Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Hero’s Journey (Page 2 of 3)

Some Assembly Required: Why Disciplined Creativity Begets Better Fiction

March 19, 2020 / / 24 Comments

Editor’s note:  “Some Assembly Required” was written and scheduled to post prior to COVID-19’s formal classification as a global pandemic and the ensuing social disruption it has caused here in the United States and around the world; in light of that, a thesis about storytelling craft seems to me somewhat inconsequential and irrelevant.

More broadly, however, the essay makes a case for slowing down, something we’re all doing out of admittedly unwelcome necessity at present, and learning to value the intellectual dividends of thoughtful rumination over the emotional gratification of kneejerk reaction; as such, I submit “Some Assembly Required” as planned—along with my best wishes to all for steadfast health and spirits through this crisis.

Castle Grayskull.  The Cobra Terror Drome.  The Batcave.  I didn’t have every 1980s action-figure playset, but, man, how I cherished the ones I got.  In those days of innocence, there was no visceral thrill quite like waking up to an oversized box under the Christmas tree, tearing off the wrapping to find this:

I had one just like it!

Or this:

Optimus Prime was both an action figure AND a playset! Didn’t have him, alas…

Or this:

The seven-foot G.I. Joe aircraft carrier! DEFINITELY didn’t have this one…

Oh, the possibilities!  Getting one of those glorious playsets was like being handed the keys to a magical kingdom of one’s very own.  After having been inspired by the adventures of G.I. Joe and the Transformers and the Ghostbusters at the movies, on their cartoon series, and in comics, now you had your very own “backlot” to stage your personal daydreams.  It was grand.

I am in no way indulging 1980s nostalgia here—surely you know me better than that by now.  Rather, I mean only to elicit the particular thrum of excitement the era’s playsets aroused, the imagination they unleashed.  It’s fair to say I became addicted to that sensation in my youth; even at midlife, I still need my fix.  Nowadays, though, I get it not through curated collections of overpriced memorabilia—retro-reproductions of the action figures of yore—but rather the surcharge-free creation of my own fiction.

CREATIVITY—ONE… TWO… THREE!

Getting a new playset as a kid and a starting a new writing project as an adult share arguably the same three developmental phases.  The first is what I call Think about What You Might like for Christmas.  This is the stage when you experiment noncommittally with ideas, get a sense of what excites you, what takes hold of your imagination—maybe talk it over with friends—and then envision what it will look like.  Selling yourself on a new story idea, deciding it’s worth the intensive time and energy required to bring it to fruition, is much the same as furnishing your parents with a carefully considered wish list:  You’re cashing in your biannual Golden Ticket on this.  It’s a period of escalating anticipation, and of promise.  The “thing” isn’t real yet—it’s still a nebulous notion, not a tangible commodity—but it will be…

Stage two is Some Assembly Required:  This is the recognition that your personal paracosm doesn’t come ready-to-play out of the box.  You’ll need to snap the pieces in place, apply the decals; you need to give the forum structure first.  To use another analogy:  You don’t start decorating a Christmas tree that’s been arranged askance in its stand.  (More on Some Assembly Required in a minute.)

Stage three:  It’s Playtime!  You’ve done the hard, preparatory work of building your imaginary realm, and now you get to experience the pure joy of writing—to have fun, in other words, with your new toys.

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Game Over: Why an Unsatisfying “Game of Thrones” Resolution Was a Predictable Inevitability

May 24, 2019 / / 32 Comments

After eight intense seasons of scheming (on the part of the characters) and puzzling (on the part of the viewership), at long last we finally know who won the Game of Thrones.

I did.

Fans found the end to be an unsatisfying “Game of Thrones” resolution
The moment we’ve been waiting for…

A few years back, as friends and colleagues were indulging in fevered speculation about who would ultimately end up on the Iron Throne, I attempted to spare them another Lost-style disappointment by explaining the story conventions of what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff identified as “postnarrative” fiction, which eschews the predictable, linear, closed-ended form of the monomythic arc—Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”—in favor of an unpredictable, nonlinear, “hyperlinked” mode of narrative “that gets more open rather than more closed as it goes along” (Molly Soat, “Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling,” Marketing News, April 2015, 44), and accounts for such Digital Age watercooler shows as The Walking Dead, Westworld, Orphan Black, This Is Us, and Mr. Robot.

