Someone Else’s Writing

I caught Panic Room on TV the other day. I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters; it was one of those movies I enjoyed while watching and then never thought about again. I still let the gods of cable TV run my viewing; despite the growing ability to watch whatever I want when I want to, I never actually put in a DVD of an old movie or order it up. I like to just find them on TV when I least expect it. It goes back to my crude childhood days of having 12 channels and no VCR; the sudden rush of delight when you turned on the TV and there was actually a good movie on still warms my otherwise black and unhappy heart.

Motherfuckin' Raoul

So, I watched Panic Room for the first time in years. Still a great movie, in my opinion. Sure, you once again have to try and care about characters who are so goddamn rich they can buy a townhouse like that in Manhattan. And that is pretty goddamn rich.

The question of why so many characters in fictions are rich is an interesting one. Of course, let’s first agree that I have no idea what percentage of characters are, in fact, rich in fiction stories. I’ve done no research. It just seems to me like an awful lot of stories focus on people who are rich. In stories like Panic Room, of course, the simple answer is: Poor people do not have anything to steal. Case closed.

Anyway, they manage to get you caring about our rich white protagonists with the double-punch of Sad Jodie Foster as Divorced Wronged Woman and her daughter, played by pre-Twilight Kristen Stewart, as Sick Girl who has diabetes and needs constant care to stay alive. So, sure, they’re rich and white and privileged, but they have their problems too. Once I get past my own class-warfare issues, it’s a fine story, told very well.

Except for Raoul.

In the story, Junior, a crackhead Trustafarian, recruits Burnham, who works for the security company that installed the alarm and titular panic room in the house, to help him break in and rob the place. It’s made very clear that Junior has chosen the moment carefully because his aged uncle has died and the house was sold, but he believes escrow has not yet ended, so the house should be completely empty. So the plan is clearly that they sneak in when no one is there, Burnham uses his knowledge of the alarm system to make sure they are undetected, they steal the $22 million in bearer bonds hidden in the panic room safe, and then they sneak out. Since no one else even knows the bearer bonds are there, it is obviously planned as a quick, easy crime. When Junior finds out the house is occupied, he goes into a fit of rage and panic. Because he was sure no one would be in the house.

Junior has just introduced Raoul to Burnham, and Burnham is upset at his last-minute inclusion. Raoul wears a mask and carries a humongous gun, and talks like a hard case. Why in hell is Raoul there? Junior says he recruited Raoul because he has experience with robbery, but it doesn’t make any sense: Junior was convinced the house would be empty and they would encounter no resistance. Junior is clearly shown to have no ability to think ahead or make complex plans. So why would he recruit a psychopath like Raoul before knowing there were people in the house that would need to be ‘handled’?

On one hand, the answer is easy: The story needed Raoul. Junior’s weak. Burnham’s a good guy, deep down, who refuses to hurt anyone. Junior and Burnham are not menacing. Raoul adds that edge of menace the story needs, because he is not a nice guy, he is willing to hurt people, and he is clearly in it for himself. So that’s the easy answer: Raoul is there because the writer decided he needed Raoul to bring some tension to the story, and to escalate the violence believably.

On the other hand, it makes absolutely no sense. Junior expects an easy score. Why would he risk a share of the money and complications to bring Raoul in? This could have been solved very easily: Have Junior call in Raoul after they discover the house isn’t empty. A panic decision. Works perfectly. Except then, of course, you’ve ruined the flow of the sequence. As it stands the scene where the three criminals arrive at and enter the house is masterfully done. David Fincher, the director, has an ease with the camera that makes for fluid visual storytelling. The camera swoops through the house like a bird, smoothly tracking the movements of the men as they appear outside, traverse the perimeter, and finally effect an entrance. They then go immediately to work. To insert a sequence where Junior calls in Raoul and then waits for his arrival would have slowed down the pace excruciatingly and ruined that flow.

These sorts of ripple effects happen a lot. As you write a story you have to be thinking about your details, because a simple change suggested towards the end can cause your whole plot to ripple out, knocking things out of place. In the end, I could believe that the screenwriter just decided to let that slight illogic lie, handwave it as evidence of Junior’s criminal-wannabe, crackhead-addled thought process. And it does almost work. Well enough anyway to get by with, except for one cranky guy watching it on Encore or whatever eight years later.

