There are no new ideas, except that there are

I was sitting in my daughter’s violin class this morning when I noticed the teacher’s sockless ankle in her Converse sneaker. She’s not young and there were some varicose veins. This was real life, but for some reason I thought, I have never seen a shot like that in a film. It wasn’t the most pleasant image, but it wasn’t as gross as it sounds. My point is that you could probably follow those varicose veins up to a very interesting story.

Some people, particularly in Hollywood, like to say that there are no new stories, but that we tell the old stories over and over again. Now, of course, Hollywood does tell the same stories over and over again. It’s part of their business plan, part of their DNA, but that doesn’t mean that that’s all there is. If you think about it, there’s a million stories all around us that Hollywood wouldn’t touch, but that, if told in an interesting way, would certainly hold up to the latest bland rom-com.

Let’s take an easy example: Considering how many of Hollywood’s biggest stars are now over 50 years old, how many films are there about 50 year olds? There are plenty of films with 50 year olds in them, but that’s not what I’m talking about. How many films are there that deal with problems and issues that 50 year old men and women have to deal with, like stale marriages or divorce or the fact that your health starts falling apart. I’m sure the list is longer, but I’m not 50, so I’d have to do some research. Who would want to watch one of these films? If it were interesting, I would.

Before I start sounding like someone with a geriatric fetish, there are a million areas that are just out of bounds: and what’s funny is that they are kept out of bounds by the same people who say that there are no new ideas.

I wrote a script that takes place in an office. It always gets compared to OFFICE SPACE or THE OFFICE. Were there really on two office stories that needed to be told? It makes you think how groundbreaking OFFICE SPACE was. I can imagine that Mike Judge had to convince a bunch of skeptical executives that people might actually be interested in what happens in an office – because it have never been done before.

It’s easy to shake the plot line of any film until you’ve got it down to its basic premise, and then declare that it’s just like some other movie. OFFICE SPACE is about a guy trying to rip off his company. You see? Just like a ton of other movies.

Except it’s not.

Compromises

When you make a film, there are two fights you will always have. One is before production, I guess you could call it “development”, when everyone from producers to financiers to friends will tell you what needs to be done to your screenplay to make it better. The other is when you hit production and you are faced with the reality of your budget, your schedule and the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t really care about that shot that you absolutely needed to get.

What’s alarming to me is that the things I fight for in the first fight – ideas that I can’t imagine being compromised without ruining the script, scenes that are necessary, etc – are often things that I’m quick to give up when facing production.

Sure, if I had more money or more time, I could do it all. But no one has enough time or money to make a movie (except David Fincher.)

As I’ve discussed before, “tight” screenplays aren’t always good screenplays. But when you’re are faced with a shrinking schedule, that stuff that added nuance and character to your screenplay, the stuff that wasn’t directly connected with the plot, that’s the first stuff to go. I’m not sure that’s the best way to make a film, but I know that every director has faced that loaded-up schedule and lost a little bit of their soul.

Personally, I love films that stray a bit, or have scenes that have nothing to do with the plot but everything to do with the film. Practically, as I’m not a producer, I haven’t figured out how to get there. Compromise is boiled into the process of filmmaking, but it is also the mother of invention and a lot of times it really does improve the film. It forces you to be creative in ways that can be very cinematic. Directors who know how to solve these problems are the ones who really know how to tell a story cinematically because they are the ones that have access to the cinematic language. In other words, if something can be said, if a story can be told, they have the vocabulary to say it differently, to tell their story in another way.

As I’m facing this problem myself, I am trying to look at it from another perspective.  There comes a point in preproduction when you are given what you are given, and you have to make a film out of it.    I’m finding that this is a much more positive way of looking at a schedule and at production in general.  It opens you up to everything that’s there, instead of the stuff that is stuck in your head that isn’t there, that you wished was there.  Take what you can and use it.

