Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Hero’s Journey (Page 1 of 3)

Under the Influence, Part 2:  The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood

October 9, 2024 / / 28 Comments

Let’s play Ten for Ten!  To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities.  This post is presented in three installments.

“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.

In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.

And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.

Given that my childhood coincided with what Quentin Tarantino terms “the miserable eighties”—that decade of “middle-of-the-road successful films”1 during which “likeability was everything”2—the following ten cinematic specimens that impressed so notably upon my nascent imagination, accordingly, span the years 1978 through 1993.

Before we dive in, let’s stipulate what this digest isn’t.  These are not what I consider the Best Movies Ever, or even the best movies of their era, neither of which I am particularly qualified to judge.

Furthermore, they are not necessarily even my favorite movies, merely the ones that made a meaningful, lasting, and demonstrable impression on me, and whose DNA has (repeatedly) found their way into my own work.

Nor does this cover my literary or musical influences, because, as Geddy Lee suggests, the project of tracing this stuff ain’t easy; it took a surprising amount of rumination to settle upon the ten selections studied here.  (None of them are particularly obscure; if you haven’t seen all ten, you’ve at least heard of them.)

I have excluded any films that may have once held sway over me, particularly ’80s action movies (from police thrillers to sci-fi dystopias to car-worshipping petro-propaganda), whose hypermasculine spirit and/or trashy cynicism I can no longer in good conscience abide.

It must also be noted I am uncomfortably aware of how, well, white all my chosen case studies are.  The filmmakers and screenwriters are nigh exclusively straight white men, with the known exceptions of Joel Schumacher, Leslie Newman, and Janice Fischer.

What’s more, every protagonist across the board is a straight white male, several of them either explicitly or implicitly Irish American, at that.  Boys like me were very well represented in popular media back then—still are—as there are precious few actors of color to be found in any these productions, and, in those rare instances, always in small or supporting roles.

These cinematic influences are all unambiguously predicated on a heteronormative worldview and a white male perspective.  I acknowledge that.

But… as much as they (mostly) glorify white boys, they all (save one) speak to at least one of two themes that have fascinated me throughout my life, and which are the dominant subjects of my own fiction.

The first is the complicated dynamic between fathers/men and sons/boys.

The second:  the special bond of boyhood friendship, and how boys often look to each other for the emotional support they don’t get from their parents.

Men’s relationships with their fathers and their friends was a central theme of “Ted Lasso”

The stories I respond to and the stories I write are, for the most part, about straight white males.  But I consciously seek to eschew the reductive paradigms favored by Hollywood—notably the solitary antihero and middle-aged manchild—in favor of men who are competent but not superheroic, compassionate but not saintly, flawed but not cruel, and definitely not proudly antisocial, brazenly irresponsible, or comfortably violent.

In stark contrast with Tarantino’s reflexively defensive view that cinematic expressions of violence and hypermasculinity (to say nothing of the institutionalized misogyny that inspirits them) are harmless exercises in wish fulfillment, I believe commercial storytellers—particularly straight white cisgendered men—have a moral obligation to be a productive part of the cultural conversation initiated by the #MeToo movement and the George Floyd protests:

We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures.  These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.  But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect—it has shut them down even further. . . .

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause, a dog whistle for a kind of bad-faith politicking.  Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down.  But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways—male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect.  Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having:  human connection.

Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of progressive ideals is only reinforcing this problem, pushing them further into isolation and defensiveness.  The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes—to approach boys generously rather than punitively.  We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.

Ruth Whippman, “Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having,” Opinion, New York Times, June 5, 2024

The storytellers could contribute to a meaningful shift of the cultural mindset if we summoned the moral imagination to refuse to further represent masculinity as a binary (and compulsory) choice between two equally oppressive and simplistic models of social posturing and self-identity—either he-man or Peter Pan—and dared to instead portray boys and men as human beings of nuanced emotion, as capable of expressing sympathy as they are deserving of receiving it.

Now more than ever, we need thoughtful, responsible fiction by men about men—stories that explore masculinity and manhood without invoking the same tired, narrow, noxious archetypes of tough-guy antiheroes who “play by their own rules” and stunted-adolescent slackers for whom rules, the mere acknowledgment of let alone adherence to, are the stuff of “adulting,” and fuck that shit.  Such prosocial, aspirational fiction might very well be called helpful exercises in wish fulfillment.  That’s what I’ve called for, and what I strive to produce myself.

