Movie Talk

Yesterday, Kathleen and Therese dished–and disagreed–about the effectiveness of Peter Jackson’s remade classic, King Kong. Here’s part two of their roaring debate.

Therese: What did you think about the authenticity aspect of the film?

Kathleen: One thing PJ and co. do really well is set a mood. The music, the Depression-era culture, the rust-bucket boat…it was spot on. Show-biz
America was just a fig-leaf over immense suffering, which fed everyone’s desperation. So returning to Jack Black’s character, I bought his desperation. It took me a few minutes to get my head away from Jack Black’s “Jack Blackness” but after a while, he became Denham to me. Everyone was desperate in this story: Denham, Ann, the ship’s captain and crew, the cannibals (were they cannibals?), Kong, and finally, America itself, a country that would fetishize a giant gorilla just to escape their troubles for a few hours. What did you think?

Therese and Kathleen are both nerds extraordinaire when it comes to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. In fact, they crafted an article (along with co-nerd, Elena Greene) about writerly lessons that can be derived from the film, and the article was published last November in the romance association’s craft magazine, the RWR. So when we heard Peter Jackson and company were tackling King Kong together, we were excited, but—surprise!—we came away with very different feelings about this remade classic.

Therese: I’m a huge Peter Jackson fan after his masterful work on Lord of the Rings, so I went to the theatre just to see him shine again with his latest furry baby, King Kong. On the whole, Kong entertained me; it was trademark PJ, with great world building and authentic characterization. What did you think?

Kathleen: I was really looking forward to Jackson’s followup effort after his kick-butt rendering of LOTR. I was so disappointed. I thought it suffered from massive bloat that dragged down the narrative. He could have lost at least an hour. I also got the impression that he was so hung up on this ‘lost world’ island he created that he lost sight of the storyline.

TW: I think the story had a character-driven engine, playing homage to each character’s journey and arc; this choice probably made for a slower ride than if PJ had chosen a plot-driven engine. (I can’t remember who it was now, but one of the actors or maybe PJ himself called this “a relationship movie,” and I agree.) The New York City sequence also essentially played the role of a looong prologue, IMO. Again, this was necessary to establish characterization, but it probably slowed down the story for some. Where do you think he should’ve snipped, Kath?

Before I start the main post, WU would like to wish everyone a happy vernal equinox. Go forth and clean out those closets!

Disney has made a cottage industry of direct-to-video sequels of their famous classic films. As a parent, my DVD library is replete with Lion King II, Lady and the Tramp II, Little Mermaid II, Cinderella II…you get the picture. This year, Disney has finally come up with a sequel for their classic Bambi, called, yep, Bambi II. As far as their direct-to-video efforts go, it’s pretty decent and offers fiction writers some lessons on how to approach crafting sequels of their own work. Let’s examine how.

One of the reasons I love talking about screenplays is that the story must be tight in a movie–characters and plot must be developed in ~2 hours–and so screenplays can yield easily highlighted lessons for the writer. As it turns out, I did take my kiddos to see Disney’s newest baby, Eight Below, this weekend. I’d read a few reviews about this flick, and I was especially interested in examining what Roger Ebert had to say about it working due to the emphasis placed on the dogs’ POV.

While telling so much of the story from the canine perspective was interesting, there were so many other essential POVs layered in this wagging tale that I didn’t find myself struck with what Ebert saw so much as I noticed something else: the way screenwriter David DiGilio escalated tension, as opposed to merely giving the characters one random challenge after another.

If you’ve seen the film or don’t think you ever will, continue on with me, but if you haven’t seen it yet and think you might, you may want to stop here as there are spoilers ahead.

Here’s the setup and the breakdown:

I’d been thinking about Silence of the Lambs just the other day, so when I stumbled across it the other night while channel surfing, I set down the remote. SotL won five Oscars, including one for best adapted screenplay, so obviously the entire team did a lot of things right. But what I find most notable about this film from a writer’s perspective is the emphasis placed on motivation.

In SotL, motivation isn’t just a necessary bit of fuel propelling the character toward his goal; it’s a theme. Understanding why someone chooses to do something becomes a riddle, an obsession, even “food” of sorts for a flesh-starved sociopath. The story also gifts us with two kinds of motivation to think about, for the underlying desire of every significant character in SotL is to transform, and that kind of desire taps into subconscious motivation. Deeelicious!

