Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the 5th book in the most popular work of fiction in history. It shouldn't surprise anyone that this phenomenal success has come in the fantasy genre, but it does. In Hollywood, fantasy is a genre that rarely stands alone; it is usually combined with one or two other forms, like action and science fiction. Also, Americans don't have a long fantasy tradition, which is one reason we think of it primarily as a form for children. But fantasy is much bigger than what Hollywood thinks it is. It is fundamental to the act of fiction. A good fantasy, on its own, has tremendous worldwide appeal, to people of all ages.

To understand fantasy, you have to look at it structurally. Fantasy is all about the story world, which, along with ghost, is the second of the 22 building blocks of every great story (discussed in great detail in the Great Screenwriting Class). Fantasy takes the story world element and blows it up a hundred fold. Everything depends on how you create and detail this world, and then on how you sequence it. Going in, writers think that fantasy is a light, airy story form. In fact it is the most geometric of the forms. Your hero starts in a mundane world, goes to the fantastical world, and returns to the mundane world enlightened.

The Harry Potter books have an exquisitely detailed story world. From the various school codes and hierarchy to the fantastical creatures to the technology of magic, author J. K. Rowling has examined and expressed an entire and unique world. Like other English fantasists, she has included an opposition of moral values. Setting the story in a school allows her to bring this value opposition forward without being preachy. Rowling also makes sure that Harry solves his problem at the end of each story by adhering to certain values, in spite of temptation. This way the theme is grounded in the plot.

The school of course is the key to the whole thing. The sequence of the fantasy - mundane, fantastical, back to mundane - attached to the school year brings out the best in the fantasy form. Fantasy teaches the audience how to live, and each year becomes a cycle of new growth for Harry. Also, high school is now the universal passage to adulthood. So everyone in the audience, worldwide, sees their own school experience in light of Harry. For the kids, Harry is the student they would all like to be. For the adults, he is the student they would all like to have been.

The obvious lesson of the Potter success is that you should consider writing a script or story in this form. Fantasy, along with horror and science fiction, is known as speculative fiction. That requires certain strengths as a writer. Here's the simplest way to determine if fantasy is for you: if you like to create story worlds, this is your form.

The Sopranos

For years I have been saying that the best drama writing is on television. Last week marked the end of the finest drama in TV history, The Sopranos. The talk has been all about how the last show ended. But the final scene was a miniature of the entire series. It was an anti-conclusion, just as the show was an anti-drama.

The Sopranos was great for all kinds of reasons. But those reasons are all aspects of a single technique: the grafting of genre with everyday reality. In structure terms, this is combining myth with drama. Genre is highly prescribed, with set story beats and audience expectations to match. Everyday reality grounds the genre, reverses the expectations, flattens the melodramatic moments of genre so the form actually hits harder.

Usually we see this technique in individual moments of a story. In The Godfather, after they assassinate the driver (filmed in extreme long shot), Clemenza says, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli." Then, at the end of the film, all the killers are calmly and professionally preparing to do their job, which just happens to be mass murder. In Pulp Fiction, two men discuss McDonald's vs. Burger King before we find out they are hit men who commit the most grisly murder.

What made The Sopranos different was that the entire TV series was built on this technique. Here's the premise: a ruthless mob boss has problems with his mother, his wife and his kids and sees a psychiatrist. A writer for the show recently said, "The mob genre is the bait and switch for this show." The mob genre let them write about "kings and queens at court," while the everyday reality showed the king frustrated by a wife and kids he can't control. He could slap his son around but he couldn't keep him from being a screw-up.

The TV medium, still so terribly under-rated, allowed the show's creator, David Chase, to extend this technique across the breadth of a Dickensian novel. A lesser writer would have taken pains to remind the audience who all these characters were. But Chase held to the technique. "I said, 'I'm going to tell stories without all this exposition.' It's what I'd seen in foreign films. Someone says something, or something happens, but it's not commented on-there's no arrows that point to it." Using his fundamental technique, he produced a highly structured, multi-character American epic that was grounded in hundreds of everyday moments.

So was I frustrated by the ending? You bet. But I was supposed to be. I realized that was the only way the show could have ended, by not ending. Some have argued that Tony really was whacked. The last scene was told largely from his perspective. If someone shot him in the head from behind, everything would simply go black.

But I think the open ending was all about the fundamental technique of the show. Every character and action in that diner was both everyday normal and full of dread. Tony had become a king trapped in a state of nature, death on all sides, and it could come from the littlest nobody. At any time. That's the life he has sown.

Farewell Sopranos, the king of drama. You were big drama and small drama; big story and small story. Most of all, you were professional writers at the top of their craft. Thank you.