Now let’s look, in mostly linear order, at the films that shaped my tastes and style, starting with the first five (of ten) selections.  Click on any of the links below to jump directly to that particular subheading and its corresponding treatise:

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Under the Influence, Part 1:  On Artistic Inspiration, Finding One’s Voice, and Tarantino’s Formative Faves

June 26, 2024 / / 26 Comments

Let’s play Ten for Ten!  To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities.  This post is presented in three installments.

“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.

In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.

And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.

It takes an unholy degree of time and stamina to write a book.  Consequently, it’s advisable to have a really good reason to take a given project on—then see it through to the finish line.  Before typing word one of a new manuscript, it behooves us to ask (and answer):  Why is this project worth the herculean effort required to bring it into existence?

I wrote my debut novel The Dogcatcher (2023) for the most elemental of motives:  I ached for the kind of bygone horror/comedies on which I’d come of age in the ’80s, an era that produced such motley and memorable movies as An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Evil Dead (1981), Gremlins (1984), Ghostbusters (1984), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), The Monster Squad (1987), The ’Burbs (1989), and Tremors (1990).  Where have those kinds of movies gone? I wondered.

Hollywood, to be fair, hadn’t stopped making horror/comedies, it only long since stopped making them with any panache.  I have spent many a Saturday night over the past decade in a binge-scrolling malaise, surfing numbly through hundreds of viewing options on Netflix or Prime or Hulu or whatever, when suddenly my inner adolescent’s interest is piqued—as though I were back at the old video store and had found a movie right up my alley.

I certainly sensed the stir of possibility in Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020), about a group of teenagers from my hometown battling undead gentrifiers.  Night Teeth (2021), featuring bloodsuckers in Boyle Heights, seemed equally promising.  And Werewolves Within (2021) is set in a snowbound Northeastern United States township already on edge over a proposed pipeline project when its residents find themselves under attack by a werewolf.

“Vampires vs. the Bronx” (2020) seemed like the perfect mix of Gen X–era throwback and Gen Z–era social commentary

All of a sudden, I felt like that sixteen-year-old kid who saw the one-sheet for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) while riding the subway to work—“She knows a sucker when she sees one,” teased the tagline, depicting a cheerleader from the neck down with a wooden stake in her fist—and knew he was in for a good time at the cinema.

No such luck.  Vampires vs. the Bronx, in an act of creative criminality, pisses away a narratively and thematically fertile premise through flat, forgettable execution.

Night Teeth, meanwhile, answers the question:  How about a movie set in the same stomping ground as Blade (1998)—inner-city L.A., clandestine vampiric council calling the shots—only without any of its selling-point stylistics or visual inventiveness?

And Werewolves Within establishes an intriguing environmental justice subplot the screenwriter had absolutely no interest in or, it turns out, intention of developing—the oil pipeline isn’t so much a red herring as a dead herring—opting instead for a half-assed, who-cares-less whodunit beholden to all the standard-issue genre tropes.

Faced with one cinematic disappointment after another, it seemed the only way to sate my appetite for the kind of horror/comedy that spoke to me as a kid was to write my own.

On the subject of kids—specifically, stories about twelve-year-old boys—I haven’t seen one of those produced with any appreciable measure of emotional honesty or psychological nuance since Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body.  That was forty years ago!

Storytellers know how to write credible children (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Home Alone, Room), and they know how to write teenagers (The Outsiders, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Clueless), but preadolescent boys are almost invariably reduced to archetypal brushstrokes (The Goonies, The Sandlot, Stranger Things).  The preteen protagonists of such stories are seldom made to grapple with the singular emotional turbulence of having one foot in childhood—still watching cartoons and playing with action figures—and the other in adolescence—beginning to regard girls with special interest, coming to realize your parents are victims of generational trauma that’s already in the process of being passed unknowingly and inexorably down to you.

