Tag: screenwriting (Page 4 of 8)

“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?

Mirror/Mirror: On Seeing Ourselves in Fictional Characters

August 26, 2019 / Sean P Carlin / 16 Comments

Over the past few months, I’ve been helping plan an old friend’s bachelor party, the experience of which has made me starkly aware of just how conservative I’ve become in middle age. Not politically, you understand—personally. When I was a kid, I was like Leo Getz in Lethal Weapon (I was seriously that annoying) who nonetheless fancied himself Martin Riggs; somewhere along the way, though, I grew up to be Roger Murtaugh.

Riggs (Mel Gibson), Leo (*Joe Pesci*), and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in “Lethal Weapon 2” from 1989 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

And that got me thinking about how, at different stages of life, we’re sometimes lucky enough to closely identify with a particular fictional character in an exceptional way; I would say the experience is even as random and as rarified as true friendship: How many times, really, have we “met” a character who speaks so directly to us, whose emotional circumstances so closely reflect our own, that through them we vicariously attain some measure of insight… and maybe even catharsis?

We’re not necessarily talking favorite characters here; those come in spades. God knows, I love Indiana Jones and Jean-Luc Picard and Philip Marlowe and Chili Palmer, but I don’t necessarily—much as I want to—relate to those characters so much as admire their characteristics. In that way, they’re more aspirational than they are analogous.

I’d like to know which characters from fiction speak to you—and for you. I’ll get us started, selecting examples from three distinct phases of my life: childhood, adolescence, and midlife. (For those interested, I’ve included each narrative’s Save the Cat! genre.)

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

May 24, 2019 / Sean P Carlin / 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

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.

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.

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

July 23, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 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!

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.

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

February 27, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 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.

Tag: screenwriting (Page 4 of 8)

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

Mirror/Mirror: On Seeing Ourselves in Fictional Characters

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

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

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

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

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

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