This mere fraction of the cast—itself three times the amount most other shows carry—alone suggests an unsatisfying “Game of Thrones” resolution was inevitable
This mere fraction of the cast—itself three times the amount most other shows carry—alone suggests an unsatisfying “Game of Thrones” resolution was inevitable

To that end, I argued that no series with as many characters and concurrent plotlines as Game of Thrones had been made to service could ever rightfully hope—or even credibly intend—to reach a definitive climax, let alone have any catharsis to offer in exchange for viewers’ time and miss-no-detail devotion:

The opening titles sequence of the show betrays this emphasis:  the camera pans over an animated map of the entire world of the saga, showing the various divisions and clans within the empire.  It is drawn in the style of a fantasy role-playing map used by participants as the game board for their battles and intrigues.  And like a fantasy role-playing game, the show is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible.  There is plot—there are many plots—but there is no overarching story, no end.  There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point.

Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 34.

The many, many peers who willingly engaged me on the subject by and large dismissed the very notion of postnarrativity—of course all stories are meant to provide closure, the argument went, and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin was on record as knowing the particulars of how his saga would conclude!—and insisted with good-natured sportsmanship that my Game of Thrones prediction (prophecy?) would be decisively debunked come the series finale.  To support that assertion, the legendary five-hour pitch meeting was often cited in which screenwriters David Benioff and D. B. Weiss claimed to have accurately deduced Jon Snow’s true parentage and were accordingly rewarded with Martin’s theretofore elusive blessing to adapt the high-fantasy series for Hollywood.

To which I emphatically called bullshit.  The account of that alleged pitch meeting—much more so than anything from the world of Westeros—is pure fantasy from people who know a thing or two about mythopoeia.

To wit:  Anyone who’s ever written a story—particularly a long-form, multipart saga like A Song of Ice and Fire—knows that a narrative takes on a course of its own as it develops, and an author’s notions about where it’s all going are about as bankable as our grand ideas of how are own lives are going to play out in five, ten, fifteen years.  In life, you got your plans and schemes… and then you got what happens irrespective of those.  The latter always wins.  Fiction works in a similar fashion.  (And—you can take my word for this—little if anything that gets pitched in development meetings survives to the final draft, anyway.)  As David Benioff himself said in 2015:

We’ve had a lot of conversations with George, and he makes a lot of stuff up as he’s writing it.  Even while we talk to him about the ending, it doesn’t mean that that ending that he has currently conceived is going to be the ending when he eventually writes it.

Debra Birnbaum, “‘Game of Thrones’ Creators:  We Know How It’s Going to End,” Variety, April 15, 2015

Exactly.  And whereas a novel is beholden to the vagaries of merely a single determinant—its author—a television show is a complex organism whose creative evolution changes constantly based on content restrictions imposed by the studio, talent availability, production logistics, budgetary considerations… an endless host of factors.

Case in point:  It came to light earlier this year that shortly after completing work on the first season of GoT, series mainstay Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) underwent high-risk surgery to treat a life-threatening brain aneurysm.  In the hypothetical instance she’d been unable to resume work on the show, what would that have meant for the so-called “grand plan” of Game of Thrones?

It would’ve been thrown right out the window is what.

Daenerys’ unsatisfying “Game of Thrones” resolution
Actress Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in “The Bells”

That’s the way TV production works.  It’s amorphous.  It’s fluid.  It’s necessarily reactive.  Trying to conceive and carry out a five-year plan for a serialized show is about as tenable as trying to do the same for one’s personal and/or professional life.  It can’t really be done because none of us know what tomorrow might bring.  Any showrunner that insists he knows how it all ends is either full of shit or delusional.

Despite that, my contemporaries maintained the same unwavering faith in the Game of Thrones writers that Tyrion inexplicably invested in Dany, certain all would be paid off and tied up at journey’s end—you’ll see!

“Spoiler alert”:  It wasn’t.

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The Cat in the Sprawl: Blake Snyder’s Genres and Postnarrative Fiction

July 23, 2018 / / 23 Comments

The industry-standard storytelling program Save the Cat!, developed by late screenwriter Blake Snyder, provides two chief implements for writers of fiction.