For all of popular culture’s millennia-long fixation on and aggrandizement of the heroic journey of (usually young) men, our commercial filmmakers and storytellers either can’t face or don’t know how to effectively dramatize the developmental fulcrum of male maturation.  George Lucas’ experimental adventure series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–1996) sheds light on Indy’s youth from ages eight through ten (where he’s portrayed by Corey Carrier) and then sixteen through twenty-one (Sean Patrick Flanery); the complicated messiness of pubescence, however, is entirely bypassed.  Quite notably, those are the years in which Indy’s mother died and his emotionally distant father retreated into his work—formative traumas that shaped, for better and worse, the adult hero played by Harrison Ford in the feature films.

Lucas’ elision seems odd to me—certainly a missed creative opportunity1—given that twelve-going-on-thirteen is the period of many boys’ most memorable and meaningful adventures.  King and Reiner never forgot that, and neither did I, hence the collection of magical-realism novellas I’m currently writing that explore different facets of that transitory experience:  going from wide-eyed wonder to adolescent disillusionment as a result of life’s first major disappointment (Spex); being left to navigate puberty on your own in the wake of divorce (The Brigadier); struggling to understand when, how, and why you got socially sorted at school with the kids relegated to second-class citizenry (H.O.L.O.).

This single-volume trilogy, I should note, isn’t YA—these aren’t stories about preteens for preteens.  Rather, they are intended, like The Body/Stand by Me before them, as a retrocognitive exercise for adults who’ve either forgotten or never knew the experience of being a twelve-year-old boy to touch base with that metamorphic liminality in all of its psychoemotional complexity.  They’re very consciously stories about being twelve as reviewed from middle-aged eyes.

As I’ll demonstrate in “Part 2” and “Part 3,” both that WIP and The Dogcatcher take inspiration—narratively, thematically, aesthetically, referentially—from the stories of my youth, the books and movies that first kindled my imagination and catalyzed my artistic passions.

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A History of the Blog (So Far)—and a Programming Update

September 26, 2022 / / 34 Comments

Since launching this blog eight years ago, I have maintained a consistent publishing schedule of one new post per month.  However, given the ways in which this ongoing project has evolved, that level of output is no longer sustainable.  Here’s a brief chronicle of the blog’s creative progression—and a statement on what comes next.

From the time I signed with my first literary manager in 1998 through the ignominious end of my career in Hollywood in 2014, I was exclusively focused on one form of creative expression:  screenwriting.

Though ultimately unproduced, my scripts nonetheless earned praise from producers and development execs for their uncommon visual suggestiveness and sharp sense of pace, which I controlled through deliberate syntactic arrangement of the very things that do not appear in the finished film for audiences to appreciate:  the stage description.

Screenwriters, if you’re unaware, are not by and large particularly skillful wordsmiths.  And, to be fair, it’s not required of them.  Plot structure, characterization, and dialogue are what the screenwriter is there to provide for a motion picture.  Why waste time and creative energy on pretty prose in a blueprint, which is all a screenplay really is?

A rarified handful of pro screenwriters, Shane Black and James Cameron among them, paint immersive pictures with their words, imparting how the world of the story feels over merely sequentially reporting what happens.  Such is the dynamic mode of screenwriting for which I strove.

Most screenplays—and I’m talking about scripts to produced films, written by Hollywood’s A-list scribes—aren’t much more than utilitarian laundry lists of things we’ll see and hear onscreen, conveyed without any visceral impression of style or tempo, and are, accordingly, nigh unreadable.  The director, after all, is going to make the movie he sees in his head; the script is just a means to get all the above- and below-the-line talent quite literally on the same page.

Excerpted from “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” by David Koepp.  Mind-numbing, no?

I actually like words, however.  I like how they sound, and the infinite combinations of meaning that can be made from them.  Truth is, I never should’ve aspired to be a screenwriter.  It was the wrong medium for my talents and interests.  “Author” and “essayist” were always a better fit for my writerly sensibilities.  It took the implosion of my career to finally embrace that.

So, when I started this blog at the encouragement of my wife—one of her many good ideas—I didn’t know quite what to write about except screenwriting.  Accordingly, my first two dozen posts are almost entirely devoted to matters of narrative craft, from my customized Storytelling 101 curriculum to the violation of the Double Hocus Pocus principle in Ghostbusters II to character deconstructions of Jack Bauer and John Rambo and a comparative analysis of the Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger interpretations of the Joker.

