In belated observation of Día de los Muertos, here’s an appreciation for the idiosyncratic storytelling of Robert Rodriguez’s Mariachi trilogy, a neo-Western action series that emerged from the indie-cinema scene of the 1990s and can only be deemed, by current Hollywood standards, an anti-franchise. The movies and the manner in which they were made have a lot to teach us about what it means to be creative—and how to best practice creativity.
Before the shared cinematic universe became the holy grail of Hollywood, the coup d’éclat for any aspiring franchise—and we can probably credit Star Wars for this—was the trilogy.
In contrast with serialized IPs (James Bond and Jason Voorhees, for instance), the trilogy came to be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as something “complete”—a story arc with a tidy three-act design—and, accordingly, many filmmakers have leaned into this assumption, exaggerating a given series’ creative development post factum with their All part of the grand plan! assurances.
This peculiar compulsion we’ve cultivated in recent decades—storytellers and audiences alike—to reverse-engineer a “unified whole” from a series of related narratives, each of which developed independently and organically, is antithetical to how creativity works, and even to what storytelling is about.
Nowhere is the fluidity of the creative process on greater, more glorious display than in the experimental trilogy—that is, when a low-budget indie attains such commercial success, it begets a studio-financed remake that simultaneously functions as a de facto sequel, only to then be followed by a creatively emboldened third film that completely breaks from the established formula in favor of presenting an ambitiously gonzo epic. Trilogies in this mode—and, alas, it’s pretty exclusive club—include Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, George Miller’s Mad Max, and Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi.
A film student at the University of Texas at Austin in the early nineties, Rodriguez self-financed El Mariachi with a few thousand dollars he’d earned as a medical lab rat; the project wasn’t meant to be much more than a modest trial run at directing a feature film that he’d hoped to perhaps sell to the then-burgeoning Spanish-language home-video market. He reasoned that practical experience would be the best teacher, and if he could sell El Mariachi, it would give him the confidence and funds to produce yet more projects—increasingly ambitious and polished efforts—that would allow him to make a living doing what he loved. He had no aspirations of power lunches at The Ivy or red-carpet premieres at Mann’s Chinese Theatre, only pursuing the art of cinematic storytelling—not necessarily Hollywood filmmaking, a different beast—to the fullest extent possible.
If you want to be a filmmaker and you can’t afford film school, know that you don’t really learn anything in film school anyway. They can never teach you how to tell a story. You don’t want to learn that from them anyway, or all you’ll do is tell stories like everyone else. You learn to tell stories by telling stories. And you want to discover your own way of doing things.
In school they also don’t teach you how to make a movie when you have no money and no crew. They teach you how to make a big movie with a big crew so that when you graduate you can go to Hollywood and get a job pulling cables on someone else’s movie.
Robert Rodriguez, Rebel without a Crew, or, How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player (New York: Plume, 1996), xiii–xiv
They don’t teach a lot of things about Hollywood in film school, like how so many of the industry’s power brokers—from producers and studio execs to agents and managers—are altogether unqualified for their jobs. These folks think they understand cinematic storytelling because they’ve watched movies their entire lives, but they’ve never seriously tried their hand at screenwriting or filmmaking. Accordingly, the town’s power structure is designed to keep its screenwriters and filmmakers subordinate, to make sure the storytellers understand they take their creative marching orders from people who are themselves utterly mystified by the craft (not that they’d ever admit to that).
It’s the only field I know of whereby the qualified authorities are entirely subservient to desk-jockey dilettanti, but I suppose that’s what happens when a subjective art form underpins a multibillion-dollar industry. Regardless, that upside-down hierarchy comes from a place of deep insecurity on both ends of the totem pole, and is in no way conducive to creativity, hence the premium on tried-and-true brands over original stories, on blockbusters over groundbreakers. As I discovered the hard way—more on that in a minute—Hollywood is arguably the last place any ambitiously imaginative storyteller ought to aspire to be. Rodriguez seemed to understand that long before he ever set foot in L.A.:
Low-budget movies put a wall in front of you and only creativity will allow you to figure out how to get around that wall. The less money and/or resources you have, the more you are forced to be creative. And what is a movie, anyway? A completely creative endeavor. Anything you can do to get away from the things that aren’t important, the better chance you have of being truly creative.
ibid., 175
Right. Accordingly, when a talented outsider like Rodriguez walks through the studio gates, skilled and confident and entirely self-reliant, Hollywood sees in him someone who will model a new creative direction they can (hopefully) codify and franchise—’cause it ain’t like they got any bright ideas of their own—as they did with Miller and Raimi before him, and again in the 1990s with Rodriguez and his contemporaries Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, among others. As such, before Rodriguez could sell his self-made debut feature to the Mexican marketplace, El Mariachi was acquired by Columbia Pictures, where it became a film-festival darling and box-office success right here in America, launching his career.
El Mariachi (1993)
Rodriguez wouldn’t have identified El Mariachi as such when he made it, but its narrative is what Save the Cat! would classify as Dude with a Problem, about an itinerant young musician (Carlos Gallardo) who wanders into a small Mexican town looking for work and soon becomes the victim of mistaken identity: An escaped convict, dressed in black and carrying a guitar case full of guns, is systematically revenge-killing the henchman of the regional drug lord, Moco (Peter Marquardt), responsible for his imprisonment. All-out war on the streets ensues, with the innocent Mariachi running—and sometimes gunning—for his life. Mariachi is given shelter by a tough-but-sexy bar owner, Dominó (Consuelo Gómez), who also happens to be the object of Moco’s unrequited affection.
Moco, incidentally, is Spanish for “booger,” which is absolutely consistent with everything about El Mariachi, an unabashedly juvenile shoot-’em-up that invokes every genre cliché imaginable, yet is nonetheless directed with such giddy panache, such a singular point of view, it’s impossible to resist its B-movie charm. Rodriguez cites Escape from New York as the movie that inspired him to be a filmmaker, and like so much of John Carpenter’s work, what El Mariachi lacks in nuanced characterization it more than compensates for with budget-stretching creative ingenuity. In Rodriguez’s hands, every limitation somehow becomes a boon, like casting non-actors in all the parts, including his fellow lab rat Marquardt, a Texan who couldn’t speak Spanish and had to be spoon-fed his dialogue as he delivered it:
I didn’t want the [villain] to be Mexican; there’s enough bad guy Mexicans in movies. I wanted the bad guy to be an American drug lord who had fled the states [sic], set up shop in a small Mexican town, and took it over, barely speaking the language.
ibid., 21
El Mariachi is a true exploitation film, a movie made with the resources Rodriguez had available to him; scenes were explicitly written around props and locations he already had as opposed to ones he aspired to obtain. Mistakes during filming—like inadvertently overlooking the need for a shot of Mariachi paying for a coconut he purchases from a vendor in the street—were either retroactively justified (Gallardo’s voiceover explains the coconut was a gift from the city to welcome incoming strangers), or simply consciously ignored on-the-fly:
Since it was so hot, [Azul] kept taking his leather vest off between shots. In one sequence he forgot to put it back on. . . . Azul asked if we should reshoot the scene and he’d put the vest back on. I told him it wasn’t worth wasting film on something like that and that if people noticed it, that means they’re probably bored and we’ve lost the battle so we might as well keep going.
ibid., 42
Audiences weren’t bored—quite the contrary. The film was so successful, talk soon turned to remaking it in English on a proper budget, possibly with Antonio Banderas assuming the role of the Mariachi. Disney of all family-friendly studios was interested in producing the project—I suppose it was a different time—and on April 1, 1992, appropriately enough, Rodriguez was summoned by a few fools from Steel Pictures on the Burbank lot to entertain their vision for El Mariachi, take two:
I met with Chris Meledandri and his crew, Jordi Ross from Spain and Mark something from Chicago. I talked to them about the Mariachi remake and they offered their take on it. Chris Meledandri wants to know if we can make him an electric guitar player and set it in Texas. He also told me his idea of having Mariachi end up on an Indian reservation and being nursed back to health and trained in fighting techniques by a mentor, so he will be prepared for the big battle. He asked about the culture and if they have an old ancient way of fighting, kind of like karate, something hand to hand, and if maybe the mentor could teach him these things. They started talking about the Hero Paradigm (I think I read that in Wehmeyer’s class at UT–Austin) and how to mold Mariachi to fit it. Chris asked Mark to run through the beats of that paradigm. Mark went through the beats effortlessly as if this were required study before applying for a job at this studio. (I found out later that it is required reading around here.) They remarked on the Mariachi’s hand being shot and noted that in these movies the near fatal injury to the hero is usually placed earlier in the film “… so maybe if we moved that up a few beats…” they said.
ibid., 105–06
Oh, Jesus. It isn’t hyperbole to say I struggled to transcribe that paragraph through an involuntary and irrepressible case of PTSD tremors.
When, as an aspiring young screenwriter, I first started getting attention in Hollywood, it was from a genre project I’d written on spec called Leapman, about a character born on February 29, 1896, who, through an act of black magick that induced his premature birth, is endowed with a prolonged lifespan: He ages only a single year for every four that pass. As such, when we meet him in present-day New York, where he grew up over a period of many decades, he appears as a person in his thirties, but has a breadth of knowledge drawn from over a century of experiences and mentorship under such real-life New Yorkers as Charles Atlas, Harry Houdini, James Weldon Johnson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Meyer Lansky. The concept generated a ton of excitement, scoring me managers and meetings and even a deal to do Leapman as a comic-book series with Top Cow. However…
I received a lot of terrible development notes like the ones Rodriguez fielded on the El Mariachi remake, only I didn’t have the confidence or experience to protect my concept; instead, I tried to make all those bad ideas work, until eventually, after countless enthusiasm-draining drafts, we improved the script into a failure. I’d hoped at the time to simply go back to the original version, the one I’d written without any expert feedback and about which we were all so initially passionate, but doing so would’ve been a tacit admission on the part of my advisers that the script had been better off before their input, therefore shelving the project outright—deeming it “conceptually flawed” and relegating it to the proverbial drawer—was preferable to subjecting their own judgment to uncomfortable interrogation. All these years later, I sometimes still think about revisiting Leapman.
Rodriguez, however, didn’t make that same mistake with the Mariachi. He wound up going with Columbia, the studio that had distributed El Mariachi, and they agreed to do another Mariachi that would pick up where the first one left off, but still function as its own standalone action movie. “Kind of like what For a Few Dollars More was to A Fistful of Dollars. Same character, different adventure” (ibid., 160). The result was Desperado, with Banderas now assuming the role of the Mariachi.
Desperado (1995)
The (admittedly slim) plot of the second film is virtually identical to that of the original, only the story model shifts from Dude with a Problem to Golden Fleece, with the Mariachi now operating as an “avenging angel,” traveling from town to town with his guitar case full of guns and wiping out entire barrooms of drug dealers in his search for the kingpin, Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), the last man Mariachi holds responsible for the death of Dominó. During the indeterminate amount of time that’s passed since the events of the first film, the Mariachi has become something of a mythic bogeyman in the Mexican underworld, with tall tales of his vengeful exploits traveling far and wide across the countryside.
Desperado is a series of set pieces—spectacularly balletic gunfights in bars and on streets and across rooftops—where once again the Mariachi is aided by a voluptuous local business owner, Carolina (Salma Hayek). While Desperado is far glossier and ambitiously kinetic than its predecessor—working with an actual budget and professional actors made all the difference (and Banderas and Hayek make for possibly the sexiest screen couple ever)—Rodriguez in no way “goes Hollywood” with the narrative, as the execs at Steel Pictures had helpfully suggested a few years earlier. He makes no attempt to give Mariachi a conventional hero’s journey, refusing to explain how he learned to fight so proficiently, or under which circumstances he acquired his faithful allies (Steve Buscemi and Gallardo, the original Mariachi now recast in an entirely new role), or even what his goddamn name is! Rodriguez stops to explain none of that.
Even more delightfully baffling are the things Rodriguez does choose to pause the narrative for, like a scene in which Tarantino shows up at the bad guys’ bar and proceeds to tell a joke that has nothing to do with the story, doesn’t advance the plot, and consumes no less than two-and-a-half minutes—a cinematic eon—of screen time! As a film editor—and I’ve cut TV spots, short films, and independent features—I can assure you that entire bit would’ve been a no-brainer candidate for deletion, but Rodriguez just didn’t give a shit. And the thing is: He was right. I belly-laugh at that scene every time I watch the movie. Desperado would be a lesser film without it. It’s great precisely because it’s such an unconventional way to allocate precious screen real estate in a studio action movie.
