True Grit

The Coen brothers are the moral philosophers of American film. They have one subject: moral accounting. That’s why no matter what genre they seem to work in, they’re always doing crime stories.

The classic crime story is a heavyweight fight between a master criminal and a master cop. The middle of the story has an intense punch/counter-punch as each takes his best shots. When one wins at the end, usually the cop, we get the pleasure of a good heavyweight fight.

That’s fine for a lot of screenwriters. But the Coens have always known that you have to transcend your genre, because then your script or film is not only more popular, it has a chance to be great.

A transcendent crime story isn’t just about catching a criminal. It’s about tallying up what is owed over the course of a lifetime, with life and death consequences. The Coen’s Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit all play out this brutal accounting system.

True Grit is set in the old west, but it’s not a Western. The classic Western is all about nation building, transforming wilderness into civilization. Shane is a classic Western.

True Grit is crime in western clothes. Tom Chaney has murdered a girl’s father and he must pay with his life. The law is supposed to handle the moral accounting in society. But this time the law fails. So it falls to headstrong, 14-year-old Mattie to make sure the job is done. This gives the film a clear, strong desire line. And that is a crucial benefit when the hero and her allies, Marshall Rooster Cogburn and Agent LaBoeuf, go on a journey to track the killer down.

Accounting is also central to Mattie’s plan. This film is filled with bargaining. She’s a ferocious bargainer for her father’s horses. And she refuses to let Rooster shirk his responsibility. This is the deal we made, she insists, and you must keep your word.

Though essentially a crime story, True Grit uses the myth structure, with its series of tests on the road, to unfold the story and play out the accounting. As in the best myth stories, the hero brings her “family” – Rooster and LaBoeuf – along for the ride. The dramatic opposition comes from the series of bad guys they must fight on the road.

But the most important opposition thematically is within the family. Each conflict with the bad guys allows the family members to tally up his or her proper payment to the others. The true endpoint of the story is not whether they bring Tom Chaney to justice. It is whether these three main characters – Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf – will come to understand the true worth of each of the others.

In the final scene, Mattie has one last payment she must make to old Rooster. She can’t make it, and for someone with such a strong moral code this is tragic. It’s not the ending we want in this movie. But it’s the ending the movie has to have.

The Coens never sermonize. Their knowledge of the screenwriting craft is too great for that. Study True Grit and the rest of the Coen canon to learn how to convert your moral vision into characters and plot. Those techniques are one of the main ways you tell the world that you are a master of the craft.

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.

Hollywoodland

I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time. Cross cut between a detective story where a guy digs into the seedy underbelly of Hollywood and the drama of a C-level movie star committing suicide. These are two very different genres that have the potential of getting to the dark side of the American Dream. Some of the greatest movies in film history deal with this theme.

But it doesn't work here. In fact, this story devolves. A quick look at why highlights how important it is to explore your premise thoroughly before you write your script.

The first big structural mistake has to do with the detective line. This one doesn't build its revelations, leading to the biggest reveal of all, who-dunnit. Building revelations are the main reason people go to see detective stories, so that's a pretty big mistake. The detective in Hollywoodland goes through various scenarios. But about halfway through it becomes clear that his investigation is just one big stall. Without the rewards of ever-bigger reveals, the fuel runs out of the desire line. The result: the audience gets really pissed off.

The second structural problem has to do with the second storyline: the drama concerns a person I don't care about. This guy supposedly commits suicide because he can't get any parts other than Superman. That's a drag, no doubt, but Norma Desmond he ain't. A drama about a personal tragedy has to start with a complex character who has great flaws but also has an heroic quality, even when he's Willy Loman. The George Reeves character is bland, with little talent. He doesn't have great flaws. He doesn't have great strengths. Without a complex character to start with, the drama can't build as it explores the deeper issue at the hero's core. So again, the story becomes less, not more, interesting as it proceeds. You can't make a bigger mistake than that.

The third cause of failure has to do with the requirements and expectations of a cross-cut structure. When you do a cross-cut over the course of an entire story, you are highlighting the comparison between the two main characters and the two lines of action. That means that the juxtaposition between scenes in each line must create a greater meaning that only comes from comparison. That doesn't happen here beyond the most superficial level. Yes, both main characters are little men in the hierarchy of LA. Yes, both have personal problems with petty jobs and broken families. But you need a lot more detail than that for a comparison to trigger new insights.