One year into this blogging project, all my notions about narrativity were challenged—perhaps even shattered—by a book I’d read called Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now (2013) by Douglas Rushkoff, which argued that Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey,” the dramatic schema that has served as the structural basis for nearly every story in the Western literary canon, had collapsed around the turn of the millennium, as evidenced by the fanatical popularity of “storyless” fiction like Lost, The X-Files, The Sopranos, CSI:  Crime Scene Investigation, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones.

Rushkoff’s premise inspired a yearslong scholarly investigation on my part, which began in earnest with a post called “Journey’s End:  Rushkoff and the Collapse of Narrative,” and turned the blog in a new, more complex direction.  This intellectual project would never be the same.

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The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely:  How the Mega-Franchise Format Warps Creative Storytelling Goals

May 23, 2022 / / 29 Comments

“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations”—Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now (New York:  Penguin Group, 2013), 16.

Traditionally, stories have been organized around universal dramatic principles first identified by Aristotle in Poetics, later codified by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and most recently customized for screenwriters in programs like Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!  But in recent decades, narrativity has taken on a new, shapeless, very possibly endless permutation:  the transmedia “mega-franchise”—that is, the intertextual and ever-expanding storyworlds of Marvel, Star Wars, The Conjuring, Harry Potter’s Wizarding World, et al.

In this month’s guest post, friend of the blog Dave Lerner returns to delineate the five creative objectives of storytelling—and how those have mutated, along with narrativity itself, in this era of branded-IP entertainment.

From the first cave paintings to the Homeric epics to the Globe Theatre to the multicamera sitcom, storytellers across the ages have told stories for reasons so obvious they often go unstated and unacknowledged.

Let’s take a look at the five creative goals that guide storytellers in any medium, whether it be a movie, novel, TV episode, comic book, or otherwise.  Commercial considerations such as “profit” and “being hired to do so” are omitted here, as these are not creative goals.

Storytelling Goal #1:  Entertainment

Elementary!  The storyteller intends for their audience to have fun, to relax, to take their minds off their problems, to experience another world, another life, for a while.  Pure escapism.  While some may decry “mindless entertainment,” I would argue that it has a necessary place in life—and I’m not the only one who sees the virtues of escapist stories:

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict.  That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.”  I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, “What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?” and gave the obvious answer:  jailers.

C. S. Lewis, On Stories:  And Other Essays on Literature

Storytelling Goal #2:  Artistic Expression

Although the definition of “Art” has been and will be debated endlessly, for the purpose of this category I will use the second definition from Wiktionary:

The creative and emotional expression of mental imagery, such as visual, auditory, social, etc.

To further specify, art is more about the feelings the artist is expressing and the statement the artist is making than the emotions they are attempting to evoke in their audience.

Arguments about whether or not a given piece is “art,” or a given medium is “capable of creating art,” though valid in other contexts, will be disregarded here.  I’ll assume if you say your piece is art, then it’s art.  I am also ignoring the quality of the piece, the term “a work of art.”  By my definition, a movie can be as much a piece of art as a painting, sculpture, symphony, literary novel, etc., though when it is, it’s usually called a “film” and not a “movie.”

Storytelling Goal #3:  Education

The storyteller aspires to teach their audience something they did not know before.  While documentaries and lectures are obvious examples, many read historical novels or hard science fiction for much the same purpose.  When I was a child, I first learned that water expands when it freezes from a Shazam! comic book.  Of course, a person may forget most of what they’d learned almost immediately afterwards, but the learning experience itself was enjoyable.

“Young Indiana Jones,” recently studied here, incorporated biographical information about many early-20th-century historical figures, fulfilling the third of five storytelling goals

Even if the “facts” presented are deliberately inaccurate, as long the intent is for people to believe them, this category applies.

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Book Review:  “Blood, Sweat & Chrome” by Kyle Buchanan

April 25, 2022 / / 20 Comments

Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome, published by William Morrow in February, chronicles the not-to-be-believed making of George Miller’s Mad Max:  Fury Road (2015) from conception to release through interviews with its cast and crew, and celebrates the inspiring creative imagination of the filmmakers, who defied the odds to create a contemporary classic—a movie as singularly visceral as it is stunningly visual.