There’s also a wonderful suspense sequence at Carolina’s bookstore, in which Bucho stops by for a quietly menacing conversation over a cup of coffee, and the wounded Mariachi is forced to duck out of sight behind the counter, trying as quietly as possible to load his handgun. It’s a masterclass in editing and sound design, and you’re just waiting for the moment it erupts into the long-awaited confrontation between hero and villain…
… but Bucho bids farewell to Carolina and exits before becoming alerted to Mariachi’s presence. Here Rodriguez proves equally adept at moments of pin-drop-silent suspense as he is with explosive action. The flawed premise of the scene, however, only becomes apparent upon repeat viewing. We learn at the end of the movie that Mariachi and Bucho, two men who up till this point have only heard of one another, are estranged brothers; they had no idea it was each other they’d been looking for all this time. Therefore, the whole prior sequence with Mariachi hiding under the cash register is predicated on the somewhat credulity-straining premise that at no point did he, like, recognize his own brother’s voice.
Even stranger still, when Mariachi and Bucho do have their face-to-face showdown at Bucho’s fortified compound, complete with a phalanx of armed thugs, Mariachi draws his guns and blows away Bucho, but the screen then immediately fades to white and Rodriguez transitions to the movie’s dénouement. How the hell did the lone Mariachi, surrounded by Bucho’s army of bodyguards, manage to walk away victorious? Rodriguez leaves it up to us to ponder. He has the audacity, in a shoot-’em-up he’d originally planned to title Pistolero, to skip right over the climactic gunfight without explanation or apology!
And yet somehow, in defiance of all conventional wisdom, of all Hollywood’s sacrosanct storytelling formulas, the movie works anyway. Desperado proved to have such a long shelf life on home video, in fact, that half a dozen years later Columbia inquired about a possible sequel. But if the studio execs thought they knew what to expect from Rodriguez, given the narrative template he’d established, they were about to be thrown for a loop by what came next.
Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
If the plots of the first two movies are all but irrelevant—flimsy excuses for a series of chase scenes and shootouts, heavily reliant on coincidence and illogic—Once Upon a Time in Mexico is almost entirely byzantine machinations and conspiratorial alliances, as a nihilistic CIA agent, Sands (Johnny Depp), exploits a planned coup d’état for the purposes of destabilizing the country. The extremely simplified gist of the plot is this: A Mexican drug lord, Barillo (Willem Dafoe), has hired a corrupt military general, Marquez, to assassinate El Presidente on the Day of the Dead. Sands is working behind the scenes to ensure Barillo’s coup happens as intended, but in the immediate aftermath, both Barillo and Marquez are then themselves to be executed, thereby creating a chaotic power vacuum.
To accomplish his agenda of catastrophic political upheaval, Sands has recruited to kill Barillo an ex–FBI agent (Rubén Blades) with a personal grudge against him, and enlists the Mariachi (Banderas again) to take out Marquez as an act of revenge against the general for murdering Carolina and their young daughter years earlier. (Hayek is seen in periodic flashbacks throughout Once Upon a Time in Mexico to the more conventional Desperado sequel Rodriguez eschewed, as if to say, “Was this the third Mariachi movie you were expecting?”)
Once again, Rodriguez shifts genres, this time presenting a Superhero narrative in which the Mariachi is elevated to such grandiose mythic proportions—and Banderas is given so little dialogue to speak—he comes off as an utter cipher. Ostensibly the hero of the movie, it’s hard to relate to Mariachi this time around, or to glean his intentions—self-serving or noble?—from scene to scene. Our association with the character from the earlier two adventures doesn’t offer much orientation, either; rather, it only fuels a nagging sensation that something about him is off…
It takes a while to put your finger on it, but Rodriguez seems to be suggesting—if never quite explicitly stating—that Mariachi is literally dead, that he’s a ghost or revenant, much the same as Clint Eastwood’s Stranger from High Plains Drifter (1973) or Preacher from Pale Rider (1985). In the flashback to when Carolina is murdered, Mariachi sustains what sure as hell looks like a fatal gunshot wound to the center of his chest… yet he inexplicably survives?
Perhaps he doesn’t. Take note, when you watch Mexico, of how often lines like “If he’s still living…” and “In a way, you’re already dead…” are uttered. Mariachi himself more or less confirms his literal exanimation at the climax of the film: When asked by General Marquez what became of Carolina, Mariachi replies, “She died.” Marquez then asks about their daughter, and again Mariachi says, “She died.” But when the general asks, “You?”, Mariachi simply says, “Dead.” Did the nameless avenging angel of Desperado transcend into a literal avenging angel here?
Or—more likely, I would argue—is it that nothing about the Mariachi trilogy is meant to be taken literally?
This saga, such as it is, is so full of ambiguities, from its obscure timeframe to its continually augmented backstories to its funhouse-mirror representation of Mexico, it’s hard to mine it for logical coherence from scene to scene let alone film to film. There isn’t an overarching narrative across these three movies, but if there’s a thematic throughline that develops over the course of them, perhaps it’s this: The Mariachi trilogy about how misunderstandings (El Mariachi) can mutate into folklore (Desperado), and how folklore, through persistent retellings over time and space, evolves into legend (Once Upon a Time in Mexico).
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Across the Mariachi trilogy, Rodriguez moves actors around like action figures on a playset, recasting the same faces in different roles (Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo) and even the same role with different faces (Gallardo and Banderas), entirely unconcerned with continuity from one adventure to the next.
Sure, why not? After all, that’s the way legends, like the flood myth, proliferate: Familiar elements are appropriated by different cultures and repurposed to serve different mythic narratives, always recurring in some form or another, like strands of DNA encoded into the story itself—mutated, perhaps, but still recognizable.
Rodriguez also never, ever lets real-world logic get in the way of a thrilling set piece. Take, for instance, the sequence in which Mariachi and Carolina wake up in a honeymoon suite to discover they are manacled to one another by way of a heavy-gauge chain. They immediately find themselves under siege by armed gunmen and must an effect a daring escape down the side of a five-floor building, swinging to the street one story at a time as bullets stitch the sheer concrete wall to which they cling. Except…
How, exactly, did the bad guys manage to fetter them while they slept in the first place… and why not simply kill them then? It doesn’t make sense. But, once again, Rodriguez doesn’t worry about that, because, as with Azul’s disappearing/reappearing vest, if the audience is taken out of the story by such a fleeting, inconsequential detail, that means they’re probably bored and the battle is lost, anyway. That these movies are filled with story choices and scenic details that don’t always add up or withstand scrutiny after the adrenaline rush they produce subsides isn’t a flaw of the filmmaking, it’s a feature.
Because it’s the very gaps in a narrative—the things left unaddressed, even and especially when they aren’t self-evident—that leave room for myths to grow. As it travels, a story gets embellished for dramatic effect, or perhaps to explain some ambiguous or undeveloped aspect, but that has a way of only creating yet more questions, contradictions, ambiguities, or continuity errors. If you try to make literal sense of a myth, be it the Homeric epics or the Mariachi trilogy, you’re missing the point entirely; it isn’t a cerebral exercise. It’s a fable to be experienced, not a code to be deciphered through meticulous fan forensics; there are no Easter eggs or “spoilers” in the Mariachi trilogy over which to obsess. Imagine that.
Before our postnarrative television and interconnected mega-franchises trained us to prize continuity over catharsis, to expect and demand immaculate canonical oversight by the creative custodians of our favorite pop-culture fantasies, we used to delight in the way fiction would inspire our imagination by suggesting peripheral details and plot points rather than spelling them out. Consider, for example, the granddaddy of the contemporary blockbuster:
The success of “Star Wars” has obviated a lot of its original virtues. Much of the fun of watching the film for the first time, now forever inaccessible to us, was in the slow unveiling of its universe: Swords made of lasers! A Bigfoot who co-pilots a spaceship! A swing band of ’50s U.F.O. aliens! Mr. Lucas refuses to explain anything, keeping the viewer as off-balance as a jet-lagged tourist in Benares or Times Square. We don’t see the film’s hero until 17 minutes in; we’re kept watching not by plot but by novelty, curiosity.
Subsequent sequels, tie-in novels, interstitial TV shows, video games and fan fiction have lovingly ground this charm out of existence with exhaustive, literal-minded explication: Every marginal background character now has a name and a back story, every offhand allusion a history.
Tim Kreider, “We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore,” Opinion, New York Times, December 20, 2019
And it isn’t merely that all those curiosity-provoking gaps, from the Clone Wars to Boba Fett to the Kessel Run, got plugged; inconsistencies were systematically rectified in pursuit of an impeccably unified storyworld. The original three Star Wars, all by themselves, are chock full of plot points that don’t neatly mate up with things said earlier or details revealed later. But rather than let those incongruities stand as mythopoeic artifacts, scores of novels and prequels and “special editions” were produced in an effort to reconcile the diegetic continuity. (Makes you wonder how unconsciously bored with the saga we’ve become after eight zillion viewings that we’re more concerned with how its dots connect than what it’s about.)
I ask you: Have those endless spinoffs made Star Wars more mythic… or less?
Desperado, Why Don’t You Come To Your Senses?
The Mariachi trilogy does have some imperfections worth criticizing, but those are almost exclusively confined to its dubious moral imagination. Wildly entertaining though they are, these movies are absolutely guilty of all the questionable tropes I’ve spent the past few years denouncing. In each one, the Mariachi is motivated to bloodthirsty vengeance by the violent death of the woman he loves at the hand of the villain, with whom she is intimated to share a sexual history. Yeah. Not great.
And since the Mexico of the Mariachi trilogy is an utterly lawless place, save for its corrupt military, the only justice, as it were, is vigilantism. Public institutions in these movies aren’t dysfunctional; they’re nonexistent. Mariachi is on a mission to eradicate all the drug dealers in the country, and yet narcotics trafficking is explicitly established as the one and only enterprise supporting the economy. After all the cartels are gone… then what?
That’s yet another question, to his discredit this time, Rodriguez bothers to neither ask nor answer. I understand this is a pulp-fiction fantasy, but the film’s few attempts at moral philosophizing (“It’s easier to pull the trigger than play guitar, easier to destroy than create”) are really just obligatory lip-service. In the Dark Knight trilogy, Christopher Nolan at least occasionally compelled Batman to seriously wrestle with the self-serving rationalization and unintended consequences of his vigilantism.
But when violence has no cost—and certainly when it’s played exclusively for laughs and/or vicarious thrills, as it is in the Mariachi trilogy—there are no consequences to confront. And while it is manifestly apparent Rodriguez in no way means for us to take the cartoonishly hyperviolent action he stages and shoots with such kinetic verve seriously, I’m honestly not sure if that makes the gory carnage in which he delights somehow more aesthetically justifiable or less. Such is why storytelling tools like the Hero’s Journey, though admittedly misused and abused by Hollywood, still have value—not as one-size-fits-all plot formulas, but as implements for responsible creativity: When applied with moral imagination, those programs can help us scrutinize the values unconsciously encoded in our narratives.
Yet while the Mariachi trilogy does not challenge the hypermasculine tropes of the action genre—it openly embraces them—that isn’t an altogether unforgivable sin. With the Mariachi, Rodriguez took an archetypal antihero, the journeyman warrior, that had been the subject of countless stories across many cultures—Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy (1964–66), Miller’s The Road Warrior (1981), Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981)—and gave him Mexican representation. Consider that Desperado was released the same year as action movies such as Die Hard with a Vengeance (starring Bruce Willis), Braveheart (Mel Gibson), Batman Forever (Val Kilmer), Judge Dredd (Sylvester Stallone), Under Siege 2 (Steven Seagal), Waterworld (Kevin Costner), GoldenEye (Pierce Brosnan), and Heat (Al Pacino and Robert De Niro); it offered a hero—to say nothing of a cast (save Buscemi)—of alterative ethnicity, one woefully underrepresented up through that point.
