Jack Kirby and Pablo Picasso

Image by WonderBros

 "If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes. " -- Pablo Picasso


I started reading comic books in earnest in the early1980s, a good time for comics. I was introduced to the work of John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Frank Miller, Michael Golden, Bill Sienkiewicz, John Romita Jr., and other, then young, creators of the time.

A friend of mine who was more of a comic book guy gave me an education on who was cool and why. He then introduced me to some of the more established guys: Neal Adams, John Buscema, Gil Kane, Ross Andru, John Romita Sr., and others.

What struck me was how all of these artists were doing vastly different things. They had their own styles. I remember liking to see how a given artist would handle drawing The Hulk. They were all so different and all great.

But one artist I could not get into was an old guy named Jack Kirby. His stuff was so blocky. Everyone looked to be carved out of stone. I remember another kid and I having a field day laughing at Kirby’s work.

 

But I was lucky because for some reason I had a trait that still serves me well – I had the desire to learn and I would listen to folks who knew more than me. If someone is older than I am, or more studied, my first inclination is assume they know more than I do until they prove otherwise. As I get older I see that this is a rare trait. (I’m not taking credit for the trait in myself – it was just there.)

I don’t get Picasso. I know I’m not supposed to say that because somehow it reflects on my intelligence, but I’m going to come clean here. I do not mean to say that Picasso wasn’t a genius; I am honestly saying that I don’t see what others see when they look at his work.

You should understand that when it comes to art I do not pretend to understand things if I don’t. I think this fear of feeling like we are intellectually deficient can make us fake knowledge instead of actually gaining knowledge.

In the story The Emperor’s New Clothes people pretend to see what they do not because they have been told that those who cannot see the Emperor’s beautiful clothes are stupid and unworthy of their station. As in the story we are all afraid to admit what others claim to see eludes us.

In the case of Picasso, I believe the Emperor in indeed wearing clothes because too many people I admire are in awe of his work. But it is important for my own personal growth that I actually see what others see before I say that I do.

With Kirby, what I did first was ask my artist friends what they saw that was so great. I did not judge their answers but rather I tried to see through their eyes. Whenever I read an interview with one of the many professional artists who were influenced by Kirby’s work, I would look for any bits of wisdom about his work.

I also looked to see what the artists I liked had in common with Kirby. Still, I could not see what others saw. I looked at Kirby’s work for years, and after about five or six years I started to see something of what people were talking about. I could see the energy and power in his work – it was kinetic.

I started to notice some of his innovations, like what my friend Scott called “Kirby dots.”  (Some people call the technique “Kirby krackle.”) It is a bunch of dots that somehow miraculously communicate energy – raw cosmic energy. Everyone uses them now, but Kirby thought it up. I saw that many of the things that had become standard comic book technique were Kirby innovations. Once I saw that a whole world opened up. This guy I had once made fun of was becoming a genius in my mind.

I also saw that his visual storytelling could be amazing. He could do in one panel what took other people three. This is one of the many things I saw John Byrne apply to his work.

I was once talking to my friend August Wilson about Picasso and how I just didn’t get it. August nodded and said, “Have you ever watched him paint?” I told him that I hadn’t and he said, “Watch him paint.” So that’s what I did. I watched him on YouTube.

For a long time I saw nothing. But I watched for years. The way that I learn to “see” is to look. I keep looking until I see. That can take years, or it might take a lifetime. But, like one of the “Magic Eye” pictures that were so popular in the late ’80s, if you look long enough and hard enough, a 3-D picture will emerge.

There's a bird in this image that you'll find if you look hard enough.

So I continued to look at Picasso. And look.And look. Every now and then I would go to YouTube and watch him paint. I started to see flickers of what I had been missing. It was him drawing rather than his painting that I started to see. I saw that he made no mistake. I mean that there were no mistakes. Like a good improviser he took what came. Every line was an opportunity. You can see it in his speed as there seems to be no thought only action – one line leads to another, leads to another, leads to another, without the slightest hesitation. There was no barrier between his subconscious and his hand. It’s balletic.

 Several months ago I had the opportunity to spend a few days with the legendary animator, and great guy, Glen Keane and I was telling him about what August had told me. Glen had never watched him paint so we pulled it up and watched. Glen’s eyes were fixed on the screen as he watched. After a moment he said, “Look where he’s looking.” I looked but didn’t see what Glen saw. He said, “Look at his eyes – he’s not looking at the line he’s painting. He’s looking at the middle of the image he’s working on.” He was.  But I didn’t know what that meant.

