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.

Little Miss Sunshine

This comedy has one of the best scripts to come along in a few years. It's a small indie film, so it's not going to make blockbuster money. But don't let that fool you. You can learn a lot from studying this script.

Comedies are almost always underestimated because they're all about making people laugh. How hard can that be? Very. If you can make people laugh on the page, Hollywood will pay you huge sums of money. Most writers think comedy comes from good jokes. That may be true in a stand-up routine, but it's not true in the movies. In the movies, you have to tell a comic story that lasts about two hours. If you start from the gag or the joke, you have no chance of writing a funny script.

The key is to find the right comic structure by which you can tell your two-hour story and on which you can hang the jokes. One of the reasons movie comedies are so hard to write is that there are so many comic story structures, all of which sequence in a different way. If you don't pick the right comic structure for your idea, or if you don't know the story beats of your form, you're in big trouble. And no amount of jokes is going to make any difference. Without the right comic structure, even the best jokes won't be funny.

Little Miss Sunshine uses one of the oldest comic structures, the comic journey. This form goes all the way back to Don Quixote and is really a combination of the comic and myth forms. Part of the success of this combination is that these two genres are in many ways opposites. The myth form, using the journey as its main technique, wants to be big, heroic and inspiring. Comedy is about cutting things down to size, finding the falsely big and poking a hole in it. So in a comic journey story, the myth sets up the laughs (puffing up the characters), while the comedy provides the punchline.

The downside of combining these two genres is that it causes you all kinds of structural problems. The biggest has to do with the episodic quality of the story. Characters on a journey encounter a number of unique opponents who are usually strangers. This means that every time your hero goes up against a new opponent, that's an episode. In effect, a mini-story. String too many of these together and you get a very bored and tired audience.

Comedy exacerbates this episodic quality. With rare exception, whenever you do a joke or a gag, you are stopping the narrative drive so the audience can see the character knocked off his pedestal. String too many of these together and your story stops dead in its tracks.

Obviously one of the keys to a successful comic journey story is finding techniques that can give you a strong narrative line. Little Miss Sunshine uses two techniques that are especially valuable: the endpoint and the family.

Near the beginning of this script, writer Michael Arndt tells the audience the endpoint of the comic journey. What's more, the characters will be going on a single-line journey. This apparently simple technique is crucial because it gives the audience a line, literally, on which to hang the events and the gags. Instead of becoming impatient with what happens next, the audience can sit back and enjoy the ride - and the jokes. You have already promised them where they are going to go. In effect, you are letting them laugh.

In journey stories with a single hero, all the opponents in the story must be new and they must be strangers. But in Little Miss Sunshine the writer sends an entire family of six on the road. That means that the main opposition is among people the audience knows and it is an ongoing opposition. Instead of a succession of unconnected events, the story has a steadily building conflict. That makes the jokes funnier and it lets the writer build to the funniest gag of all when the family gets to the beauty pageant at the end of the journey.

If you're interested in how to write any of the various comic story structures, take a look at the Comedy Class or the Comedy Software.

Superman Returns

Movies based on comic book super-heroes are more difficult to write well than they appear. These stories are a sub-form of the action genre, with a number of fantasy and horror elements thrown in. Mixing these three genres properly is tricky, which is why most super-hero films are huge and expensive flops. Superman Returns has a better script than the Superman films of 20 years ago. The writers have obviously learned two big lessons from recent successful super-hero films like Spider-Man, The Incredibles and Batman Returns.

The first lesson is: give the hero a serious weakness and need. The writers don't just recycle the usual Superman history, which is generic by now and has little psychological force for the audience. Instead Superman's weakness is focused on his relationship with Lois Lane. Clearly they were in love and he abandoned her, and it has had painful consequences for both of them. This is written and played seriously, so while the man has superhuman strength, he is recognizably all-too-human.

The second lesson is: give the superhero a dangerous opponent. Some have complained that Kevin Spacey's performance is too jokey (I don't agree). But as written, this Lex Luthor is not campy, like the opponent Gene Hackman played in the original Superman. He's nasty and deadly. In the Great Screenwriting Class, where I talk about how you create the right opponent for your hero, I start with one of the keys to great storytelling: your hero is only as good as the opponent he fights. This is certainly true when you write a super-hero story. You begin with a big problem: the super-hero is almost never in believable jeopardy. So creating an opponent who can give the hero a fair fight is extremely difficult already. If you then make him a campy joke, you have effectively killed your plot.