Sympathy is the Devil

For some reason, someone must have decided that I’m the primo demographic for the new Jennifer Aniston/Jason Bateman movie, THE SWITCH because I’ve now seen the trailer thirty times.   I will never see this movie but the trailer tells enough of the story for me to get angry about one particular aspect about Hollywood films in general: that the characters need to be “sympathetic”.

Every script writer or filmmaker has had to answer to this esoteric and meaningless question: Is the character sympathetic to the audience?

So let’s look at the trailer for THE SWITCH and watch how a movie is so terrified of its own premise that it breaks its back trying to keep the main character sympathetic.

The story is something like this: Jennifer Aniston needs a sperm donor, so she gets it from “the perfect guy”.  Jason Bateman is in love with her, but they’ve been friends forever, and because of Bateman’s character flaws, or whatever, it just wasn’t happening.  So one day, Jason Bateman switches his sperm for the sperm of the perfect guy.  And then the rest of the story happens, but that’s not important for this discussion.

The writers cooked up this premise and as far as high concept ideas go, this one isn’t so bad.  There’s a lot of possibility there.  But they ran into a problem: switching someone’s sperm before it gets put in the turkey baster and shot on its way to conception is a really awful thing to do.  It’s almost definitely illegal.  What kind of a scumbag would do something like that?

Instead of answering that last question, which to me would make a far more interesting film, the writers cooked up a host of unlikely and improbable ways to get that sperm switched.   There’s a big conception party where the sperm is celebrated.  Ever hear of one of those?  No, because no one would do that.  But the real reason they have this party is so Jason Bateman can get seriously drunk.

He gets so drunk that when he goes to the bathroom and finds the perfect guy’s sperm, he picks up the cup and plays with it.  He does that, not because that what a drunk person would do.  He does that so that he can drop it by accident.  You see, it wasn’t enough just to get him drunk.  He has to be in a situation where he feels, in his drunken state, that he has to put his sperm in a cup and put that cup in it’s place.  That’s what he does.  He is so drunk, in fact, that he’s not even sure he did it the next day.  And then the rest of the movie happens.

Let’s ignore, for a second, that being shitfaced is not really an excuse for doing something unsympathetic.  I can’t imagine that a drunk driver could use that excuse in court, or even in the court of public opinion.  The reason that the writers went to all this trouble was to create a situation where Jason Bateman’s subconscious would do the dirty work for him.  In other words, he gets to do this horrible, life-altering sperm switch, and take very little moral responsibility for it.

Now, I’m sure the rest of the movie addresses this, and I would bet that him taking responsibility would probably involve him becoming the kid’s actual father.  But my point is that it was all unnecessary pretzel twisting because, if you imagine the alternative, you get a far more interesting character and a more interesting film.

The alternative would have been, simply, that Jason Bateman switched the sperm on purpose. He would have made a conscious decision and actually had to overcome obstacles to achieve his desired purpose.  Then he would have had to deal with the moral consequences.  I’m not sure he would be a more or less sympathetic character, but I am sure he would be a more interesting character.  He would have been a character we liked to watch, rather than a character that we liked and had to watch.  It might have been a little more plausible too.

The new realism

If you want to see how low Hollywood has sunk, watch THE BREAKFAST CLUB again and imagine the remake.   THE BREAKFAST CLUB is a unique film in a lot of ways, but mostly in the way it treats its adolescent characters with honesty and respect.  It sets them in an environment that they recognize and that doesn’t seem false.  Characters swear constantly, they talk about sex a lot, they smoke pot: and the realism that this adds is hard to imagine being recreated in our current system.  Think of NICK AND NORA’S INFINITE PLAYLIST, a film that proudly marks its main characters as straight – no drink, no drugs, no sex, no swearing, no problem.  The girl who gets drunk is treated like a sad joke.   It’s a cute film, but it doesn’t exactly recreate the real world that those characters would have to navigate.  Molly Ringwall’s character isn’t too far from them, but she’s obviously used to dealing with all sorts of pressures that Nick and Nora casually shrug off.