Glen told me that his mentor, Ollie Johnston, would say to him that every line in a drawing only exists in relationship to every other line in the drawing. Glen said that it took a while before Ollie’s words made sense to him. But after a few years he got it. And he could see in watching Picasso that he got it, too.

Sometimes I ask a student to read a particular thing or watch a particular movie and after they do they will come back and say that they didn’t get it. They will not read or watch it again. They are done. On that first look they think they have seen all there is to see (or not see).

But every now and then, a students trusts that I see something that they cannot and they will look until they see what I see. I had one student who watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and did not know what I saw in it. He watched it again and again and like with one of those magic eye pictures something emerged – something so clear that he didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before. Now he marvels at the film, the same way I marvel at Jack Kirby.

I’m still looking at Picasso, because I still don’t fully get his work. Not as well as I would like. Maybe in a few years I will. Maybe I never will, but I will learn something just from looking.

My advice about learning: Keep looking.

"The Godfather," how to find the Theme and other things you may have missed.

These are just a few links to things that some of you may have missed. So, in case you are interested, here they are.

I recently gave an interview to Henry Sheppard for his blog Adelaide Screenwriter.  He asked me a question about The Godfather and its theme.  This was my answer:
http://adelaidescreenwriter.blogspot.com/2012/02/brian-mcdonald-godfather-and-how-to.html


I also did a guest post for Kay Kenyon's website Writing the World:
http://www.kaykenyon.com/2011/12/10/what-is-the-job-of-a-storyteller/

This is a nice book review from Henry Sheppard:
http://adelaidescreenwriter.blogspot.com/2012/01/book-review-invisible-ink.html

And this is the rest of my interview with Mr. Sheppard:
http://adelaidescreenwriter.blogspot.com/2012/02/interview-with-brian-mcdonald-part-1.html
http://adelaidescreenwriter.blogspot.com/2012/02/interview-with-brian-mcdonald-part-2.html

An embarrassingly nice review of Invisible Ink. Though apparently not so embarrassing that I won't stoop to calling your attention to it: http://www.paperwingspodcast.com/2012/01/pwp-19-how-to-write-comics-that-engage-your-audience/#comment-8710

Some of you may have seen these already, but for those who hadn't I hope at least some of these things are worth your time.

Thanks,

-- Brian

Movies I Like: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Before I get into Terminator 2 I want to talk about the first movie a little.

Back when the The Terminator was released I did not see it. It looked like it was going to be a dumb action movie, it had a nondescript title, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was a celebrity body builder who had been in movies, but was no movie star. Everything about The Terminator screamed B-movie.

Then I saw the cover of Cinefex Magazine and on the cover was an intriguing image of a robot skeleton with a wall of fire behind it. I didn’t know what this image was, but I was hooked – I had to see this movie. The film was no longer out so I rented it on VHS and was blown away. The movie had no business being this good. It was clear that there was no budget and the effects were mediocre. There is a puppet head of Arnold that is almost laughably bad. But none of that mattered because the script was strong.

There were also sparks of genius in the film that communicated to me that this James Cameron guy was going to be around for a while. One thing that sticks with me is a scene that takes place in the devastated dystopian future. Reese, one of the main characters moves through a settlement of humans. These are people living in squalor. But Cameron does some brilliant work here. It is a piece of visual storytelling that put him ahead of the pack.

Reese moves past a mother and daughter huddled together gazing into a television. In this future full of the unfamiliar here is something we recognize – a mundane tableau of domestic life.

But then Cameron cuts around to see the view from the other side and we see that the mother and daughter are huddled around a fire built inside the shell of a television. This shot tells us so much about how our world is no more – there are only shadows of it left.

It’s nothing short of brilliant. Like all great visual storytelling it looks easy to do because it’s easy for an audience to understand. It isn’t. Cameron is a first-rate communicator. This ability, and sometimes willingness, to communicate with an audience is becoming a rare thing.

This brings me to Terminator 2. This film was highly anticipated and did not disappoint. These are just some of the reasons I think the film worked for so many. I can’t get into everything because it would be way too long of a post.

