Size Matters

So I just finished watching the original Poseidon Adventure for the first time. It'll surprise no one to learn that I dug the heck out of it.

Do you know how many things happen in this movie? We quickly grow to care about some imperfect but loveable people. The wave hits, and the ship capsizes. A small group of survivors led by a (self-described!) "renegade" Reverend makes its way through the ship, trying to maintain hope while hitting obstacle after obstacle. Throughout this journey, there are small plots and threads and jokes and conflicts... and, of course, action o'plenty. This is a big, popcorn blockbuster of old.

Do you know how long this movie is? 117 minutes.

To put that into perspective, here are some recent movie lengths:

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - 168 minutes
Zodiac - 158 minutes
Blood Diamond - 143 minutes
Babel - 143 minutes
Spider-Man 3 - 140 minutes
Knocked Up - 129 minutes
Lucky You - 124 minutes
Reign Over Me - 124 minutes

Now, quality and genre aside, may I humbly submit that the vast majority of movies do not need to be this long? And may I further humbly suggest that crossing the two-hour mark for a movie remain the exception, and not the rule? Why is it taking us longer to tell our stories?

Our stories? Yours and mine? Can mostly be told in 100 minutes. Let that be our goal henceforth!

How to Kill a Dog

Can't wait to see who stumbles across this blog searching for that cheerful phrase! Welcome, Dexters of the future!

Ahem. To business.

There's a scene in War of the Roses in which wife Barbara has just served husband Oliver some pate. Oliver's looking for common ground, while Barbara just wants to convince him how far she'll go to get him out of "her" house. She drops the hint the pate is made from Oliver's beloved dog Bennie. Oliver's horrified, and immediately begins violently barricading them both in the house to settle this once and for all.

Cut to: Bennie in the front yard, giving a little whimper.

I would love to know if this scene -- the "It's okay, folks, we wouldn't really kill the dog" beat -- was always in the script, or if it was a late-game change. (If someone knows, please be in touch.) Because it really could have gone either way... either Barbara has truly snapped after Oliver accidentally ran over her cat and pissed on her fish. Or Barbara just really wants to convince Oliver there's no chance at reunion. Regardless, the message seems to be that in movies you can kill human beings any way you like, but don't you dare kill the dog.

Except.

Killing the Dog Method #1: A Fish Called Wanda. You may recall the stuttering, but animal-loving Ken being given the task of killing an old lady, and accidentally killing each of her three terriers instead (perhaps most memorably, squished dog by falling safe). Why is this funny and not boycott-worthy? Well, the character killing them desperately wants to kill the old lady, and is devastated with each dog's death. And the comic reversal (Oh no, I killed the dog instead of the person!) takes the sting out of the deaths. Plus the deaths are cartoony to watch. (They were originally shot gorily with butcher's entrails as dead-dog-bits, but audiences said "Gasp!" and the changes were made.)

Killing the Dog Method #2: The Hills Have Eyes (2006). Family on vacation trapped in desert has two dogs with them, Beauty and Beast. Very early on, poor Beauty wanders into the hills and is later found gutted. (Someone found a use for butcher's entrails after all...) It's gross, for sure... but in my memory we don't see the dog actually being killed. Once again, it's okay to show pretty much anything happening to the human beings, but-- the dog is killed off-screen. We're allowed a bit of distance from the event itself. Also, there are two dogs: one as initial victim, the second to avenge that dog's death and repeatedly come to the aid of the humans. The dog has its day in the end.

Killing the Dog Method #3: The Royal Tenenbaums. The day of the wedding, a drugged-up Eli Cash skids up to the house, narrowly missing Ari and Uzi Tenenbaum. Looking down, they realize their beagle Buckley is under the car. This is particularly upsetting given Buckley survived the same plane crash that killed the boys' mother the year before; they all survived the plane crash, but Buckley doesn't survive standing on a sidewalk? This dog death works because it precipitates one of the biggest reversals in the film. Chas, furious Eli almost killed his kids, chases Eli through the house, ready to tear him apart. But when the chase is over, Chas is a changed man. Having his kids come that close to death -- and then getting the rage out of his system -- seems to allow him to "reset". Maybe the other shoe has dropped. Regardless, Chas will no longer be oppressively paranoid about his sons' safety. Thanks to the sacrifice of Buckley.

Phew! That was a lot of dog-killing for one day. I didn't even make it to Eight Below!

You may be wondering if the lesson here is "Jennica should not be allowed two cups of coffee on Sunday mornings". I think it's "writers who wish to kill dogs and other beloved animals on screen, beware".

Fairy Tales & Terror

I remember seeing a panel of indie filmmakers talking about how they envision their films. One said, when she was writing the script, she always asked herself: Which fairy tale is this? Is it The Ugly Duckling? Is it Cinderella? Is it Peter Pan? Conceiving a new story on the foundation of an old one that's already deep in our consciousness... not a bad idea, I thought. And wrote it down in my notebook. And promptly did not make use of this idea when conceiving or writing a single script.

But I remembered this thought when I watched V for Vendetta. You know, the adventurous tale of the innocent girl taken in by the "monster" who turns out to be no monster at all? Or, as some like to think of it, Beauty and the Beast?

I'm sure I'm not alone. Lovely girl, horrible "monster", the girl is held captive, the girl becomes a sympathizer (seeing there are worse things than "beasts" in humanity), the girl falls in love with him and helps defend him and his house...

The important lesson for me, here, is that I actually thought of the fairy tale while watching the film, and it didn't weaken Vendetta's story-- it only made it richer. This "what story is it like?" thing isn't a cheat, and it isn't just shorthand... it's a layer. A filter. A lens through which we might see new characters and a new story, so that the new story resonates deeper.

If you as screenwriters do the "What kind of fairy tale is this?" please let me know!

Lessons from the Incredibly Obvious File #4

Or: Don't Draw Attention to the Stupid Stuff

There's a tradition in screenwriting of pointing out the script's own story or logic problems. I've heard this called both "shining a light on" the problem, or "hanging a lantern" on it. Basically, you've got a minor logic hole that isn't worth writing around, so you have a character in the story acknowledge the issue. The idea is, by acknowledging the issue, you defuse the audience's questions about it.

Say, for instance, a character in a horror pic noting that it would have been smarter to run out of the house, than into the basement. We then think-- okay, they know that was stupid. But too late now.

What you don't want to do? Shine a light on something that will actually make us ask more questions.

There's a scene in The Island in which Ewan McGregor has just started to question the rules of his post-plague institution. This particular institution is supposed to keep plague survivors safe... but is in fact a world in which human beings are essentially prisoners, manipulated into hoping they'll win a ticket to a Utopian island. All the prisoners are dressed in crisp sci-fi white.

In conversation with the director of the institute, an increasingly rebellious Ewan says: "And... Let's talk about all the white. Why is everyone wearing white all the time? It's impossible to keep clean." The conversation moves into a new direction from there, with that question never answered.

Well maybe it's just me, but when the character asks that question and is given no answer-- I start to wonder too! Hey, yeah, that must be so much effort in terms of laundry. And wouldn't it be easier to control all these guys if they wore colour-coded uniforms? Based on, say, gender, or age, or dietary needs, or whatever? Surely dressing them all exactly alike is more work than it's worth.

But the movie can't answer the question, because the only possible answer to the question "Why is everyone wearing white all the time?" is "Because we are in a science fiction movie."

If you're following convention for the sake of convention... or you're trying to get away with something... don't frickin' hang a lantern there, okay?