Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

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Imaginations on Fire: Rush’s Geddy Lee on Artistic Originality

March 19, 2015 / / 3 Comments

“When I feel the powerful visions/Their fire has made alive/I wish I had that instinct—/I wish I had that drive”

—“Mission” from Hold Your Fire (1987); lyrics by Neil Peart

Two things have grown considerably in the fifteen or so years that I’ve been a screenwriter:  the volume of material in my portfolio, and, correspondingly, my confidence in my creative skills.

With so many screenplays under my belt (I’ve lost count at this point), as well as two novels I’m readying for publication next year, I can look over my body of work and see the influences from—the echoes of—artists that inspired me in my formative years.  I was in high school when I realized that the same wondrous mind was responsible for both Star Wars and Indiana Jones—who the hell was blessed with that kind of imagination?!—and spent a considerable portion of my adolescence studying the screenplays and biographies of George Lucas (those resources, mind you, were not easily available online at that time).  One of my early stories during that period, long before fan fiction found a thriving forum on the Internet, was titled “Indiana Jones and the River Styx.”  When my novels are published, I’ll cite specific influences that helped shape them here on the blog.

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Diversity on Television: Lessons in Characterization from “Jane the Virgin”

February 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Considering the vastly improved representation of minorities on network TV this season—Empire, Black-ish, Cristela, Fresh Off the Boat, How to Get Away with Murder—it isn’t altogether surprising that the most delightful, dynamic, dimensional character to grace the small screen at present has emerged from the freshman pack.  What did catch me off guard, I’ll be big enough to admit, is that it was the least likely character on the last show I expected.

After nearly a decade of identity crisis, anemic ratings, and critical indifference, The CW, bastion of star-crossed supernatural romance and small-screen superheroics, scored its first Golden Globe win this season—for an adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela, no less:  Jane the Virgin.

Jane offers something a little different than its Big Network counterparts—something harder to categorize:  deftly written dramedy that concurrently satirizes and honors its telenovela heritage, complete with idiosyncratic flourishes like a whimsical narrator and on-screen text commentary.  Some of its characters, like Jane’s father, telenovela superstar Rogelio de la Vega (portrayed by Mexican actor Jaime Camil), are as consciously absurd as the series’ plot twists.  Yet in spite of his ostensible function as straight-faced comic relief, an analysis of Rogelio’s five traits shows him to be a case study in psychological complexity and originality.

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Attack of the Clones: Why Hollywood’s Creative Approach Is in Need of a Reboot

February 2, 2015 / / 8 Comments

I had no context to recognize this at the time, but I came of age in a golden era of fantasy cinema.  Some of my earliest theatrical experiences included Superman II (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), and Back to the Future (1985).  Movies like those were made, by and large, by a generation of filmmakers—notably but not exclusively Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—that had been raised on the sci-fi and fantasy offerings of 1950s B-movies and comics, and later became the first students to major in cinema studies and filmmaking; when that formal training was fused with their pulp passions, the contemporary blockbuster was born:  first with Jaws (1975), then Star Wars (1977), and then Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Superman:  The Movie (1978) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Goonies (1985).  That cornucopia of imaginative fantasy—hardly an all-encompassing list, by the way—was my first exposure to the movies.  Is it any wonder I was hooked for life?

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Stoking the Fire: Finding Versatility in Genre Conventions

January 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy represents cinematic perfection to me:  Batman Begins (2005) was the Batman movie I’d waited my whole life to see; then, much like Batman himself emerging from the cover of shadow when least expected, came The Dark Knight (2008), a gripping thriller à la Michael Mann’s Heat in which the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro roles were assumed, quite credibly somehow, by Batman and the Joker; and just as no artist before Nolan had tackled the early days of Batman’s crime-fighting career (including his apprenticeship and inspiration to go vigilante), no one had authored its concluding chapter, either, until The Dark Knight Rises (2012)—it is, if you take my meaning, the Last Batman Story.  For a character that had been in continuous publication—across multiple media—for seventy years at the time these films were produced, Nolan managed to find new, vital aspects of Batman’s rich hagiography to explore.

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Thoughts on “Ghostbusters II”: The Sequel

January 11, 2015 / / 16 Comments

My analysis of Ghostbusters II provoked some healthy debate when it was posted on Proton Charging’s Facebook page yesterday.  It is a testament to Ghostbusters—the movie, the franchise, and the sequel—that it continues to inspire such a passionate following over twenty-five years after the last installment was released.

