Watchmen

Mixing genres is the fundamental story technique of mainstream Hollywood moviemaking. If you want to play in that league, you need to master the technique. But be warned. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you end up with a big mess.

Watchmen left me with a strong sense of missed opportunity. This movie had the potential to be another deep exploration of the role of the savior in modern American life, with a shot at reaching the heights of the best of the form, The Dark Knight.

The challenge facing the writers was huge. They had to weave at least three stories, each from a different genre. First is the fantasy superhero story about who these characters are, why they formed their team, and why they disbanded it. Second is the detective story where Rorschach tries to uncover who is assassinating his old superhero pals. Third is the action story where someone is out to destroy the world.

In putting these three genres together, the writers have created a massive Rube Goldberg mechanism that lumbers along, puffing and wheezing, pushing forward, backing up, until it finally collapses at the finish line 2 hours and 43 minutes later.

Watchmen is a textbook example of how to write, and not write, a superhero origin story. The origin of a superhero is often the most fun aspect of the character and is a complete story unto itself. So the writer has to figure out how to combine a fairly long origin story with a full-blown crime or disaster tale, and make both lines seem like one.

Batman Begins gives us a model for how to execute this job properly. There the writers begin by crosscutting Bruce Wayne’s ghost as a youth (the bats and the death of his parents) with the training he receives from Henri Ducard of the League of Shadows. Then Bruce returns to Gotham to fight crime as Batman and eventually uncovers the plot to destroy the city, concocted by none other than his teacher, Henri Ducard.

But notice one huge advantage the Batman writers have in doing their adaptation: they have to detail the ghost of only one character. This difference is the source of all of Watchmen’s structural problems. The Watchmen’s writers tried to provide detailed ghosts for all nine of the Watchmen superheroes. They realized putting all of these origin stories together at the beginning would create its own movie and have little to do with the assassination/world destruction plot.

So they tried using an advanced story structure form (which I discuss in detail in the Advanced Screenwriting Class). In this form you set up a character with an intense desire line. Then at various intervals, you halt the narrative drive and you explore some dramatic issue or delve deep into character. This technique was used in both Forrest Gump and Lord of the Rings.

This advanced storytelling form has some great strengths but also grave dangers. If you don’t set up a strong enough desire line, the side trips eventually collapse the story. Similarly, if you go too often or spend too long in the side trips, your narrative drive stops. And if these side trips are about ghost – information about the past – then your narrative drive is really in trouble because you are literally going backwards.

All of these problems occur in Watchmen. The writers use a detective story for their desire line: Rorschach wants to find out who is killing the retired superheroes. This appears to be a good choice, since the detective form has one of the cleanest and most propulsive lines of any genre. It is also a form focused on finding out what happened in the past, usually having to do with who committed a murder. So the audience is more accepting in this form of looking backwards.

But the detective form has nowhere near the narrative drive needed to support this many backward looking journeys, for this many characters. And it cannot then flip to an action story line where a team defeats a supervillain who is trying to destroy the world.

The result is a film of three stories in which none is done well. Of the three, the most interesting by far is the story of the origin of this band of superheroes. Had the writers focused on this, they could have had a terrific film.

Of course all of this implies that the writers had a choice. All kinds of forces could have dictated that they somehow make the three-in-one story work. Faced with that task, you do the best job you can.

But whatever the reality of this film, Watchmen shows screenwriters that there are limits to how much you can hang on the narrative line. When mixing genres, the main rule is the pick one genre to be the primary one. Then be very careful how many other genre elements you hang on it. Or you’ll end up with some very nasty wreckage.

The Bourne Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum is the best action film of the year and is a textbook case for how to write in this very popular form. Let's look at just a few of the techniques writers Tony Gilroy, Scott Burns, and George Nolfi use.

The first element that stands out in The Bourne Ultimatum is the hero's strong need. Need is the one of the seven major structure steps in any good story, and yet it is missing from most action films, where the hero is a paragon of virtue or a superhero. Thatâs a huge mistake, because need is what makes the story matter. Itâs personal, to the hero and to the audience. Need is what unifies a story under the surface, so the action film becomes more than just a series of stunts.