Knocked Up

For years Hollywood has been looking for the "high concept" story. That's a story with a big (and highly marketable) plot twist. Now, because of Judd Apatow, that's starting to change, at least in comedy. Apatow is the father of the "low concept" story, and every studio in town is looking for one.

Low concept is a story based on an experience that anyone in the audience could have. Like an accidental pregnancy. The potential audience for a low concept story is huge, because everyone can identify with it. It also has a built-in emotional resonance, and comedy is funnier and more successful when the audience makes an emotional recognition in their own lives.

Sitcoms have known this for years. That's what the form is based on. Until Apatow, nobody thought you could pull the audience out of the house by using that approach in movies. And the conventional wisdom has some merit in this case. Because even though low concept gives you a potentially massive audience that can identify with the story, it puts tremendous pressure on the writer to come up with a new take on an everyday experience the audience knows so well.

Not surprisingly for a low concept story, there isn't much plot in Knocked Up. Love stories are already plot challenged, so when you add low concept to it, you have a story with a big hole in the middle. By the time the boys visit Las Vegas, I felt like we were in another movie.

So how does Apatow overcome the lack of plot and fulfill the requirement that a low concept story put a fresh face on a familiar experience? It's all in the character set up. In the Comedy Class and the Love Story Class, I talk about how these two genres depend heavily on how you set up the character oppositions. In many romantic comedies, the male and female leads are set up as opposites in some way. Then each has a friend who gives them advice, usually wrong, having to do with the stereotypical flaws of the other sex.

Knocked Up starts with the classic opposition of man and woman. In fact, these two are such an odd couple that Apatow has to finesse the fact that Alison, played by Katherine Heigl, would never sleep with Neanderthal Ben, played by Seth Rogen, even if she were blindingly drunk. But this opposition-the mature woman and the man-child-provides the basic line on which the story hangs. It also gives Apatow the essential comic opposition from which he can create a lot of the jokes. True, these jokes play off the commonly perceived differences between men and women. But Apatow is so good at comic dialogue, and his story is so grounded in the emotion of the conflict, that these lines stand out from the usual and are very funny.

But the really brilliant move in the character opposition-indeed what makes the movie-is how Apatow sets up the allies. Ben's ally is not a lone bachelor but a group of adolescent boys in men's bodies. Alison's ally is not a single woman bitter about love and men, but a couple whose marriage is worn to the breaking point.

This character opposition takes the story beyond men and women having trouble dating to the much broader and deeper set of issues about how men and women live the length of their lives. On one extreme is the permanently adolescent man who has complete freedom but no love and no children. On the other extreme is permanent life as a couple, with love and children but no freedom, no sense of self, and the constant realization that one is growing old. By placing pregnancy within this much larger opposition, the emotional and comical resonances ricochet and build to a breaking point within every person in the audience.

The lack of story means the strengths of the character oppositions play out primarily within the individual scenes. But these scenes are often very strong and well worth study. In one remarkable scene, the sister, played by Leslie Mann, and an obviously pregnant Alison try to get into an exclusive club. When the gatekeeper refuses them entry, the sister lays into him, attacking him at his weakest point, which is his pathetic job. It's so real it's painful. He calmly takes her aside and calls her on her true weakness, the reality that has driven her to embarrass herself while trying to embarrass him. She's a stunning beauty but she's getting older, and she and her pregnant sister aren't going through that door.

Great comedy isn't about being funny all the time. Do that and you won't be funny at all. Great comedy is about creating a painful emotional reality, a charged atmosphere where the jokes become lightning bolts, showing you the truth, making you laugh and cutting your heart out all at the same time.

Grey's Anatomy

TV drama is ascendant right now and Grey's Anatomy is at the top of the heap. It's worth taking a look at how this show works to get a clue about writing for a drama show and maybe even creating one of your own.

Grey's Anatomy is the best show about high school to come along in a while. The interns are the freshmen, "the Nazi" is a junior, Burke and McDreamy are seniors, and the Chief Surgeon is the principal. The fact that this is high school in a hospital only affects what the characters do for their class projects. Think bio class with human guinea pigs.

Besides being brilliant, this high concept premise for a TV show indicates that the show's creator, Shonda Rhimes, understood the first rule about TV: it's about a community of opponents. Sure we bring in guest characters every week. But the audience tunes in so it can live for a moment in this community, in this extended family. We watch the family members fight but we love them anyway and know that they love each other. They just have a hard time living together under the same roof (just like us).

High school has all the highs and lows of living in a community, but taken to the nth degree. As Charles Dickens, a notorious nerd, once remarked about his own high school, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." (He was also the first to write that line in the school yearbook.) By pushing high school into the adult world of the hospital, Rhimes lets the viewer relive that heightened state, at its best and its worst, without limiting the audience to actual high school students.