Speaking of which, I suspect the development of Ghostbusters II went something like this:  Someone on the creative team—probably Dan Aykroyd—became taken with the notion of a river of slime as a key element of the sequel (I believe I’ve even seen drafts of the script in which “River of Slime” was suggested as the movie’s subtitle).  It probably didn’t take long to realize, however, that a river of slime is a noncorporeal entity—flowing ectoplasm has no agenda beyond existing, no antagonistic impulses whatsoever—and this Monster in the House movie was clearly in need of a monster—i.e., someone the Ghostbusters could actually fight.  Hence, Vigo the Carpathian was conceived.

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A Profile in Superheroics: Norm Breyfogle

January 5, 2015 / / 2 Comments

In my analysis of the Joker, I made brief mention of Norm Breyfogle, the masterful comic-book illustrator whose work graced the pages of, successively, Detective Comics, Batman, and Batman:  Shadow of the Bat between 1987 and 1992.  Mr. Breyfogle began his tenure as resident Bat-artist at a very exciting time for the Caped Crusader:  Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) had just rocked the comics world, heralding a brand-new era for both the legendary character and the medium itself, and Tim Burton’s Batman would go on to become the highest-grossing film of 1989, thrusting its titular hero out of the shadows of specialty shops and into the national spotlight, irrevocably changing both the comics and movie businesses in the process (probably for the worse in both cases, but that’s a subject for another article, I suppose).

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Final Repor(t) Card: A Character Assessment of “Stephen Colbert”

December 16, 2014 / / 6 Comments

Stephen Colbert:  Great performance artist… or the greatest performance artist?

I ask that as someone who saw Spinal Tap play Carnegie Hall.  (Seriously.)  After popularizing the “mockumentary” format in 1984 with This Is Spinal Tap (and I don’t think anyone since has done it better, even in light of how fashionable the aesthetic has become among contemporary network sitcoms like Modern Family and Parks and Recreation), a strange thing happened:  fictitious bandmates Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) emerged from the movie’s contained narrative to play live concerts and sit down for talk-show interviews; they became altogether separate entertainers (and entities) from the actors who portrayed them (the wigs and British accents contributed to the seamless illusion), seldom speaking out of character (even on the DVD commentary track!), and the history of the group so painstakingly “documented” in This Is Spinal Tap came to serve as the band’s accepted background as they went on to forge, over the next several decades, a genuine history here in the real world, which includes the release of actual albums (1992’s Break Like the Wind and 2009’s Back from the Dead, the latter of which lost the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album to—wait for it—A Colbert Christmas:  The Greatest Gift of All!) to supplement their apocryphal discography.

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To Survive and Thrive: Strategic Genre Switches in “The Hunger Games”

December 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

You sensed it right from the start:  The familiar plot machinations of The Hunger Games series weren’t there to comfort us (in their perversely dystopian way) in the latest theatrical entry, Mockingjay, Part 1.  The world and characters were the same, sure, yet we found ourselves, like the protagonist herself, immediately disoriented in this third go-round; nothing about this adventure, for us or for her, could be deemed business as usual.

So, what changed?

I’ve written a great deal about how indispensable I find Blake Snyder’s ten story models, but have offered little thus far in the way of illustration.  The Hunger Games series, a powerhouse big-studio franchise if ever there was one, provides an object lesson in two distinct types of Save the Cat! genres.

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Fallacies of Storytelling: More on Goals

December 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

It turns out the subject of character goals was in the air this week.

This morning, the “Cats” over at Save the Cat! (which does not include the innovator of the techniques they practice, Blake Snyder, as he regrettably passed away in 2009 quite unexpectedly and prematurely) posted a podcast in which they advocate for the requirement of a tangible, external goal on the part of a story’s protagonist, citing, among other examples, Academy Award Best Picture winner American Beauty (1999) as a case study.  If you read yesterday’s post, you know how I feel about this, but I elaborated my position in the comments section of the Save the Cat! website, which I am also making available here:

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Fallacies of Storytelling: The Protagonist’s Goal

December 4, 2014 / / 4 Comments

Back to the Future.  Escape from New York.  Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Saving Private Ryan.  Even in a cultural media vacuum, what narrative fundamental do the titles to those movies tell you about their respective plots?

They are goal-driven.

Goals can be an invaluable tool to establish suspense, propel a plot, and create an active protagonist.  But, like any storytelling appliance, they are an elective, not a mandate.  In the movie business, insecure creative execs will insist on their inclusion in every screenplay—a silver bullet for any plot that fails to effectively engross (which relates to an industry-wide problem I addressed in my first post:  the misapplication of craft).

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