Tag: Hollywood (Page 4 of 5)

“It’s Over, Johnny”: The Thrill Is Gone in “Rambo: Last Blood”

September 24, 2019 / Sean P Carlin / 14 Comments

The following article discusses story details of Rambo: Last Blood.

In the lead-up to Creed (2015), the New Yorker published a fascinating analysis of the six Rocky movies, arguing that they can be viewed as a trilogy: In Rocky (1976) and Rocky II (1979), the Italian Stallion goes from nobody to somebody; in III (1982) and IV (1985), he mutates once again, this time from hero to superhero; Sylvester Stallone then sought to extricate the champ from the excesses of Reagan’s America (the robot butler, anyone?), setting up Rocky’s ignoble return to the streets of Philly in Rocky V (1990), then credibly reestablishing him as an underdog in Rocky Balboa (2006). It was this iteration of Rocky—the purest version—that Stallone reprised in Creed and Creed II (2018), in which an aging, widowed, streetwise Rocky acts (reluctantly at first) as mentor and trainer to a young protégé.

Sylvester Stallone in “Rambo: Last Blood” (2019)

Sly’s other signature role, troubled Vietnam vet John Rambo, has had no less of a winding road through the past five decades when it comes to his ever-evolving characterization: The self-hating solider of David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood was recast as a sympathetic hero in the 1982 movie of the same name, who in turn became the jingoistic superhero of Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988). It was only in his belated fourth cinematic adventure, Rambo (2008), that his prototypal literary temperament atavistically asserted itself:

You know what you are, what you’re made of. War is in your blood. Don’t fight it. You didn’t kill for your country—you killed for yourself. God’s never gonna make that go away. When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.
Rambo’s inner monologue in Rambo (2008)

Upon ending the prolonged moratorium on both creatively depleted franchises in the aughts, Stallone didn’t “retcon” some of the lesser entries in the Rocky and Rambo series, but rather embraced them as part of both heroes’ long emotional arcs: Just as Creed II redeems the hokey jingoism of Rocky IV, Rambo IV acknowledges that the previous sequels glorified violence—gleefully, even pornographically—and burdens the protagonist with the guilt of that indefensible carnage, refusing to let him off the hook for it. The inconvenient mistakes of the past aren’t expunged from the hagiographies of either of these American icons for the sake of a cleaner narrative—an increasingly common (and inexcusably lazy) practice in franchise filmmaking, as evidenced by recent “do-over” sequels to Terminator and Halloween—but instead seed the conditions in which we find both Rocky and Rambo at the next stage of their ongoing sagas.

So, in Rambo: Last Blood (2019), which sees the itinerant commando back home at his ranch in Arizona (per the coda of the last movie), the big question I had going into the film was this: Which permutation of Rambo would we find in this story—the one about what happened after Johnny came marching home? What might Rambo, who has always served a cultural Rorschach—first as an expression of the political disillusionment of the seventies, then recruited in the eighties to serve as poster boy for the Reagan Doctrine—tell us about ourselves in the Trump era?

Oh, Snap! The Nostalgia-Industrial Complex — ’90s Edition

July 29, 2019 / Sean P Carlin / 13 Comments

Et tu, Millennials? The old nostalgia-industrial complex got its hooks into you, too, huh? I must ask: Have you not witnessed in firsthand horror what pining for the good old days has done to Generation X…?

To recap: We Xers have thus far spent the twenty-first century reliving all our childhood favorites—Star Wars, Super Friends, Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, Lethal Weapon, Halloween, Bill & Ted, Tron, Transformers, Terminator, Top Gun—a pathological exercise in self-infantilization that has catastrophically retarded both the culture as well as a generation of middle-aged adults who are at this point more passionately invested in Skywalkers and superheroes than are the juvenile audiences for whom those characters were originally intended.