The first is the “beat sheet,” which is just Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey by another (more user-friendly, less academically dense) set of names:  “Crossing the First Threshold” is renamed “Break into Two”; “Tests, Allies, Enemies” becomes “Fun and Games”; “Approach to the Inmost Cave” is simplified as “Midpoint”; and so forth.  The beat sheet offers an easy-to-use mythic blueprint for outlining a narrative.

Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” or monomyth

The second tool, which is really Snyder’s principal innovation, are his genre classifications—the ten different narrative variations on the hero’s journey, each with its own central dramatic question and particular set of story conventions:  Monster in the House is about a killer in a confined setting (Jaws, Halloween, Fatal Attraction); Dude with a Problem depicts an innocent hero thrust suddenly into a life-or-death battle (Die Hard, The Martian, Home Alone); Golden Fleece stories are about a quest undertaken for a defined and/or tangible prize (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ocean’s Eleven, Stand by Me), etc.

The beat sheet offers the writer a universal macrostructural narrative foundation; the genre categories prescribe the requirements/expectations germane to each of the ten subtypes of story models.  The most successful narratives are recognizable as a single genre only, whereas some of the biggest bombs and/or creative failures of recent memory (47 Ronin, Winter’s Tale, The Mountain Between Us) mixed and matched tropes from multiple genres, leaving the audience bewildered and disoriented.

Of course, the hero’s journey/beat sheet doesn’t apply to fiction in the new “postnarrative” mode of our hyperlinked Digital Age, which “is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 34).  So, given that, do Snyder’s genre types, then, have any relevance for nonlinear, open-ended “rabbit-hole” fiction—like Lost, Mr. Robot, This Is Us, and Westworld—for which “an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (ibid.)?

In a previous post titled “Saving the Cat from Itself,” I argued that postnarrativity, as a form, hadn’t yet been codified—merely identified—and therefore it would be a mistake to impose Snyder’s templates on series like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.  Beyond that, I haven’t much explored the matter, let alone settled it.

In today’s guest post, longtime friend of the blog Dave Lerner, a.k.a. dellstories, takes on the issue of whether the genre classifications of Save the Cat! have any applicability to postnarrativity.  Feel free to post follow-up questions for Dave in the comments section below, and kindly pay a visit to his Patreon page.  Take it away, Dave!

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Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

February 27, 2018 / / 58 Comments

Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars:  The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed:  what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”

Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation?  If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?

If so, what is it, then?  How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”?  And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?

 

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES

Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this:  George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences.  When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career:  how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.

“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol

In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from.  The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers.  (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)

In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites).  Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.

In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War.  As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows?  The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.

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Won’t Get Fooled Again: “The Last Jedi” Incites a Fan Rebellion against Disney’s “Star Wars” Empire

January 29, 2018 / / 46 Comments

Well ahead of the release of The Last Jedi, I’d made a private resolution to stop being so goddamn grumpy about Star Wars and superheroes moving forward.  That’s not to suggest, mind you, I rescind my cultural criticisms of them, merely an acknowledgment that I’d said my piece, have nothing more to offer on the matter, and have no wish to spend 2018 mired in negativity.  There’s enough of that going around these days.

And yet here I find myself, first post of the New Year, compelled by fate—just like Obi-Wan, I suppose, and, more recently, Luke Skywalker himself—to crawl out of hiding.  Here’s what happened:

The week Last Jedi hit theaters, I was preoccupied with last-minute errands and arrangements for my trip home for the holidays, and Star Wars, frankly, was the last thing on my mind.  I was peripherally aware the movie was “in the air”—reviews were near-universally hailing it as “groundbreaking,” the best of the series since Empire—but altogether oblivious that it had already opened.

Until Saturday, December 16.  That’s when unsolicited text messages start pinging in rapid succession from friends and colleagues, decrying it as “the worst Star Wars ever,” “a betrayal,” “the death of the franchise,” etc.  (One old friend even suggested I stay away from the movie at all costs if I wanted to preserve any fondness I had left for Star Wars.)  I couldn’t quite reconcile any of that with the glowing critical notices, so I went to Rotten Tomatoes, and, sure enough, an overwhelming plurality of the audience was hating this movie.  Not strongly disliking it, mind you—despising it.  Some excerpts:

“I will pass on IX and it won’t make any difference in the grand scheme of things, but there is nowhere the plot can go in the final movie that I particularly would care for.  I have no investment in the characters, plot or universe anymore.”