As I’ve said before, I have mixed feelings about realism, but what I would give for some realism in today’s films.  What’s awful is that films these days come out intending to be realistic, but end up being a cross between a sort of naturalism and some sort of Hollywood fantasy.  Naturalism is the goal of the “indie”, naturalism being the most superficial and bland brand of realism I can think of – made worse when the contortions of handheld cameras and improvised acting strain so hard to achieve something that comes across as so fake.

But it is truly amazing that with Hollywood making films almost entirely for people under the age of 25, that they cannot offer them anything other than overblown fantasy superhero crap.   They cannot present the world that we live in because drug use in movies hardly exists, while in the real world it’s so popular that it’s becoming legalized.  This need for sanitizing the movies has always been around, but challenging it seems to have gone out of style.   Pushing boundaries isn’t really what I’m talking about.  I’m just talking about presenting a world that looks something like the world I live in.

Imagine this story: a man, married for a few years, falls in love with another woman  and runs off with her, leaving his wife and kids with nothing but alimony.  You could say, “what a jerk” to do something like that, or you say, “you know, that’s kind of romantic.  He fell in love.”   I know a few friends that this has happened to, but I don’t see any American films about them.  What’s the Hollywood version of that?  Or the “indie” version?  Why do movies feel the need to moralize or act as role models?    Is Mary Jane’s boyfriend problem in SPIDER MAN all we’re going to get from now on?    Or Cameron Diaz trying to figure out how to live up to her super CIA Tom Cruise character?

The main reason naturalism isn’t going to save film is that it’s boring.  The main reason that Hollywood keeps trying to up the ante on the action, blowing up bigger things, etc. is because it’s not boring – except that it’s becoming boring because that’s all they do and they’re not as good at it as they used to be.   If realism is the goal of filmmakers, and I don’t think it has to be, then they need to figure out a new way of bringing it to life.  They need to start by being a little more honest with themselves and the world they live in.

Little conflicts in life and film life

Generally, when I need to find something out, the first place I go is Google or Wikipedia, like most people today. It’s not always what you need, but for some little piece of information, it really can’t be beat. What are the ranks of the NYPD? How does New York get its water? This stuff used to mean a trip to the library where the book you needed wasn’t always there, or a phone call to a professional. It was research.

Those boundaries don’t exist anymore. There is no struggle to get information. Not only can you find out what you need to know, you can probably watch a video on it. Our lives have become easier. Is that good or bad? Maybe a little of both, but for a screenwriter, it’s a real pain in the ass.

It’s easier to find things out, as I said. But it’s harder to think of obstacles for your characters to find things out. Realistically, your characters would spend an hour or two on the internet and find out what they need. It’s not very cinematic. The life blood of narrative film is conflict and when there is no challenge for your character, things get pretty tricky balancing reality and film reality.

Which is why films can seem so dated. It’s not just that it takes two years to make a film and technology changes so fast these days that it’s hard for filmmakers to keep up. It’s also that it is less interesting. A character going to the library is infinitely more interesting than a character sitting at his computer.

Watch White Heat, which is a fabulous old film about cops and gangsters, and watch how they use the cutting edge technology of the time, the 1940’s. Today, all the information that the cops are getting is available in far less interesting ways.

On the other side, getting away with crime is nearly impossible now. Everybody has a cellphone camera. There are surveillance cameras all over. There are tracers on dollars, we can see through walls, we can tap any phone, trace any call instantly. It’s all great for stopping crime, and crime has gone down in part because of all that stuff. But filmmakers choose mostly just to ignore the stuff that doesn’t fit in. It’s not that they don’t want to be realistic. It’s that it isn’t that dramatic.

There needs to be some risk, some conflict. As our lives become easier, our conflicts become harder to dramatize.