Always keen to recognize—and replicate—a winning formula, a new permutation of forward-thinking backward-gazing has recently seized Hollywood: Sell nineties-era nostalgia to the generation that came of age in that decade! Over the past few years, we got a pair of Jurassic Park remakes-masquerading-as-sequels that didn’t inspire a single word of enthusiasm (certainly not a second viewing), but nonetheless earned over a billion dollars apiece, while our last conventional movie star, Dwayne Johnson, used his considerable clout (or more aptly muscle?) to resurrect both Jumanji and Baywatch. As for this year? Hope you’re excited for warmed-over helpings of The Lion King, Men in Black, Toy Story, Aladdin, and yet more Jumanji. And while we’re at it, let’s welcome back slacker duo Jay and Silent Bob, because surely their grunge-era stoner humor still holds up in middle-age—

—as well as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, back from buddy-cop purgatory for more Bad Boys badassery! You know damn well whatcha gonna do when they come for you: Buy a ticket!

For an indeterminate, but clearly not immeasurable, swath of moviegoers, there is no marketing campaign more alluring than one that taps into foggy childhood memories. . . .
. . . The great nostalgia-industrial complex will [continue] steamrollering us against our better judgment into multiplexes, hoping for a simulacrum of the first high we felt watching great characters years ago.
Tom Philip, “Summer ’19 Brought To You By Nostalgia-Bait Movies,” Opinion, New York Times, July 4, 2019

Not just multiplexes. (And how are those even still a thing?) On the small screen, VH1 revived game-changing nineties slasher franchise Scream this summer (how, for that matter, is VH1 still a thing?), and new iterations of decade-defining teen melodramas 90210 and Party of Five are on the way. Dope.

Big News from a Small Climate Reality Chapter: Los Angeles Joins the County Climate Coalition

March 31, 2019 / Sean P Carlin / 4 Comments

What can I do about it? When it comes to the climate crisis, all of us have thought or expressed that sentiment, even—at some point or another—the most passionate environmental activists. It can be uttered out of well-meaning curiosity… or genuine bewilderment… or political frustration… or apathetic abdication. Regardless of which mindset it reflects, it is a universally valid—and perfectly understandable—acknowledgment of the overwhelming complexities of the problem of climate change. What can any of us, as individuals, really do about it?

Especially when individual efforts simply aren’t going to move the needle on this at the speed and scale required; we have ten years, per the IPCC, to halve our greenhouse-gas emissions if we’re going to keep global warming below catastrophic levels. By all means: swap out your lightbulbs, compost your trash, take public transportation whenever possible—but understand the time when “small” personal actions like that could’ve actually made a meaningful difference has passed.

Now this existential crisis must be addressed legislatively, with bold and effective public policy, hence the reason so much has been made of the Green New Deal resolution, and the less-publicized but no-less-crucial Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would (finally) put a price on carbon pollution. As exciting and promising as those steps are, though, in some respects they only make an answer to our intimate question—What can I do about climate change?—seem yet further out of reach.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey outside the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 7, 2019 (Saul Loeb/AFP—Getty Images)

Take me, for instance. A recovering screenwriter, I’m happy to illustrate at length the storytelling transgressions of Ghostbusters II, or mathematically quantify the similarities between Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the Joker (they’re precisely 60% alike, for the record)—ya know, intellectual stuff—but good luck putting those “skills” to use in service for environmental-policy initiatives, right?

Well, not so fast. Here’s how a bunch of ordinary laypeople banded together to do exactly that—to make a legislative difference in relatively short order—and how a few tricks I picked up in the Hollywood trenches actually came in handy.

“Almost” Doesn’t Count: On Trying and Losing (Repeat as Needed)

November 28, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 26 Comments

In the event you don’t keep track of these things, the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the World Series last month, four games to one, to the Boston Red Sox. It was both the Dodgers’ second consecutive World Series appearance and defeat. From the point of view of many a long-suffering fan here in L.A., collapsing yet again mere inches from the finish line amounts to nothing more than another season-long strikeout, a yearlong exercise in futility, a squandered investment of time and emotional support. “This is where baseball breaks your heart,” someone said to me in the waning days of the season. To be sure, I share the sentiment: It’s hard as hell to get so frustratingly close to the Golden Ring only to go home empty-handed. A miss is as good as a mile, after all. Close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. “Almost” doesn’t count.

As recently as a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known, much less cared, who won or lost this Series—or even who played in it. I came to baseball relatively late in life—around forty—as I recounted in “Spring Fever,” the gist of which was this: For whatever reason, neither I nor any of my boyhood pals were born with the “sports gene.” We were all pop-culture fanatics, more likely to be found at the local comic shop than Little League field. When we saw the Bronx Bombers play the Indians at Yankee Stadium in 1986, none of us knew what the hell to make of that abstract experience; when we watched them face-off again in David S. Ward’s Major League in 1989, in the context of a Cinderella narrative, suddenly the rivalry had meaning. We loved movies and comics; sports we simply had no use for.