But much like the nonstop action in the movie itself, the adulation expressed in the book never pauses to interrogate Miller and company’s moral imagination.  Let’s fix that, shall we?

I abhor nostalgia, particularly for the 1980s and ’90s, but I’ve recently found myself revisiting many of the films and television shows of the latter decade, the period during which I first knew I wanted to be a cinematic storyteller, when earnest star-driven Oscar dramas like Forrest Gump (1994) coexisted with, and even prospered alongside, paradigm-shifting indies à la Pulp Fiction (also ’94).  Those days are gone and never coming back—the institution formerly known as Hollywood is now the superhero–industrial complex—but I’ve wondered if some of those works, so immensely popular and influential then, have stood the test of time?

Yet my informal experiment has been about much more than seeing if some old favorites still hold up (and, by and large, they do); it’s about understanding why they worked in the first place—and what storytelling lessons might be learned from an era in which movies existed for their own sake, as complete narratives unto themselves rather than ephemeral extensions of some billion-dollar, corporately superintended brand.

In an entertainment landscape across which there is so much content, most of it deceptively devoid of coherence or meaning—a transmedia morass I’ve come to call the Multiverse of Madness—the secret to studying narrativity isn’t to watch more but rather less.  To consume fewer movies and TV shows, but to watch them more selectively and mindfully.  Pick a few classics and scrutinize them until you know them backwards and forwards.

In college, I spent an entire semester analyzing Citizen Kane (1941), from reading multiple drafts of its screenplay to watching it all the way through with the volume turned down just to appreciate its unconventional cinematography.  That’s how you learn how stories work:  Study one or two movies/novels per year… but study the shit out of them.  Watch less, but do it far more attentively.

Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the subject of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome”

That is, admittedly, a counterintuitive mindset in our Digital Age of automatic and accelerating behaviors, whereby post-credit scenes preemptively gin up anticipation for the next movie (often through homework assignments) before we’ve had a chance to digest the current one, and the autoplay feature of most streaming services encourages and enables mindless TV binge-watching.

But the quarantine, unwelcome though it may have been, did offer a pause button of sorts, and we are only now beginning to see some of the ways in which folks exploited the rare opportunity to slow down, to go deep, that it offered.  One such project to emerge from that period of thoughtful reflection is entertainment journalist Kyle Buchanan’s recently published nonfiction book Blood, Sweat & Chrome:  The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max:  Fury Road”:

In April 2020, as the pandemic swept the planet and the movie-release calendar fell apart, I began writing an oral history of Mad Max:  Fury Road for the New York Times.  Without any new titles to cover, why not dive deeply into a modern classic on the verge of its fifth anniversary?

Every rewatch over those five years had confirmed to me that Fury Road is one of the all-time cinematic greats, an action movie with so much going on thematically that there’d be no shortage of things to talk about.  I had also heard incredible rumors about the film’s wild making, the sort of stories that you can only tell on the record once the dust has long settled.

Kyle Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome:  The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max:  Fury Road” (New York:  William Morrow, 2022), 337

A movie two decades in the making, Fury Road, the belated follow-up to writer/director George Miller’s dystopian action-film trilogy Mad Max (1979, 1981, 1985) starring a then-unknown Mel Gibson as a wanderer in the wasteland—the Road Warrior—began its long journey to the screen as a proposed television series in 1995 when Miller won back the rights to the franchise from Warner Bros. as part of a settlement from a breach-of-contract suit he’d filed over having been fired from Contact (1997).

Eventually inspired to do another feature instead—“What if there was a Mad Max movie that was one long chase,” Miller pondered, “and the MacGuffin was human?” (ibid., 31)—the ensuing production was plagued with one near-terminal roadblock after another.  The behind-the-scenes story told in Blood, Sweat & Chrome is as thrilling, in its own way, as that of Mad Max:  Fury Road itself.