There are many elements that go into a well-constructed show. Let's look at one of the more important ones, setting up the oppositions.

One reason Grey's Anatomy is so popular is that it has very clear oppositions among the ongoing characters, and it has a lot of them. The first set of oppositions is between the "freshmen," the interns. There are three women and two men, and each is very different from the others. In fact they are so schematically different they border on cliché. But then high school is famous for the various groups with the simplistic labels. The two guys here aren't just two young doctors. One is the narcissistic ladies man who wants to be a plastic surgeon, while the other is such a pathetic hang-dog (he even looks like a St. Bernard) I keep waiting for the writers to hang a keg of whiskey around his neck. The women are just as extreme. That can make for some ludicrous scenes on occasion. But the important point is that in TV your characters have to begin recognizably different. You've got plenty of time to add texture to these people as the seasons progress. What you don't have is time to identify how your main characters oppose each other in fundamental ways.

Having five unique interns would be enough for most shows. But Grey's adds a second set of oppositions between the interns and the doctors. This is an opposition based on experience, on learning the craft of medicine. And that focuses primarily on how the doctors and the interns deal with their patients in life-and-death situations. The nice touch here is that while the doctors know best how to operate and deal with the patients, in love they are just as dumb as the freshmen. The basic concept here is that when love comes to town we are all in high school for the rest of our lives.

Which leads to the third set of oppositions. These doctors are involved in all kinds of twisted opposition in their love lives. They are led by the nominal main character of the show, Meredith, who is a revolutionary character for TV. Meredith is the first girl-next-door prom princess who loves sex (ie, she's a slut) and isn't ashamed of it. But it does cause her all sorts of complications, which the audience loves to watch. Meredith looks and sounds like a high school girl, and she's in over her head with the cutest senior in school. Who can resist that?

Using love as a major opposition is a two-edged sword on a TV show. It generates intense passion, which is great for drama and comedy. But it also forces the writers to constantly rip characters apart and put them into new relationships. The sense of farce and soap opera has already begun to take over the storylines.

Still this is a beautifully constructed TV show for the long haul. If you would like to write TV drama, or even create your own show, take a look at the TV Drama Class and the TV Drama Blockbuster add-on, where you can find out all the structural elements that make a hit.

Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics is an average romantic comedy. But compared to other recent films in the genre, it sparkles like a diamond. And, it has a few techniques that are instructive. Romantic comedy is extremely deceptive; it looks light and easy, but is incredibly hard. Part of the problem comes from the fact that the form is highly choreographed, with about 12 unique story beats the writer must hit to satisfy the audience. By the same token, the form is very contrived, so expressing real feeling - and a love story better have real feeling - is a big challenge.

The romantic comedy form has fallen on hard times recently. But it continues to be one of Hollywood's most popular forms, and if you can write a good one, your script will be very popular as well. I go into extensive detail about how to write a good romantic comedy in both my Comedy and Love Story classes. But let's focus here on a few of the techniques that Music and Lyrics does well.

Music and Lyrics is, first and foremost, based on a premise that gives the story a huge structural advantage. By doing a romantic comedy between two songwriters, writer Marc Lawrence gets the benefits of a musical without dealing with the inherent structural nightmares that the musical form brings. The lead characters can use music to express emotion more intensely, but Lawrence doesn't have to deal with the awkward, reality-blowing fact of people bursting into song.

What about some specific techniques? The first is what I call the "love endpoint." This is a technique I explain in the Great Screenwriting and Love Story Classes. To make the characters develop the way you want, and to make sure the plot comes from the characters, you have to start at the structural endpoint of your story and work backwards. There are many structural elements that determine this endpoint, and it has nothing to do with the actual plot beat that ends the story. In love stories the endpoint is not the love between the two people but rather proper love. In other words, the love of two people who have grown. That means beginning your story by establishing two people who have weaknesses, and these weaknesses are so severe that the two characters are closed down and experiencing a miserable life.

A second technique the writer uses in Music and Lyrics is "mutual need." In this technique, both characters exhibit a variation on the same need. Don't get me wrong; you don't have to use mutual need to write a great story. But it's an especially useful technique in love stories, because love stories are founded on the concept of two people learning from each other. Giving two characters a variation of the same need helps the audience better understand how the characters are closed off at the beginning and how they blossom at the end.

In Music and Lyrics, both characters are experiencing some form of stunted creativity. Alex is a has-been who has tried to fix his creative failure by writing soulless, formulaic songs. Sophie is a writer who was dumped by a famous novelist who told her she had no originality. Each must find their creativity before they can find love with the other. And each becomes creative because of the help they receive from the other.

Romantic comedies may be tired right now, but use that to your advantage. The writer who finds his or her own creativity in this form will find the audience beating a path to their door.