One thing that makes this piece work is its clear communication. Much of what I mean can be seen in the film’s first act. First acts are an endangered species in Hollywood and I think that is one of the reasons box office receipts keep falling. The first act gives a story context and lays the groundwork for the story’s emotional beats. Without it there is little for an audience to care about except shallow spectacle.

Here, the first act introduces us to Sarah Conner and does not assume that we have seen, or remember, the details of the prior film. We find Sarah Conner who, in the first film, was hunted down by and nearly killed by a Terminator, a machine from the future, in a mental hospital. It is clear she has been put in this hospital because her story of a “killer robot” is not believed.

The setting of a hospital allows Sarah Conner to relate her story to a doctor in order to clue us, the audience, in on what happened before. The film is so well set up that you can watch it with no knowledge of the first.

Cameron had used a similar technique in Aliens, his sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, where the main character Ripley is questioned about what happened to her and her crew in the first film. This allows her to tell the story directly to us so that we can understand the story to follow. It creates context and therefore emotion.

We learn in Act One of Terminator 2 how terrified Sarah is of this killer robot from the future. We also learn that the reason she is being pursued is because she gives birth to, and raises, the man who leads the resistance against the machines. The machines sent a robot back in time to kill her before she could give birth to her son. We learn now that Sarah has since had a son, and that if Sarah cannot stop the machines, that the fate of humanity is grim – a nuclear holocaust launchedby these killer machines.

 

We see Sarah has been working out in preparation for the fight with the machines that will surely come. She is a lean, mean, fighting machine.  In fact, that’s exactly what she is – a human Terminator. This is brilliant. When Sarah makes her escape we see just how efficient and effective she can be at hurting people to get what she needs. Everything she does has a cold, mechanical quality.

Schwarzenegger’s Terminator from the last film was inhuman, but in this film we see that he is more human than Sarah Conner. If you know the film you know how, but for this post it isn’t important. 

“Sarah as Terminator” is further driven home when she discovers the identity of the scientist whose work will unwittingly create a self-aware computer that launches the nuclear attack on humanity. What does Sarah do? She tracks down the man and attempts to kill him.

This is exactly what the Terminators did, and are doing, to Sarah. They are trying to kill her and her son for something they haven’t done yet.

Schwarzenegger’s Terminator (there is a non-Schwarzenegger Terminator in the film), along with Sarah’s son, saves the scientist from Sarah. Sarah has become a killing machine using cold logic to reach her goal, whereas the Terminator displays more humanity.

Making a film about a woman whose fear drives her to become the very thing she hates elevated the film to a place where it transcends its genre and its sequel status. It is true in life that we must take care not to become the things that we fear and/or hate. Instead of being a film designed only to make money, it’s a story that has a reason to be told.

Movies I Like: Rear Window

Why I haven’t written about Rear Window before is beyond my comprehension. Really.

This is one of the best films that master-of-suspense Alfred Hitchcock ever made in his 50-year career as a filmmaker.

When I was a teenager, working for my mentor Bruce Walters, he would tell me stories about the film Rear Window and how effective it was. I had read about it in film books and heard stories, but the film had been, along with others of Hitchcock’s classic films, unavailable for 20 years or so because of legal reasons. But in the early '80s there was a release of Rear Window, the 1956 remake of his own film The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, and the amazing Vertigo.

They had been away for so long it was as if they were new releases. They were incredible to see on the big screen. These old films made millions at the box-office, and were hits once again.

But Rear Window was something special—I have never before or since seen an audience so involved in a film. We were all on the edges of our seats. The audience acted as a single organism—holding its breath, screaming, laughing, and biting its lips all in perfect unison. All of us feeling the same thing together. It was magical.

Even now, when I show scenes from the film in classes, people get caught up in the film and want to see more.

Rear Window, first released in 1954, was adapted from a Cornell Woolrich story by screenwriter John Michael Hayes. The film stars Jimmy Stewart as an adventurous magazine photographer who is trapped in his apartment because of a broken leg. He has little to do but to look voyeuristically out his window at the neighboring apartments. In the apartment directly across from him, he believes he sees a murder and the fun begins.

You may know the story because it was the basis for a more recent film called Disturbia. Others have borrowed from the premise as well.

But one of the things that makes Rear Window such a great film is not only Hitchcock’s flawless direction and visual storytelling to create tension and suspense, but the brilliant screenplay. The story beneath the external thriller is a love story. In fact, I would argue that the love story is the real story being told.

