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

No, of course I’m not talking about your bedsheets, pillowcases, shams, comforters, duvets, box spring covers, or decorative silk dust ruffles. What I’m asking you is this: how many individual plotlines have you written into your script, and have you sewn them all up by the end, or did some of your threads wander off and get lost, marring the pattern of your story?

The other day I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and while most of it was pretty good and some of it was great, the filmmakers made one small but very important mistake. First, though, a little background. An awful woman named Dolores Umbridge (played by Imelda Staunton) takes over the ‘Defense Against the Dark Arts’ course at Hogwarts and does away with all practical instruction, turning the course into a completely useless waste of time. Several students persuade Harry, who has a special aptitude for both defensive and offensive spells, to start teaching his fellow students what they should have been learning in the class, and they form a training group which they call ‘Dumbledore’s Army’. The problem is that Umbridge, who’s been busily staging an administrative coup against Dumbledore, has outlawed all student organizations, clubs and activities, so if they’re caught, they’ll get expelled. And then, of course, they get caught, and it turns out that Harry’s sometime romantic interest Cho Chang (Katie Leung) is the one who led Umbridge to the Army’s secret meeting place. Thereafter, all the members of the Army ostracize Chang, and after a moment’s hesitation, Harry does too. Later, though, Harry learns that Umbridge forced Cho to drink veritaserum (a magical truth serum which forces the imbiber to spill his or her guts) and that it therefore wasn’t her fault that the Army got busted. But does he apologize to Cho for doubting her? Or try to work up the courage to approach her and apologize but fail? Does he do anything at all which acknowledges the importance of this revelation? Sadly, no.

This is a big problem for two reasons. First, it makes Harry look like a jerk. He liked Cho enough to ask her out on a date the last time out, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but now he doesn’t even care about her enough to admit he was wrong? And second, it leaves an important plotline unresolved, meaning audience members are likely to feel partially unsatisfied by the film. Not every storyline needs a neat and tidy resolution; life, after all, is generally neither neat nor tidy. But stories do need some kind of resolution, even if it’s just an acknowledgement that the story won’t resolve happily. Harry could have tried to approach Cho and lost his nerve. He could have apologized to her and been rebuffed. Or heck, if likeability weren’t a concern, he could even have even said “well screw you anyway!” The point is just that he needed to try to do something. Without that, the filmmakers are effectively telling us that Cho Chang and her seeming betrayal of Dumbledore’s Army don’t actually matter at all even though they obviously do.

So when you’re polishing your script before you send it out to be eaten by wolves — or maybe, just maybe, turned into the next box office record-breaker or Academy Award-winner for Best Picture — make sure you don’t lose track of your thread count and forget to resolve an important throughline in your story.