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“Young Indiana Jones” Turns 30:  Storytelling Lessons from George Lucas’ Other Prequel Series

March 28, 2022 / / 18 Comments

A television series based on an immensely popular action-movie franchise shouldn’t have been a creative or commercial risk—quite the opposite.  But with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which premiered on March 4, 1992, filmmaker George Lucas had no intention of producing a small-screen version of his big-screen blockbusters.  Here’s how Lucas provided a richly imaginative model for what a prequel can and should be—and why it would never be done that way again.

Though he more or less innovated the contemporary blockbuster, George Lucas had intended—even yearned—to be an avant-garde filmmaker:

Lucas and his contemporaries came of age in the 1960s vowing to explode the complacency of the old Hollywood by abandoning traditional formulas for a new kind of filmmaking based on handheld cinematography and radically expressive use of graphics, animation, and sound.  But Lucas veered into commercial moviemaking, turning himself into the most financially successful director in history by marketing the ultimate popcorn fodder.

Steve Silberman, “Life After Darth,” Wired, May 1, 2005

After dropping the curtain on his two career- and era-defining action trilogies (Star Wars concluded in 1983, then Indiana Jones in ’89), then failing to launch a new franchise with Willow (his 1988 sword-and-sorcery fantasy fizzled at the box office, though even that would-be IP is getting a “legacy” successor later this year courtesy the nostalgia–industrial complex), Lucas did in fact indulge his more experimental creative proclivities—through the unlikeliest of projects:  a pair of prequels to both Indiana Jones and Star Wars.  And while both arguably got made on the strength of the brands alone, the prequels themselves would, for better and worse, defy the sacrosanct conventions of blockbuster cinema—as well the codified narrative patterns of Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”—that audiences had come to expect from Lucas.

A perfunctory scene in Return of the Jedi, in which Obi-Wan finally explains Darth Vader’s mysterious backstory to Luke (a piece of business that could’ve been easily handled in the first film, thereby sparing the hero needlessly considerable risk and disillusionment in The Empire Strikes Back, but whatever), served as the narrative foundation for Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999–2005), in which a precocious tike (The Phantom Menace) matures into a sullen teenager (Attack of the Clones) before warping into a murderous tyrant (Revenge of the Sith).  Underpinning Anakin’s emo-fueled transformation to the dark side is a byzantine plotline about Palpatine’s Machiavellian takeover of the Republic.  Meanwhile, references to the original trilogy, from crucial plot points to fleeting sight gags, abound.

You’ve all seen the movies, so I’ll say no more other than to suggest the story arc—which is exactly what Obi-Wan summarized in Return of the Jedi, only (much) longer, appreciably harder to follow, and a tonally incongruous mix of gee-whiz dorkiness and somber political intrigue—is precisely the kind of creative approach to franchise filmmaking that would’ve been summarily nixed in any Hollywood pitch meeting, had Lucas been beholden to the corporate precepts of the studio system from which the colossal success of the original Star Wars afforded him his independence.

George Lucas on the set of the “Star Wars” prequels

Which is not to say Lucas’ artistic instincts were infallible.  Financially successful though the prequels were, audiences never really embraced his vision of an even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away:  Gungans and midi-chlorians and trade disputes didn’t exactly inspire the wide-eyed amazement that Wookiees and lightsabers and the Death Star had.

Maybe by that point Star Wars was the wrong franchise with which to experiment creatively?  Perhaps it had become too culturally important, and audience expectations for new entries in the long-dormant saga were just too high?  In the intervening years, Star Wars had ceased to be the proprietary daydreams of its idiosyncratic creator; culturally if not legally, Star Wars kinda belonged to all of us on some level.  By explicitly starting the saga with Episode IV in 1977, he’d invited each of us to fill in the blanks; the backstory was arguably better off imagined than reified.

As an IP, however, Indiana Jones, popular as it was, carried far less expectation, as did the second-class medium of network television, which made Lucas’ intended brand extension more of an ancillary product in the franchise than a must-see cinematic event—more supplemental than it was compulsory, like a tie-in novel, or the Ewok telefilms of the mid-eighties.  The stakes of the project he envisioned were simply much lower, the spotlight on it comfortably dimmer.  In the event of its creative and/or commercial failure, Young Indiana Jones would be a franchise footnote in the inconsequential vein of the Star Wars Holiday Special, not an ill-conceived vanity project responsible for retroactively ruining the childhoods of millions of developmentally arrested Gen Xers.  Here Lucas expounds on the genesis of the series:

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There He Was… and in He Walked: Lessons on Mythic Storytelling from the Mariachi Trilogy

November 19, 2021 / / 48 Comments

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.

