wouldn’t exactly make sense in context of Anakin’s larger arc towards Vaderhood.

Instead, the writers should’ve stuck with Anakin’s entirely believable and consistent objection to being given a Padawan instead of effectively dropping it within moments of bringing it up. Anakin’s ultimate downfall, after all, comes in part from selfishness, and what’s more selfish than not being willing to teach and share knowledge? They could’ve had had Ahsoka take more and more extreme and foolhardy chances (and get into more and more awful trouble) in repeated attempts to win Anakin’s respect and approval, and he could have rescued her more and more grudgingly and pushed her away more and more vehemently each time.

Furthermore, the writers should have taken better advantage of preexisting Star Wars mythology. Jedi knights aren’t supposed to develop any personal ties of any kind which might distract them from their service to the Republic or corrupt their devotion to its ideals. That’s why Anakin’s marriage to Padme in Attack of the Clones had to be kept a secret, and that’s why many in the Jedi Council were opposed to inducting Anakin into the order in the first place, because he’d already grown old enough to form a deep attachment to his mother. Anakin’s return to his homeworld of Tatooine to bring back Jabba’s son should have stirred up all the old wounds caused by his mother’s death, and the writers could have used that by making Anakin finally realize that he actually cares a great deal about his apprentice — that he’s formed a sort of familial bond with her, in fact — and that he desperately needs to save her from Count Dooku’s ambush and embrace her as his apprentice. In one sense, this would have been positive growth and development for Anakin as a person, and in another it would have been one more mile of blacktop on the road towards his future role as a betrayer of the Republic and a lord of the Sith, which would’ve made for some tremendous and affecting dramatic irony.

Even more importantly, what little superficial conflict there is between Anakin and Ahsoka has nothing to do with the theme or plot of the story. It has absolutely no influence on the outcome. In my fantasy better version of the movie, Count Dooku would have defeated Anakin and Ahsoka individually; they would have had to work together to win out in the end, and because he would have had to learn to accept her as his apprentice and she would have had to learn to accept him as her master in order for them to work together, their relationship would have been organically tied into the larger framework of the story — in my version, everything that they went through would have mattered.

Sadly, though, Darth Lucas didn’t bother with any of that, and for a change, it appears he’s being punished for it at the box office. Clone Wars is only going to make about $15M on its opening weekend, well below expectations, and I’m willing to bet it won’t have that much in the way of legs either. Too bad for everyone concerned they didn’t make a better film.

**In my defense, I saw Clone Wars with a friend for his birthday, so I didn’t have any choice in the matter. In my anti-defense, I had a more or less OK time with it despite all the problems I mentioned above — and the many other ones I didn’t get into here. I more or less agree with Cinematical that large parts of the movie are good, brainless, action-oriented fun… as long as you hold your nose at times and completely turn off your brain all the way through. So shoot me. Or slice off my head with a light sabre. At least it was no Brown Bunny

I didn’t rush out and see it on opening day or anything, but I’ve been kinda sorta halfway interested in seeing Swing Vote. It’s about a presidential election that’s so close that it winds up coming down to one man’s vote, but due to a technical glitch, his vote is lost on election day and he gets to cast it again ten days later, meaning that both candidates spend those ten days doing everything humanly possible to persuade him to pick them, which is a pretty good concept — and I’m something of a politics junkie, so it sounded like it’s right up my alley. Besides, I like Kevin Costner. (So sue me; he has an amiable presence, and he’s actually a better actor than most people give him credit for being. Besides, he’s made a bunch of really good movies, like The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Tin Cup, and plenty of others.) But anyway, back to Swing Vote and my half-formed plans to see it. Luckily for me, Bill Martell took the bullet so I don’t have to.

Here are an excerpt of the post in which he explains how Kevin Costner has put another nail in the coffin of his career, but you should really read the whole thing. (It starts off talking about the recent earthquake out in L.A.; the movie section comes after that.)

One man will decide the fate of the free world.

And that man is Joe 6 Pack. His name is even product placement - Bud. The problem is, they make fun of him - the movie ridicules him and turns him into a complete idiot… even though he’s our lead. Our identification character. He’s a complete idiot, he lives in a trailer park, he works in an egg factory (but the movie doesn’t really get into egg processing at all - it’s like nobody did any research) and is constantly drunk. This is what they think of the average American voter… Thanks!

Now, there are things they could do to make Bud likable - but they don’t do any of them. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to do the opposite - to make him even more of an unlikable, impossible to identify with idiot. They could have made him really really funny - kind of the Adam Sandler method (though Sandler isn’t that funny) - but all of the jokes are on Bud - we’re laughing at him, not with him… except we aren’t laughing at him, either. He’s an idiot - you wonder what *Costner* was thinking. They could have had things happen to him that earn our sympathy - but when he loses his job at the egg factory it’s because he was stumble-bum drunk on the job and knocked over a whole pallet of eggs - right in front of the security camera. Nothing sympathetic at all.

Now, bear with me a moment for what might seem like a bit of a digression.

A few days ago, I watched A Face in the Crowd at the urging of a close friend who’d rented it from Netflix. It’s a very good movie (written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan) about a charismatic hobo who gets turned into an overnight media sensation and quickly takes advantage of the situation to become one of America’s biggest and most powerful celebrities, and Andy Griffith surprised the ever-living crap out of me by delivering an astoundingly good performance, but after I finished it, I commented to my friend that as good as it was, I didn’t think the movie was completely successful because the lead character just wasn’t sympathetic enough for me to really care what happened to him.

Her response was that There Will Be Blood proves that the protagonist doesn’t really have to be likeable for a film to work. (She knows it’s my favorite movie of 2007 even though she doesn’t like it quite as much as I do.) Paul Thomas Anderson, though, took care to make Daniel Plainview powerfully sympathetic in Blood despite his many tragic flaws by giving him a son he clearly loved, and as the story unfolded and the worse angels of Plainview’s nature threatened to get the better of him, I was rooting for him to hold onto his love for his son and become a better person with every fiber of my being. Giving a bad character (or even one who’s just morally conflicted) someone to love is just one of the many techniques available that can very effectively make audience members emotionally invest in him even when he seems quite unsympathetic on the surface, and Paul Thomas Anderson pulled it off handily.

I think Andy Griffith’s character in A Face in the Crowd was supposed to start off as a likable country-bumpkin everyman who only gets corrupted when the media and rich power brokers get hold of him, and that does work up to a point because of Griffith’s superb performance, but the problem is that the character he plays was actually pretty much dishonest and corrupt right from the beginning, and just for in case anyone had any doubts on that point, one of the supporting characters, Mel Miller (played by the great Walter Matthau) actually says so near the end of the movie. Not a good idea when you’re trying to make a tragic drama about the malevolent influence of money and the media on otherwise innocent Americans.

Anyway, once again, back to Swing Vote. Apparently, the filmmakers did an even worse job of making Kevin Costner’s character sympathetic than Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan did with Andy Griffith’s, which is kind of ironic given that Kevin Costner came much closer to getting it right in another movie he produced, Mr. Brooks, which is actually about a much more overtly unsympathetic character, a serial killer! Too bad, but hey, at least I get to save twelve bucks and wait for it to show up on cable. Thanks, Bill!