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.

Every now and then the success of a movie surprises me a little, and May 2008 is one of those times.  Why is Iron Man doing so well?

The villain’s plan is the most important part of an action movie or a thriller, but the plan in Iron Man isn’t just generic, it’s not even sketched out very clearly in the first place.  And to make matters worse, whatever exactly it is, it has something to do with selling arms to bad guys in other parts of the world who want to use them on their own people, or maybe on their own immediate neighbors, meaning it has no direct effect on any of the characters in the film, on any of the people they care about, or even on most people in the audience in most parts of the globe.  So the stakes suck.

(Oh, and note to manufacturers illegally selling arms: don’t leave your company’s name prominently stenciled on the boxes.  I mean, duh!)

Just as importantly, the resolution of the protagonist’s character arc (his growth, or the lesson he learns) has to be intimately bound up with the defeat of the villain’s plan — it’s literally the way the protagonist changes and improves as a person that enables him to finally defeat the villain — but in Iron Man, the creative team actually made Tony Stark’s character development part of the problem!  He starts out as a stereotypical weapons dealer who’s unmoved by the harm wreaked by his work, but when he’s kidnapped by terrorists and he sees the toll his weapons take up close and personal, he vows he won’t sell any more weapons until he figures out some way to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands and being used against innocent people.  Sounds like a neat idea, both in terms of weapons and character design, right?  But while his solution is the Iron Man suit, something that can’t be used against innocent people because he’s the one piloting it, the suit immediately complicates matters enormously when the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic, I mean, Obadiah Skid-Marks, or whatever the heck the villain’s name is, copies the suit and not only makes a much bigger, stronger version of it but plans to sell boatloads of them to bad guys all over the world!  Kind of makes the whole Iron Man suit concept look like a really bad idea, huh?  Sort of makes you wish Tony Stark had just stuck to being a heartless weapons dealer and left well enough alone, right?

Well, imagine instead if the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic actually had a really cool villain’s plan: sell (or even give!) a whole bunch of weapons to terrorists so they can stage a huge attack on the United States… which would force the US to buy lots and lots and lots of weapons from the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic in order to fight back, making him super-rich and mega-powerful!  Then maybe he wouldn’t be so generic, and people in the audience would really care about (and understand) his plan and the efforts of the hero to stop him.  Even people in other countries would care a lot, because nobody without a vested interest in the proceedings wants the US to go to war.  Let’s face it, war pretty much sucks infected corpses for everyone.

If this were Stane’s plan, then Tony Stark’s character growth would be perfectly and completely bound up with the conflict of the story: his earlier uncaring self would have enabled his co-executive Mr. Generic’s devious villainy, and his new, better self (and the Iron Man suit his new, better self created) would be required to defeat Generic and his terrorist army — and better yet, he could defeat them without even starting a war at all.  That would be awesome.  That would be an incredibly satisfying ending.  And since we’re at war now in the real world, and because it often seems like there are no good solutions, just more problems, it would give the audience a huge cathartic release of all the tension and fear they’re carrying around because of real-world events — tension and fear which can’t, at the moment, be released in the real world.  That’s called taking advantage of the zeitgeist.

Some of you may be figuring I’m completely full of ass because Iron Man is making tons and tons of bank and looks to be a monster success, but after some thought, I came to the conclusion that there are two basic reasons for that.  One, the economy sucks and the war sucks and everything sucks and there seems to be no way out, so just like a really full balloon can wind up being popped by a lot of things, even a brush with a sticker magnet on the fridge, not just by a really well-sharpened needle, people were primed for release and Iron Man provided it.  And two, which is kind of a variation on one, it was the first movie of the summer, and whatever its flaws, it provided some definite summer pleasures, including Robert Downey Jr.’s awesome lead performance, nice acting all around, some really fun effects, a few good suit sequences, and the first appearance of a popular superhero character in his own movie.  But I’ll make you a bet that unfortunately nobody will ever be able to collect on either way: if the script had been structured and written better, the movie would’ve made even more money.  A lot more money.  And it would’ve built even more interest in the inevitable sequel.  Unless someone has a time machine or a scope that can look into alternate universes, there’s no way to prove I’m right, but I’m sure I am.