Back to the House That Love Built
Rodriguez made the original film with the modest intention of seeing it released via the Spanish home-video market; instead, it became a theatrical trilogy seen the world over, as mythic in its own right as its very subject. He conquered Hollywood not by playing the game their way—the mistake I made—but by doing what he wanted to do, the way he wanted to do it, without anyone’s help or input. That seems like such an irretrievably far-gone concept for an industry—and an audience—increasingly influenced by the homogenous creativity of the Marvel-industrial complex.
But it is also a hopeful reminder to me, having made a mid-career course-correction from screenwriter to novelist, that I consciously absented myself from all the bullshit so I could realize my full creative potential by trusting my instincts and telling the stories I want to tell, the way I think they should be told. Finally having the wisdom to recognize that and the courage to do it has proven to be its own kind of success. I hope, like Rodriguez, you figured that out far sooner than I did, my fellow creatives, but at least be assured that it’s never too late.
Good luck to you in following whatever passion you have. You will most probably succeed in attaining it. And if you don’t, you’ll find that if it’s really your passion you are following then you will find enormous fulfillment and incredible satisfaction from at least trying.
Rodriguez, Rebel without a Crew, 195
I’ll drink a piss-warm Chango to that.
>These folks think they understand cinematic storytelling because they’ve watched movies their entire lives, but they’ve never seriously tried their hand at screenwriting or filmmaking.
I’ve had a body my entire life
That means I’m qualified to practice medicine, right?
Exactly, Dell! The analogy I’ve always used is this one: I’ve ridden in cars my entire life, but if yours breaks down, don’t call me for help — because I don’t know the first goddamn thing about how they work!
As Rodriguez says, you learn to tell stories by telling stories, not having them told to you. Watching movies for entertainment is not the same as studying them for technique. I recall when I was developing Leapman, I had to listen to an Asshole Who Shall Remain Nameless lecture me on how character arcs work. Using Avengers, which at the time had only recently been released, as an example, he helpfully explained to me that Tony Stark’s arc in that movie was to go from selfish to selfless, because Iron Man sacrifices himself at the climax of the movie, something he never would have done at the beginning.
I bit my tongue — I wish I hadn’t — and didn’t bother to explain to Nameless Asshole that, no, that was Tony’s arc in the first Iron Man movie. (In Iron Man 2, he doesn’t have an arc because the screenwriters saddled him with too many issues and didn’t know how to resolve any of them. That is very poorly structured screenplay indeed.) None of the individual heroes had arcs in Avengers — that was what their introductory solo movies were for; instead, it’s the team itself that arcs: The Avengers go from a dysfunctional group to a functioning unit. But I didn’t bother to school my adviser because — again — the Hollywood power structure is such that the storytellers must always defer to the pencil-pushers. I can only imagine that’s gotten worse now that the industry has moved on from the Epoch of the Blockbuster that Lucas and Spielberg ushered to the Epoch of the Mega-Franchise pioneered by Kevin Feige.
>The less money and/or resources you have, the more you are forced to be creative
Called it!
> trained in fighting techniques by a mentor, so he will be prepared for the big battle. He asked about the culture and if they have an old ancient way of fighting, kind of like karate, something hand to hand, and if maybe the mentor could teach him these things
The sad thing is… the fact that Meledandri asked questions is actually relatively progressive. Not progressive enough to keep me from cringing, of course
>the story model shifts from Dude with a Problem to Golden Fleece
As you’ve recommended
> flawed premise of the scene, however, only becomes apparent upon repeat viewing
Like Raiders of the Lost Ark, and many others
–
I see why you like Rodriguez and his movies
Rodriguez broke traditional rules about his career trajectory. His movies broke traditional rules about storytelling. In both cases they were successful, because Rodriguez knew the rules and the consequences well enough to break them, and because limitations forced him to be creative
Let’s contrast this w/ Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Kerry and Kevin Conran (https://www.seanpcarlin.com/sky-captain/)
Sky Captain broke traditional narrative by not having a hero/villain confrontation, among numerous ways. However, these breaks, I’ve argued, hurt the movie and left the audience disappointed, even if we couldn’t fully articulate why
And afterwards, the Conran brothers more of less gave up. According to IMDB.com Kevin made one short film after this (Gumdrop) and one visual effect credit. Kerry has smattering of other credits
Side note: Rodriguez was forced to resign from the Directors Guild of America when he gave Frank Miller co-director credit on Sin City. Because of this, he was not allowed to direct John Carter. He was replaced by Kerry Conran, who was replaced by Jon Favreau. The project fell through, Andrew Stanton convinced Disney to acquire the rights, and he directed the final product
And you should look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rodriguez%27s_unrealized_projects . It’s… interesting…
Hey, Dell!
When my two high-school friends and I made that amateur sequel to The Lost Boys on VHS-C, we knew absolutely nothing about screenwriting or filmmaking. It was only after I went to film school and learned about the production process that I realized we had intuitively landed on all the steps required to make a movie, from formatting the screenplay to location scouting to storyboarding to camera set-ups. We learned everything just by doing it, and by asking ourselves at each step what was required now.
The mistake we made on Lost Boys II — not to rehash that old anecdote, which can be read in full here — was that we bit off way more than we could chew. Trying to produce a feature-length screenplay was simply too quixotic for a bunch of inexperienced seventeen-year-olds with camcorders. We should’ve started much smaller, and worked our way up to more ambitiously complex projects. But live and learn.
And you are 100% right about Raiders of the Lost Ark. I am an enormous Indiana Jones fan (Leapman, in fact, takes direct influence from Lucas’ The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which I am considering doing an entire post on next year for its 30th anniversary), but that first movie is full of all sorts of, shall we say, storytelling gaps. For instance: Indy and Marion manage to escape from the Well of the Souls through some backdoor that leads straight to the excavation site… so why was the Well of the Souls never discovered when those catacombs were unearthed? The entrance was right there in plain sight!
Tons more questions abound: Why is Sallah walking freely around the dig site when, last we saw, he’d been marched away at gunpoint by Nazi soldiers? How did Indy survive that ride atop the submarine — did it never submerge? And what was his plan to escape from that Mediterranean island after he rescued Marion? There are a lot of things in those movies that, as we used to say in the ’90s, make you go Hmmm…
I don’t want to veer off on an Indy tangent, but I’ll just say here one of the reasons I never get tired of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade no matter how many times I see it is because it is a breathtakingly elegant piece of storytelling from start to finish. There really aren’t any “cracks” in that narrative; it’s close to a “perfect” movie. Even at the beginning, when Indy translates the Grail tablet’s closing passage — “… where the cup that holds the blood of Jesus Christ resides forever” — the storytellers are setting up the “twist” ending: that the Grail can’t be removed from the temple. Indy — and, by extension, the audience — assumes the passage refers to the cup’s hiding place, but a less-arrogant interpretation would’ve made it clear from the start that you can find the Grail — perhaps — but you ain’t leavin’ with it!
I completely agree with your assessment of Sky Captain, which is such an interesting creative failure… and such a tragic Hollywood downfall story. The hero/villain confrontation issue is a fascinating one — a subject that deserves its own post. (Perhaps you should pitch the idea to Mythcreants? I mean, you’re always welcome to post here, but they have a much bigger readership.) Recall that William Shatner and Ricardo Montalbán don’t share a single face-to-face scene in The Wrath of Khan, and yet the movie is arguably the most epic of all the Trek features. The Voyage Home has no corporeal antagonist, and yet is was, up till that point, the most commercially successful; by breaking with the established formula, the filmmakers brought the franchise to new heights of creativity and popularity.
For me, Ghostbusters II is a case study in the pitfalls of eschewing a traditional villain. In many ways, Ghostbusters II is a superior film to the original — it’s more emotionally mature and possesses greater moral imagination — but the screenwriters painted themselves into a corner by selecting a noncorporeal antagonist (the River of Slime) and then relied on Double Hocus Pocus to resolve the issue (as I wrote about here and here). Vigo the Carpathian gave the Ghostbusters a physical enemy to fight… but he had absolutely nothing to do with the slime.
I tend to think that had El Mariachi gone straight to Spanish home video as originally intended, or, alternatively, had Desperado failed and somehow prematurely ended Rodriguez’s directorial career (though even that speculative scenario seems unlikely given that the movie was made for $7 million, ten times less than Sky Captain‘s bloated budget), that wouldn’t have “broken” Rodriguez. I don’t get the sense, reading Rebel without a Crew, that he was ever after Hollywood validation. He just wanted to make movies, and I think he would’ve kept doing that one way or the other. To review his filmography — both the produced movies and unrealized projects — is to see that he clearly doesn’t give a shit about critical or industrial accolades; you don’t win Oscars making movies like Spy Kids, Sin City, and Machete. He doesn’t even appear to be jealous that his best buddy, Tarantino, gets all the love from the critics; I think Rodriguez is just that secure in himself. God bless him for it.
I’ll even wager that Tarantino sometimes wishes he could indulge in his more pulpy sensibilities without fear of critical reprisal; I suspect that’s why QT occasionally dips a toe in the pool where Rodriguez swims, joining him on such projects as Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Grindhouse. But Tarantino likely never fully loses sight of his lofty position — both a privilege and a burden — in the pantheon of Important Film Directors; he doesn’t have the same luxury of developing B-movie projects like Predators and Red Sonja. There is a certain freedom that comes from being unbeholden to the institutions of Hollywood, from the movie studios to the talent agencies to the entertainment guilds to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to the celebrity tabloids to the film critics. That’s how George Lucas, who also renounced his membership in the DGA, flourished for so many decades. “Anything you can do to get away from the things that aren’t important, the better chance you have of being truly creative.”
As a practicing minimalist, I think the same rule applies to personal happiness: Extricate yourself from the things that aren’t important, and you have a better chance at finding happiness. It’s all about recognizing what adds value to our life, and what doesn’t. When we learn to recognize that everything in our life — every material good we own, every job we take on, every hobby we cultivate, every habit we develop, every relationship we maintain, every text message we answer — costs us in money, time, and/or attention, we become extremely prejudicial about what we invite into our lives. Learning that — and learning to put the principles of minimalism into practice — absolutely changed my life. I am a healthier, happier, more balanced human being for having shut out all the bullshit in favor of spending my money, time, and attention on only the things that matter to me, like my writing, my blogging, my family, my climate activism, and my animal fostering. If it isn’t important — if it doesn’t add measurable and/or identifiable value to your life — let it go.
For those unaware, friend of the blog dellstories has a brand-new article up on Mythcreants. Please consider investing a small amount of your time and attention on “How Useful Are Dave Lerner’s Eight Rules of Writing?”
>William Shatner and Ricardo Montalbán don’t share a single face-to-face scene in The Wrath of Khan
True, but Khan’s and Kirk’s motivations directly feed off each other. Dr. Totenkopf died before Sky Captain had even gotten involved
>A movie like Sky Captain needs a great villain, a great hero-villain confrontation, a great climactic scene where the villain gets a much-deserved comeuppance
Okay, no direct confrontation, but Khan was perhaps the greatest Star Trek villain ever, and his death, quoting from Moby Dick while setting off the Genesis Device, immeasurably superior to the revelation that Dr. Totenkopf had been dead all along. As Jim Steinman wrote and Meat Loaf sang, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”
Dr. Totenkopf was “played” by Sir Laurence Olivier using archived footage and computer graphics. Olivier, like his character, had died some time before. Compare Oliver’s Totenkopf to Montalbán’s Khan. Even though Olivier was the superior actor, Khan was much cooler, more interesting, more menacing, all around better, than Totenkppf
I don’t know if a better villain could have saved Sky Captain, but it certainly would have helped
Oh, 100% agreed re: Khan Noonien Singh. There’s admirably little room for improvement in Nicholas Meyer’s terrific Wrath of Khan screenplay. I might even argue the story is better served for not shoehorning in a conventional mano a mano face-off between hero and villain. Meyer wasn’t trying to make the movie fit within a prescribed adventure-movie formula; rather, he was only trying to tell the best Trek story he could with the resources he had, à la Robert Rodriguez.
The Wrath of Khan is a classic STC! Superhero narrative about a retired legend pulled back into action on account of an old nemesis, and how brilliant the filmmakers were to draw from “Space Seed” — to use that episode as the backstory for their truly cinematic epic. I’m a huge fan of many of the later Trek films (particularly The Voyage Home, The Undiscovered Country, and Generations), but the series never again found a villain quite as compelling as Khan. The Borg Queen might’ve come close, but the screenplay for First Contact — contrary to popular appraisal — is a structural mess; it’s two completely different stories competing with each other for screen time. Many have called First Contact the Next Generation‘s Wrath of Khan, but it lacks the earlier film’s elegant storytelling.