Enter Dr. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter who, as a former psychiatrist, is a master at dissecting (if not consuming) the subconscious mind. He may be the only person capable of unraveling the mystery of rampant serial killer, Buffalo Bill. When FBI student Clarice approaches him to do just that, Lecter deduces from one look at her cheap shoes what her obvious motivation is: to advance, to be something more than a poor West Virginian. When he reveals he’d like a room with a view instead of the enclosed walls he’s lived with for so long, a deal is struck. But Clarice later learns the deal was bum to begin with, and Lecter shuts down, putting the investigation in jeopardy. Though she was warned to never let Lecter inside of her head, she can’t resist when the devil asks for a dance – in exchange for information about what’s really beneath her desire to find Buffalo Bill and rescue his latest victim, a senator’s daughter by the name of Catherine…

I posted on the importance of authenticity in storytelling a few days ago and promised a glimpse at one of the big screen’s biggest authentic successes: When Harry Met Sally. If you ever have the opportunity to listen to the movie notes with director/producer Rob Reiner, take it. (In fact, I highly recommend viewing director notes in general, with a notebook and some form of writing utensil in hand. The directorial revelations are almost always enlightening from a writer’s POV.) If you listen to the notes, you’ll hear Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron tell the tale of the tale. They met one day to discuss a movie—not WHMS, either. Ephron didn’t take to whatever Reiner’s concept was, but while they were lunching, they got to talking about men and women, about loss in relationships, about friendships. Ephron was startled by some of what she learned about men, and Reiner was equally stunned by what he learned about women. Ephron began taking notes.

A high concept was born.

Here are just a few of the delicate truths that were revealed about the sexes during that fateful lunch:

Last week, I highlighted the novelist’s golden rule: show but don’t tell. Well, guess what? Screenwriters break this rule all the time themselves. They can get away with writing, for example, “character is suddenly passionate” and “he’s really mad.” What the heck? Doesn’t this fly in the face of what I said about screenwriters showing through dialogue? Nope; it works with it. And I’m going to tell you why…

It works with it, because the screenwriter is counting on actors and directors—sometimes even scenery, lighting and camera angles—to show for them. (This is how actors earn their dimes, by the way.) Granted, how Al Pacino shows anger may be very different from how Jennifer Aniston shows anger, but there’s no doubt they can both show it—and effectively. Punching a hole in the wall or smearing mayonnaise on your best friend’s new silk blouse; breaking someone’s pinkie or snapping a pencil…you get the picture. An inventive actor or director will treat an open “telling” line like an empty canvas and color it up with as much or as little detail as they please.

Take Peter Jackson’s epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, for example. According to Jackson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, the biggest effect sequence in the movie evolved from a single line in the play. This particular drama unfolded just before a demon-like monster called a balrog appeared to challenge the fellowship (protagonists). The script itself said something along the lines of, “The fellowship runs from the balrog, down a staircase and across a bridge,” but director Jackson expanded on the concept based on imagery of a crumbling bridge that one of his artists composed. Hmm, he mused, what would happen if there are more crumbling segments and the characters have to jump over gaps? What would happen if we add arrow fire to the scene? What would happen if the characters are separated from one another, with some of them stranded on a teetering stair section? Of course the answer is that in choosing to do those things, Jackson dramatically increases tension in the scene—so naturally he opted to do it. Point is, this lengthy, chair-gripping sequence was born from a single TELLING line about running down a staircase. (The script, by the way, remained the same, even after Jackson amped up the drama.)

How can we as novelists use this tidbit to help us?

A script can’t be written like a novel. But can a novelist learn something by leaning over the shoulder of a screenwriter?

Clear character action/reaction and dialogue make up 99% of a good script; a character’s musings are nearly impossible to convey on the big screen. A novelist, on the other hand, can linger in character thought for pages—even chapters—on end. Bottom line: The screenwriter works on a girdled canvas. One book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Screenwriting points out an exception: books about mental patients often make compelling movies, because the characters’ thoughts can be shown in all their dishabille through a telling blend of mercurial action and overzealous speech (e.g. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Ken Kesey and translated into a fabulous flick that earned five Academy Awards).

A successful screenplay works for many reasons, and one of them is that the writer is forced to show (not tell) almost everything. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to pull some dialogue from some of Hollywood’s championed children. Let’s see what we can learn from them.

One of the things we like to do is analyze movies for the storytelling structure. Our latest film analysis is the Joss Whedon sci-fi flick, Serenity.

Whedon’s movie is an outgrowth of his t.v. series Firefly. Fox TV abused the show by giving it crappy time slots and showing the episodes out of order before pulling the plug due to bad ratings (Whedon has famously declared he’ll never work with Fox again). The series found a home on the SciFi Network, and the respectful treatment helped it become a cult-classic. Universal acquired the rights to Firefly and greenlighted a feature film based on the series, perhaps the first time in Hollywood history that a movie studio wanted to transform a failed t.v. show into a feature film.

Released in September 2005, the film did ok at the box-office, just enough to recoup the cost of production (source), and now the studio is in talks with the SciFi Network to produce a t.v. film to be shown on SciFi. So Whedon’s vision lives on.

What made Firefly and, by extension, Serenity a story that captured the hearts of millions? We watched the movie to find out, then chatted about it.

Kathleen: One of the things that knocked my socks off was how Whedon used contrasts to flesh out both character and setting so that both are real and believable. Let’s talk about setting first. The success of sci fi storytelling really hinges on world building. I really dug how Whedon juxtaposed a Western over a futuristic world. “Stagecoach in space,” he called it. What did you think of that?