A few years later, I found myself formally studying comics (under legendary Batman artist and DC Comics editor Carmine Infantino) and cinema (in college) in preparation for making a career in those fields. What they don’t tell you in school, though, is that when you turn your passions into your profession, you often do so at the expense of the joy you once took in those pastimes. Worse still, so many of the things that directly inspired me to be a screenwriter, from Star Wars to superheroes, I eventually grew to disdain. And what Dodgers baseball restored in me, outside my conscious awareness as it was happening, was the innocent pleasure of being a fan of something again; it’s been a welcome, even analeptic, reprieve from the tyranny of passion.

Game 2 of the 2018 World Series

The Dodgers’ reentry into the World Series this fall, and the collective hope it kindled of their first world-championship win in precisely three decades, coincided with a sobering anniversary of my own: It’s been exactly twenty years—October of 1998—since I signed with my first literary manager off a screenplay I’d written called BONE ORCHARD. It occurs to me only now, as I type this, that the project was something of a creative precursor to Escape from Rikers Island, trafficking in many of the same themes and concepts: an urban island left to rot and ruin, overrun with supernatural savages (demons, not zombies), with a neo–hardboiled detective at the center of the action. (I’d studied Raymond Chandler in college and have since been heavily influenced by his fiction.)

Anyway, there I was, twenty-two years old and only a few months out of school, and everything was unfolding right on schedule. The script would be taken to the spec marketplace and I would soon join the ranks of working screenwriters. You study for a career in the arts, and you get one—simple as that.

Christ, if only. BONE ORCHARD didn’t sell. And while I was halfway through writing my follow-up, the management company repping me shuttered. Young and naïve though I was, I nonetheless intuited I wasn’t likely to move the needle on my screenwriting career in New York—an ambition I was resolute about fulfilling—so I left the comforts of home behind for Los Angeles.

When you first arrive in Hollywood, good luck getting anyone with even a modicum of clout to give you the time of day. Not gonna happen. What you do—and what I did—is seek out aspiring filmmakers at the same level and pool resources. In addition to screenwriting, I’d had experience as a film and video editor, so I started cutting USC thesis shorts pro bono. Within a year or two, I’d established a circle of friends and colleagues, all in our twenties, who were collaborating on “portfolio projects.” I was editing by day and writing by night, hoping to network my way to new representation—an objective that would, to my slowly percolating astonishment, take another half-dozen years to realize.

Through the Looking Glass: How Johnny Depp’s Reclusive Tendencies Are a Funhouse Reflection of Our Own

August 31, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 29 Comments

From his days on Jump Street when I was in junior high, to his offbeat movie roles during my time as a “serious” film student in college, to our shared penchant for supernatural cinema, Johnny Depp has steadfastly remained the most exciting actor of his generation. But his apparent withdrawal from reality in recent years is the role I’d most come to identify with after my screenwriting career catastrophically imploded. Alas, Mr. Depp—this is where I leave you.

Rolling Stone recently ran a feature profile on actor Johnny Depp, detailing his extensive financial hardships (a reported $650 million fortune vaporized by his compulsive-spending disorder), legal entanglements (home foreclosures and a contentious lawsuit with his former business managers), personal controversies (allegations of spousal abuse and a growing dependency on drugs and alcohol), and “reports he couldn’t remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece” (Stephen Rodrick, “The Trouble with Johnny,” Rolling Stone 1317 [July 2018]: 83).

Thorough as Rodrick’s reporting is, though, the documented facts of the respective scandals are less compelling—less tragic, even—than the wider arc of the narrative he presents, illustrating just how far Depp has come from the “days when he was a male ingénue and not a punchline: bankrupt, isolated and one more mistake away from being blackballed from his industry” (ibid., 134).