Unless, of course, you are doing a nice human drama about characters and relationships. Good luck getting that financed today. I’m trying to get mine done, and unfortunately there is no harder kind of film to get made and seen right now. Despite the fact that this is only kind of film most of the people I know want to see. But that’s for another post.

Being 40 and writing younger

That stuff is depressing, and trying to lie your way through a script with false optimism, doesn’t make the script good. Not to mention the fact that it makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning, and even harder to sit at your desk and write.

These are the things a mid-life crisis is built around, and generally you emerge from that either solidly cynical or with a new found peace with your insignificance.

It might make sense that these inner quarrels would make great material for your films, but you’d be wrong. Or maybe not, but the truth is that, just like no one really wants to hang out with someone having their mid-life crisis, no one wants to see their movies either. Cynicism in films makes for bad films. A little perspective on that might help.

The other sad reality for a filmmaker is that , while you get older, your audience doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s always been like this, but right now, it’s people under 35 who go see movies. I have a theory that in the 1950’s, when the pin up girls were all kind of wide and chunky, that the audience was older, because that shape is, honestly more appealing to someone in their 40’s than it is to someone in their 20’s, who prefers the skinny types we get now.

Making films about 40 year olds is generally not that interesting, and part of the reason is something I already mentioned. When you turn 40, you know how the world works. The other side of that is that your character is now fully formed. You buy the same stuff at the supermarket. You know what you like, and don’t like. You know what you believe in. Etc. If you make films about 40 year olds, it’s not going to have a lot of character growth. (Of course, there are exceptions. This is generally.) One of the things we love about American movies is watching things happen to the hero, and seeing how they affect the hero. People over 40 aren’t really that affected by what happens to them because they’ve seen it all before.

What 40 year olds, and above, have to offer is perspective. As I’ve said twice already, we know how the world works. Twenty year olds making films have the enthusiasm, the drive, the energy, they’re full of revolutionary spirit and they’re cute, but they really have no idea what’s going on. Look at those relationship movies where the characters go on and on about what love is supposed to be. One of my pet peeves. since I’ve had kids, is the father/son movie when the father has this big catharsis at the end about what a lousy father he’s been. It’s such a kid’s idea about what it’s like to be a parent.

So these are my thoughts: keep your characters young and look at them with the perspective of being 40. Knowing how the world works means that you can create a truer world, with truer characters, and fill it with the things that you think are important. Because even though when we’re 40 our character are fixed, they’re still different.  A grown up film doesn’t have to be full of grown ups.

A few things I learned from writing an action script

Here’s just a few things I learned about writing an action script, as I was writing it.

1. Plot doesn’t matter, except when it does.

Action scripts have a strange relationship to plot.  If you think about all the actions films you’ve seen, it’s not really the plot you remember.  You remember the action and you remember the character(s).  Hellboy had something to do with the devil taking over the earth, but Hellboy is a fun character and that scene when he fights the monster in the subway is action at its best.  Lethal Weapon was something to do with militias and heroin, but what’s great is Mel Gibson being such a crazy bad ass.

Having said that, the plot is what drives the action along.  Obviously the better the story is, the better the action would be.  But looking at these films, as I’ve done a lot of, and the best plots are the simplest ones.   The more complicated ones get bogged down explaining everything near the end, when they should be delivering the main course.   The real story is what’s going on with the characters, which brings me to the second thing I learned.

2. Action films are really character dramas.

The action is fun, especially when it’s done well, but what makes an action film stand out is a fun character and what’s going on with their life and relationships.  Bruce Willis in Die Hard is dealing with the bad guys, but he’s also dealing with a marriage gone bad.  Spiderman is great when he’s kicking ass, but it’s just as much fun to watch him be such a loser in life, trying to chase Mary Jane.  If you don’t embrace those scenes as a writer, I’m not sure what you’re going to be writing because the action only gets you so far.