The film has Swiss-watch precision construction. The first act tells us that Stewart’s character does not want to get married. In the first dialogue in the piece Stewart is on the phone and we hear just what he thinks about marriage. And to underscore his point while he talks on the phone, he is watching a neighbor couple across the way in their apartment as they argue.

Soon after Stewart’s nurse comes in and they have a conversation about Stewart’s voyeurism and well as his reluctance to get married. 

Also in Act One, we meet Stewart’s girlfriend, a fashion model played by Grace Kelly. She is perfect and this is why Jimmy Stewart doesn’t want to marry her. She does want to marry Stewart, but he thinks his rough life as a photographer traveling to far-off lands and living in harsh conditions would be too much for her. After all, she is a woman who likes the finer things in life and is always dressed in the latest fashions.

 During the course of the story, Grace Kelly shows that she has a taste for danger. She even sneaks into the suspected murder’s apartment to collect evidence of the crime. Stewart becomes more attracted to her as he sees that she is more than a delicate fashion plate.

 

Here’s the thing that blows me away as good, old-fashioned, delicate and precise storytelling.

Not only are the arguing couple Stewart sees across the way an image of marriage and relationships, so is every other neighbor that Stewart watches. There is a middle-aged couple who have a dog as a surrogate child, but appear to be happy. There is a newlywed couple whose blinds are shut most of the time. There is an older woman, probably a widow, who sculpts a decidedly phallic piece of art. There is a lonely woman nicknamed “Miss Lonely Hearts” hopelessly looking for love. There is a sexy neighbor nicknamed “Miss Torso” who always has men swarming around her. Grace Kelly notes that the woman doesn’t love any of these men. She knows because it resembles her apartment, she says. There is also an unmarried songwriter across the way who does find love in the end.

Even the man suspected of murder is suspected to have killed his wife.

Each of these neighbors has a story reason to populate the story. When I say that they seldom make good films anymore, this is what I mean: Things now are often random. But in well-crafted pieces, things appear random and are anything but. Everything matters.

In films now they may have a murder story and they may have a romance, but those things would in no way be tied together. This is why things feel tacked on often—story elements are not integrated. Random characters and events strung together do not a story make.

Rear Window is the story of a man who learns that the woman he thought was so delicate has another side. Like him, she has a taste for adventure, but also likes her world of fine food and fashion. She is a complete human being with many sides.

If you want to see a genuine masterpiece – number 43 on AFI’s top 100 movies of all time—then see Rear Window. If you want to learn from master storytellers how to make your own stories better, then this a film you must see and study.

And see Rear Window on the biggest screen you can, because that’s how it should be seen. 

Movies I Like: The Wizard of Oz (Doing what the story needs)

 “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works." -- Steve Jobs

As a teacher and consultant, one of the things I see people struggle with the most is the concept that they should be the servant of their story rather than the master. That means that as a storyteller you make decisions based on the needs of the story rather than personal preferences.

Most storytellers have scenes, characters, settings, shots, or moods they want to put into their story. These are the things they like and so they figure that all of these things put together will make a good story. Most of the time, a good story is not the outcome of this process.

No method is foolproof, and any technique can yield a substandard product. I liken it to a recipe. Two people working from the exactly same recipe may have differing results. One dish may be delicious and the other less so. Some people can cook and some can’t. But surrendering to the dictates of one’s story is a recipe that works more often than not.

It may or may not still be true, but at one time The Wizard of Oz was the most seen film on earth. It is fair to say that by most standards this film has worked for the vast majority or audiences since its release in 1939 over seventy years ago. It is also an excellent example of the creators of this film giving over to its needs rather than imposing their will upon it.

The writing is impeccable. The credited screenwriters, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf, and Noel Langley, never lost sight of the film’s main point – that we may already have what we are looking for. You see this in Dorothy herself, who in the opening of the film dreams that there must be a better place, only to find that when she is away from home it had everything she was longing for. She wants nothing more than to get home.

The supporting characters of the Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man also find that they have all along had the very things they had been looking – a brain, courage, and a heart, respectively.

I talk more about this in my first book Invisible Ink, if you’d like to read more about the film’s story construction. But what makes the film such an achievement is that there were many more writers than credited and several directors, yet they all seemed to be servants of the story.

I’d like to talk about some of the other creators of this film and how they let the film itself dictate their creative decisions.