(For my money, Dr. Tolian Soran is a great Trek villain — squarely in the tradition of philosopher-antagonists such as Ricardo Montalbán’s Khan and Christopher Plummer’s Chang, and played with memorable menace by Malcolm McDowell — but I’ve met few people, if any, who share my overwhelming affinity for Generations. I think it’s a far superior Trek feature film than its reputation suggests.)
I haven’t seen Sky Captain since its theatrical release, so it’s hard to speak diagnostically about it. I probably should take another look at it, if for no other reason than you and I can discuss its storytelling choices more deeply and try to extract some lessons from it.
P.S. I found this article on Newsweek this morning that I wanted to share: “‘The Book of Boba Fett’ Explains a Major ‘Return of the Jedi’ Plot Hole.” If this doesn’t emphatically support the point I make under the Hero with a Thousand Faces subheading in the essay above — to say nothing of the central thesis of “In the Multiverse of Madness” — I don’t know what does.
I missed everyone of those. Interesting read, Sean.
Thanks, Jacqui! Perhaps, given what a fan of Westerns you are, you’ll find time over the holidays to sample one or more of the Mariachi movies, all of which are basically self-contained stories that don’t require familiarity with the others. I mean, they certainly exist on the far fringes of the genre — they’re neo-Westerns set in Mexico — but they aspire, in their own way, to the same mythic grandeur as any traditional Western produced by the likes of, say, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, or Kevin Costner. You are always welcome to come back to this post and let us know what you thought of them!
Wishing you a very Happy Thanksgiving!
Fascinating essay, Sean. I love your deep knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject–when you “geek out,” you certainly do it with panache.
There’s a concept you related in film making that has a counterpart in writing novels. Just as having all stories line up perfectly with beat sheets can be too repetitive and sometimes counterproductive (although it’s important to recognize that sometimes it works beautifully, like in Moana), novels can be run through the same mill.
In a way, it’s a good thing that most people’s first novels are crap because by the time I ran mine through enough beta readers to clean up all the overwriting, my voice had been erased. The driving force of the story had been subsumed into accepted structure. And ultimately, that’s okay–like many first attempts, it was far too autobiographical for me to be comfortable with having that out in the world for anyone to see.
However, l try to be sensitive to that sort of thing in other’s books. In one review I wrote recently, for a madcap romp where things just happened one after another-bam!–and then the character dealt with them, I penned something to the effect of “part of me is itching to edit it, but I’m afraid I’d break it.” I think forcing into a predetermined structure would have removed a lot of the charm.
Or for another example, consider Harry Potter. By the time it became a movie, it was already so huge that it was a bit above any desires to remake it and force it into a mold. But I assure you–the entire series could have been written without a single mention of Quidditch. The story would have marched on just fine without it, and that’s often a reason I use to cut.
But people loved Quidditch. I think it was a silly game and in no way deserved the time spent on it. And I would have been wrong.
Maybe we should blazon “Make room for idiosynchrasy” somewhere on our creative and reviewing checklists. : )
What wonderful insights, Cathleen! Thanks for taking the time to share these thoughts.
With respect to my own fiction writing — and I quite recently finished the first draft of a new novel (hence the reason this post was not ready in time for Día de los Muertos as I’d intended) — I plot out my stories beforehand on a beat sheet, but I only use it as a road map, not a blueprint. Having the outline handy gives me the confidence to take detours through the world of my story, and often to take unplanned routes to the same preplanned endpoint. You discover as you write the manuscript that what made sense in a broad-strokes outline doesn’t quite work as you’d envisioned, or can be embellished in a way you hadn’t previously considered, or can be made to pay off something that happened earlier that also wasn’t accounted for in the beat sheet. You’ve got to allow room for moments of inspiration. Dogmatic adherence to a plot diagram or prescriptive paradigm, like the Hero’s Journey, can neuter one’s creative impulse for narrative experimentation and/or idiosyncratic expression.
You mention Harry Potter. When I first got to Hollywood, Sorcerer’s Stone was just being released theatrically, and by the time I was actually able to get some meetings with people in the industry, Chamber of Secrets was out and the town was in the grip of Pottermania. J.K. Rowling had landed upon a “magical formula,” and now Hollywood was doing what it does best: attempting to codify that formula and mass-produce it. And I recall taking all these meetings and pitching the projects I was developing, and the exec or producer or manager across the table from me would say, “No, that’s not gonna work because…” And the “because” always had something to do with the fact that it was too similar to some other property in development, or not similar enough to anything that exec had ever heard of. And then the guy across the table would say, “You know what I’m looking for? The next Harry Potter. A boy who goes to wizard school — what a pitch!”
And even then, young and inexperienced though I was, I thought to myself: Bullshit. If I’d come in here two years ago and pitched you “A boy goes to wizard school,” I wouldn’t have made it any further than that before you shut me down with “No, that’s not gonna work because…” Those execs were enamored with the concept not on its own creative merits, but simply because it had become a billion-dollar franchise overnight. And I remember thinking even then, Wow, you fuckers have no vision. Honestly, Cathleen, I had an early intuition that it was a town full of Monday-morning quarterbacks, and I should’ve listened to my gut — I should have gotten the hell out of Hollywood then! But I kept thinking that eventually I’d find the person who would see the potential in my ideas, just as they were — because that’s how all my favorite movies got made, after all. Only I never did. You have to believe in yourself, and the merits of your own ideas. That’s why Rodriguez was successful: He never needed Hollywood’s help or validation. Those are the only types of creative folks the industry actually respects — the ones who aren’t enamored with Hollywood and don’t need it.
The subject of learning to take and give feedback is something I covered at length in “Writers Groups: The Pros and Cons,” but here’s what I know about that in a nutshell. On taking feedback, often what we get from a beta-reader isn’t a note, but rather a suggestion. “What if your protagonist were secretly a kleptomaniac, and he was stealing from the five-and-dime where he works?” That’s a suggestion — which may or may not be right for your project. Inexperienced writers will either get defensive about a suggestion like that and shut it out, or they’ll try to make it work exactly as prescribed. Neither response is particularly productive.
Instead, a writer needs to learn to suss out the note underpinning the suggestion. The note is this: “The protagonist is insufficiently compelling. He is dull and his job is dull. Consequently, readers are bored.” Once you extract the note from within the suggestion, now you have actionable feedback. You can decide at that point if making him a klepto is the right revision for what you’re trying to achieve, or figure out an altogether different way to address the underlying issue. Early in my career — and this definitely happened on Leapman — I took suggestions without ever peeling them back to get to the note underneath. I was trying to incorporate a lot of random (often wrongheaded) suggestions without ever fixing the fundamental problem that prompted them. So, learning how to take feedback is key.
And once I’d cultivated that skill, I was much better at giving feedback. I would zero-in on some aspect of a script I felt wasn’t working — wasn’t eliciting the intended emotional response from me — then use the tools of the craft to diagnose the problem. So, when I gave feedback, I’d say, Here’s the problem (the note), and here’s one way you might address it (the suggestion). That made me a much better beta-reader, and a much more efficient editor — of both other writers’ materials as well as my own.
There’s one other pitfall to avoid when critiquing a fellow author’s work. When we read a piece of material, our impulse is to rewrite it to conform to exactly the way we would’ve written it. That’s not what a good editor does. A good editor asks: What are the author’s creative intentions for the material, and how do I best help her realize those intentions to their fullest creative potential? In other words: You aren’t there to rewrite the material in your voice, but rather to help the author tell the best story possible in her voice. You’re gut-checking her, not rewriting her. That’s all. Save your voice for your work. You know?
Because when we impose our own creative instincts on someone else’s material, or — worse still — insist that their story conform to a thetical narrative template, that’s when we give notes like, Hey, you should cut that whole bit about Quidditch or What’s the point of the scene where Tarantino tells that long joke? And while I acknowledge there’s a fine line between idiosyncratic and self-indulgent, sometimes we just need to let an artist trust in his own creative instincts. Maybe it works — as it did when Lucas made the original Star Wars — and maybe it doesn’t — when he made The Phantom Menace — but if art isn’t occasionally used for experimental modes of expression, what good is it? I mean, we’ve seen what happens when all stories are made to look like all other stories, and it’s called the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even for some of their moral shortcomings, I’ll take a Mad Max or Mariachi trilogy over a corporate mega-franchise any day…
Thanks for gracing the blog with your comments, Cathleen — I am much obliged to you. Wishing you a bountiful and happy Thanksgiving!
In How Useful Are Neil Gaiman’s Eight Rules of Writing? (https://mythcreants.com/blog/how-useful-are-neil-gaimans-eight-rules-of-writing/) the ONLY rule they thought was truly useful:
The Fifth Rule
“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
I think of it this way
A good editor doesn’t dress you in their clothes. But they’ll help you choose which of your own clothes you should wear, and make sure your shirt has no stains and your fly is zipped
BTW, you did that w/ my guest post here. You didn’t put in your own opinions; you helped me express MY opinions better
That’s an excellent article over there at Mythcreants — “How Useful Are Neil Gaiman’s Eight Rules of Writing?” — and I completely agree with Oren’s assessment: Only the fifth “rule” has any value. I would even say the Fifth Rule is essentially the same thing I was saying to Cathleen above, just phrased a little differently. It all comes down to extracting the note from the suggestion — that’s the discipline of receiving feedback.
Stephen King’s On Writing is considered by most to be “essential reading” for those looking to learn the craft. I’ve read On Writing multiple times (though it has admittedly been a while) — and I am in general a fan of King’s fiction — but that book, as I recall, is way more interesting as a personal memoir than it is valuable as a writing instructional. It’s got a lot of general advice, or advice that maybe reflects King’s process — like how a first-draft manuscript should take no more than three months to produce, period — but doesn’t necessarily apply to every artist, or every project. I do enjoy learning about the creative process of other writers, but rarely do I incorporate any of those habits or protocols into my own regimen.
When Robert Rodriguez says you learn to tell stories by telling stories, he isn’t just referring to dramatic structure; he’s also talking about process — about “discover[ing] your own way of doing things.” He struggled with that a bit during the scripting of Desperado, his first properly formatted “studio” screenplay, written under a deadline:
Exactly. I used to be the same way — prioritizing the quantity of time spent writing over the quality of those writing hours — until I adopted a deep-focus approach to my work. You figure these things out through trial-and-error. You go through the creative process enough times, practicing and refining it, until eventually it becomes intuitive. I imagine for our most successful commercial writers — like King and Gaiman — the process they’ve cultivated is almost entirely instinctive at this point. And aspiring authors look to them and say, What’s your secret? I think they try, with only good intentions, to impart some wisdom, but their process isn’t codified, and, more to the point, it is customized exclusively for them as individuals, so they really don’t have much useful advice to offer you or me. You know? And I suspect that’s kind of what you were getting at, Dell, in your satirical piece “How Useful Are Dave Lerner’s Eight Rules of Writing?” There’s just no easy-bake recipe for this, no matter how helpful one would be.
And thank you for your kind words about our experience working together as blogger and editor, which I hope will not be the last! I would actually love to host more guest posts from other writers — not because I’m in search of “free content” that I don’t have to write, but because I genuinely enjoy the editorial process and think I’ve gotten much better at it, even since “The Cat in the Sprawl.”
The challenge there is that I have a very modest readership, and the blog has only gotten more idiosyncratic in recent years as I’ve inserted myself — my experiences and opinions — into the posts with greater regularity. The blog’s brand, such as it is, has become very narrowly defined now, reflective of my interests in environmentalism and morally imaginative storytelling. Such is why I enjoyed writing this piece — a straight-up study of narrative craft with only brief digressions into personal anecdotes (the Leapman story) and the topic of moral imagination. If all goes to plan, my December post will also be focused strictly on narrative craft — specifically, the use of backstory in Scream, just in time for its 25th anniversary. It’s kind of refreshing for a change to study some fun movies, like Desperado and Scream, and talk about their storytelling techniques without getting too sociopolitical about it!