Robert Rodriguez at the world premiere of “Alita: Battle Angel” on January 31, 2019 in London (Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty)

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.:

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Patriarchal Propaganda: How Hollywood Stories Give Men Delusions of Heroism

October 6, 2021 / / 24 Comments

Movies and TV shows—and this includes both your favorites and mine—mostly exist to remind us that ours is a man’s world.  Popular entertainment in general, regardless of medium or genre or even the noble intentions of the storytellers, is almost invariably patriarchal propaganda.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Since at least as far back as the adventures of Odysseus, men have used fantasy narratives to contextualize ourselves as the solitary heroic protagonist of the world around us—a world that would be appreciably better off if only our judgment weren’t questioned or our actions thwarted by those of inferior hearts and minds.  In the Book of Genesis, God creates man from the dust, gives him dominion over the Earth, then provides him with a “helper”—Eve—who proves considerably less than helpful when she defiantly feeds from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and spoils Paradise for everyone.

Such are the stories we’ve been hearing for literally thousands of years, and the reality we live in today is very much shaped by the presumption of patriarchy they propagandize.  In 1949, this way of telling stories—the Hero’s Journey—was codified by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and adopted by Hollywood as the blueprint for the blockbuster.  From our Westerns (Dances with Wolves) to our policiers (Dirty Harry) to our space operas (Star Wars) to our spy thrillers (James Bond) to our teen comedies (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) to our superhero universes (Iron Man) to our mob dramas (The Sopranos) to our sitcoms (Two and a Half Men), it’s a man’s world, baby—with the rest of you there to either support us or (foolishly) stand in our way.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with escapist entertainment.  It isn’t fantasy the genre that’s the problem, or even the Hero’s Journey story model, but rather the near-universal underlying patterns and motifs in our popular fictions that have unconsciously supported—that have surreptitiously sold us—the fantasy of patriarchal hegemony.  As such, white men in particular have been conditioned by these cultural narratives to see ourselves as the central heroic figure in the Epic of Me—even our storytellers themselves:

While accepting the award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for his work on The Queen’s Gambit, Scott Frank brushed off the “get off the stage” music not once but three times, reading a prepared speech from two full-length pages he’d shoved into his pocket and blowing past his allotted 45 seconds to speak for three minutes and 28 seconds—more than four and a half times as long as he was supposed to.

Viewers couldn’t have asked for a more perfect embodiment of white male privilege and entitlement as a visibly annoyed Frank reacted to the orchestra’s attempts to play him off by saying, “Really?  No,” and making a dismissive hand gesture.  The second time they started playing, he said, “Seriously, stop the music,” again waving his hand as if he were shooing away a fly and pressing on.  The third time, he insisted, “I’m almost done.”  Each time, when he commanded them to stop playing the music, they actually stopped the music.  Who knew it was that easy?

Bonnie Stiernberg, “Those ‘Queen’s Gambit’ Emmy Speeches Epitomized Exactly What’s Wrong With Hollywood,” InsideHook, September 20, 2021

Whether we’re aware of them or not, men have certain expectations about how the world should work:  that it should work for us.  After all, God gave us, not you, dominion over all living things and natural resources on Earth.  But when reality conflicts with those birthrights, we grow frustrated, and rather than questioning the stories we’ve been told about our place in the world, we tell more of the same self-mythologizing horseshit—to assure ourselves, and others, of our God-given entitlements, of our singular heroism.  Consider, for example, the overwhelming popularity—ten entries and counting—of the testosterone-charged Fast & Furious franchise:

These films use the concrete landscape to assert individuality and a refusal to knuckle under to authority.  With the exception of Brian and perhaps Roman, these inner-city car racers don’t want to be reintegrated into society.  They race cars to gain status and money, to impress sexy women, and to defy the police—just like [celebrated American NASCAR driver] Junior Johnson and the Dukes of Hazzard.  But, like the conformists and suburbanites they reject, they act like everything in nature exists to be consumed and exploited.

robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019

Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) famously makes his gang say grace before they eat, an utterly meaningless gesture since, unlike obeying the law, it costs him nothing to do so, yet it nonetheless speaks volumes about his patriarchal values.  He and his crew aren’t enlightened antiheroes as they believe, merely entitled gearheads who proudly and explicitly live their lives “a quarter mile at a time,” because to think beyond that would require a sense of empathy for those outside their range of awareness, as well as compel a sober consideration for the long-term consequences of their, to put it generously, socially irresponsible behaviors.