That’s why my wife The Duchess and I can’t wait for true Internet Television, so we can just press buttons on our remotes when we like or dislike something. I’m not thinking about tedious typing of opinions. Just big red and green LIKE and DON’T LIKE buttons we can mash whenever something displeases us. And then a little avatar of our heads pops up on screen, cursing and dancing in rage. For both buttons, actually, now that I think about it. And who wouldn’t want my disembodied head to appear on your screen, cursing and complaining?

This is the problem with being a working writer: You just can’t enjoy movies any more. You’re always tugging at the plot threads, seeing if anything shakes loose. It can be maddening. This is why I drink. Because I know someone’s out there right now, doing the same to my books. The bastards.

I can still remember the day we figured out Room 29.

Being a nerdy kind of guy my entire life, I went through a period of being enamored by puzzle books, in the sense of entire books being a puzzle. The first one I came across, and the one that remains, in my mind, the best example of them, was Maze by Christopher Manson. I don’t remember how I found it; by the time I came across it the contest portion (offering a $10,000 prize to the first person who successfully solved it) was long over. I didn’t care about the contest; the book itself was unbelievably cool.

There were others. There was the Merlin Mystery, which was unbelievably complex and zero fun. Zero, zero fun. Maze remains my favorite, by far.

Maze is a book that is also, literally, a maze. Each page of the book contains a drawing of one of the rooms of the maze – basically the pages are the rooms. The conceit is that you are part of a group of people who enter the maze along with a less-than-helpful guide, who narrates your progress (or lack thereof) through the maze. In each room/drawing there are doors marked with numbers; you choose which room to go to next by selecting a numbered door and then turning to that page. In the drawings and the text are clues both to which room to go to next and the overall puzzle. Your goal is to find the shortest path from room 1 to room 45 and back out again, and to decipher and answer the riddle hidden in room45.

It’s fucking genius. Part of it is the writing. Here’s the text from Room 1:

…the entrance hall of the Maze. They looked carefully at the bronze doors, trying to choose. The uncertainty of visitors is one of my little pleasures.
“It’s easy to get lost,” I said helpfully. “This can be a sinister place.” The sun glared at me through the gateway.
Something was ringing behind one of the doors. They spent some time trying to decide which door it was, not understanding that the silences of the Maze are as eloquent as the sounds.
“Decisions, decisions,” one said. “Too many decisions.”
“The story of my life,” said another.
“We don’t want to be late,” said a third, opening one of the doors.
“Nary a soul to be seen,” said the first, peering into the gloom.
I waited patiently for them to choose which was to go … into…

The sense of every little thing – every word, everything in the images – being a clue was enervating. I would pore over every room seeking clues. I drew matrixes of rooms, trying to figure out the shortest route. For a while we were stymied; we could not figure out how to cross over to what seemed like the second half of the maze, we kept dead-ending. And then one day I was examining Room 29:

And we realized we were missing a door. We’d seen #8, #40, #35, and #2, but there’s one more door in there (unnumbered doors don’t count). Can you see it? It was pretty exciting when we finally did.

In the years since failing, pretty convincingly, to solve the riddle (our triumph of noticing the hidden door in Room 29 was our last intellectual Win with this) I’ve occasionally attempted to capture (i.e., steal) the tone of this little puzzle book for my own writing, with little success; the images are at least 50% of the atmosphere. In fact, I even attempted my own ersatz version of the Maze a few years ago (it was a Geocities web site, believe it or not). Check it out, if you want, but don’t complain to me if it makes no sense!

This ain't the first time a movie about a Box has totally sapped my will to live.

I’m not entirely sure when this blog became nothing but half-assed movie reviews. I’ll have to launch an investigation. Until I figure it out, just be thankful that I throw myself on Crap Grenades so you don’t have to. In other words, I sat down and watched The Box starring Cameron Diaz the other night, and now that my week has been ruined you are safe from this horror.

The Box is a movie based on Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button”, written way back in 1970. I have something of a Writerly Man Crush on Matheson; not only have I loved most of his writing, but he’s endured, which isn’t easy. I’d like to think someone like Will Smith is going to make a travesty out of one of my books decades after I’m gone, but chances are slim.

The basic premise is this: A financially strapped couple are visited by a mysterious man who gives them a box with a button. He tells them that if they press the button, they will receive $1 million, and someone “they do not know” will die. That’s the same premise as the original story, more or less. The original story, of course, ends pretty quickly. It’s creepy, and it’s effective – hell, they’re still adapting it forty years later. I’d call that effective.