The Superman story uses another storytelling trick that audiences love. I refer to it as the Scarlet Pimpernel technique. In The Scarlet Pimpernel, the hero appears to be an effete and effeminate bon vivant who cares about nothing but the latest fashion. Secretly, he is a dashing action hero saving the unfortunate (but not poor) victims of the French Revolution. Superman pretends to be the bumbling and possibly cowardly nerd, Clark Kent. In reality, he is the Man of Steel, saving mankind from all sorts of crimes and disasters.

The contrast between these two personas - the weak and the heroic - is inherently fun for the audience. It also makes the central thematic point of these stories, which is the importance of living courageously. Just how much the audience loves this technique is readily seen in any Superman film. In The Scarlet Pimpernel, the hero does his heroic deeds in disguise, so his pose as a fop is completely believable. In Superman, the hero simply removes his Clark Kent glasses and greases back his hair. Apparently no one in Metropolis has facial recognition, and the audience couldn't care less.

The Devil Wears Prada

The Devil Wears Prada is a simple little comedy that appears to have almost nothing going for it. The hero doesn't go through much character development. She gets caught up in trying to be successful, forgets her friends and her boyfriend, and ends up opting for integrity and a substantial career instead of climbing the executive rungs of the fashion business. It's all very predictable and trite. But this obvious character change is there to give the writer a clean line on which to hang a sequence of funny bits. The secret to the success of this comedy is found in three structural elements: a horrible but believable opponent, a unique and authentic story world, and a psychology the audience is all too familiar with.

A great opponent is just as important in a comedy as it is in an action story. Since comedy structure is based on snowballing nightmares (see the Comedy Class for how to set this up), you always have to start with a powerful opponent who can generate the nightmares. A great comic opponent is not literally deadly like an opponent in an action story. But she must be socially deadly, able to inflict severe humiliation or loss. Here, the hero's boss, Amanda (played perfectly by Meryl Streep), is a monster with no end of ways to torture her assistant and make her feel small.

The comic scenes and lines come out of a unique story world - the fashion industry - that is both foreign, and thus surprising to the audience, but is also part of our everyday lives. A sense of authenticity is very valuable in storytelling because it gives the audience the exciting sense that they are peering into a hidden world. When that world is fashion - the clothes we wear to look good - that excitement is magnified.

The comedy also relies heavily on a deep psychological scar, especially for women, that is embedded in American culture. This is the pressure to be thin and beautiful. A lot of the fun in this movie comes from the fortunate casting of Anne Hathaway in the lead, an actress more beautiful than most supermodels. But I'm sure the script was written from the beginning based on the assumption that a beautiful actress would play the part. So when the fashionistas remark with disgust that the Anne Hathaway character is a size 6!!, the joke is funny because it is both absurd but also, within this world, totally real. With each joke the audience senses that if it can happen to a "normal" woman who is this beautiful, what chance do I have. A joke or gag is always meant to create laughs by diminishing the character. If you can also give the audience some recognition or revelation about their own life at the same time, the joke is ten times more effective.

Children of Men

As the most creative, literally, of all genres, science fiction places a tremendous burden on the writer. You have to create the world, in detail. Children of Men gets some of this right. But there's a lot missing, too.

The first rule of science fiction is to remember that you're writing about the present world, not the future. Indeed, the biggest mistake science fiction writers make is they place the story in such a bizarre and unrecognizable world that the audience can't identify with it. The viewer takes a clinical attitude toward the story, and all emotion is gone.

The world of Children of Men is just weird enough to feel like the future, but it is also horrifyingly present tense. Immigrants are outcasts, torture is justified, bombs explode anywhere for no apparent reason.

It is in the details, however, that Children of Men runs into problems. The most important detail of any science fiction world is the basic rules by which the society works, and that is not clear here. Why all the deportations? Why the war with the immigrants? Why is a baby born to this woman and no others? I can guess at these things. But the writer doesn't want the audience to guess, because that means they are thinking about the construction of the story and not the story itself.

