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

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.