3. Endings are important

This may seem self-evident, but I’ve gotten an entirely new perspective on how endings work and how to approach them by writing this script.   Sure, you want to tie it all together at the end.   Of course, you’re big action scene at the end has to outdo whatever came before it.  (I’m not sure about that rule, but it’s a nice goal.)  Most importantly, you want to deliver that jolt, that shiver that goes up your spine, that feeling that makes you think, fuck yeah!  Think of  the end of Robocop.  What came before it was great, but the ending was so satisfying.

Maybe that’s the feeling you’re looking for: satisfaction.  You know that feeling when you keep eating and don’t get full, but eventually you just get tired of chewing?  The orgasm isn’t always the best part of sex, but when it is, it is.   The buildup is one thing, but if you need to deliver in the end.  To do this, you need to spend a hugely disproportionate amount of work on the last ten pages of your script.  That work pays off.

There’s plenty of other things I learned, so maybe I’ll do another post like this later.

Educated Characters

Stupid characters are fun to write.  They’re easy to write too, an easy target, they never really seem in on the joke.  It’s sort of a way for the audience to feel good about themselves.  At least we’re not as stupid as that!  But, putting aside the usual Pollack joke racism and dumb blond sexism, I think that anyone who cherishes the education that they got, owes it to the world to spread the word that education is good.

It’s not that hard to write a smart character.  I often write characters that are smarter than I am.  Characters, even dumb ones, are more articulate than me: they always know what to say because I wrote it for them.  An educated character uses the right word.  If I can’t think of that word, I have a thesaurus to help me.  I’m not above looking up a quote or a poem and have my character recite it from memory.  I know a few quotes and poems, so it’s not unnatural to me that someone might know more.

An educated character doesn’t have to be an intellectual.  A college degree doesn’t mean that you go around spouting Yeats.  But educated people think things through.  They have an idea of how the world functions and the history of events leading up to the present.  Educated people move this world forward, and I expect my characters to do some of that too.  When a dumb person, like Forest Gump, or a child, spouts off some little nugget of wisdom in a film, it is so phony it makes me sick.  Does anyone really believe that simple truths are discovered by simple people?  Apparently, uneducated people do think that, or at least they are willing to suspend their disbelief for two hours.

There are entire sectors of this country that have decided that educated people think they are better than them and are therefore worthy of their contempt.   Hollywood films have to reach across borders, not just educations, to get to the broadest audience possible.  They avoid anyone with intelligence for fear that a character like that might not appeal to the masses, or that the language won’t translate.

I’m not a person that believes that films are lessons for peoples’ lives – I don’t think drinking in a film makes anyone drink in real life, or violence in films makes people violent – so I’m not saying that the reason characters should be educated is to influence someone to get educated themselves, although that would be great if it did.  But I live in a world of educated people, and I’d like to see a little more of that reflected in the films I see.

Happy Endings…

Endings are always tough in movies.  When I try to think of the perfect ending for a film, I always think of ROBOCOP, when Dick gets fired, allowing Robocop to shoot the hell out of him.  And if that’s not enough, the CEO calls after him, “What’s your name, son.”  And Robocop, who’s spent the whole movie trying to figure out who he was, calls back, “Murphy”.  It all just comes out of nowhere, but it’s been there all along.  And, most importantly, it leaves you with this shot of adrenaline as you’re ready to leave the theater.  It’s great.

I can’t think of a recent film that’s left me with that kind of satisfaction, even if I’ve seen some good films.   Sure, Robocop has a happy ending (well, Murphy’s family’s still gone.  He’s still a robot), but even a nice dark ending can leave you with satisfaction if it’s done well.

I’m not sure why endings are so hard, but they seem to be difficult for novelists too.  Novels are usually not as stuck to plot as a film is, so they can sort of just meander on to their endings, maybe have the narrator contemplate what happened, and it’s fine.  For a film, where the plot and the time are so crucial, that ending really has to rise to the occasion.  But it almost never does.