If you want to see how to write a good drama and figure out the structural problems buried in your premise, take a look at the Great Screenwriting Class. Techniques for writing the detective story, including all the unique story beats, are found in the Detective, Crime and Thriller Class and the Detective Genre Software.

Mystic River

Mystic River is a classic example of what is referred to as an "actor's movie." Big monologues, gnashing of teeth, tearing of scenery.

Being an actor's movie is not necessarily a bad thing. Big stars want to be in them. And actor's movies often win Oscars in the actor-heavy Academy.

But that doesn't make them great movies. Mystic River is a hybrid script, combining drama with the detective/crime forms, where the seams show. And the closer you look at the script the more you see how failures in story structure and genre make this highly ambitious film ultimately disappointing.

Mystic River uses the classic technique of showing the three lead characters as boys, when one of them is molested. The rest of the story therefore has to turn on how one boy's ghost haunts all the boys as adults. But this central connection is never made. Yes, the molested boy, Dave, is a broken man. But the other two, Sean and Jimmy, seem to be no different than they were as kids. And Dave's horror has no real effect on them as adults.

In short, the ghost creates drama, but it is irrelevant to the drama in the present. When the detective/crime genre is added to the drama, the viewer keeps looking for the connection that will make each pay off to its fullest potential. This never happens. Thus the crosscutting between these two tracks in the body of the film simply doesn't work.

On one track is the investigation. But this has a clumsy set up as well. The script is so heavy-handed in suggesting that Dave committed the murder of the girl that we know he obviously didn't. Clearly this movie is going to be about, among other things, false accusation. But this way of introducing theme is not good for surprise and plot. We may not know who did it, but we sure as hell know it wasn't Dave.

As this investigative line plays out, we dig into another ghost concerning Jimmy's past life of crime. But none of this is played out in the present, so it has very little revelatory power.

What's worse, to keep the false accusation line alive, the writer has Dave's wife tell Jimmy she thinks Dave killed Jimmy's daughter. This is so overwhelmingly stupid and unbelievable that the moment comes across as a plot contrivance, immediately kicking the viewer out of the movie-going experience.

The second track of the film is provided by the drama of losing a daughter. This gives the actors a lot to chew on. But the drama is ultimately hollow, because the girl has not been a character in the present and she has had no effect on any of the major characters except Jimmy.

The full disappointment of the movie comes after Sean tells Jimmy who really killed his daughter. The false accusation theme is pretty much dropped. Jimmy's wife, suddenly sounding like a modern-day Lady MacBeth, tells him he could be the king of this town. And Sean's estranged wife finally talks to him on the phone and returns. None of it makes any sense. But it does suggest that this film could have really expanded at the end had it been set up properly at the beginning.

Mystic River shows the potential power as well as the many pitfalls of writing a transcendent crime story, detective story or thriller. Combining one of these genres with drama so that both lines work through each other is extremely complex (see the Detective, Crime and Thriller Course). But just attempting it is enough to set your script apart and get you the attention that every writer in Hollywood needs to succeed.

Catch Me if You Can

The trickster is the most popular of all characters. In Catch Me If You Can, the con-man character generates a number of fun scenes. But the script has no idea how to tie them together.

This movie uses the James Bond approach. But instead of stringing stunts, it strings cons.

The writer makes some attempts to build a story. First, he tries to give some psychological foundation to what's happening by showing the failure of the hero's father. But it is unconvincing and way too long.

The writer also uses a framing device to kick the story up a notch. We begin with the capture of the hero, then flash back. But this frame gives us no new information about the story or the character, and only removes what little suspense we might have had about whether our con-man might escape.

One of the main ways you build a story is by having a main thematic line that is expressed through the need of the main character. This character is a teen-age boy who seems to con just because he is good at it and likes money and women. And no one seems to be getting hurt by it. So the cons don't lead to a more complex web of design or destruction. And with no need, it doesn't matter if the hero changes.

Without a theme or a point, all the story can do is come to an abrupt halt. The writer tries to set up a climactic ending by making us wonder if the hero will come back to work for the FBI. But it's never been set up, so it comes across as fake drama.

The main lesson from this movie is: the trickster character is more difficult to write than he appears. He seems to be so much fun that there seems no reason for him to change and do something else. That may give you some enjoyable scenes, but you can't build the story.