In The Bourne Ultimatum, the hero, Jason Bourne, has both a psychological and a moral need. Psychologically, he must figure out who he is. Morally, he feels deep guilt about all the people he has killed and must try to make amends. The psychological need has been present from the first Bourne film (and novel), and is indeed central to the high concept premise of the series. The moral need is unique to this film and makes the hero seem like a real person, in spite of his almost super-human fighting abilities.

A second major structural technique the writers use in this film is a double desire line laid over a single track. Normally you want to avoid two desire lines, because then you have two spines and the story falls apart. But here, the writers give Bourne two contradictory desires, to seek and avoid. He wants to find out who at the CIA has done this to him and he must avoid those same people because they are trying to kill him. This is a classic predicament: going after A makes it much more difficult to accomplish B; going after B makes it much more difficult to accomplish A. (Ironically this is the same technique used in creating the sitcom desire line).

Notice, instead of creating two separate desire lines, this technique creates a push-pull effect along a single track and places the hero under extreme pressure. It also gives the story a very strong spine on which to hang a number of big action set pieces without losing plot and momentum.

This brings up the biggest mistake most action writers make: they donât know how to create action without killing the plot. There are a lot of reasons for this. One has to do with how you set up the opposition. Most action opponents are all-powerful and evil. That makes them dull. But more importantly, everything about them is right on the surface. Result: no surprise and no plot.

In the Bourne films, the opposition is very powerful. But most of it is hidden under the surface. There are layers upon layers that Bourne must uncover. In Ultimatum, he continues to dig into the corrupt CIA that made him the killing machine that he is. And he has both ongoing opponents, like the David Strathairn character, as well as a succession of new assassins trying to kill him. All of this contributes to a plot that is much better than we get in most action films.

Action stories are among the most underestimated of all genres, because they seem to charge full speed down a single straight line. Thatâs why so many bad ones are written. A good action film, like The Bourne Ultimatum, is like an athlete who is so talented you donât see the myriad of techniques he has hidden under the surface. If this is your form, take a look at the Action Story Class, and study films like this one for the techniques that make this tough form look easy.

Casino Royale

It's tough to say that a movie franchise generating revenue in the hundreds of millions per picture is in need of an overhaul. But the Bond pictures have been stale and predictable for years. In certain ways this is unavoidable. Bond is a super-hero, and the action genre, of which these movies are a sub-set, has a tendency to deteriorate into a string of stunts and action set pieces.

The obvious difference that accounts for the revitalization of the Bond franchise is getting a new actor to play the part. But the crucial changes in the new Bond have nothing to do with acting or directing and everything to do with story structure. Put simply, the writers have moved the character away from god and myth and toward the real and the dramatic.

This shift is apparent right from the start when the film establishes the new Bond's physical bona fides. Which is a fancy way of saying this guy can believably kill someone with his bare hands. This is not the suave but slight Bond who dispenses with his enemies using a few karate chops. This Bond has a long, brutish fight to the death in a grimy bathroom. No fancy technology. Just messy, ugly hand-to-hand combat.

Casino Royale also uses the Batman Begins technique of giving the hero a recognizable weakness and need. This is still James Bond, superhero. But he is clearly troubled by his coldness and his inability to love. And he is not proud of the fact that he treats women as conquests and only sleeps with women who are married (and even gets them killed as a result).

A third structural area where this Bond moves toward the real and the dramatic is the opponent. The villain here is not the evil World Dominator, a mythical figure with no effect on the audience. The opponent here is someone who funds terrorism. His attacks are against real people and their deaths make an emotional difference to the audience.

Perhaps the biggest change here is the most difficult one to see, which is the shift from action to plot. Most Bond films are a sequence of stunts with no plot. There are certainly some big action set pieces in Casino Royale. But they are grounded in a developing plot. Plot is the most complex of the major writing skills and involves, among many other things, using the full 22 steps of every great story (see the Great Screenwriting Class). But one of the keys to plot is creating opposition not primarily from strangers but from those closest to the hero. Casino Royale does this much better than most Bond films and it makes a huge difference.

Films like Casino Royale, Superman Returns, Spider-Man, The Incredibles and Batman Begins show that sound story structure techniques don't just work in serious dramas. They work just as well in super-hero myth stories. And if you don't know what these techniques are, you're not in the game.