The movie, unfortunately, grinds on for quite some time after this set up. Forget Cameron Diaz’s unfortunate accent. Forget that I am increasingly convinced writer/director Richard Kelly was merely impenetrably lucky and not a genius when he made Donnie Darko. The simple fact of the matter is, The Box starts off with a terrific premise (albeit one given to the filmmaker by the howling ghost of a much better storyteller) and then completely and utterly fails to develop that premise into anything nearly as good.

This is a pretty common problem for writers. The high-concept idea is not that hard to come up with, but plotting is frickin’ hard. It’s easy enough to imagine a world where robots have rebelled against us and rule the world, it’s difficult to tell a story around that premise. If you doubt me, try it.

What Kelly does with his solid-gold premise here is flail about and come up with a ridiculous reason behind the premise, and then he doubles down on that ridiculous reason and dares you to drown in the ridiculous. Which is audacious in its way.

<— SPOILERS AHOY! Turn back now if you don’t want this story ruined for you. —>

(more…)

Ah, zombies. Once the forbidden fruit of horror films I wasn’t allowed to see — I remember when Dawn of the Dead came out and every kid on my block had snuck in to see it except me; it was a difficult time in my adolescence, let me tell you — now crossed over completely into pop-culture saturation along with vampires. Zombies are now about as scary as Gremlins, and I thought we’d passed the No Return sign back when Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland brought them into comedy. However, there seems to still be some gas in that tank, huh?

Like everyone else, I often daydream about the Zombie Apocalypse. I like to imagine how I’d survive: How I’d secure the house against attack, stock up on supplies, find clever ways to go out and grab supplies without being hunted down. The amazing comforts I’d devise, like solar-heated water tanks on the roof, a garden on the deck, bike-powered batteries for a few hours of electricity at night. The people I’d refuse to admit into my pimped-out survival house. The sheer number of cats I’d have to take in and feed out of my well-known weakness for the kitties.

In short, there is something terribly compelling about the zombie apocalypse story. No matter how many times I see it, I’m still intrigued by the next one.

I’ve never read the graphic novel, but when I saw the ads for The Walking Dead on TV, my first thought was this looked like the least original thing I’d ever seen. Every single aspect of it had been done before: The zombie apocalypse itself. The abandoned and creepy hospital. The empty world littered with the last vestiges of panic. The lone survivors banding together. The inevitable conflicts between Type-A personalities struggling for power over their fellow humans.

I mean, if you haven’t seen each one of these details in previous zombie/apocalypse stories, you simply having been reading/watching any.

So, I felt no need to rush to my TV and watch the show. I dawdled. One night I had a free hour so I popped it up on Hulu out of curiosity, and yep, it’s as well-worn and cliche-filled as I expected. It’s also quite good.

The fact that you can take a story told five thousand times before and hit every single expected beat like clockwork and still create something compelling is a tough one for writers. We like to think in terms of amazement and innovation. We like to think we’re going to redefine this, reinvent that. We like to think we have the imagination to avoid the same ruts left in the road by previous writers, and we abhor ripping off previous efforts. But the fact is, you can have a story built entirely from What has Gone Before and still pull it off – the trick is sensible plotting and good characters. There is a reason, after all, that things get done over and over again: Because, in their basic form, they work.

Thus it is with The Walking Dead. There is absolutely nothing (so far) special about the story. A vague virus hits, tuns most everyone into walking dead that want to eat the living, civilization collapses, and a small number of survivors struggle to live day-to-day. I have really enjoyed the first three episodes, though, because the characters are drawn well, even if they are themselves sometimes cliches or caricatures. And the plot, while not innovative, really, beyond anything in previous zombie movies, makes sense, unfolds sturdily and naturally, and so far has avoided any fake twists or sudden jerks in direction.

It’s early, of course; aside from the main character, Sheriff Rick, the other characters haven’t had a lot of screen time, so it may well be that the satisfactory sketches they are now will become unsatisfactory bullshit later. So far though they’ve sold me. I like how the plot is spinning out organically: Rick makes mistakes and doesn’t know everything, but his quest for his wife and son, which in lesser works would have been an endless one designed to  drive the overall arc over years, ends in episode three. I like how the character relationships are being illuminated slowly, with little twists that are completely believable. For example, Rick’s best friend and Rick’s wife have started an affair, because she thinks he’s dead. When Rick returns, she instantly cold towards the best friend, which also makes sense. And then she tells us that the best friend told her Rick was dead — and we’re left to wonder if this was because the best friend believed it himself, or whether he left Rick for dead, possibly for his own reasons.