Children of Men also fails to explain or justify the desire line. This is the motive for the quest. Everything else relies on it. So it must be very strong and completely believable. Why is this guy facing almost certain death to escort a woman he doesn't know? Telling us he needs money and is a former activist doesn't cut it. Why does the woman have to go on this trek at all? Saying the British government won't recognize a baby born to an immigrant woman is absurd.

And that leads to the biggest problem with the script, one that is very common to science fiction stories. Science fiction often borrows the journey technique from the myth genre in order to structure the story. The problem with the journey is that it can easily become episodic. The hero encounters a series of opponents on the road but each attack is essentially the same beat. Which means that this kind of science fiction story has no plot. Sure enough the plot in Children of Men quickly becomes tiresome. The two leads drive for a while and then get attacked. Then they drive some more and get attacked again.

This film has some amazing cinematography that goes a long way toward making this world seem intensely real. There is a single take during the battle scene - about ten minutes long - that will take your breath away. But ultimately any film, including science fiction, comes down to story. If you don't set up the story world and the plot properly, no amount of camera work will cover the holes.

If you would like to learn all the techniques for setting up a detailed world and a plot that builds steadily to the end, take a look at the Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Class or the Science Fiction add-on to Blockbuster.

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain works as well as it does because it uses the love story genre, not drama, to make its point. Had the writers done this as a social drama, they would have focused everything on the central issue at stake. They would have used a lot of moral argument in the dialogue, which would have immediately raised the defenses of all those on the other side of the issue.

But the love story genre is much trickier, and far more effective. The love story is based on what two people feel for each other. What’s at stake in the story is not the characters. It’s the love itself. There is almost no moral argument in this film about the injustice of these two men unable to be together. Instead we see the positive effect on them when they are together. And we see the negative effect, not only on them but on everyone around them, when they are forced apart.

Because the writers understood this story strategy, and executed it so well, the great flaw in the script stands out even more clearly. For the story to have its greatest impact, the initial attraction between the two men can’t just be physical. This has to be a deep romantic love between them, and the reasons for that romantic love have to be made clear from the start. Instead all we get are a few short scenes of them working together on the mountain, and suddenly they are drunk having sex in the tent. That means everything they feel for each other afterwards must just be assumed. True, they act as though they feel deeply for each throughout the rest of the picture. But without the emotional groundwork at the beginning, the audience can only know how they feel on an intellectual level. They can’t really feel it themselves.

I always say, you can’t montage love. That’s true no matter who the lovers are.

Syriana

Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana is one of the most ambitious scripts to come out of Hollywood in a long time. His story strategy is a strange combination of showing the audience an extremely big picture while also placing them in extreme ignorance. He tells a very horizontal story, showing many elements and forces working at one time, but also puts the audience in the same position as a cop trying to figure out a crime.

Gaghan is clearly within the storytelling tradition of the last hundred years in which the viewer comes to understand over the course of the story. This approach reached its apex in such European films as Last Year at Marienbad and The Conformist. It makes the audience work hard, but the endpoint is supposed to be a deeper learning of the real patterns of the world.

Unfortunately, that never happens in Syriana. What comes together at the end is the idea that the powerful of the world conspire together to increase and perpetuate the powers that be. But we know that from the beginning. The specifics of what happens remain confusing and there is almost no emotional completion.

When you make the audience work this hard to figure out so many strands, and force them to sit in ignorance for almost the entire film, you had better have a fantastic plot revelation at the end. In effect, if you make them take their medicine, you have to give them a great treat for their effort. But we never get the treat. Gaghan might argue that he is purposely trying to cut against a big Hollywood finish, with everything tied up neatly. But giving the audience a great plot isn’t “going Hollywood.” It’s good writing.

Even if you accept this excuse for a flat plot payoff, Gaghan has to justify taking the medicine with something. With an intellectual, multi-strand movie like this, the payoff isn’t going to be emotional. It has to be a great thematic revelation. But this too is missing. We know from the beginning that big corporations run the world and get most of what they want. So learning that at the end is not learning anything.

Study this script carefully if you want to see the strengths and weaknesses of horizontal storytelling. Perhaps the biggest insight a writer can take from Syriana is: the more characters you track in a story, the harder it is to make an emotional impact on the audience.