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

My apologies for the ridiculous delay since the last entry. I pitched a serial to a producer last week and he was very interested, but as soon as I got home from the meeting, all ready to fire off a couple scripts and a bible, I had a blinding revelation which completely changed a significant aspect of the story. Ever since then, I’ve been working feverishly on revising the episodes and replanning the whole story (as well as dealing with a hundred other things) so I haven’t managed to make time for the blog until now. I’ll try not to let that happen again; in fact, I’d like to get onto an every-other-day schedule if I can, though I’m not going to make any promises. Anyway, all that personal jabber aside…

I’m one of the five or six people watching On the Lot. In some ways, it’s a huge mess of a show, but I’m surprised anyone ever thought it would be a hit regardless of how well executed it might have been. The sad fact is that most people just don’t give a crap about filmmaking. They don’t dream of becoming directors. They don’t wonder what it’s like to make a movie. And they don’t envy anyone in the business who’s not a celebrity. This manifests quite clearly in the dismal ratings and box office of every behind-the-scenes project that comes down the pike — I think without exception — so it’s a mystery to me why the financial types in the business keep greenlighting them. Of course I gobble them up, and I’m sure many of you do too, but we’re the exception that proves the rule. We’re the proud few who actually want to make movies, so of course we care.

But enough of that. I come not to bury On the Lot, but to praise (some of) its filmmakers. Telling a story in two minutes is hard. Damn hard. For the longest time I had no idea how to do it. Virtually all my shorts have been much closer to ten minutes than two, and some were a lot longer than that. Nor could I seem to get the knack of telling an episodic story in short, bite-sized chunks of no more than three or at most five minutes… i.e. for the web. Several years ago, in fact, after working for an animated TV show and totally failing to get any of my scripts on the air, I decided to roll my own show on the web. To make a long story short, while I set out intending to keep each episode under five minutes, I quickly wound up with a stack of really great 30-page scripts, perfect for conventional television but totally untenable online, and since I’m not a certified, accredited showrunner, into the closet they went. So I can sympathize with contestants who have trouble telling a complete and compelling story in just a few brief seconds. But I’ve long since gotten over my mental block, and anyone who’s made it this far on the show should have too.

Telling a story this compressed is all about shorthand; it requires quickly establishing characters and problems we’re all familiar with and can understand immediately. If this sounds like broad, shallow writing, that’s because in a way it is. In just two minutes, there’s no time for subtlety or complexity. Of course you have to personalize your stereotypes to make them feel fresh and new, but they still have to be familiar, or you’ll spend all your time and then some just setting things up and you’ll never get to the actual story. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many people do — sketch out a character but neglect to put him or her in a story. (In fact, that happens with depressing regularity in features, too.) Other people try to assemble a plot but neglect to populate it with characters. (Likewise depressingly common in features.) Both mistakes are fatal.

So how did the filmmakers in last night’s episode do? Well, they were all over the map. Andrew Hunt’s Zero2Sixty was the best of the bunch (you can thank me later for avoiding the pun) because he came up with a funny, exciting scenario filled with well-drawn characters — a nebbishy, ineffectual car salesman gets caught up in a frantic car chase when a thief steals a car off his lot (thank me again!) and an FBI agent needs to borrow a car to go in pursuit; the car salesman accompanies him to protect the car and finds himself rising to the occasion and successfully selling the car to the agent. Jason Epperson’s Sweet was also very good. It’s about a guy who gets home from work and realizes he’s forgotten his anniversary, so he has to make a mad dash to get his wife some flowers and arrange dinner reservations in the few short minutes before she gets home. Everyone can relate to that dilemma, and the story was told in a fun and amusing fashion. Unfortunately, Sam Friedlander’s entry, Key Witness, was a dud. The story had something to do with a cop trying to bring in a reluctant witness, but we never found out why the witness wasn’t cooperating, and more importantly, neither the cop nor the witness ever became characters. So not only did we not really know what was going on, we didn’t have any reason to care. I halfway hope he squeaks through the voting, because his earlier Replication Theory may have been the funniest 90 seconds about farting that I’ve ever seen, but Witness showed none of the visual flare or storytelling panache of his earlier work, and I’m afraid the truth is that he deserves to go home.