“Steaming pile of bantha poodoo.”

“Easily the worst in the Saga.  Lifelong Star Wars fan.  It’s now all over.”

“Worst movie EVER.  I can’t begin to find the words that express how bad this was.  Guess it’s hard to say much without spoilers.  Just be warned it’s not the star wars you know.”

“You won’t fool me, nor my money, ever again.”

And then there was this succinct four-word review:

“Fuck you rian Johnson”

How to explain such opprobrium?  (Note:  There are those that suggest a vocal minority of haters has merely created the misleading illusion of substantial backlash—possibly that’s true—but the sampling of direct responses I’ve fielded for the most part range from faint praise at best to seething vitriol.)  I mean, these were the movies that were supposed to “redeem” Star Wars after creator George Lucas’ best malignant efforts to ruin all our childhoods with the prequels, right?

Epic fail—”Episode VIII” turned out to be something other than the glorious return of the Jedi many fans anticipated

So, what’s gone wrong? I wondered.  Were fans simply being oversensitive?  Or did filmmaker Rian Johnson, making his Star Wars debut, indeed deliver a credibly bad movie—a “franchise killer”?  How exactly did things reach such an extreme, fevered pitch a mere two years after Disney’s much-anticipated brand-relaunch of Star Wars?

It’s a complicated answer with more than one determinant, but I can get to the heart of the problem for you.

Hold that thought, though.  We’ll get back to Star Wars shortly.

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Foundations of Storytelling, Part 1: The Logline

March 23, 2017 / / 57 Comments

This is the first post in an occasional series.

With the Second World War looming, a daring archaeologist-adventurer is tasked by the U.S. government to find the Ark of the Covenant—a Biblical artifact of invincible power, lost for millennia in the desert sands of Egypt—before it can be acquired by the Nazis.

On Christmas Eve, an off-duty police officer is inadvertently ensnared in a life-or-death game of cat-and-mouse in an L.A. skyscraper when his wife’s office party is taken hostage by a dozen armed terrorists.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, a resort-island sheriff finds himself in deep water—literally—when his beach is stalked by an aggressive great white shark that won’t go away.

All of the above story concepts should sound familiar—that’s why I chose them.  Yes, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, and Jaws are all popular—now classic—works of commercial cinema.  But they are also excellent exemplars of storytelling at their most basic, macrostructural levels, as demonstrated by the catchy summaries above, known in Hollywood as “the logline.”

When a single image, let alone a single sentence, imparts the essence of a story, the underlying concept is a powerful, primal one

 

THE LOGLINE AS A SELLING TOOL

The logline is a sales pitch:  In a single compact sentence, it conveys the protagonist (respectively:  the adventurous archaeologist; the off-duty cop; the beach-resort sheriff), the antagonist (the Nazis; the terrorists; the shark), the conflict and stakes (possession of the Ark for control of the world; the confined life-and-death struggle; the destruction of a man-eating leviathan), the setting (1930s Egypt; an L.A. skyscraper at Christmas; a summer resort), and the tone/genre (action/adventure; action-thriller; adventure/horror).  You can even reasonably glean the Save the Cat! category of each:

  • Raiders as Golden Fleece (Subgenre:  “Epic Fleece”)
  • Die Hard as Dude with a Problem (“Law Enforcement Problem”)
  • Jaws as Monster in the House (“Pure Monster”)

A cogent synopsis like any of the above allows a prospective buyer to “see” the creative vision for the movie, ideally triggering the three-word response every screenwriter longs to hear:  “Tell me more.”

Note what isn’t included in the logline:  The names of any of the characters.  Thematic concerns.  Emotional arcs.  Subplots.  Descriptions of particular set pieces.  That’s the “tell me more” stuff, and none of it is necessary—it is, in fact, needlessly extraneous—for the “elevator pitch,” so called for the brief window one has to hook to an exec before he steps off onto his floor (read:  loses interest).  The point of a logline is to communicate the story’s most fundamental aspects, and to capture what’s viscerally exciting about the premise.