In the Frank L. Baum book The Wizard of Oz, he describes Dorothy’s world of Kansas as gray and drab. According to the book America’s Songs, by Phillip Furia and Michael Lasser, when E.Y “Yip” Harberg was trying to come up with the song for Dorothy to sing in the first act he thought of Baum’s description of the grayness of Kansas and decided that the only color she would see would be the rainbow – and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was born.

Understand that Harberg did not start with the idea that he wanted a song about a rainbow. No, he looked at the story itself to find the song that the film needed rather than some song he wanted to write for some ego-based reason. He was the story’s servant rather than its master.

What’s even better is that the director was inspired by the song to shoot the Kansas scenes in black-and-white and the Oz scenes in color. Again he was only acting as a servant of the story. He did not say to himself, “I always wanted to shoot a part of a film in black-and-white and some in color.” No, he only tried his best to serve the needs of the piece.

These days when I read interviews with directors they talk a lot about what they wanted to see, or show, and very little about the dictates of the films themselves. They seldom surrender to the film or the story being told. They’d rather have unnecessary camera moves, or other effects, that they believe are eye-catching or cool.


Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

Then there was the matter of Dorothy’s hair. The film’s first director Richard Thorpe had made many missteps in making the film and was fired off the film and was replaced by George Cukor, who did not like what he saw of Thorpe’s footage. For one thing, Thorpe made actress Judy Garland look too sexy and old for the part. With inappropriate make-up and a curly blonde wig, she did not bring to mind an innocent farm girl from the early 1900s.

Cukor, being a servant of the story, took off half of Garland’s make-up and had her curly blonde wig removed in favor of dark hair and braids. He wanted to make sure she looked the part of a Kansas farm girl.

Cukor soon left the film to work on Gone with the Wind and was replaced by Victor Fleming. But did Fleming feel he had to change Garland’s look so that he could put his mark on the film? No, he left it because it worked. This was not about the egos or whims of Cukor or Fleming or the other creators on the team – it was about the story. They asked themselves, “What does the story need?” That was the recipe they followed to make a bona fide film classic.

Next time you are working on a story ask yourself what the story needs. Forget the cool scene you want to see. Forget the funny line you had in mind. Forget the quirky character your want to write. Check your ego at the door and ask yourself what the story needs you to do. Be the servant not the master. Surrender to the needs of your story, and in seventy years maybe someone may still be writing about your story. Better yet, maybe audiences will still be enjoying the story itself.

Tell 'em What You're Gonna Tell 'em

A few days ago I sent out a link to friends and students to a story about a studythat said readers found stories more enjoyable if they knew the ending first.  This seemed obvious to me, but I was informed by a few people that this finding was counter-intuitive.

For me this study was nothing master storytellers haven’t known for millennia.  The first rule of story construction is “Tell ‘em what you are going to tell ’em.”

To explain to my friends and students why this finding was no surprise to me I sent them the following response. They thought it would make a good post, and so here you are:

A friend once asked me to read a novel he was writing, and I tried, but could not get through it. I told him that it bored me and I couldn't finish because I didn't know why I was reading it—he needed to tell people why right away. 

He didn't know what I meant, so I asked him if I ever told him about the time I almost got shot. He said that I hadn't, and he leaned in to hear the story. Then I told him that it had never happened, but it was clear he wanted to hear that story.

Starting with the ending is often how stories are told in the natural world of conversation because it engages people—it hooks them.

“I was fired today.”

“My wife’s been cheating on me.”

“My house was robbed.”

Those are the endings of the stories. Then the teller goes back in the timeline to flesh out the details.

I remember bad reviews of TITANIC (a mediocre film in my opinion, but with some very strong story elements) where reviewers panned the film because they couldn’t understand why people would sit through a story where they know the ending—the ship is going to sink.

But that knowledge is the engine that drives the story. People sat through the film because they knew the boat was going to sink. And they knew not just because of the history, but because Cameron put that information right up front.

In SUNSET BOULEVARD Billy Wilder starts the story with the body of William Holden floating face down in a pool and the rest of the film is his voice-over telling the story of how he got there. But we know right off he ends up dead, so we watch to find out how.

Wilder did basically the same thing earlier in DOUBLE INDEMNITY where you see that the character Walter Neff is hurt—shot. And he then tells the story of how he came to get shot into a tape recorder because he wants to get the story out before he dies.

Old stories use this structure: This is the story of how the brave knight defeated the dragon.

Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories: How the Camel Got His Hump.

Sometimes the serial nature of story implies the ending. We know that Batman will defeat The Joker. And that Superman will win against Lex Luthor and that Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple will solve the mystery: Yet this does not stop us from enjoying the journey.

The classic long-running television detective show COLUMBO is often called a mystery show, but it was not a mystery at all. Each show started with the murderer committing the crime. The audience saw every aspect of how and why the crime was committed before the detective was ever introduced.

Of course the viewers knew that Lt. Colombo would solve the crime, but they did not know how. The fun was in seeing just how the detective solved the murder—or how he trapped the killer into admitting their crime. It was engaging and suspenseful. So much so that the show “ran,” in one form or another, from 1971—2003.

Hitchcock said that he never created suspense by keeping information from people, but by giving it to them.

Because, I believe, we are listening to stories for survival information we are want to know just how William Holden died so that we can avoid it. My friend with the novel wanted to know just how I got away without being shot.

Since human conversation is the parent form of all storytelling, it contains the seeds of drama and literature. If you listen to stories in “the wild” when people are talking and may be unaware that they are even telling stories, they will often start with the ending.

Imagine someone from a non-profit speaking to an audience of potential donors. She shows a slide of a distinguished businessman on a suit in a fancy office and says that this man was once homeless. People will listen.

But what if she started with a slide of the man while he was homeless? The lead-up to the ending it would be far less interesting. It may be a surprise ending, but it's a far less interesting story.

Knowing the ending does not answer all the questions—it poses more questions. Plus people understand why they are they are listening, or reading, or watching.

Embracing Cliché (by not being cliché)

"There is nothing new in art except talent." – Anton Chekhov


When teaching story structure, one of the biggest objections I have run into over the years is that “life’s not like that.” You can read my answer to that on my old Sherman Alexie post.

Another objection is that utilizing structure creates stilted work. Yes, it can, if one has only a superficial understanding of structure and has yet to master it. But that’s true of learning any new skill.

Still another objection is the beginner’s idea that the practice of story structure leads automatically to cliché. Legendary playwright Anton Chekhov said that a writer can’t introduce a gun in the first without using it by the third act. This is the most basic rule of story structure. Hollywood legend Billy Wilder said, “If there is a problem with your third act, it is really a problem with your first act.”

This is a variation of what Chekhov said. I am not smarter than Chekhov and Wilder, so I listen to them and do what they say and more times than not it works out.



But people who know this rule see a gun introduced early in a story and roll their eyes because they know it will be used later: “Of course the gun was used at the end. That’s so cliché, so predictable,” they say.

So these writers who want to avoid cliché often opt for randomness, because randomness is not predictable. But after teaching hundreds of students over the years I have noticed something about my students who desperately want to be different – they are all “different” in exactly the same way. They create, ironically, the same clichés. In their stories, the guy will not get the girl. In their stories, characters are quirky. In their stories, the main character dies at the end. Their stories are dark – no happy endings for them. Their stories present random scenes that go nowhere and are awkward because, “That’s the way life is.” These are the clichés of the avant-garde, the clichés of those who wish to be simply “different.”

These writers never seem to ask themselves why the more mainstream clichés exist – they chalk it all up to lazy writing or rose-colored glasses. Sometimes it is. They are not completely wrong about that. But it is no less lazy than a series of random events and dark, quirky characters that do not serve a story function. (Making the writer feel “original” is not a real story function.)

Hitchcock talks about want to avoid a cliché in his classic film North by Northwest. In the story, the main character, played by Cary Grant, is being pursued by the bad guys who are trying to kill him. In one scene, the bad guys try to kill Cary Grant in an open field using a crop-dusting airplane.

Peter Bogdanovich asked Hitchcock about this in a 1963 interview:

How did you get the idea for the plane sequence?

This comes under the heading of avoiding the clichés. The cliché of that kind of scene is in The Third Man. Under a street lamp, in a medieval setting, black cat slithers by, somebody opens a blind and looks out, eerie music. Now, what is the antithesis of this? Nothing! No music, bright sunshine, and nothing. Now put a man in a business suit in this setting.

What’s funny to me is that Hitchcock both used the cliché and avoided it. He knew he needed a scene where the character was isolated and alone, where the bad guys try to bump him off. He did not choose not to have the scene, but rather to avoid the cliché trappings of the scene. This is what made the scene an original and a classic.  