The lesson to draw from all this is that even though shorts (and commercials) are very different from feature films, the basic rule of establishing character and situation immediately actually applies to both. You have very little time to grab your readers’ or audiences’ interest before they toss your script into the trash, hit the ’stop’ button or walk out of the theater. And if you think about it, why would you waste your time and theirs on scenes and material that aren’t actually a crucial part of your story? Get right to the point, or you’ll get kicked off the lot too. (What, you thought you were going to get away without any bad puns at all? Not a chance!)

There’s something fundamentally un-Die Hard-ish about the latest entry in the Die Hard franchise. Oh, it’s an action movie all right, and it stars Bruce Willis as a cop named John McClane, but that’s where the similarities end. This John McClane isn’t much of a wisecracker; wisecracking has been reassigned to a character named Matt Farrell, who’s played by Justin Long. This John McClane doesn’t seem to have any problems with authority; in fact, he gets along with government types just fine. This John McClane zips all over the landscape, never getting trapped anywhere. And this John McClane faces a villain with amorphous motivations and ill-defined goals. Only the last issue is a problem with Live Free or Die Hard as a movie, but all four mean it’s anything but a real Die Hard flick.

Lajos Egri opens his excellent book The Art of Dramatic Writing with one of my favorite passages on the subject:

A man sits in his workshop, busy with an invention of wheels and springs. You ask him what the gadget is, what it is meant to do. He looks at you confidingly and whispers: “I really don’t know.”

Another man rushes down the street, panting for breath. You intercept him and ask him where he is going. He gasps: “How should I know where I am going? I am on my way.”

Your reaction — and ours, and the world’s — is that these two men are a little mad. Every sensible invention must have a purpose, every planned sprint a destination.

Yet, fantastic as it seems, this simple necessity has not made itself felt to any extent in the theater. Reams of paper bear miles of writing — all of it without any point at all. There is much feverish activity, a great deal of get-up-and-go, but no one seems to know where he is going.

Everything has a purpose, or premise. Every second of our life has its own premise, whether or not we are conscious of it at the time. That premise may be as simple as breathing or as complex as a vital emotional decision, but it is always there.

We may not succeed in proving each tiny premise, but that in no way alters the fact that there was one we meant to prove. Our attempt to cross the room may be impeded by an unobserved footstool, but our premise existed nonetheless.

Whenever it comes in your particular version of the writing process, eventually you have to figure what it is you’re really writing about — what point you’re trying to make, how everything in your story ties together, and why any of it matters. (Personally I call this “theme” rather than “premise”, but that’s a subject for another day.) Some writers manage this subconsciously, at least some of the time, but I always prefer to understand what I’m doing so that I can be sure to do it again next time.

But to get back to the subject at hand, what does this have to do with Die Hard?

Die Hard is about doing the right thing even when everyone thinks you’re wrong. Die Hard is about fighting the system — and everyone who wants to destroy it. It’s about being the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass, remember?

Live Free or Die Hard, however, is about none of those things. It’s a pretty entertaining action movie (albeit often a silly and poorly shot one) but it’s not a legitimate entry in the Die Hard franchise.

The irony is that by choosing the subject of computer hackers, the filmmakers had the opportunity to make a perfect addition to the series. A lot of hacking is about publicly and visibly breaking the system to prove that it’s vulnerable and force the powers that be to fix it, and every hacker knows that corporate and government types Just Don’t Get It. Hackers are the quintessential iconoclastic outsiders, just like John McClane, and McClane and Farrell should have had to contend with a bunch of misguided “my way or the highway” government types who were sure they knew exactly how to deal with Thomas Gabriel but who were actually playing right into his hands. That would’ve made Live Free a real Die Hard, and just as importantly, it would’ve rung true and genuinely resonated with our fears about crackers, computer terrorism and a government ill-prepared to protect us from them instead of just paying them lip service.

Oh, well. Chalk up another one to the Department of Missed Opportunities.