I mean, if you’d never seen Raiders, Die Hard, or Jaws—if you knew nothing else about them other than the information contained in those loglines—you’d already have a sense of why these are, or could at least make for, gripping stories.  Pitch any one of them to a movie executive, and he can immediately envision the scenes—or at least the potential for them—suggested by the central premise.  Each one piques curiosity and, one step further, inspires the imagination.

The Raiders logline is so compelling because it takes (what was at the time) an arcane scholarly discipline, archaeology, and credibly applies it to an action-film archetype, typically the province of superspies like 007.  It also features historical elements that don’t seem like they should belong together—Nazis and Biblical relics—to envision something simultaneously smart and thrilling.

The Die Hard and Jaws loglines are exciting because they take their police-officer protagonists and essentially reduce them to “everyman” status (unlike Raiders, which features a specialist as its hero) by putting them in overwhelmingly harrowing situations that play to some of our most primal fears:  terrorism and sharks.  In short, they have that compelling What if? factor.

That’s how those stories got sold, and how the movies themselves got made.  We don’t need any information beyond what we get in those loglines to want to see the finished product.  As such, condensing a story to its logline is an absolutely essential skill for any screenwriter.

Let me amend that:  It is an essential skill for all storytellers, novelists included—perhaps especially.  And its applications are far broader than simply marketing.

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This Counts, That Does Not: On Canonicity in Media Franchises

January 20, 2017 / / 34 Comments

It may surprise you to learn this, but the events of Star Wars never actually happened—the majority of them, anyway.  I mean that sincerely—not for a minute should that be interpreted as snide or condescending.  But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…

In 1983, George Lucas brought his Star Wars trilogy to a close with Return of the Jedi (oh, those bygone days when movie franchises actually reached—wait for it—a conclusive resolution).  Throughout the eighties, the series lived on by way of a pair of made-for-television Ewok movies and the Saturday-morning cartoons Droids and Ewoks, which continued to stoke interest in the franchise—and its lucrative action-figure line… for a while.  But by the end of the decade, with no new big-screen productions to energize the fan base, Star Wars had resigned its position at the top of the pop-cultural hierarchy.

George Lucas looks to the horizon

Lucas, who had always been a forward-thinking businessman as much as he was a visionary filmmaker (he negotiated a reduced fee for writing and directing the original Star Wars in return for ownership of sequel and merchandising rights, which the studio deemed worthless and was only too happy to relinquish), had plans to revisit the Star Wars galaxy in a prequel trilogy that had been part of his grand design when he was developing the earlier films—hence the reason, in case you never thought to ask, they are numbered Episodes IV through VI.  Even though the prequels themselves were some years off—production on The Phantom Menace wouldn’t commence until 1997—he began laying the groundwork to return Star Wars to its lofty place in the cultural consciousness by commissioning science-fiction author Timothy Zahn to write a trio of novels set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi—what later became commonly known as “the Thrawn trilogy” (named for its chief antagonist).

The books were released successively in ’91, ’92, and ’93 (my best friend Chip and I couldn’t get down to the local bookstore fast enough to buy a copy of each upon publication, though being a year older, he got to read them first); they were New York Times bestsellers that not only got their intended job done—reigniting public interest in a dormant media franchise—but also led to an endless, ongoing series of novels that explored every facet of the Star Wars galaxy:  No character or event was too small to be the focus of its own story.  Thus, the Star Wars Expanded Universe (SWEU) was born.  Han and Leia had twins!  Luke got married!  Chewbacca sacrificed himself for the Solos’ son Anakin!  A universe of stories, far beyond the contained narrative arc of the classic trilogy, took on a life of its own and captured the imagination of a generation that invested itself in the ongoing space opera collectively known as Star Wars—a vast, complex continuity that Lucasfilm maintained with curatorial oversight to prevent inconsistencies and contradictions in the expansive mythos, which comprised movies, books, comics, TV shows, RPGs, and video games.

The Force awakens? For many fans, it never went dormant

When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, however, they had their own ambitious plans to expand the franchise, and didn’t want to be tied down to every addenda in the extensive mythology.  And just like that, everything other than the feature films and then-current Clone Wars animated series was “retconned”—still commercially available, mind you, under the new “Legends” banner, but henceforth declared noncanonical.  This was an outrage to many of the longtime fans who considered these “expanded universe” adventures sacrosanct—who’d invested time, money, and interest in the world-building fictions of the Star Wars continuity that had been undone with the stroke of a hand.  Some of their favorite stories were now apocrypha, whereas the much-derided prequels, on the other hand, were still canonically official.  Where was the justice—the sense—in that?