After reading a couple of the Rules of Writing, I wanted to come up w/ my own rules. But everything I came up w/ had so many caveats, exceptions, required explanations… So I went for the funny, instead
There are plenty of things to learn about writing. Very few (if any) can be distilled to a single sentence w/ no further discussion, one that works for everyone in every situation
I got the impression (correct me if I’m wrong) that more than one executive gave you a “rule of writing” they’d picked up from somewhere, and expected you to follow it like a commandment from God? You’d mention that that was a problem w/ Scriptshadow. Carson would post “What I learned” from a script or movie that morning, and your managers would want you to apply it almost immediately, even if, in your case, that particular advice had nothing to do w/ your project
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I think you should offer to write a guest post for Mythcreants. Maybe a defense of the Orville?
I suppose the only rule of writing is that there are no rules…
… but there are principles. So, my advice to anyone who wants to be a storyteller is to:
– read a lot and write a lot, because there’s no better way to build confidence than through applied practice;
– study a few highly respected storytelling programs (there’s a lot of valuable stuff, for instance, in McKee, Vogler, and Snyder, and their books are a lot cheaper than a master’s degree in creative writing), but don’t expect to find all-purpose rules in them, merely tools;
– join a writers group with serious, committed authors/screenwriters either at or (ideally) above your present level. (Joining a group like this is easier than ever thanks to Zoom.) The key benefit of participating in a critique group that meets regularly with half a dozen consistent members is that you learn how to take feedback and how to give it; it is impossible to overstate how crucial it is to cultivate that particular skill.
That’s my general advice: Learn the principles and practice them. If they aid your process, adopt them; if they don’t, discard them. Just keep writing stories, because you will get better at it, and once you’ve developed the skills to tell a good story, you will find your unique voice asserting itself more prominently with each story you write. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
After I logged off yesterday, I was giving more thought to the whole “note behind the suggestion” thing we were talking about. And I asked myself: What was the note behind Chris Meledandri’s suggestion that Rodriguez make the Mariachi an electric guitar player from Texas who learns Okichitaw from a Native American mentor. The note was this: The core concept of El Mariachi will be more commercial if American audiences can directly relate to him, so make him an American rock musician with a Vogler-approved hero’s journey. Same concept, Meledandri likely reasoned, but wider appeal and therefore greater box-office potential.
Of course, the best thing El Mariachi and Desperado have going for them, as I argued in the last paragraph under the subheading “Desperado, Why Don’t You Come to Your Senses?”, is their Mexican flavor. That’s what distinguishes them from American shoot-’em-ups: that they bring their viewers into a culture, however fictionalized, that’s foreign to us, and is therefore a little dangerous, a little sexy. Rodriguez was right to stick to his guns, if you’ll pardon the pun. Because the terrain on which the Mariachi treads is unfamiliar to us, and because we ultimately know so little about the Mariachi himself, Desperado has mystique. There is no mystique in Star Wars anymore; it’s all been drained out. Marvel is another franchise devoid of mystique, because mystique is the antithesis of point-and-clap entertainment. It isn’t the unknown we want from The Book of Boba Fett and Halloween Kills and Ghostbusters: Afterlife; it’s the familiar, the comforting. We don’t want to be challenged with new visions, simply reassured that, to quote Nick Schager’s review of Ready Player One, our “most cherished old-school cartoons, comic-books and video games aren’t just worthwhile; they’re all that matters.”
I mentioned in the post above that studio execs and managers, et al., are utterly mystified by storytelling craft. They are desperate for someone to explain to them how stories work. But for the reasons I illustrated in my anecdote about Tony Stark’s “arc” in Avengers, they will never admit they have something to learn from actual screenwriters/storytellers! I mean, that would completely undermine their authority! That’s where ScriptShadow was a godsend to them. I wonder if Carson is even aware that his site wasn’t (isn’t?) a resource for screenwriters so much as creative execs, who absolutely treated every word he said as if it were inscribed in stone tablets at Mount Sinai. (And they never, ever, EVER cited him as the source of their infallible wisdom, either, even though we were all reading his daily posts and recognized his words when they were being regurgitated back to us.) Much like newbie writers, our managers wanted the security of rules, not the ambiguity of principles. Rules by their very nature, after all, bestow authority on those charged with enforcing them.
I didn’t always agree with Carson’s assessments (more on that point in a minute), but, unlike all the creative execs I ever dealt with, he actually read the scripts (not merely the coverage) and had strong opinions on them, for which he always provided evidence from the text itself. Again: Whether or not you agreed with his takeaways, he’d always done his homework. The professional screenwriters I knew by and large really resented him, because they all felt that they were being made to tailor their scripts to what he thought made for a creatively successful screenplay, and who the fuck did that tennis instructor with absolutely zero industry experience think he was?! I would argue that what they really resented was the dysfunction of the creative-industrial complex, and Carson became a convenient scapegoat for the frustration they couldn’t take out on their managers and producers.
I’ll give you a concrete example of how something Carson asserted became Hollywood gospel, even though I would argue he was 100% wrong on this particular observation. He loves the original Star Wars and considers it an almost flawless piece of storytelling, and would often argue that the reason why the movie is so satisfying is because of the way Lucas executed all the character arcs. (That’s true — I completely concur.) Accordingly, he would frequently point out (perhaps he still does?) that Luke’s “fatal flaw” is that he doesn’t believe in himself, and he needs to learn to see in himself what the audience saw in him all along. So, when he switches off his targeting computer during the trench run, he’s completing his transformational arc.
That’s incorrect. There is absolutely no evidence in A New Hope to suggest Luke doesn’t believe in himself — quite the opposite, in fact. Luke has one of the few transformational arcs that actually doesn’t begin with a so-called “fatal flaw.” Han does: He goes from being an unethical loner to someone who learns to work as part of an ethical group. Leia does: She’s a cold fish who learns to not be so single-minded about politics and actually make herself vulnerable to love; she has purpose at the beginning of A New Hope, but by the end of Empire, she has passion! Most character arcs work like that: An emotional shortcoming — a “fatal flaw” — is overcome, and the character emerges a more self-actualized person for it.
Luke’s arc (at least in A New Hope) doesn’t work like that. His arc is to learn who he is, which is a common superhero arc (just ask Neo in The Matrix and Harry Potter). In this particular instance of personal transformation, the hero isn’t “wounded” or “deficient” to start, but still grows by the end. Elliott in E.T. has no fatal flaw, but he arcs by attaining a spiritual connection to the universe, just like his fellow resident of the San Fernando Valley, Danielsan. That’s why all the bullshit in Cobra Kai about how Daniel didn’t deserve to win the karate tournament because he performed an “illegal maneuver” completely misses the point of The Karate Kid: Daniel won not because he was more skilled than Johnny — he wasn’t — but because he’d attained spiritual enlightenment under Mr. Miyagi’s tutelage, as exemplified by his perfect execution of the “crane kick,” much the way Elliott learned the same from E.T. No “fatal flaw,” but a transformation just the same. (Unlike Daniel, though, Elliott’s emotional arc wasn’t undermined by a series of subpar, literal-minded sequels.)
So, when I was working on Leapman, I had a protagonist who was already an enlightened being; the point of this character was that he’d lived so long and learned so much (sort of like Bill Murray near the end of Groundhog Day), he’d overcome the need to hold fast to petty grievances. But there were other ways to arc his character — to give him an emotional learning experience — except they were of the more subtle variety, like Luke and Elliott and Danielsan. They weren’t clear-cut, patently obvious transformations, like Han Solo and Phil Connors (and I don’t say that pejoratively; I find both Han and Phil’s arcs to be supremely emotionally satisfying!). But there was no explaining that to my advisers, because they’d already “cracked the code” of Luke Skywalker’s arc — well, Carson did all the work, in fairness — and it was all very simple and by-the-numbers, so just do it exactly like that, thank you very much.
But they didn’t understand the subtilties of transformational arcs the way I do — and by they I mean Carson, too — because they hadn’t studied and practiced this stuff for years the way I had. I was mentored throughout the aughts by a screenwriter who’d written for Law & Order and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he trained me on how to use the character-arc techniques pioneered by a guru named David Freeman. And David once said that the reason why most scripts are so bad is because they only employ the most obvious storytelling techniques — the top five percent of tools in the toolbox, the ones even the average moviegoer is savvy to. The other 95% of techniques, he taught, operate beneath the audience’s conscious awareness; they’re effectively “invisible.” The truly great screenwriters — the Aaron Sorkins, the Joss Whedons, the Quentin Tarantinos — use all those “invisible” techniques to invest an audience’s emotion in their stories and characters, hence the reason those guys clean up at the box office and at the awards shows. They’re drawing from a much deeper toolbox than your average screenwriter, and they do it time and time and time again. Those guys are the real deal; they’ve got the stuff of reproducible magic at their fingertips.
But reasoning that you can simply take some random “What I Learned” observation from ScriptShadow and just apply it to your WIP like spackling paste is fool’s thinking. It’s pure spaghetti-slinging: Well, maybe this will work! And as a working screenwriter, every choice you make is second-guessed as you make it, because you’re required to get feedback on every fucking treatment and draft you produce. You are constantly made to take the opinions and suggestions of people who don’t understand the craft but nonetheless act like they have all the answers. That conversation Rodriguez had with Meledandri isn’t the exception in Hollywood; it’s the norm. The only difference that time was the filmmaker, Hollywood neophyte that he was, was nevertheless wise enough to reject those wrongheaded development notes. That’s harder than it seems, particularly when you’re a young screenwriter/filmmaker, and you’re on a Hollywood lot taking meetings with producers and studio execs; you’re so busy thinking How do I not screw this up? that you forsake the very creative instincts that got you through the studio gates in the first place! It happened to me, and it happens to most of us that get that far; the system is explicitly designed to make the storyteller feel subservient — to feel lucky to even have a probationary seat at the table. That Rodriguez never got ensnared in that trap is a real credit to his instincts and his belief in himself. That’s what I couldn’t help thinking as I reread Rebel without a Crew all these years later; I wish I’d internalized and applied its lessons when I first read it back in college.
On a different matter: Perhaps I should pitch Chris and Oren a defense of The Orville! The belated third season is coming out on Hulu early next year, and the show even has an amended title (The Orville: New Horizons). Maybe I’ll watch the series over again from the start and see if I can’t formulate a worthy piece on the subject? I’m going to have to see how much time I have for blogging in ’22. For the past seven years, I’ve consistently published one post per month — I’ve never missed a month — but that might (might) have to change next year. I’m pursuing some new opportunities with my fiction writing, and if they pan out — and who the fuck knows if they will, given that I have been assured by an endless series of mentors, advisers, and colleagues that “success is imminent” since I was 22! — I may have to scale back some of my hobbyist blogging, which is creatively rewarding but also time-consuming. We’ll see what the new year brings. New horizons indeed!
On the subject of mystique as it pertains to the character of Boba Fett, here’s yet another spot-on piece of evidence to support my assertion in the essay (as well as the reply) above:
I’ve only ever seen Desperado, so I really enjoyed this analysis, as usual! Hope the writing is going well!
Thanks, Suzanne! Yes, the writing is going very well, thanks! I was under deadline to complete a draft of my WIP by Halloween, hence the reason I was unable to publish this particular post on the Day of the Dead as I’d intended, as well as why I have been absent from everyone’s blogs — including yours — these past weeks. I’m looking forward to catching up on your latest adventures over at mydangblog soon!
Desperado is definitely my personal favorite of the three films: It’s more polished than El Mariachi and more fun than Once Upon a Time. I think the key to enjoying these movies is to appreciate each one for what it wants to be: Don’t expect Mexico to be a sequel, in the conventional sense, to Desperado, just as you shouldn’t expect Desperado to work as a direct sequel to El Mariachi. You just enjoy each one for what it is — don’t look for an overarching narrative — and that’s when you begin to appreciate the recurring motifs and thematic evolution across the trilogy. It’s certainly the kind of filmmaking — and storytelling — that gets me excited, and that is in woefully short supply these days, alas. Perhaps that’s what compelled me to write about it?
Hope you are in a period of productivity yourself! Looking forward to catching up…
Ooh, which WIP and why the deadline? Is something exciting on the horizon?