Isolated is precisely the right word; one can’t read the Rolling Stone piece and not be impressed by the extent to which Johnny Depp is alone in the crumbling edifice of his ivory tower:

I want to go home, but feel reluctant to leave. One of the most famous actors in the world is now smoking dope with a writer and his lawyer while his cook makes dinner and his bodyguards watch television. There is no one around him who isn’t getting paid.
ibid., 135

Yeah. But who gives a shit, though—am I right? Whether you’re of the mind that it’s hard to feel bad for spoiled Hollywood stars devoid of limits or impulse control, or whether, like me, you don’t have a crap to spare for the vacuous affairs of celebrity culture (I’ve been checked out at least as long as “Brangelina” was a thing), the trials of Johnny Depp should logically provoke either schadenfreude or apathy, but certainly not sympathetic interest.

And yet I don’t merely sympathize with his current state of reclusion—in fact I empathize with it. Perhaps that’s because the different seasons of Depp’s career—the spring, summer, and arguably now the fall—have run parallel to my own life. During my time as a film-school student in the nineties, he was one of the most exciting actors to follow because of his uniquely unconventional tastes in directors and material. After I moved to Hollywood and learned to loathe the blockbuster, he headlined the last big movie franchise I actually genuinely enjoy. But my awareness of him, and his singular talents, predates all of that. He’s one of the only major artists whose career I’ve followed since its inception.

Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

June 25, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 55 Comments

I can’t say it was by deliberate design, but the blog this year has been heavily focused on the power of storytelling as a cultural lodestar, one that reflects the changing times as much as it influences them. Like gravity, or capitalism, narrative is a governing force in our lives that mostly operates invisibly, if for no other reason than we’ve gotten so accustomed to its ubiquity.

“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations. Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives. Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time. That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 16).

Taking those values “into our dreams,” as Rushkoff puts it, is a crucial proviso, because it underscores the subconscious way storytelling works: A good story seduces you with the promise of entertainment, incrementally winds you up into a state of suspense, and only lets you out when it’s made its point—when it’s imparted its takeaway moral. Over and over we submit to this experience, fondly recalling with friends the parts of a story that made us jump, or laugh, or cry, but seldom do we give much consideration to its underlying ethos; that sort of subtextual scrutiny, let’s face it, begins and ends in third-period English.

But if fiction is the means by which our mores and traditions are conferred, then it is also, accordingly, the way in which bad ideas are inculcated, even by trustworthy artists. Much of this is owed, quite innocently, to utilitarian narrative patterns that have, through mass-repetition, developed into accepted sociocultural precepts.

You all know the rules: sin equals death

Genre conventions are part of a pact storytellers make with their audience, a set of tacitly agreed-upon expectations: an action thriller will have violence; a slasher film will feature teenage sex; a romantic comedy will pair ideologically (and adorably) mismatched lovers. The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given. Commenting on the erotica blockbuster Fifty Shades Freed, comedian Bill Maher noted:

“Psychologists have to explain how in the age of #MeToo, the number-one movie in America is about a woman on a leash. Or, how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots: she married her boss; stalking is romantic; and ‘I hate you and then I love you’” (Bill Maher, “New Rule: Hollywood’s Grey Area,” Real Time with Bill Maher, February 16, 2018).

To a certain extent, given their sheer volume, archetypal scenarios are unavoidable. And most writers, I suspect, don’t promulgate them with an actively malignant agenda: I don’t imagine screenwriter J. F. Lawton, for instance, set out to make the case that prostitution is romantic when he conceived the neo-Pygmalion fairy tale Pretty Woman; that was simply an incidental if unfortunate concomitant. Artists, after all, have consumed thousands of stories, too, and are therefore as susceptible to the subliminal indoctrination of culturally ingrained—and narratively reinforced—worldviews as the rest of us. Some of our most cherished American myths even help to explain how we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history.

A Couple of Gen Xers Talk Movies, Screenwriting, and Zombie Prison Breaks

April 20, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 17 Comments

Recently, I participated in a lively Q&A over at Bookshelf Battle about nearly every pop-cultural topic imaginable: the genesis of Escape from Rikers Island; rumors of the zombie genre’s demise; whether the hero or villain is more crucial to the conflict and meaning of a story; if, in our Era of the Endless Reboot, there are any Hollywood remakes I’d actually endorse; what aspiring screenwriters need to learn (and how they can learn it); and my exclusive, foolproof plan for breaking out of a prison full of flesh-eating undead monsters. To paraphrase Stefon from Saturday Night Live: This conversation has everything!