Small stuff, but combined in a good recipe it works well, and shows how even the most worn premises can still be good storytelling. As a writer you can get a little fixated on the “high concept” or the hook of an idea. Sometimes it’s good to remember that good storytelling wins most battles.

As I am wont to do, I trolled my pay-per-view menu the other night for curiosities. I am in love with the odd gem of a movie that you discover sometimes, a film that got no love in wide release but turns out to be really entertaining despite some faults. It’s not always easy to find such gems, but when you do, it’s great.

As we are moving into the Age of Anybody Can Make a Movie, things are getting interesting. More and more you read about movies being made for tiny budgets – budgets you can imagine raising yourself. Like this, or Primer. I mean, if you can make a movie that gets a wide release in theaters and then a run on pay-per-view for the cash you can advance off your credit cards, ala Clerks, we should be entering into a simultaneous nightmare/paradise where anyone who has the mental discipline to concentrate for more than ten minutes should be able to make a movie.

And thus, Monsters, made for a reported budget of some pocket lint, interesting stones, and a live chicken. Supposedly made with off-the-shelf equipment and without the benefit of craft services or, heck, permits. Do I believe that? I dunno. Maybe. (Warning: Spoilers ahoy!)

The movie looks great. Really great. The effects are used sparingly but wisely, and are, in fact, effective. And the premise is interesting: Six years ago a space probe crashes into Mexico and alien life-forms – huge, dangerous creatures – infest the area. Mexico and the USA move the military into place to keep the aliens from spreading, and traveling between the countries is difficult and expensive. Our two main characters end up having to travel the “infected zone” on foot, and hilarity ensues. All well and good, and I salute the filmmakers for crafting something that looks great. The story, on the other hand, was a let down.

I mean, you have this premise, and it’s great. And here’s what they do with it: The two main characters mope about, because they are very sad. The woman is the daughter of a rich man and is engaged to a man she does not love; the man is a bit of churl who has a son who thinks of him as a friend of his mother’s, not his father. The rich girl is trapped in Mexico and her rich father, who employs the churl, orders him to escort her from the country safely. So far so good – it won’t win a Pulitzer, but that’s a perfectly serviceable set up.

The characters then proceed to mope about.

The movie is about 60% set up, which is a problem. Handled differently, holding back the titular monsters until more than halfway through the story would build tension like a motherfucker, but here there is no tension whatsoever. The characters’ situation devolves as they miss the last ferry out of the area and have their papers stolen, leaving Sad Girl to hock her engagement ring to bribe their way into a land crossing. They mope about in the border town as they wait to travel. They mope about on a boat as they are ferried by surprisingly polite and honorable mercenaries hired to get them through the Infected Zone. They see a Monster! Very exciting, except it goes away, and nothing happens. They mope about on land as a new set of mercenaries escort them through the forest. Finally, in a nifty set piece their caravan of trucks is assaulted by Monsters and everyone but Sad Girl and Churl are killed rather gruesomely. Despite the fact that the Monsters display knowledge that the trucks contain tasty human morsels, they completely ignore the truck containing Sad Girl and Churl and simply walk away after killing everyone else. The Monsters walking away is kind of a theme in this movie.

On foot, now, Sad Girl and Churl start walking, and mope more.

They finally reach the humongous wall the USA has built along the border to keep the Monsters out. The fact that some folks read an immigration subtext into the movie begins and ends, I think, with this massive wall – the story is so uncomplicated and lacks so much detail, it’s hard to say there is any subtext here. Deciding that the movie takes place in Mexico and involves the USA building a huge wall to keep Monsters out of itself and therefore this is an allegory for immigration policies is a bit of a stretch, or perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, as in wishing there was actually some depth to the movie.

There isn’t. The characters make it over the wall and discover that the Monsters have broken through and have destroyed the border towns on the other side. They find a gas station with working phones and call for help. They witness two Monsters in a graceful, kind of beautiful mating dance. The army arrives to rescue them, and Sad Girl announces she doesn’t want to go home. The end.

MY GOD THE MOPING.

