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

A German who was a child during WWII and witnessed American bombing raids on his own country at very close range immigrates to the United States, signs up to be a Navy pilot and gets shot down while flying a top-secret bombing run over Laos during the Vietnam War. He’s captured by the Viet Kong and endures all manner of torture and privation at their hands, but he organizes an escape with his fellow prisoners of war and, with great difficulty, makes his way through the deadly jungle until finally he’s rescued, whereupon he immediately returns to active duty as a pilot.

Sounds tremendously interesting and exciting, right? Sadly, it’s not, or at least it’s not nearly as interesting and exciting as it should have been.

I’m writing, of course, about Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, a dramatic retelling of the story of Dieter Dengler, which Herzog first told in his excellent documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Herzog is one of my absolute favorite writer-directors, responsible for masterpieces like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, and Rescue Dawn would seem to play to his strengths. The cruelty and power of nature is a recurring theme in his work, showing up in every single one of his films I’ve mentioned and many more, and so is man’s inhumanity to man, which is also prominently on display here. But Rescue Dawn is missing something. Of course we care for Dengler in the generic sense we’d care for anyone going through what we see him experience, and Herzog unsurprisingly does a terrific job of capturing those experiences on film. The problem is that Dengler starts off as a cipher and remains one through the bitter end. What motivates him? Who is he really? Why did he join the very military that obliterated his own home town, why did he bomb other people as he himself had been bombed, and why did he return to active duty after being shot down and experiencing firsthand the fear and hatred consuming his targets because of those bombings? The answers to those questions would surely be immensely compelling — the stuff of great drama — but they’re barely even hinted at, and so Dengler remains abstract, more like someone you’d hear about on the news than an individual you know personally and care about because of that relationship.

What’s needed is a character arc for Dengler, some kind of inner journey that gives form and meaning to his outer journey and provides a point, a reason to care about it all. The tragedy is that such an arc is alluded to in passing by the title card that ends the movie, informing us that Dengler left the military shortly after resuming active duty and took up a career as a test pilot. Perhaps he did this just because the fear of being shot down again was too great to overcome, but maybe he made that choice because it allowed him to satisfy his need to fly without requiring him to continue killing and maiming a bunch of hapless subsistence farmers.

The latter scenario is really the only sound option, because it’s already right there in the story’s DNA. As a child, obviously, Dengler saw the excitement and glamour of being a fighter pilot without gaining an adult’s understanding of the true consequences of war, and so when he grew up, he joined the Navy, eager to partake of that excitement and glamour and still not truly aware of the dark side of the job. But his experiences after being shot down had to have changed all that. You simply can’t get bombed, tortured, imprisoned, attacked by villagers who are terrified of Americans even when they’re practically just American corpses, and mistakenly shot at by your own people, without changing. And just as importantly, it’s human nature to prefer stories in which the protagonist changes and learns a lesson, because if he doesn’t, everything that just happened to him could happen all over again, and in that case there’s no point in wasting time on the story in the first place!

If Rescue Dawn had instead been a voyage of discovery, and if we’d seen Dieter Dengler coming to grips with what he’d learned during his ordeal and deciding he couldn’t remain in the military (particularly if we didn’t immediately learn of his subsequent career as a test pilot and so only saw him giving up flying, the most important thing in his whole life) it would have delivered a tremendously powerful emotional payload and it surely would have connected with a significantly larger audience than it has. Though Herzog certainly doesn’t have an unblemished track record, I can only wonder whether he feared the current political climate too much to risk questioning even decades-old US military policy… or whether he was unable to raise financing for a version of the film that would have asked those questions. As it stands, while Rescue Dawn has many incidental pleasures and secondary strengths, it’s ultimately a failure.

No, I’m not talking about the superb Renoir film of the same name, though maybe I should one of these days. Today’s subject is actually audience expectations. The night before last, I watched House of Fury, an Anthony Wong martial arts comedy (seriously! and he really pulls it off, too!) and though it was surprisingly fun, it fell apart for a little while about two-thirds of the way through when it suddenly developed a bad case of multiple personality disorder.