Oh, how kind of you to express interest, Suzanne! Thank you. I will reply to your question directly via e-mail this afternoon.
great post — yes, never too late & never too early, fortunately
Thanks, da-AL! While I certainly wish my career had fulfilled its early promise while I was still in my 20s and 30s, I have some hard-earned assets now I didn’t have then: far more masterful command of my craft, greater moral imagination, something meaningful to say about the world (owed to life experience) along with the confidence in my skills and myself to say it unapologetically. I would not trade any of those things just to be 25 again.
Sean, This blog piece of yours brilliantly illuminates dark, hidden corners (hidden from the general public, anyway) and fetid underpinnings of the world of Hollywood film production and, at the same time, is an entertaining ride through a non-traditional construction of a film trilogy that defied the Hollywood “rules” of success. Well done! What I am left with is two-fold: 1. My heart aches for the young man whose dreams where taken by idiots who did not know how to nurture the talent in front of them and 2. As a life-long science fiction/fantasy fan, I LOVE the premise of your spec script and would love to see you turn Leapman into a novel. The hell with Hollywood!
Thanks, Tara, for sparing some of your time to read this piece and share some kind words about it! I don’t take that for granted.
Let me address your numbered points one at a time:
1. No one should ever feel badly for me! Even under the most favorable circumstances, a career in Hollywood is a long shot. I share my experiences here only to illustrate the systemic dysfunction of the creative-industrial complex (“which means the industrial part rules everything and they screw around with the creative people,” says George Lucas), and to encourage other artists to trust their creative instincts and believe in themselves — a piece of advice I wish someone had offered me twenty years ago!
But my experiences were not in vain. I met many wonderful, talented people in the film industry, like my mentor Joe Reinkemeyer and my dear friends Marissa Jo Cerar (creator of Women of the Movement) and Adam Aresty (screenwriter of Stung) and Chuck Hayward (Emmy-nominated writer on WandaVision). And from those people — and others — I learned everything I know about the craft of storytelling. With those skills, I have reinvested my creative energy over the past eight years in my blog and in my prose fiction, and I’m happier and more productive than I have ever been in my adult life. I can say with full truthfulness that I harbor no ill will, hurt feelings, or disappointment for anyone I knew in Hollywood or any setbacks I may have experienced there. Hell, anyone who reads this blog regularly knows the most fundamental thing there is to know about me: I don’t look back.
2. The funny thing about Leapman is that it came so close to actually being realized (as a comic book), it’s actually the project I’m kind of “known for,” even though it died on the vine well over a decade ago! Friends ask me all the time, “Is anything happening with Leapman?” To which I respond, “Not really — and how the hell do you even remember that project?!” But it keeps the project at the forefront of my mind, and I’m considering revisiting it in the new year.
When I was developing the concept, I’d created an extensive timeline that accounted for how old the character appeared in a given year along with a notation about what he was doing (learning to play baseball from Babe Ruth in the Bronx in 1922; running into Malcolm X in Harlem in 1943; meeting Jonas Salk in 1954 when his children’s home is selected to test the polio vaccine; etc.). The idea was that I could just dip into any adventure that inspired me and tell that little episodic story, so you never quite knew which period of his life was going to be explored from issue to issue. So, I might just start writing some short stories about the character and then at some point collect them in a book of his various adventures.
But nothing I write is done so from a place of spite for Hollywood. I just had to discover the hard way that screenwriting was not the best outlet for my creative instincts and impulses. My friends Marissa Jo and Chuck, by contrast, have found professional success and creative fulfillment in Hollywood — and God bless them for it! — but that industry was just never a good fit for my sensibilities or personality. And now I am privileged to be able to follow my creative instincts without any consideration for their commercial potential, unbeholden to the vagaries of the creative-industrial complex. In other words: I get to traffic in my own daydreams without any restrictions whatsoever. Like I said: No one’s heart should ache for me.
Friends of the blog: Please check out Tara’s latest post over at Tara’s Thoughts, “The Magical Warmth of Memory with Grateful Thanks to Gillian Bibby and Roger Wilson.”
I am grateful to know you have created a life for yourself that honors your gifts and who you are as a human being. And thanks so much for the cross post!
Had things worked out for me fifteen years ago, Tara, the best outcome I could’ve hoped for — the best outcome — would’ve been a steady stream of work-for-hire assignments on the umpteenth sequels to Taken and The Expendables. You know? In the alternate universe where my career takes off as predicted, that’s what I’m doing: Writing soul-crushing, morally bankrupt action movies, most of which never even get as far as production. Oh, yes, I’d be living in a lovely home in Encino (south of Ventura, naturally!), never having written a single thing that reflects me — who I am, and what I believe in.
After my career irreversibly collapsed, I retreated from all my social circles in Los Angeles — something I wrote about here — and proceeded to spend the next five years wishing I could leave to go back to New York. (We couldn’t because my wife’s career was out on the West Coast.) Finally accepting that I was in L.A. for good and could no longer go on tormenting myself or my long-suffering wife, I started cultivating interests and activities that had nothing to do with the film industry: I became a Dodgers fan; I adopted minimalism; I started volunteering for L.A. Animal Services and Best Friends Animal Society; and, most prominently, I trained under Vice President Gore to serve in the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. (I wrote about all of that earlier this year in “One Good Idea.”) All of those things “got me outside of my own head,” if that makes sense, and put me in touch with a reality beyond Tinseltown.
Consequently, I am a better person, and a far better writer, than I was when all I cared about was the movie business — an industry that was making me miserable! I mean, all of this sounds like the plot of a really corny Hollywood movie, but I needed my professional life to completely fall apart in order to find what was truly important to me. And like a Hollywood movie, there was an unexpectedly happy ending: Just when I’d come to accept, willingly and happily, that I was a Los Angeleno for life, a path back to New York presented itself.
But that’s a blog post for another time…
Sean, wow. Your posts are every bit as skilled and insightful as the type of story deconstruction seen in film magazines in the pre-digital era. I’d say you should be writing for Creative Screenwriting, but I don’t think they could handle your honest critique of the industry!
While I’ve never seen El Mariachi, I’ve always adored Desperado. A few years back I watched it alongside Once Upon A Time in Mexico. I hadn’t seen the sequel since its theatrical run. And, man, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it! I probably went in expecting more of a traditional sequel, and Rodriguez was having none of that. I’m impressed that you managed to truncate the plot into a (semi) small description.
Rodriguez is an old-school film geek, a man who will make his art regardless of industry expectations or limitations. I mean, how about that From Dusk Till Dawn sudden story shift?! Unfortunately, his type seems rarer these days, which is strange considering anyone with an iPhone and a computer has the tools to make a movie now…
Oh, bless you heart for those kind words, Jeff! Responding to all the reader feedback on this particular post — like Tara’s comment directly above yours, and my reply to dellstories about the undue influence ScriptShadow exerted on the industry — has happily reminded me how liberated I finally felt to express my views and opinions openly and honestly through this blog, something I never did during my days in Hollywood. I always felt I had to defer to the “experts” there, even as I began to suspect, with increasing unease, that I knew a lot more about cinematic storytelling than any of them. Now I just say what I wanna say! That was the gift this blog gave me, once I really got comfortable with blogging (which only happened over time).
I used to read Creative Screenwriting regularly back in the day, but even then I felt it was kind of worthless, because — as I recall — it was never particularly critical about any of the movies it analyzed; the editors never wanted to say anything explicitly unflattering about a film or a filmmaker (probably because most of the magazine’s contributors were all Hollywood hopefuls themselves). And what I hope an essay like “There He Was… and in He Walked” demonstrates is that one can celebrate the creative ingenuity of a particular movie and be critical of certain aspects of it at the same time; the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. We can appreciate a movie’s artistic accomplishments and critique its shortcomings in the same sitting!
But these days, everything is so binary: You’re either a “superfan” or a “hater.” There’s no more room for ambiguity. And stories like the Mariachi trilogy teach us, if we’re open to it, to be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity, you know? It doesn’t traffic in certainties; its plot points can’t be mapped or totted up into a logical whole, a unified storyworld. And, as a viewer, you’re either cool with that or you’re not. I have my issues with The X-Files — I think it promotes a dangerous mistrust-of-government mindset — but one of the things I admire about it was its unapologetic unwillingness to offer conclusive resolutions to its worldbuilding mysteries. At its finest, X-Files understood that science fiction best serves us when it inspires intellectual and philosophical curiosity — when it provokes big questions rather than provides tidy answers. And the Mariachi trilogy does the same for mythic narratives; it invites us to engage our imagination, a far more valuable reward for our time than, say, the true identity of the protagonist, or whether or not he’s a revenant in the third movie.
I saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico in theaters, as well, and I think my response to it at the time could best be described as bewildered if not exactly disappointed. Like you, I went in expecting “Desperado 2.” When I finally screened Mexico again, this time absent any long-gestating expectations, I was able to appreciate it not as a sequel to Desperado, but rather for what it wanted to be. And I remember thinking, “Wow, I didn’t see it before, but this movie is really kind of good. It might even, in its own right, be great.”
But that only happened once I realized you’re not meant to read anything literal into the events of those movies, such is why the third film — the most mythic of all of them — takes its very title from the opening line of every fairy tale ever. Because if you’re looking for cohesive narrative continuity across these movies, you’ve come to the wrong series. Rodriguez refuses to reward us with the dopamine rush of pattern recognition. The puzzle pieces of this mythic narrative just don’t neatly interlock the way we’ve become accustomed to expecting from our corporately mediated mega-franchises.
From Dusk till Dawn is another great example of a “rule breaker” on account of its midpoint genre shift. (And I could say a lot about that film, both complimentary and critical, but I’ll save it for another occasion.) A colleague of ours in my old writers group, represented at the time by a manager both you and I know well, once wrote an absolutely amazing spec that starts as a boyhood coming-of-age story in a Jewish community only to shift in the middle into a horror movie as the protagonist’s rabbi is revealed to be a vampire! It was a brilliant script that never got a shot in the spec marketplace because the writer was explicitly told you can’t introduce a speculative element like vampirism that late in a story. (And this, by the way, was long after Rodriguez and Tarantino disproved that little piece of conventional wisdom, but I’m sure the response to that was/would’ve been, “Well, you’re not Tarantino…”) But because this screenplay didn’t “look like” other scripts this hopelessly dogmatic manager had read, it was deemed “conceptually flawed” and therefore unsellable.
Given the easy access we now have to professional-grade filmmaking equipment, I’m not sure where all the Rodriguezes of today are? It’s possible that there’s such a deluge of content now — on YouTube and TikTok and the sundry streaming services — it’s much harder for any one filmmaker to break through? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s too easy to make movies/shorts these days — that there are so many out there now it’s become impossible for any of them to rise above the pack? So, what I suppose we have are a zillion indies all competing for attention in an overcrowded media landscape, and then a handful of branded IPs — Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones — towering stratospherically above all of that. Makes it hard to imagine a movie like Desperado being produced and/or finding an audience these days.
We’re definitely awash in content now. Over Thanksgiving dinner, my wife and sister and I were talking about how when we were growing up, we were intimately familiar with all the TV shows that were “before our time” — like I Love Lucy and Bewitched and My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch — because the viewing options were so much more limited, and all that stuff ran in syndication on local TV. Nowadays, young viewers don’t “discover” older shows because there’s too much new content to keep up with, all of it algorithmically personalized to their interests and available to access on-demand. My wife works with 30-year-olds who’ve never so much as seen an episode of Cheers or Seinfeld because there’s just never been an opportunity to watch any of those golden oldies; no one “channel surfs” in the age of on-demand content. With that much new programming, how does any single content creator — be it filmmaker or novelist or what have you — gain any traction in the market or in the culture? I don’t know. That’s certainly a conundrum that’s stymied professional progress for us both, sir.
Friends of the blog: Please check out Jeff’s latest blog post, “Y: The Last Man — The Show Must Go On.”
I love the line from Rodriguez’s quote: “You don’t want to learn that from them anyway, or all you’ll do is tell stories like everyone else. You learn to tell stories by telling stories.”
And: “The less money and/or resources you have, the more you are forced to be creative.”
A lot of what you share about film, Sean, applies to creativity in general. Formula writing, like formula film-making, has an audience. But as a writer it sure is easy to blend in with the crowd and disappear if you’re writing stories that lack originality. It’s one of the reasons I’m not a fan of romance – the genre tends toward standard tropes, and for the most part, we know the end right from the beginning.