An old song lyric goes, “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” Craft is about how well you execute a concept. 


If you want to avoid a cliché first ask honestly why the cliché exists – there may be a good story reason to have it. But then what you do is find a way to get away from the trappings of the cliché.

One way to do that is to choose opposites. This is an old acting trick. They say that when playing a miser stress his generosity. Good actors will often play opposites because it takes their performances away from the cliché. The actor might smile and speak sweetly when the character is seething with anger, for instance. Playing opposites gives characters depth and avoids the cliché. One can always play against a cliché while still understanding its usefulness in telling a particular story. This way one gets the best of both worlds. 


At the very end of his classic film The Apartment, Billy Wilder had guy get the girl and proclaim his love for her. This is a cliché if ever there was one. How did Wilder both use the cliché and avoid it, too?


In the scene the man and women are playing cards together when the man proclaims his love. Does the woman say that she loves him too, throw her arms around him, kiss him and say that she loves him too? No, she does not.


What she does is continue to play cards. The man bears his soul and says again how he feels. Still interested in her cards the woman smiles and says to the guy, “Shut up and deal.” And we know she has feelings for him, too.

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine

in The Apartment.

This is a film classic by one of the best filmmakers in history. He did not run away from the cliché, but he knew just how to soften it, take the gloss of sentiment off it.


Another way to use the cliché while avoiding its trappings is to tell the truth. If the story demands that you have a type of scene you have seen a million times before then ask yourself what might really happen in that situation. Don’t copy what you have seen in the movies, but be as honest to real life as possible. How would a person really act if they were being shot at? How would someone behave if they were trapped somewhere with a bloodthirsty monster? 

Jodie Foster in the basement with the killer as he views her through  night-vision goggles in The Silence of the Lambs.

I remember reading an interview with Ted Tally, screenwriter of The Silence of the Lambs, where he talked about needing get the heroine in the basement with the killer. At first he wanted to avoid the cliché, but he realized that he could not escape the story’s demands. So his job was to find a convincing story reason that compelled the woman to go into the dark basement alone with the killer.

When you are constructing a story, and you introduce a gun in Act One that must be used by Act Three, your job is not to use the gun, but to surprise the audience by how the gun comes back. Maybe it is used by a character that we least suspect would use it. Or you could construct the story so well that the audience forgets all about the gun until it returns.


My point is you don’t avoid the clichés by not using them, but knowing why you might need them to help tell your story and how you might dress them up in new clothing.

My Book FREEMAN Is Out!

  Hey guys, my new book FREEMAN is actually out now.  We had a pre-release last month at TR!CSTER, but now it is available to anyone on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. 

FREEMAN, an original screenplay, is a western about Thomas Freeman a former slave, living out West with his wife and child, building a new life. Accused of stealing, he is forced to become a fugitive. To evade the posse on his trail, he finds himself using the same tricks he used as a runaway slave. Problem is, Freeman's also being hunted by an expert tracker by the name of Cage. Cage's former profession? Slave-catcher. And he knows all the tricks.          
 

The book also includes my notes on how the story was constructed.  As often as possible I like to show you all how the elements of story I write about can be put to practical use.

In my first book INVISIBLE INK I use the script for my short film WHITE FACE to show how the principles of Invisible Ink were applied. And on this blog I often use the work of others as examples. But with FREEMAN you can see how these principles can help in the construction of an entire feature film.

In this book I show how theme/armature can be applied to every aspect of one’s decision-making when writing a story – how one can use armature as a compass that points true north. I hope that I show how these ideas of structure can be used to create an interesting, exciting, emotional and meaningful story. That was the idea. So far people tell me that the book does just that.

Hope some of you find it helpful as well.

-- Brian  

Movies I Like (Redux): Planet of the Apes

"Overall theme leads to characters then on to plot"
-- Rod Serling


This post is a kind of “re-run” of a previous post, but I thought that with the new Planet of the Apes film about to open, it was worth posting again. The original post was about the erroneous, in my opinion, comparison of M. Night Shyamalan to Rod Serling, I have altered this version just a bit to speak only of the original Planet of the Apes.

It would take only a casual glance at my writings to deduce that I’m a huge Rod Serling fan. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are tired of reading about it.  