Maybe I should back up a bit. House of Fury is about a chiropractor named Yue Siu Bo (Anthony Wong) who likes to tell tall tales about his supposed exploits as a secret agent. In fact, the movie opens with a fantastical scene in which he battles something like ten masked villains who can turn into sand, teleport around the field of battle and otherwise make life extremely difficult for him. Wong’s character emerges triumphant… but then we find out that we were actually seeing a story he’s been telling to some high school kids while he waits to pick up his daughter after school. Naturally they don’t believe him, but they enjoy listening anyway because he tells it so well. His daughter, meanwhile, catches sight of him and sneaks off in the other direction; she’s embarrassed by all his BS, and so is her brother.

Soon thereafter, though, a few actual bad guys show up at Yue Siu Bo’s office on a mission from the film’s chief villain, and now he gets into a real fight. This one, being set in the real world, is relatively gritty and realistic and involves absolutely no supernatural abilities whatsoever, and though Wong’s character makes a valiant effort, he’s eventually overwhelmed. One man triumphing against impossible odds is really just the stuff of fantasy, after all. His kids then try to find out what happened to him, and they discover that he really is a secret agent (tasked with protecting retired agents who have adopted new identities and entered the civilian population) so they set out to rescue him from the villain.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this premise. In fact, it’s an excellent one; it creates conflict in Yue Siu Bo’s family, it makes for great character arcs for him and his kids, and it sets up plenty of fun and exciting action. The problem is that after establishing a clear division between fantasy and reality (the goofy supernatural fights Wong’s character talks about winning versus the real ones he actually gets into which don’t end so well for him) the filmmakers went and destroyed the distinction by inserting fantasy into reality. An older fellow named Uncle Chiu (played by Ma Wu) turns out to be a retired agent and the villain’s real target, and he suddenly starts levitating up the sides of buildings, flying through the air and displaying other patently impossible abilities.

There’s actually nothing wrong with fantasy action, either. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon proves that it can be used to magnificent effect. But whereas Crouching Tiger established a world in which people with exceptionally advanced martial arts skills can partially defy gravity, and then rigorously and consistently enforced the rules of that world, House of Fury tells us that gravity-defying acts are limited to silly stories… and then promptly breaks its own rules. Audiences can accept the impossible in a movie (just look at the Spider-Man franchise!) but only if the movie plays fair. Change the rules in the middle of the game and you utterly destroy suspension of disbelief.

P.S. Sorry this entry is late; I had a sudden avalanche of work on Sunday, and I never even got the chance to go out and see any movies, let alone think about writing a blog entry. Don’t worry, though; blogging about new releases is only delayed, not canceled!

Last night, I watched the first couple episodes of Island at War, a BBC miniseries from a couple years ago. (Yes, apparently it’s British Week in the Screenplay Science laboratory.) Overall, it’s proving to be a nicely executed but not particularly exceptional show about the invasion of the British Channel Islands by Nazi Germany in WWII, but one scene in the first episode really popped. Cassie Mahy (played by Saskia Reeves) has just lost her husband, an amiable civilian, to enemy fire, and rather than exhibit the standard, obvious signs of grief — tears, weeping, proclamations that she can’t go on without him, etc. — she gets angry. The fact that this is entirely in character (partly for reasons that aren’t revealed until the second episode) is a bonus, but the real point is that her bitter, furious tirade at her dead husband for going out on the pier and getting shot make us feel her grief far more viscerally and immediately than any mere crying jag ever could. As executed, the scene is tremendously powerful. If it were written “on the nose” (in industry term for dialogue in which characters say exactly what they’re feeling, e.g. “I miss my husband terribly”) it would’ve been mediocre at best.

OTN writing is a deadly mistake that’s unfortunately very commonly made by new screenwriters… and by a surprising number of more experienced ones, too. Part of the problem, I think, is that while teachers and screenwriting books almost all warn against the practice, they never seem to give a very good explanation of why it’s so bad. Oh, they’ll say things like “it has no subtext,” but that’s not really helpful to someone trying to acquire an emotional understanding of what works and what doesn’t work.