Dreamgirls

All musicals have a special problem when it comes to storytelling. They use two tracks of communication, drama and music. The writer must let each form do what it does best and then somehow connect them and make them appear to be one line.

Dreamgirls has many fine elements, most especially some of its pop songs and a number of dazzling performances. But the screenplay is not its strength. The script is serviceable, allowing the writer to hang the songs on a storyline. But even that breaks down about half way through, so the second half of the movie feels like a concert with too many songs stuffed down our throats.

Not surprisingly, the story problems come out of the character setup. In the beginning of the film, Effie is the main character. She is the lead singer and the driving force in the group's desire to reach the top. But the Dreamgirls are quickly taken over by Curtis (Jamie Foxx), who determines all the action steps the group will take. The problem with Curtis as a character is that there is nothing inside. He's not a person, he's a money-making machine. Also, even though he is driving the action, he is the Dreamgirls' main opponent.

This kind of character setup isn't a problem as long as Effie is the lead singer of the group. But halfway through the story, she gets tossed out. At this point Dreamgirls essentially ends. But there's still half a movie to go, and the second half feels infinitely longer than the first. Why? Notice the domino effect. Replacing Effie as lead singer is Deena (Beyonce Knowles), who has been chosen because she is so plastic and bland. So she can't carry the second half of the story. That leaves the plot pusher, Curtis, but all of his action steps at this point involve making more money, which is the same story beat. So the story fractures and grinds to a halt. Now the songs have no line to hang on, no emotion to punctuate. No matter how good a song might be on its own, each one feels, at this point in the film, like a big fat blob. I found myself begging the screen, "Please don't make me sit through another interminable song."

A lot has been made of the writer's attempt to go beyond the personal to the historical and the political. To show the rise of black music during the civil rights era and how black music was then co-opted by the white corporate establishment. I certainly applaud the effort. But the technique isn't there. Again the prime culprit is all those never-ending songs. The writer has no time to develop the complex interconnections between the musical history and the political history. So he relies on the old film chestnut, the montage. This is shorthand writing, and all it does is confirm the simplest stereotypes. In fact, Dreamgirls includes one of the most offensive scenes of the year, when it shows a terrific "black" song being stolen and defiled by a truly horrible white pop band that is supposed to stand for all "white" music.

For me the most interesting element in this movie is one it did not intend. Thematically it paints itself into a corner; it moves logically and inexorably to an indictment of itself. Dreamgirls supposedly shows the history of Motown music, but it doesn't have any Motown songs. It shows the corruption of soul music into generic pap, acceptable to all, and the movie is just another example of that endpoint.

The Holiday

The first requirement of any genre film is that you hit the unique story beats that define the form. Depending on the genre, you will have anywhere from 8-15 beats that you must include or your audience will be disappointed. The second requirement of any genre film is that you twist these beats in a unique way to make your inherently generic story original.

Most writers fail at the first requirement either because they don't know the genres they are using or because they haven't studied their genres sufficiently. More advanced writers tend to fail in the second requirement, and we need look no further than the romantic comedy, The Holiday. The Holiday is what you get when the writer hits the love story beats in the most predictable way possible.

This film seems to have a terrific "high concept" premise. Two women with love troubles, one American and one British, trade houses and find true love in the other's country. But premises can be deceiving, especially high concept ones. That's why I go through so many premise techniques in the Great Screenwriting Class. Premise is where 95% of writers fail, because they don't know how to break down a premise idea and figure out the structural problems they are bound to face.

The premise of The Holiday has a number of hidden flaws that almost guarantee it will be a predictable, phony script. Most importantly, we have two lead characters who cross paths in mid air and play out their stories in separate locations. Notice two crucial effects. First, the writer has half the time for character development for each of the two leads. Second, the story structure is by necessity a cross cut structure. Cross cut highlights comparison between characters. But with each character having half the time for development, the comparison between these two characters only highlights how clichéd and shorthand the writer has drawn them.

A perfect example of this is the ghost and need of the Cameron Diaz character, Amanda. In love stories the ghost and need is always some version of a cycle of fear that is preventing the hero from being able to love. Amanda's inability to love comes from the fact that her parents split up and left her literally unable to cry. When Amanda explains this ghost and need to her love interest, it's so phony and on-the-nose that I thought I saw a flashing red sign above her head saying: STORY BEAT ALERT!!! This leads to the phoniest, on-the-nose self-revelation of the year when Amanda discovers that she really is in love with her guy because, you guessed it, SHE CRIES REAL TEARS!!!

Genres are formulaic, but that doesn't mean you have to write them that way. If you want to know how to meet but also transcend the story beats of the romantic comedy, take a look at either the Love Story Class or the Comedy Class. It's all about learning your form well enough so you can take a chance on being original and know you have a rock solid story structure to back you up.