When I was a very young boy (this would have been 1969 or ‘70), I remember my father speaking with wonder and excitement about a film he’d seen called Planet of the Apes. He spoke with such joy it is possible that my love of film started at that moment.

My Dog Trixie and I in 1970

When I saw the film I was just as impressed as my father had been. It wasn’t until years later that I would know that the film was co-written by Rod Serling—or even who Rod Serling was.


Serling was the creator of an early television classic called The Twilight Zone, a show known for strange happenings and twist endings. But for me what shines through his work is his love of humanity coupled with his profound disappointment that we can be a cruel, self-destructive and greedy species. 

This can be seen even in his work which precedes The Twilight Zone, when he was writing for the live television dramas of the early 1950s. His work spills over with humanity. But for better or worse, because of The Twilight Zone, he has become known as the twist-ending guy.

People who are not practitioners of something are often impressed with the obvious. People who don’t act, for instance, think that crying on demand is good acting. Or that being able to do accents or memorize lines is good acting. Trained actors know different. A lot of work that people don’t notice as easily goes into great acting.

In writing, the twist ending is one of the obvious things that people are very impressed with. But what is often overlooked is that Serling’s endings were linked to the story’s theme—the reason to tell the story.

Serling winning Emmy number four.

Back to his screenplay for the original Planet of the Apes, which is very much like a feature-length Twilight Zone. (By the way, I used to tell people that Planet of the Apes was just a long Twilight Zone, that it had all the same structure, but people said that I was crazy. Then some guy cut a short version of the film and made it into a Twilight Zone and people were surprised how well it worked.)

http://theforbidden-zone.com/media/tzone.shtml

Okay, back to the monkey movie. Planet of the Apes was a film where the twist blew people away.

In the opening of the film an astronaut on a starship tapes a log. In it he talks about how long he’s been away from Earth and how even more time would have passed on Earth because he and his fellow astronaut have been traveling at light speed. Then he says:

“I wonder if Man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who has sent me to the unknown...still makes war against his brother, and lets his neighbor's children starve.”

This is the theme that the entire film explores—are human beings essentially war-like, self-destructive creatures? The story never loses track of this.

So, Taylor, the astronaut, and his fellow travelers crash land on an unknown planet. At one point, as they walk through a desert looking for food and such, they have this exchange:

LANDON (heatedly): You thought life on Earth was meaningless. You despised people. So what did you do? You ran away.

TAYLOR: No, not quite, Landon. I'm a bit of a seeker myself. But my dreams are a lot emptier than yours. (pause) I can't get rid of the idea that somewhere in the Universe there must be a creature superior to man.

There it is again. Human beings are not so great.

Later, intelligent apes with the power of speech capture Taylor. On this planet, human beings are primitive brutes that cannot speak (Taylor was injured during his capture and cannot talk). One of the apes, Dr. Zaius, talks to another in front of Taylor’s cage:

ZAIUS: Men are a nuisance. They outgrow their own food supply in the forest and migrate to our green belts and ravage our crops. The sooner they're exterminated, the better.

Here it is again. Humans are self-destructive. But this time out of the mouth of someone other than Taylor. Now Taylor finds himself trying to argue on the side of humanity.

This point of view is consistently stated throughout the film.

At the end of the film, Taylor escapes the apes and this strange planet only to discover the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. He has been on Earth the entire time. Humans have destroyed the Earth. This “twist” is right in line with what the film has been saying the whole time. We brought about our own destruction by way of a nuclear war.




If the three acts can be defined as Proposal, Argument, and Conclusion, then we can look at the tape log at the beginning of the film as a proposal. And the second act as the argument when the opening statement or proposal debated. So the conclusion of the film is proof positive of what the film has been saying all along.

This is not just a trick—it is storycraft.


Serling’s stories are timeless and they matter. In the ‘60s, when he wrote the film, the cold war was raging and people felt like any minute the world might end by our own hand.

Today, although it is still a possibility, we are slightly less worried about the nuclear threat and more an environmental one. But it doesn’t matter what the method of possible destruction is, only that we may be the ones ultimately responsible.

 Great stories are never just timely, they are timeless.


Rod Serling was so much more than a writer of twist endings. He was an artist and a craftsman. His writing was so good that it still inspires filmmakers today. I wonder if this new film Rise of the Planet of the Apes will employ as much storycraft. Will there be a strong underlying theme that can be seen, and felt, throughout...or will it be an excuse to show cool-looking CGI apes?