The real reason OTN writing is a disaster is actually very simple: it provides no conflict, so it just lies there dead on the page or the screen. Think about it. In Island at War, Cassie Mahy is trying to fight the anguish and desolation which threaten to overwhelm her. We already know she’s grief-stricken, because we saw that she loved her husband. A scene in which she merely expressed her grief wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, and it wouldn’t contain any conflict, either. Conflict, though, both internal and external, is literally what stories are made of. And conflict provides tension, because we want to see how it resolves and whether the characters get what they want or not. Without conflict, you don’t even really have a story at all. Subtext is important not only because it adds layers of meaning to your story, but because it adds conflict — between what a character is saying and what he or she really means, between characters who may not fully understand each other, inside a character who is trying to fight some sort of feeling or drive, and so on.

And yes, the infamous rat (which has now shown up in FX’s otherwise somewhat promising new show Damages!) is quintessential on-the-nose writing.

Well, it’s been a very long day, so I’m off to watch disc one of the Fanny Trilogy. Maybe it’ll spawn a new blog entry, but even if it doesn’t, I’m finally going to get out of the office and see some new releases this weekend, so come hell or high water, I’ll start talking about current movies again within the next few days. Hope you all have a great night.

Last time out, I talked a little about House of Cards, and in doing so, I mentioned Richard III and Profit. Later that night, I got to thinking about the three of them, and I realized that for all their similarities, there’s actually a very interesting difference between them — while Profit goes to great lengths to reveal Jim Profit’s backstory and explain (and even justify) his dark and twisted nature, House of Cards tells us just about nothing about the life story and origins of Francis Urquhart, its own scheming, amoral protagonist. (Richard III strikes something of a middle ground, so I’ll leave it out of this discussion.) Yet House of Cards still expects us to empathize with Urquhart enough to be captured by the narrative, and in fact the miniseries was so successful that it spawned two sequels and much critical worship, while Profit suffered abysmal ratings and tragically premature cancellation.

This seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, which dictates that everyone’s problems and pathologies be explained in terms of abusive parents, traumatic childhoods and the like. Probably the best single example of this pop-psychology approach to writing is the upcoming Halloween remake, written and directed by Rob Zombie based on John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original. By all accounts, we’re going to see a ton of flashbacks to Michael Myers’ childhood, as well as a lot more material with Dr. Loomis, all in an attempt to make Myers understandable in contemporary human terms. Yet the original, with its faceless and incomprehensible villain, is a landmark, and made close to $50M in 1978, or over $150M in today’s dollars. The book hasn’t yet been written on the remake, but I doubt it’ll be nearly as successful.

Why the seeming paradox?

You could answer that House of Cards aired on the BBC while Profit was on Fox, and there’s certainly a lot of truth in that. Mainstream American audiences, and especially American broadcast networks, have very little patience for morally complex characters and low ratings, and in fact niche shows with deeply flawed protagonists (such as FX’s outstanding The Shield) have almost entirely flourished on cable, an option that unfortunately wasn’t nearly so available back when Profit debuted. But that’s not the whole story.

What’s really making the difference is something I alluded to in another recent blog post, that time about On the Lot: namely, how understandable and relatable the different stories’ protagonists are. House of Cards was successful not only because it found the right home, though that was undoubtedly very important, but because everyone watching the show could understand why Francis Urquhart, a man who spent his entire life behind the scenes making sure that other people’s careers stayed on track, would give into the temptation to sieze some power and glory for himself. And from the moment he made that initial decision, he found himself on a slippery slope, with each subsequent decision he made completely understandable given his circumstances — he had to do everything he did, almost as much to keep himself out of jail as to achieve his goal of becoming Prime Minster. Profit, however, failed because when you get right down to it, Jim Profit was a really weird guy, and very few people could find it in their hearts (or minds) to understand him. He had sex with his (step)mother, he slept in a cardboard box instead of a bed, he seemed to play games and manipulate people just for the sheer joy of it… None of these are traits that the average person can relate to even a tiny little bit. That doesn’t make the show any less brilliant, but it does mean it would’ve had a heck of a time finding an audience no matter when and where it aired.

In the end, I’m not sure what the lesson is in terms of craft. If you want financial success, obviously, design a protagonist who’s understandable and relatable even if he is antiheroic. Flawed and evil protagonists, after all, are a tough enough sell all by themselves. But Profit is probably my favorite show of all time, and I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from trying to make something just as daring and inspired, so part of me hopes that at least some of you try to buck the system, if only just once.