As I’ve said, I’m working on an action film now, and I think I finally figured out the ending.  It’s a pretty good ending, but it’s not up there yet.  It doesn’t have that moment you remember.   Hopefully, as I write it, it’ll come to life and I’ll have some more ideas for it.

It’s different for me, too, as I’ve mostly written artier films which have more ambiguous endings or endings that don’t end every story and theme that came before it.  I got a lot of criticism about the ending of CHASING SLEEP because it didn’t answer every question, but I thought it was pretty clear that it wasn’t meant to.   The ambiguity was supposed to leave you questioning your own feelings about the story and your sympathies to the character.  I’ve had people who’ve seen the film explain it back to me better than I’ve ever explained it, so I know that it works if you let it.  It’s true, it doesn’t deliver that feeling of satisfaction that I’m talking about here.

Maybe the reasons that so many endings seem unsatisfactory are because writers are more comfortable asking questions than answering them.   Or maybe it’s because they are lazy.

staying in touch with reality

I moved out of LA a long time ago.  I got tired of living in place where people only discussed films in relation to box office success.  In LA, everywhere you go, no matter which party you’re at, they discuss the latest releases and how well they’re doing, with a little bitterness mixed with envy and even pride, that they are in the same business.

I’ve always thought that films should represent life, and that if you live in a world of film, your films become increasingly out of touch.  Nobody in Hollywood wants films about Hollywood, but, in a sense, that’s all they get.  They hunger for writers who come in from outside: a New York cop, maybe, or an ex-con artist with a story from Florida.  But they usually fit it into their vision of the world.  I was at a meeting with a manager in LA and I told him about a story about this guy who wins the lottery.  Because of the circumstances, he can’t cash the ticket so he has someone he knows cash it for him.  The manager asked, why doesn’t this guy steal the ticket?  I didn’t have a good answer because it hadn’t occured to me.  The character doesn’t steal the ticket because that’s the way the character is.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was his own jilted Hollywood idea about life.  Most people I know wouldn’t steal the ticket for the simple reason that it’s a scummy thing to do.  In Hollywood, if you don’t steal the ticket, there’s something wrong with you.

This is an easy target, but I used to love Speilberg films, like most people I grew up with, but as he grew away from his suburban childhood, his films started losing their appeal.  Once he entered into that life of super-mogul/star director, he became that stylistic genius of film who could do anything to tell a story, but had run out of stories to tell.  Eventually, he abandoned his style too.  Did the world change, or did he get older, or did he lose touch with ordinary people somewhere on the flight between his Hamptons estate and his location scouting in Germany?

I moved to Seattle and then New York because I wanted to have a life outside of the film business.  It was also nice to live places where films were discussed in terms of the quality of the film, not just their muscle at the box office.   Most of my friends are not in the film business.  It’s interesting, and sometimes disheartening, to hear what they think about the latest releases, but it gives me a perspective of films that I doubt anyone at the studios has.  It’s disheartening because I wish they were a little more film-savvy and a little more skeptical about a film’s marketing.  They don’t look at the menu of films and get pissed off that film is, and could be, so much more than what they are being offered.  They pick from the menu.

It took me a long time to figure out how to write and make the films that I wanted to make.  Unfortunately for my career, as I’ve gotten better at it, the more Hollywood has distanced itself from those kinds of films.   So now, I’m as out of touch with Hollywood as Hollywood is with the rest of the world.  I know I’m not alone, because most of my friends in the film business who make interesting films are struggling.  We hold on to the idea that there are still people out there who want to see our films; large audiences that are being ignored.  These audiences are being marketed to, but the products leave them feeling empty.  It’s tough maintaining a passion for this stuff, when the world really doesn’t give a shit, but it’s also impossible to watch films get more and more mundane and not feel, passionately, that films could be so much more.  After all, the world doesn’t give a shit about anything until there is something to give a shit about.