The Departed

The Departed is very instructive in showing us how to write a crime thriller, and how not to. It starts with a terrific premise: cops and criminals have a mole in the each other's organization. But this is also a premise that is loaded with pitfalls. In the Great Screenwriting Class, I talk extensively about how you develop your premise, to learn not only the potential strengths of your idea but also the hidden structural weaknesses.

In The Departed, the writers must immediately confront the difficulty of two main characters (see my breakdown of The Prestige for more on this problem). Again, the need to cross-cut between two leads first takes a toll on the definition of the characters. The writers are so interested in getting the plot going they fail to give Billy (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) a motive for going undercover. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that no one in this movie has a motive for what they do.

Lack of character motive (which is connected to the first major structure step, the Need) is always a big weakness. But in a story already dominated by plot, this is a disaster. The characters are nuts and bolts being moved by plot mechanics.

The premise does highlight the strength of The Departed, which is the plot. But it also shows us how even the best plot can spiral out of control.

Plot in crime stories is all about opposition under the surface, and The Departed is worth studying to see how to create that, not only in a crime story but in any work of fiction. But when you are creating your plot, you have to be aware of the fundamental trade-off between plot and believability. The more you try to hide the opposition under the surface - thus giving you more plot - the more you push the believability of your characters to the extreme. You become so conscious of creating surprise that you force the characters to take actions that they, and indeed no human being, would logically do.

This believability problem surfaces right away when Billy, who has been to the police academy, becomes the mole in the Costello crime family. It would be so obvious that this guy is the snitch that I was immediately reminded of Clark Kent and Superman. Somehow when Superman puts on a suit and a pair of nerdy glasses no one can see that he is Superman. In a fantasy superhero story, the audience accepts that convention and lets it pass. Not so in a realistic crime story.

The writers keep the believability problems at bay for most of the story. But any story that emphasizes plot always pushes the reveals to the end, where whatever believability problems it has will be magnified as the reveals come fast and furious. Sure enough, The Departed rapidly disintegrates into farce and stupidity. The final sequence is filled with reveals and assassinations, but they are based on actions so mindlessly dumb that the audience is left muttering, "No! No! No!"

Even worse, this sort of false plot, sprung at the end, kills the audience's sense of investment in the film itself. If it's so easy to assassinate these characters, why didn't they just shoot Costello in the first place and save me 2 1/2 hours of my time.

Pearl Harbor

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a movie that set out to copy Titanic should be so embarrassing. I felt like the guy in A Clockwork Orange who had to watch violence and pornography with his eyes pried open.

The structural gimmick of the love triangle between the boyhood friends and the nurse was so full of contrivance and cliche that I kept being amazed that the actors didn't break out laughing. Since this personal line was so silly, the duty line of the men going off to war, which the personal line was supposed to offset, became a joke as well. Not that it wouldn't have been a joke on its own. This stuff was Top Gun warmed over, and Top Gun was already a cliche of a cliche. Especially when Alec Baldwin, as Colonel Dolittle, was on, it literally felt like they were doing a Saturday Night Live skit, but they kept right on doing one bad scene after another with no one breaking for laughs.

Of course it didn't help matters that the subject of this film was the biggest screwup in American military history. This wasn't a battle, it was a firing squad. Watching massive stupidity that results in thousands of Americans slaughtered is not my idea of a pleasant way to spend my time at the movies.

Since they didn't want to end the film with a massive defeat, the creators figured they would tag on another movie, the Dolittle raid on Tokyo. While this raid was considered a real morale boost for the American people, it was militarily useless and a bungle from start to finish. So this movie kept right on beating the cliches to death, rubbing our noses in our own incompetence, long after the big battle scene was over. The result was a three hour marathon of self-abuse.

The only thing that saves this movie is that the attack on Pearl Harbor, as painful as it is, is spectacular. Even now, seeing all those men slaughtered brings strong feelings of anger and pity.

One lesson to take from this movie is that James Cameron's strategy of starting with a love story and turning it into a disaster picture can still bring a load of people into the theaters. Spending a ton of money on marketing hype helps too. But boy was this movie hard to sit through. As I left the theater, all I could think of was, "They shoot audiences, don't they?"