Books need to stand out, and that happens with expert storytelling as well as outstanding creativity. But the same sorts of gatekeepers stand in the way of originality. They want the tried and true story that’s hot at the moment, just wearing different clothes. It’s a push-me pull-me for many authors.
The good thing about indie publishing is creativity has no restraints, originality counts, and anyone can get a book out there, not just authors with money or connections.
The bad thing about indie publishing is anyone can get a book out there. 🙂
Hey, Diana! Thanks for stopping by! Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving!
I’ve written on this blog about how I first learned screenwriting and filmmaking from an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys my friends and I produced when we were in high school; without a budget to work with, we were forced to figure things out as we went, relying on creativity to solve procedural/logistical problems. It was truly one of the most joyous creative periods of my life.
But as I mentioned in my comment to dellstories above, the mistake we made — the reason why we were ultimately never able to finish the movie — was owed to the quixotic scope of the project: It wasn’t realistic to think we could shoot a feature-length film, no matter how we may’ve tailored the script to meet our considerable production limitations. We should’ve started smaller.
I think aspiring authors can sometimes fall into the same trap. In filmmaking, pragmatics have a tempering effect on ambition, as everything you envision has to be reified somehow; but prose storytelling is limited only by one’s imagination, not budgetary considerations. Consequently, rather than focusing on telling a really tight, self-contained short story, novella, or novel, authors start too big, conceiving their project as a trilogy or an ongoing epic in the vein of The Wheel of Time or The Dune Chronicles or A Song of Ice and Fire. (And it doesn’t help that they’ve been trained to believe all of those series emerged from the authors’ imaginations fully formed, with the entire narrative arc preplanned plot point–for–plot point, merely waiting to be transcribed to the blank page. No one has been more full of shit in that particular respect than George R.R. Martin, who irretrievably lost the thread of his sprawling narrative after — if not before — A Storm of Swords, and yet the more starkly apparent it becomes that he’s winging A Song of Ice and Fire, the more he stubbornly insists he’s merely executing some predetermined “grand plan” for it he hatched back on Day One.) Fantasy author E.J. Wenstrom discusses how she got lost in her own series, Chronicles of the Third Realm War, in this post at Terribleminds.
The way to build confidence is to learn one thing at a time. Start with flash fiction — write a hundred of those until you’ve got their rudimentary setup-and-payoff structure down pat. Then try your hand at short-story writing for a while before you wade into the deeper waters of long-form fiction, with all of its subplots and narrative digressions and multiple-POV characters. This advice is elementary, but it bears repeating because it is so often ignored by aspiring artists and storytellers: Start by crawling before you learn to walk; then move on to running and dancing and somersaulting.
That’s the best thing about prose fiction: It doesn’t cost a dime! Back in the old days, cinema students shot sparingly on film because every foot of it cost $$$ to purchase and develop. But it costs the same to write 100,000 words as it does a hundred — nothing. Go write — it’s free for the taking! But if you want to learn storytelling, you’ve got to start off with bite-sized narrative boli. And you need to understand — not you, Diana; the royal you, I mean — that your first dozen stories are going to be (failed) writing experiments, so don’t dive headlong into a four-volume worldbuilding epic only to discover 2,400 unsalvageable pages later that all the effort was valuable only as a learning experience.
And the thing that I found so inspiring about Rodriguez’s origin story was that he viewed each and every project he made as a learning experience — a chance to practice his skills and build his confidence — and not a Hollywood calling card. He mentions several times in Rebel without a Crew that if he knew El Mariachi was going to be seen by so many people, he’d have worked that much harder on it! Whether one is an aspiring filmmaker, author, or artist of any medium, I highly recommend Rodriguez’s book, because it’s a really inspiring account — a portrait of the filmmaker as a young man, if you like — of an artist who “was only twenty-three and in no hurry to rush into the film business ill-prepared” (ibid., xv). He was guided by creative aspirations, not professional ambitions; by focusing on the former, the latter took care of itself. It’s a great lesson that can’t be repeated often enough.
Thanks for joining the conversation, Diana.
“…he viewed each and every project he made as a learning experience — a chance to practice his skills and build his confidence.” That’s such a great line, and I think its important that we look at every project that way regardless of where we are in the learning curve. We can ALWAYS improve and grow. What we love to do is worthy of our practice and devotion.
As the late Neil Peart of Rush, long considered the greatest rock drummer of all time, once said: “What is a master but a master student?”
Since we’re talking about how limitations and restrictions foster creativity (a favorite topic of mine)
https://psychotronicreview.com/2021/08/06/texas-chain-saw-massacre-vs-happening/
Seriously, Dell: What would I do without you? You always come through with a link to a relevant article; you enrich this blog with your contributions. Thank you.
When our generation first saw Star Wars in the 1970s and ’80s, what wowed us about it was that it took us to unimagined worlds, yes, but it also had that How’d they do that? factor that made the movies of that era so memorable. Movies don’t have the Wow! factor anymore, hence the reason Jurassic Park still captivates us, but Jurassic World, despite earning a billion dollars, inspired a collective shrug.
The Avengers movies can depict dozens of superheroes in simultaneous combat, but that doesn’t match the heart-soaring thrill of the “You’ve got me? Who’s got you?” moment in Superman: The Movie. When Christopher Reeve lifts off into the night sky in graceful defiance of gravity, we tingle. But when Henry Cavill blasts off into the heavens, the particles beneath his boots scattering to the wind and the atmosphere warping around him, we reach for another fistful of popcorn because it doesn’t inspire wonder; we know it’s just digital pixels that have been manipulated to form a computer-generated image.
To create the globetrotting adventures of Indiana Jones in the pre-CGI age, Spielberg shot Raiders of the Lost Ark in Tunisia, Temple of Doom in Sri Lanka, and Last Crusade in Venice and Jordan. (Even the TV series shot in over a dozen countries.) Contrast that with Kingdom of the Crytal Skull, which was filmed primarily on the Universal backlot, augmented with waxy vegetation, oversaturated cinematography, and unconvincing CGI.
Rodriguez has long been attached to a remake of Escape from New York, and though a version of that could be made today with credibly photorealistic renderings of the ruins of Times Square and the Statue of Liberty, et al., it would never accomplish what Carpenter did: make us wonder how the hell such a convincingly tactile post-apocalyptic Big Apple was created for a low-budget exploitation flick. We might admire the attention to geographical detail in an updated version of EFNY, but no one would ever watch it and wonder how it was done. It would be slicker, sure, but not necessarily more impressive or immersive.
Modern cinematic artifice — and by that I mean CGI, motion capture, bullet time, etc. — has for the most part made filmmakers less creative, not more. When CGI was still in its infancy, James Cameron used it in movies like The Abyss and Terminator 2 as a tool to tell more ambitious stories. In The Matrix, bullet time was innovated to demonstrate Neo’s altered perception of the Matrix’s simulated reality; it showed us something we’d never seen, but in service to a story which was about the very notion that we’re not looking carefully enough at the world around us! But computer-generated FX eventually became misused to present more ambitious visuals; increasingly, story was secondary. Limitations on the original Star Wars trilogy forced Lucas to be a better storyteller; contrast that with the prequels, where he had a limitless toolbox at his disposal but never a worthwhile script to shoot.
There’s certainly an argument to be made that the collapse of narrativity that occurred around the turn of the millennium created a problem for filmmakers — traditional stories were no longer resonating as they had for so long — and a reliance on ever-greater spectacle became the solution: If you couldn’t tell stories audiences hadn’t heard before, at least you might show them things they hadn’t seen before. But it was mostly in service to lackluster stories, from The Phantom Menace to The Happening to Transformers to Terminator Salvation to arguably even Avatar, a film that earned nearly $3 billion at the box office and yet no one ever talks about it or cites it as a personal favorite. Movies just stopped mattering a long time ago, which is how they got co-opted by the superhero- and nostalgia-industrial complexes.
It’s certainly hard to point to an instance of a filmmaker improving with greater clout and bigger budgets; mostly, they either become lazy (Spielberg) or self-indulgent (Lucas). The CGI spectacles of today aim to wow our jaded eyes (an ever-more-difficult task), but the exploitation films of yore — Halloween, The Road Warrior, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Last House on the Left — were more concerned with prompting a visceral reaction. That’s why they stick with us, decades later. They certainly prove money can’t buy creativity.
For me, I think it all comes back to Rodriguez’s point: Absent yourself from the things that aren’t important. Don’t get caught up in the trappings. If you’re a filmmaker, that could mean the trappings of Hollywood: the money and mansions and red carpets. If you’re an average member of the suburban middle class, that might mean the trappings of consumer capitalism: the new car; the bigger home; the HDTV upgrades; the latest-model iPhone. Some of the best Christmas stories, from A Christmas Carol to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, serve as annual reminders this time of year to prioritize how we live over what we have; when happiness can’t be bought at a store or found in a box, we’re inspired to be more creative about how and where we seek fulfillment. Whereas the Marvel franchise stimulates automatic and accelerating behaviors, we need more stories that encourage deliberate and decelerating behaviors. We need more Christmas Carols, all year long. I believe we’re ready once again for those kinds of stories, we just need our storytellers to step up and tell them — with the fullest degree of moral creativity possible.
So, embrace those restrictions, people!
You didn’t mention that Rodriguez is one of the directors and producers, and a couple of the character voices, for the Book of Boba Fett
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-the-book-of-boba-fett-episode-3-cameos-robert-rodriguez/
Before we get to that, Dell, can we take a moment to celebrate the resolution of a Star Wars mystery that has bedeviled fans for four decades? I mean, who didn’t leave the theater in 1983 and immediately ask, “But why was the rancor’s handler so upset when Luke killed it? Surely the explanation can’t be as simple and inconsequential as a momentary instance of comic relief…?”
You know, if you’re an Xer, the name “Robert Rodriguez” probably calls to mind imagery from his early neo-Westerns like Desperado and From Dusk till Dawn; if, on the other hand, you’re a Millennial, you probably associate him more with kiddie fare like Spy Kids and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Accordingly, I think two things have denied Rodriguez membership in the (admittedly subjective) pantheon of Great American Filmmakers.
The first is that his brand is inconsistent (save for one quality that we’ll get to in a minute). The oeuvre of Martin Scorsese, for instance, varies appreciably (he’s directed everything from Mean Streets to Cape Fear to Age of Innocence to Kundun, to say nothing of all of his crime/mob dramas, his signature milieu), yet there’s no denying the man has an identifiable brand. Same can be said for Spielberg, Cameron, Carpenter, Nolan, Tarantino, Eastwood, Shyamalan, David Fincher, Tim Burton, Woody Allen: Through good films and bad, their distinct fingerprints are all over their movies. Rodriguez is more akin to a filmmaker like the late Richard Donner: undeniably skilled, but perhaps too versatile — too grab-bag selective in his range of projects — to be a brand name unto himself. He’s more artisan than artist (and, to be clear, that isn’t intended as a criticism).
The second thing is his taste. He came of age on the exploitation cinema of the seventies (his foremost formative influence is Escape from New York, a remake of which he’s long been attached to direct), and in the decades since, he’s never made any effort to broaden his creative sensibilities beyond that — or, for that matter, his brand. That’s his brand, in fact: stylish, self-admitted schlock like Machete and Planet Terror and Sin City, with occasional work-for-hire jobs like Roadracers and The Faculty and The Mandalorian. And I am in no way judging him for his proclivities (Wes Craven, after all, made almost exclusively modestly budgeted horror movies over the course of his career), but Rodriguez has made no discernable attempt to interrogate the tropes and values embedded in the B-movie narratives he enjoys — no effort to challenge his moral imagination. (Craven, on the other hand, was constantly challenging the ethics of both the horror genre and its audience with his films; he was as cerebral as he was visceral.)
As enviable as Rodriguez’s early sucess is — and that’s owed 100% to his raw talent and self-confidence — there is something to be said for maturing a little before becoming a professional storyteller/artist. The late Neil Peart of Rush, a band that experienced mainstream success while its three members were barely yet legal drinking age, had at one point said he’d be all right with it if the half-dozen albums of their discography prior to Permanent Waves just kind of went away, because they represent the views of an artist who was still coming into maturity. (I’ll be posting an essay later this month in which I talk about my own journey from commercially imaginative screenwriter to morally imaginative storyteller.) Rodriguez is a filmmaker whose tastes don’t appear to have changed at all since he was a teenager, you know? I’m not saying he ought to go make arthouse cinema, but there’s little indication of maturity, of changing tastes, in his filmography.