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Classifying the “Star Trek” Movies by Their “Save the Cat!” Genre Categories

December 16, 2016 / / 18 Comments

Star Trek turned fifty this year (something older than me, mercifully), but you needn’t be a fan to appreciate some of the lessons writers of fiction can take from its successes and failures during its five-decade voyage.  I mean, I probably wouldn’t myself qualify as a “Trekkie”—I simply don’t get caught up in the minutiae.  What I’ve always responded to in Trek is its thoughtful storytelling and philosophical profundity.  “Even the original series, for all its chintziness,” someone told me when I was thirteen, “it was still the thinking man’s show.”

I recall watching The Original Series in syndication, and being swept away by the classic time-travel episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”; finally I understood that Trek was about ideas, and those could be just as thrilling—more so, in fact—than set pieces.  Anyone who was around for it certainly remembers the excitement when The Next Generation premiered, unknowingly kicking off perhaps the first major-media “shared fictional universe” two decades before Marvel got there.  I watched the pilot with my father—which was a big deal, since television wasn’t his thing (the nightly news excepting)—and I haven’t forgotten his lovely, two-word appraisal of the first episode when it was over:  “It’s kind,” he said, with no further elaboration.

It took some years to fully appreciate that assessment.  Having grown up on the adventures of James T. Kirk, the original captain’s renegade spirit and cowboy diplomacy appealed to my juvenile worldview; Picard, on the other hand, seemed like a high-school principal in comparison.  But over time, I came to identify with Picard’s genteel, introspective mindset, and every line he uttered—even the technobabble—sounded like poetry from the mouth of Patrick Stewart, who endowed his performance with such dignity and conviction.  For me, the best part of Star Trek was getting Picard’s closing takeaway on the issue du jour.

The franchise continued to grow as I did, and my wife, whom I started dating at nineteen, was as much a fan as I was, it turned out, and we looked forward every few years to the next feature film, until the series finally, against all expectation, sputtered out with Nemesis (2002) and Enterprise (2001–2005).  Among other reasons for that, Trek had been eclipsed by a new sci-fi franchise—The Matrix—that spoke to the ethos of our new Digital Age.  Perhaps more than any other genre, science fiction needs to reflect its times, and times change; finality is something to be accepted—embraced, even—not feared.  The Enterprise, thusly, had been decommissioned.

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Collapse of the Tentpole: Why Hollywood’s Grim Summer Is Good News for the Rest of Us

September 7, 2016 / / 20 Comments

Hope springs eternal—and by that I mean it was just this past spring I was lamenting Hollywood’s hopeless addiction to nostalgic, twentieth-century brands, from superheroes to Star Wars, and its incorrigible aversion to original genre works in favor of endless sequels and remakes (I will not cave to social pressure by calling them “reboots” just to assuage the egos of filmmakers too precious to be considered slumming with the likes of—heaven forbid—a remake).  And yet…

And yet what a difference a summer can make.  Let’s review the scorecard, shall we?

Batman v Superman took a critical beating (to say the least) and, despite sizable box-office returns, underperformed to expectations, an inauspicious opening salvo in Warners’ would-be mega-franchise (and something tells me, no matter how tepid the public response, they’re not going to take “no” for an answer on this one).  The follow-up, Suicide Squad, performed well even if it didn’t fare any better critically, though one could argue both movies actually did the health of the budding cinematic universe more harm than good in that they tarnished the integrity, such as it is, of the brand; DC is thus far not enjoying Marvel’s critical or popular cachet.  And you don’t build an ongoing franchise playing only to the base.

Other expensive underperformers:  Warcraft; X-Men:  Apocalypse; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:  Out of the Shadows; Neighbors 2:  Sorority Rising; Star Trek Beyond.  Jason Bourne opened well but suffered a steep second-week drop-off—it had no “legs,” in box-office parlance.

Who ya gonna call to exterminate the "ghosts" of a previous generation haunting the multiplex?

Who ya gonna call to exterminate the “ghosts” of a previous generation haunting the multiplex?