Dom appropriates Christian iconography to assert his moral authority—pure patriarchal propaganda

(And if you’re inclined to dismiss Dom’s worldview as the patently absurd pseudophilosophy of a one-dimensional action-movie street racer—nothing worth taking seriously—it’s worth remembering that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s operating motto is “Move fast and break things,” which sounds like exactly the sort of iconoclastic rallying cry you’d expect to hear Dom growl… until you realize the thing Zuckerberg might’ve broken while becoming the fifth wealthiest person in the world is democracy itself.)

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Grounded and Elevated: Screenwriting Secrets for a Sure-Thing Hollywood Pitch

January 18, 2021 / / 30 Comments

Despite everything, it seems I still have a few friends in Tinseltown.  A development exec I know, aware of my blog’s polemical crusade against late-twentieth-century nostalgia as well as creatively and morally bankrupt storytelling, recently forwarded several e-mails containing informal pitches (from agented writers) he’d solicited for “reboots” of three classic IPs straight from the Gen X archives.  They offer fascinating firsthand insight into the demoralizing vocation of Hollywood screenwriting.

It might surprise those outside the industry to learn only a small fraction of a given screenwriter’s time and effort is spent developing original stories, known as “spec scripts.”  Few of those screenplays ever sell (certainly nowadays), and fewer still are produced; mostly, such projects are mere “calling cards”—writing samples designed to establish a scribe’s commercial sensibilities and creative credentials so he or she might be given the opportunity to vie for “open assignments.”  In those instances, a prodco controls the film rights to an intellectual property (IP)—a novel, a comic book, an old TV series—and, accordingly, invites such candidates to come in and pitch a take on it.

For instance, my prison break–zombie outbreak mashup Escape from Rikers Island afforded me opportunities to pitch cinematic adaptations of the pseudo-documentary series Ancient Aliens and the Japanese manga MPD-Psycho, as well as a remake of the 1992 action thriller Trespass.  If you’re higher up on the food chain—in, say, J. J. Abrams territory—that’s when you might get a shot at a gold-plated franchise like Star Wars or Mission:  Impossible.

Nicolas Cage as an anxiety-riddled screenwriter struggling to adapt “The Orchid Thief” in “Adaptation”

Because for the most part, Hollywood isn’t looking for new ideas; they have enough branded IPs to keep them in business through infinity and beyond.  What they’re looking for are skilled stenographers—writers-for-hire who can take a preexisting property and, juggling input from a thousand different chefs in the kitchen, turn it into a viable script for which a movie studio will be persuaded to invest millions of dollars.  That’s the litmus test:  Can you take an established IP and from it write a script that will motivate the studio to write a check?

The following proposals provide an insider’s glimpse into that singular development process.  With my contact’s express permission, I have reproduced the relevant text from his e-mails verbatim, including all typographical errors and syntactical idiosyncrasies, but excluding the identities of the authors, their representation, the executive, and his production company.

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The Road Back: Revisiting “The Writer’s Journey”

September 28, 2020 / / 20 Comments

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.

As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble.  From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.

The Writer's Journey graphic
The stages of the Hero’s Journey

The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum:  George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later.  After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.

In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own:  The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer.  The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:

  • MAPPING THE JOURNEY:  Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
  • STAGES OF THE JOURNEY:  Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
  • LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY:  Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
  • THE REST OF THE STORY:  ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT:  The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling.  After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating.  He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California:  Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420).  Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.

Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all:  The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.  Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!

Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”

But why is it essential?  If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all?  Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?

Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:

The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure.  The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.

The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories.  Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.

ibid., 7

I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time:  An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work.  Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation:  I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.

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