As such, the Mariachi trilogy might represent him at his most creatively singular. You know? Those movies, for better or worse, feel like the vision of one filmmaker. The very concept of that series — an avenging musician — feels like something that could’ve only emerged from Rodriguez’s brain, much the way Star Wars is the singular idiosyncratic vision of George Lucas (even though it got expanded upon later by hundreds of other artists). Can you say that about anything else Rodriguez has ever done? Mostly, his talents have just been in service of other people’s visions, be it Frank Miller (Sin City) or John Carpenter (EFNY) or now Lucasfilm.
And that’s perfectly fine! But what it suggests to me is that Rodriguez isn’t a filmmaker with a lot to say about the world. He likes making movies — and he’s excellent at it — and he’s pretty much unconcerned with what those movies have to say. He’s a visceral filmmaker more than a cerebral one. Spielberg, who also found success in his 20s, started as the former but developed into the latter, whereas Rodriguez never did. Rodriguez gets off on imagery over ideas. Again: That isn’t a criticism of him, merely an observation. And it’s what makes him ideally suited to shows like The Book of Boba Fett, which rely more heavily on arresting visuals and heroic spectacle than on intellectual storytelling, more on serving a preexisting brand than forging new artistic paths.
Since “There He Was… and in He Walked” is about exercising the creative impulse — what it means to be creative; how to best practice creativity; and that the best way to learn how to tell stories is by telling stories — I thought it appropriate to share an article that appeared in the New York Times this morning: “An 8-Year-Old Wrote a Book and Hid It on a Library Shelf. It’s a Hit.”
In short, it’s a true account of a second-grader from Idaho who wrote an 81-page illustrated book about his “Crismis” adventures, left it on the shelf of his local public library, and now there is a yearslong waiting list to read it! What’s more, it is inspiring other children in Boise to write their own stories.
Yeah. Not only does this lovely report perfectly demonstrate Robert Rodriguez’s assertion that we learn to tell stories by telling stories, but it’s a reminder of what storytelling is supposed to be: a very personal, deeply felt act of expression. It arises out of an emotional need, not a commercial calculation. When we “go pro” with our writing, we can lose sight of that. I certainly did, as I recently documented. Now that I’m once again writing what I want to write, the way I think it should be written, I’ve gotten back in touch with that same pure creative spirit that compelled me to make Lost Boys II in high school, and, going back even further in time, to write my first horror story, “Turn the Streetlights Out,” in the fifth grade. (One of these days, I’m going to scan the original copy of “Turn the Streetlights Out” and publish it here on this blog.)
“An 8-Year-Old Wrote a Book and Hid It on a Library Shelf” is also an example of our public institutions at their absolute purest — a hopeful reminder that they are there to serve and support us. The librarians at that local Boise branch are unsung heroes making a real difference in their community by encouraging that boy’s creative and enterprising spirit, and by supporting the creative instincts and efforts of other children who want to express themselves. That’s government at its best. Public institutions have reflexively become the go-to villain in our fictional narratives (from political thrillers like Scandal and The X-Files to superhero sagas such as Batman Begins and Iron Man 2) as well as our real-life narratives (the January 6 insurrection), and libertarian propaganda like The Walking Dead insists we’re better off without government anyway, but the Boise Public Library reminds us how public institutions can, should, and do function most of the time. To quote Adlai Ewing Stevenson II: “Your public servants serve you right; indeed, often they serve you better than your apathy and indifference deserve.”
Just imagine if librarians — to say nothing of mail carriers and social workers and public-school teachers — were the heroes of our popular fictions? What if we started celebrating them with the same awestruck reverence as we do violent, extrajudicial vigilantes? The TV series Abbott Elementary is doing just that. My WIP features a municipal animal-control officer as its protagonist. Storytellers should use their moral imagination to help us better appreciate and support the work of real difference-makers, like those amazing librarians in Boise. Those are the people who give me hope — who remind me that compassion and altruism and a spirit of common good are alive and well. There are so many of those stories out there — the kind that offer a model for real heroism, and aren’t merely optimistic but anti-cynical — and, now more than ever, we need the storytellers to retire the orgiastic demigod-worshipping of superheroes and Star Wars in favor more morally imaginative narrativity. Perhaps, in the process, they’ll even reconnect with their own inner eight-year-olds — those whose imaginations were inspired by superheroes, before they became enslaved by them.
This is so inspiring! there really is something to be said about sticking to your guns. a great reminder to believe in ourselves, especially if we are putting the work in and looking at everything as an opportunity to grow and learn!
Indeed, AB! I would say “sticking to your guns” is an especially apt metaphor in this particular instance, given the type of movie Rodriguez was making! His story is absolutely inspiring, and Rebel without a Crew is only more relevant now, with the digital-filmmaking tools that have been made available to us in the years since the book was first published in the mid-’90s. These days, there’s nothing stopping anyone who wishes to express themselves creatively, which is precisely what Rodriguez encourages us all to do in Rebel.
I also recently read Brian Jay Jones’ biography George Lucas: A Life (which I reviewed here), an equally fascinating portrait of a visionary filmmaker who insisted — stubbornly and very successfully — on doing things his way, naysayers be damned. Say what you want about Lucas, but he believed in himself.
Like Rodriguez, Lucas rose to prominence in Hollywood during a renaissance period for indie cinema and dramatic films; how both auteurs achieved success in that environment, it seems, was by bringing a pulpy genre sensibility to their indie-spirited movies that made them feel different from everything else audiences were seeing. During periods when movies were either down-and-dirty DIYs (like A Woman Under the Influence in the ’70s and Dazed and Confused in the ’90s) or, alternatively, studio-financed spectacles (like Earthquake in the ’70s and Independence Day in the ’90s), both Lucas (with Star Wars) and Rodriguez (with Desperado) managed to deliver movies that were the best of both worlds: narratively idiosyncratic but visually ambitious. That’s a testament to their self-belief.
Talent and drive are essential components to success, but equally crucial — and far less heralded — is self-belief. Self-confidence. If that’s a trait that doesn’t come naturally — and even if it does — it can be cultivated and fortified through habitual practice, through trial-and-error. You don’t need money to make movies; you need only something to say and a willingness to risk failure. You don’t need external validation to be an artist. Too many of us — including yours truly — operate under the misguided assumption that landing an agent and selling a script and getting a screen credit will somehow legitimize us as artists. Bullshit. We’ve had everything we needed for that all along. And my hope for every young artist and creative person out there is that they realize that a hell of a lot sooner than I did. (But better late than never!)
Thanks for reading and commenting, AB. Please feel welcome to pour yourself a piss-warm Chango and join us here anytime!
If you don’t know something about a subject, don’t think you know something about a subject – a valuable lesson my mother taught me.
Wise words, Lena. No one assumes they know anything about plumbing; when we have a problem with our pipes, we call a plumber. By that same token, nobody assumes they could do the job of a dental hygienist, or an air-traffic controller, or a short-order cook. We respect the fact that those are, each in their own way, specialized skills that take time, training, practice, and certification to master.
But screenwriting is one of those ill-defined skills a great number of people erroneously assume they understand intuitively. I suppose it’s because we’ve all spent our lives watching movies, so we think we understand how stories are told. Nowhere is this truer than in Hollywood, where everyone from managers to agents to producers to actors think they’re just as proficient as any pro screenwriter. (Just this past week, in fact, it came to light that actress Jenna Ortega of Wednesday “went ahead and changed dialogue without consulting the film’s writers,” per Variety.) This is a quality many, many folks in Hollywood possess in spades: confidence without competence.
The irony of it all is that most screenwriters, even the supremely competent ones, seldom have much confidence at all, even after they’ve achieved a measure of success; they are plagued throughout their careers by an immedicable case of Imposter Syndrome. The town’s entire power structure is designed to subjugate the screenwriter. If I had really understood that, I would’ve reconsidered pursuing a career as one.
What impresses me so much about Robert Rodriguez is the way he built his confidence — in his creative instincts, yes, but more importantly in himself — by learning to be technically proficient and therefore self-reliant. He didn’t need Hollywood’s validation — even at 23 years old. Accordingly, he couldn’t be subjugated by them, because he never felt pressured to play their stupid game. After his agent told him a major studio wanted to make a development deal with him based on the heat El Mariachi was generating back in ’92, Rodriguez wrote this:
Most young filmmakers with that kind of heat on them would trade their soul away at that point to be welcomed into the industry — to be “in the club,” as it were. And once you do that, you’re fucked. Hollywood owns you. But Rodriguez’s ace in the hole was that he never aspired to work in Hollywood; he only wanted to make movies. Because he knew what he wanted and didn’t get seduced by the whole Hollywood scene, he set his own terms:
He was so uncommonly wise and clearheaded about what he wanted. He trusted his gut. I really envy him that.
The lesson in all of this, Lena? If you’re gonna place a bet in life, place it on yourself, not on people who talk a big game but are mostly full of shit. I wish I’d understood that at 23…
He was a wise man, indeed, to do what he loved instead of getting sucked into Hollywood’s fame and fortune. I have respect for someone like that. Most people aspire to money and fame- which is understandable in a way – but none of that can buy true love, health, or true friendship, and as you said, Sean, they own you. It changes everything, I think. If you have a talent, it’s something you should nurture like he did because he just wanted to make movies. A huge salute to Robert Rodriquez! At 23…well, we all had our dreams then.I think that’s part of what molded us into the people we became. Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson. Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson.
Ditto all of that, Lena. And it’s worth noting that Rodriguez’s particular origin story is an exemplar of how to build confidence. He viewed every project he made — from the movies he shot on his dad’s camcorder when he was a teen, to the 16-mm shorts he made in film school, to El Mariachi, which he’d explicitly produced for the indiscriminate Spanish home-video market, to Roadracers, a TV movie he directed between Mariachi and Desperado “just for practice” — as an opportunity to experiment, to make mistakes, and to learn from them. He never put pressure on himself to make a “masterpiece” — a project that would be a film-festival darling and launch a career in Hollywood. He viewed every project as a learning experience — a creative workshop — whereby it was safe to “fail” because the stakes were so low.
Try to view your blog in the same manner. It’s just a workshop to try out ideas — to see what you say so you might better know what you think. I don’t think my blog’s creative identity really cohered until 2020 — six years after I started it! But even now, I don’t put pressure on myself to turn out a Pulitzer Prize–winning composition with each new post, and I accept that some of my essays fall short of my creative ambitions for them.
To wit: Part of the reason I wrote “Sorting through the Clutter” was because I was always somewhat dissatisfied with “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” my first thesis on the subject of minimalism (though I recently reread that earlier effort and didn’t think it was as bad as I’d remembered). Precisely two years ago, I published a piece called “Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer” that has some very good ideas in it, but I don’t think I gave it enough time to incubate. Recently, however, I thought, “Well, if I could rewrite that article, how would I do it?”
And I came up with an idea — a fresh angle on Buffy — that I deemed worth pursuing; accordingly, later this month I’ll be posting “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born,” which serves as a second take on that subject, this time a bit more nuanced and carefully considered. But the original post will still be available to read, because this blog will always stand as a public record of my creative, intellectual, and moral evolution. It’s doesn’t have to be “perfect.”
When we, as artists, relieve ourselves of the pressure to produce perfection, we give ourselves room to grow creatively — and thrive artistically.
Thank you so much for the advice. I really appreciate it because all I really want to do is write – always has been a first love. I’ll be on the look out for your new article on Buffy, loved the first one as well.
Thanks, Lena. Sometimes I’m less generous toward my own work than others are inclined to be; very often readers like yourself get what I’m going for even when I feel a given thesis did not live up to my ambitions for it. But I won’t revisit a subject unless I have something sufficiently new and different to say about it. And since Buffy, like Star Wars, is an exhaustively covered subject on pop-culture blogs and in online periodicals, I would not be posting a new essay about it unless I had a fresh take on it. Look for that to post later this month…
Sorry for repeating the same sentence! Oh my gosh!
No worries, Lena! You left a thoughtful comment that I appreciated, and that’s all that matters — not some benign typo.
Thank you!