Rest assured, this only LOOKS hopeless…

I invite you to join in with your thoughts! Feel free to leave a comment on either post—that one or this one—and I will, as always, be delighted to respond.

Please find my discussion with Bookshelf Q. Battler here.

State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence

March 28, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 40 Comments

Last month, we talked about the subject of creative inspiration: that an artist’s many influences affect his worldview and sensibilities in ways totally unique to him, and that they, along with his particular life experiences, constitute his voice. In time, those influences become so embedded in his subconscious that he is no longer necessarily aware of the sway they hold over the art he produces, and as his confidence in his craft intensifies, his intellectual capacity to identify them in his work diminishes in kind.

As it happens, a week or two after posting the treatise, I received an object lesson in its very proposition. The experience was an acutely emotional one for me, though not at all unpleasant or unwelcome, and a reminder of what storytelling at its best can do: A story can comment on its times while reflecting timeless truths. It can depict a very specific world that is nonetheless universally relatable. It has the power to preserve a moment or an episode in all its emotional complexity, serving as a time capsule that can continue to yield new insight with age. A good story changes the course of history, in some unquantifiable measure, influencing subsequent real-world events and artistic works in ways that, I think, go mostly unconsidered.

Here’s how one movie no one’s ever heard of exerted appreciably more impact on my personal and creative evolution—and even on my forthcoming novel—than I’d heretofore considered, and how it had something profoundly meaningful to say to me, both then and now.

Two years ago, I published a post with recommendations for Irish-themed movies to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day; among them, a long-forgotten crime drama from 1990 about the Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen called State of Grace, which had the cosmic misfortune of opening the very same week as Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. The latter, as I’m sure you know, was a box-office hit that deservedly claimed an immortal place in the cultural consciousness, while the former—starring no less than heavyweights Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, John Turturro, John C. Reilly, and Burgess Meredith—quietly disappeared from theaters within two weeks of release and promptly faded into obscurity. No one really saw it, and the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion Pictures, soon thereafter assured that it mostly remained unseen in the years to follow.

Sean Penn (as Terry Noonan) and Gary Oldman (as Jackie Flannery) in Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace”

My cousin’s husband owned a video store out in Jersey at that time, and he was always bringing by screener copies—sometimes even bootlegs—of current films, which was how I first experienced both State of Grace and GoodFellas when I was fourteen. For a kid that had up till that point subsisted on a cinematic diet of almost exclusively Spielbergian fantasy, the comedies of John Hughes and Eddie Murphy, and the action extravaganzas of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, those two movies—‘cause I hadn’t yet seen The Godfather—were nothing short of revelatory.

State of Grace was a particular favorite, and I even managed to score a copy of the promotional one-sheet from my local video shop in the Bronx when they were done with it, which hung in my bedroom throughout high school. The movie was my introduction to newly minted Oscar-winner Gary Oldman, and he delivers a searing, unsettling, heartbreaking performance that made me a fan for life. But by the mid-nineties, my secondhand VHS of Grace had gotten misplaced, and given the scarcity of the film’s availability, I haven’t had occasion—despite trying in 2016 for that best–of–St. Patty’s post—to see it since.

Until this month, when I found a wonderful Blu-ray reissue, limited to 3,000 units, and, like the story’s troubled protagonist, I ventured back into Hell’s Kitchen to reunite with some very old faces…

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

January 29, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 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.

Foundations of Storytelling, Part 1: The Logline

March 23, 2017 / Sean P Carlin / 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.

Tag: Hollywood (Page 4 of 5)

“It’s Over, Johnny”: The Thrill Is Gone in “Rambo: Last Blood”

Oh, Snap! The Nostalgia-Industrial Complex — ’90s Edition

Big News from a Small Climate Reality Chapter: Los Angeles Joins the County Climate Coalition

“Almost” Doesn’t Count: On Trying and Losing (Repeat as Needed)

Through the Looking Glass: How Johnny Depp’s Reclusive Tendencies Are a Funhouse Reflection of Our Own

Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

A Couple of Gen Xers Talk Movies, Screenwriting, and Zombie Prison Breaks

State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence

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

Foundations of Storytelling, Part 1: The Logline

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