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

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen has a small but extremely devoted following — enough to warrant a beautiful new Blu-Ray release of the film — but to many of its fans, the fact that it never caught on with a larger audience in any of its releases remains a mystery. Certainly the basic notion of a group of old friends and compatriots coming together for one last caper has great appeal; it shows up very effectively in plenty of heist films, for example. And when you add the twist that the characters are all old and forgotten by a world that’s moved past them, and they want to show everyone that they still have what it takes and that they shouldn’t be discounted, the concept acquires some real beauty and heart. So when I recently watched Munchausen again, hoping to find that my original lukewarm reaction was a mistake, I was hugely disappointed to find that I liked it even less than I used to.

Munchausen, as you might expect, is the story of Baron Munchausen, but he’s a completely unlikeable jerk. He’s selfish and egocentric, he treats other people like doormats, and he never, ever makes any kind of sacrifice whatsoever on anyone else’s behalf. This is just a quick blog entry, but one example of his awful behavior is enough: we find out that he left his faithful servant and good friend Berthold (the guy who can run really, really fast, played by Eric Idle) to rot in a birdcage prison on the moon for twenty years because he just didn’t give a crap, and he’s only rescuing him now because he needs Berthold’s speed. But since there apparently are never any real personal stakes for Munchausen himself (even when he gets killed, he just comes back) why couldn’t he have rescued Berthold a long time ago? This just isn’t a good way to make the audience like the Baron and root for him.

Perhaps Gilliam and his co-screenwriter, Charles McKeown, recognized the problem with the Baron on some level, because they added a little girl to the story, Sally (played by a very young Sarah Polley) to serve as a sort of surrogate POV character. After all, wouldn’t a spunky young kid without a malicious bone in her body melt anyone’s heart? But she doesn’t help. First, it’s the Baron’s story, not hers. He’s integral to all the major turning points of the story, and he goes through all the major character changes, such as they are. She’s pretty much just a bystander. And second, her character isn’t even developed to the degree she could have been as a bystander. So she’s really just window-dressing.

Finally, the stakes of the story are never adequately dramatized. Munchausen’s quest in the film is to save the city from the Turkish army besieging it, but the only citizen of the city we ever meet is its unspeakably repugnant leader, The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (played by Jonathan Pryce) and frankly, I’d rather get trampled and beheaded and cut into little pieces and then have all my little pieces shat upon by some soldier with a bad case of food poisoning than put up with that guy in charge for so much as one extra minute. Give me anything but Horatio Jackson, PLEASE! In fairness, a city is made up of a lot more people than its mayor, or president, or whatever the heck office is indicated by “The Right Ordinary”… except the only other characters we meet who are even temporary residents are members of the theatrical touring group owned by Sally’s father — and you guessed it, Sally’s father is also a huge jerk. That means that Sally is literally the only person we could conceivably care one whit about saving from the Turks… and she isn’t even in danger, because she’s off with Baron Munchausen rounding up his former servants to help break the siege! So who cares what happens? If anything, I was rooting for the Turks to raze the city and then dance on The Right Ordinary’s corpse in the rubble!

So, to recap, if you have a nice little film career going, you stand a very good chance of destroying it and rendering yourself unemployable if (1) you make a film with a complete asshole of a main character and do nothing whatsoever to make him likeable; (2) you make sure there are no larger stakes in the story to make the audience care about anything or anyone onscreen; and (3) you spend an ungodly amount of money so that the backers of your movie take a huge bath and have to eat lots of crow.

All in all, it’s too bad that it turned out this way, because aside from the story, there’s much to like here. (Though I know, that’s sort of like saying, “So aside from 9/11, how did you like New York City?” to a tourist who picked the wrong day to visit us.)  The production design is extraordinary — it’s practically an illustrated encyclopedia of Terry Gilliam’s artistic obsessions — and the acting is excellent, there are some great jokes, Uma Thurman is absolutely luminous… but there’s just no reason to give a crap about anything that happens.

There’s a bit of a double meaning in the title of this entry; on one hand, it refers to Alien³, which is my official subject today, and on the other, it’s a sharply-worded reprimand to myself about how I’ve ignored you lately, since I’ve committed the cardinal sin of blogging and neglected my readers for something like 70 weeks now. (70 weeks in hyperactive supercharged faster-than-light-speed dog years, anyway… but still.) So please accept my abject, humble and utterly self-effacing apologies. I’m very, very sorry, and I promise I won’t ever let it happen again… until next time, anyway. My excuse is that some very exciting developments may be developing in the other half of my life (the one in which I wear a writer-director’s hat) and they’ve taken up ridiculous amounts of my time and prevented me from going to the theater or even watching any DVDs, but excuses are just excuses, like they say, not worth the breath they’re made with.

So anyway, Alien and Aliens are both great and widely-beloved movies, numbers 52 and 68 in the IMDb’s Top 250 as of this writing, but Alien³ was a critical and commercial dud and has an IMDb rating of only 6.4. People have debated what went wrong for years, but the biggest single reason is that James Cameron did an extraordinary job of emotionally attaching us to the ad-hoc family unit of Ripley, Hicks and Newt in Aliens, and then Fox went and spat in the faces of every last audience member who cared by killing Hicks and Newt in the very opening moments of Alien³— and doing it offscreen, no less! It was one of the most astonishingly short-sighted and self-destructive decisions I’ve ever seen in the movie business, and that’s saying a lot.

The point is really very simple. If you toy with audience expectations, if you don’t give them what they want and expect, play fair. People will respect and appreciate your work even if you give them a nasty surprise as long as they realize in retrospect that they could have (and maybe should have) seen what was coming. The deaths of Hicks and Newt, though, amounted to the studio saying “oh, right, they got hit by a car and died… so anyway, how about Bobby and Sue getting married — who saw that coming?” Trust me; you don’t ever want to be that rude when writing your script. You’re trying to get your readers (and ultimately your audience) emotionally invested in your characters and your story. The very last thing you should do is betray that investment and make people feel stupid for caring.