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.

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.

It’s a bold move to make a movie with an unsympathetic protagonist. We in the audience are expected to see the world through the eyes of the main character — and to feel it through his (or her) heart. But would you like to become Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh or Ken Lay, even just for a couple hours? Most people might not be able to experience the emotions that drive characters like those at all… and if they could, they’d probably rather not find out. That’s why something like three out of every two phrases you’ll hear in Hollywood are “likable protagonist,” “sympathetic lead role” or “relatable main character.” After all, nobody ever went broke underestimating the bravery of the American public.

So I have to give major props to the creative forces behind Mr. Brooks and Ratatouille for defying convention. (And yes, I really am drawing a parallel between Mr. Brooks and Ratatouille. Just bear with me; it’ll all make sense in a minute.) Unfortunately, I also have to take a lot of the points I give them with one hand away with the other, because in the end, they both chickened out. Mr. Brooks, as you probably know, is about a serial killer played by Kevin Costner, and Ratatouille not only stars a rat, it stars a French rat named Remy who desperately wants to become a chef at a five-star restaurant. Talk about unrelatable! In each case, though, very possibly because someone with power over the purse strings was afraid audiences couldn’t or wouldn’t relate, we also get another, more overtly likable character as an emergency backup target for our sympathies. In Brooks it’s the cop played by Demi Moore, and in Ratatouille, it’s the hapless human Linguini, who also dreams of being a chef, but who doesn’t have even a fraction of Remy’s talent.

The problem is that these extra quasi-protagonists have the exact opposite of their intended effect. As I explained in another blog entry a week or two ago, the contrast between Earl Brooks and Detective Atwood makes Brooks seem less sympathetic than he would have been without her. The likable shmo Linguini does the same thing to Remy the rat, but Ratatouille has another problem on top of that: Linguini actually takes over the story for awhile, leaving Remy in limbo. In fact, at one point it’s not completely clear whose story Ratatouille is telling — and that’s extra-deadly when one of your leads has glowing red eyes, sharp teeth and jagged, spiky fur. Linguini is made even more relatable (and more damaging to audience investment in Remy) by the addition of the Colette subplot. (Colette is the assistant chef Linguini falls for.) Romantic longing is one of the most appealing and sympathetic traits a character can have… and it goes to Linguini rather than to Remy. I’m not saying Linguini should’ve been cut entirely; being a rat, Remy needed someone to help him in the kitchen. But Ratatouille wasn’t Linguini’s story, and it shouldn’t have ever seemed like it was.

For those of you who still think that Atwood and Linguini were necessary as full third-wheel protagonists because Brooks and Remy just weren’t sympathetic enough, rent As Good As It Gets. Melvil Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) is one of the most obnoxious and detestable protagonists to come down the pike in a long time, and yet the movie made almost $150M domestic and won a couple Oscars for its leads. That’s because Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks took care to balance Melvin’s unappealing characteristics with plenty of ones that we could understand and relate to. To be fair, Brad Bird et al did much the same with Remy — he has a dream he’s determined to fulfill, he feels unappreciated by his family and painfully out of place with his own kind, he’s very good at something he cares a lot about, and so on — but they didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions. Or, as I suggested earlier, someone else took their courage away from them. And that’s too bad, because both films would’ve been a lot stronger and more successful if they’d stood foursquare behind their protagonists instead of trying to be all things to all people.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong; Brad Bird is one of my favorite filmmakers, and for for all its flaws, Ratatouille is great stuff, easily my third-favorite Pixar film behind The Incredibles and Monsters, Inc. Unfortunately, it’s also my third favorite Brad Bird film, and he’s made only three.

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.