Plenty of other “surefire” sequels outright bombed:  Alice Through the Looking Glass, Ghostbusters (not a sequel, but it was promoted as one), The Huntsman:  Winter’s War, Zoolander 2, Independence Day:  Resurgence, and The Divergent Series:  Allegiant, the last of which has resulted in a particularly embarrassing—and unprecedented—predicament for its studio, Lionsgate, which, following in the footsteps of previous YA adaptations Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, unnecessarily split the last movie into two parts, and now they’re stuck with a commitment to a final sequel (or half of one, anyway) without an audience anticipating its release.

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Saving the Cat from Itself: On Deconstructing “Game of Thrones” and a Troubling Pattern of Misanalysis

June 17, 2016 / / 18 Comments

Ah, Save the Cat!—the screenwriting manual some swear by… while others forswear altogether.  Here are my thoughts on why it is a worthy—even indispensable—storytelling program that has been irreparably corrupted by the very people who teach it.

The folks over at Save the Cat!, which does not include the program’s late innovator Blake Snyder, offered an object lesson last week on the misapplication of craft.

It’s common practice for Save the Cat! to break down a current or classic movie and illustrate how it conforms to a story’s fifteen major narrative “beats” as Snyder identified them (Blake himself published an entire book dedicated to this skill-building exercise, which I recommend—certainly over any of the recent analyses on the STC! blog).  This is what a sample “beat sheet” (of my own authorship) would look like (click on it for a closer look):

A "Save the Cat!" breakdown of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
A “Save the Cat!” breakdown of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”

Simple enough, right?  The entire story summarized at its most basic, macrostructural level.  That’s the kind of plot overview I’ll painstakingly compose before I begin Word One of my screenplay or novel, so I know the plot is always tracking in the right direction.  It’s an indispensable application to help a writer “break the back” of his story, as well as an excellent learning tool:  By reverse-engineering well-regarded movies, you can teach yourself the fundamentals of mythic structure.  That is ostensibly the reason Save the Cat! offers sample deconstructions on a near-weekly basis.

As part of the exercise, Save the Cat! assigns its cinematic subject a genre per Snyder’s codified classifications (you’ll notice I designated Raiders an “Epic Fleece”), but, quite frankly, the Cats are usually confoundingly off the mark:  In the last year alone, they’ve misidentified Brooklyn (for the record, it’s “Family Institution”), The Empire Strikes Back (“Fantasy Superhero”), Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (“Caper Fleece”), Room (“Family Institution”), Whiplash (“Mentor Institution”), Her (“Separation Passage”), and Birdman (which, as I demonstrated in a previous post, is a “Fool out of Water” story).  Not particularly encouraging.

In their most recent breakdown, they’ve attempted to apply Blake’s beat sheet to the pilot episode of Game of Thrones.  With my Raiders breakdown in mind, have a quick look at their effort here (feel free to skim—you only need to get the gist in order to follow my assessment of it).

Using "Save the Cat!" to analyze "Game of Thrones" proves tricky
There’s a VERY particular reason “Game of Thrones” failed to reach a satisfying conclusion…

Notice how clean and to-the-point the Raiders analysis is?  Now compare that with the Game of Thrones breakdown, which is mired in needlessly copious detail and author commentary, as the analyst attempts to illustrate that “Winter Is Coming,” like any other good story, conforms to the Save the Cat! precepts—and yet the more closely the episode is studied, the less it seems to actually adhere to them!

So, instead of saying, “Gee, this isn’t going like I originally thought at all—Game of Thrones appears to operate on an altogether different narrative wavelength,” the analysis is instead loaded with conditionals:  “this B Story doesn’t fully interweave with the journey of the main protagonist”; “the main story of the pilot episode is structurally the equivalent of just Act One from Blake’s beat sheets”; “many of the storylines weaved over the series often will not simply resolve where their Act 3 would normally otherwise end, but rather they then evolve into a new story.”

Wouldn’t any of that seem to suggest the conclusions of this experiment in narrative reverse-engineering aren’t supporting the thesis?  Not according to this examination, which posits instead that “Blake’s other beats are simply yet to come.”

Here’s the logical (read:  actual) takeaway:  The reason the analyst had such a hard time making Game of Thrones fit comfortably within the Save the Cat! paradigm is because it doesn’t.

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