It’s a mistake a lot of writers make when they imagine that their characters are so defined by their back story tragedies that even when being chased through the jungle by frickin’ Monsters they will continue to fixate on their own sadness exclusively. I mean, imagine you’re Sad Girl: Daddy treats you like a piece of china he owns, you despise your life and future hubby. Very sad. Okay, fine. Now imagine you’re Sad Girl being chased by Monsters. I doubt you’d have so much mental energy for moping. And yet, in this film , the characters mope endlessly even as they barely escape with their lives.

The other mistake here is the lack of any informative detail. The characters mope, and by the end have changed. In the beginning she’s a sad, fragile girl and he’s a cad who sleeps with a random skank just as she’s starting to like him. At the end, she says she doesn’t want to go home and they embrace. What the heck? How these character arcs happened is a mystery, because we see none of it. The writer just wanted an emotional punch at the end and put it in, period.

This is not to say the movie is without anything to recommend it; there’s some really nice atmosphere and I’ll admit the mopery, while annoying from a storytelling standpoint, worked well from an atmospheric standpoint, which may have been the intention. I do think the story needs more action, more danger – sure, the Monsters kill a dozen or so people in the set-piece assault on the caravan, but you never get the sense that Sad Girl and Churl are in any danger. They are horrified by what they see, but the next morning they get up, stretch, and start hiking as if the goddamn forest wasn’t filled with, yes, frickin Monsters.

Ah, but then, I didn’t figure out how to make a kick-ass movie for under twenty grand, did I? Sigh. Nope.

I have no idea why I’ve been thinking about the movie The Hangover recently. I saw it in the theaters last year and watched it again on TV a few weeks ago just for the heck of it. It’s a fun movie, and I enjoy it, but it’s not exactly Citizen Kane, so I’m not sure why I’ve been turning it over in my head so much. I think it’s because comedies are so hard to pull off; more often than not I see an ad for a comedic film and I can just smell the failure. As the old saying goes, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard”, and baby, I believe it. As a writer, I know that whenever I try to be funny I screw it up royally. Any funny bits in my stories come directly from the characters, growing organically. I guess there’s a lesson there.

Anyway, I think the difficulty in making a successful comedy is why The Hangover interests me: It’s one of the few recent comedies I not only enjoyed, but think works as a story, not just a collection of hijinks. That’s the thing: A comedy can be a successful comedy and still fail as a story. If you’re laughing, it’s a success, even if the characters and story are frickin’ terrible. I think The Hangover works as a story for three main reasons:

1. The character of Alan: I really like Zach Galifianakis in general, and this role was perfect for him – and I hadn’t yet seen him do the same damn character too many times when this came out. But what I think works here is the way his character is handled. He’s obviously the Outsider/Weirdo, a character often trotted out in comedies both because their bizarre behavior can be used to comedic effect, but also because their nonstandard reactions can drive the plot or gloss over defects. It’s a fun trope. What’s good about The Hangover‘s use of it, though, is that Alan is not presented as a Freak for Fun, a guy you’re supposed to laugh at all the time. Yes, he’s strange, but the matter-of-fact way his family treats him and his oddities along with the affection the other characters have for him (at least by the end) makes it work. If he were just there to be mocked and abused throughout the movie, it would have been far too mean-spirited. Yes, there’s some gentle mockery there, and even at the end there are moments of discomfort for the other characters when he does strange things. But you believe these characters actually like Alan, by the end, and that adds a comrades-in-arms charm to what could have been a really mean story.
2. The scene split between the beginning and end of the film, where Phil (Bradley Cooper) calls the bride-to-be to inform her of the past two days’ events. “We fucked up…” It’s a scene that adds just a dash of real regret and horror to the story. It’s played relatively straight, and Cooper, I think, manages to convey that sense of dismal horror when you realize things have gone so wrong for so long now that there is simply no way to make it right. It’s a brief sequence, immediately broken by the sudden realization that they do, in fact, know where the groom is, but for thirty seconds or so it invites the viewer to imagine the alternate-reality version of this film, where they actually do lose the groom and the wedding is ruined, friendships destroyed, and, fuck, man, charges brought. That sudden spike of terror infuses the rest of the movie with just enough gravitas to make the humor work on a much deeper level.
3. Finally, the scene in the impound yard where Phil shows actual concern for Alan. It’s after they’ve allowed themselves to be Tasered in order to escape criminal charges and get their car back. Alan tells Phil he is worried about the groom, and Phil shows human feeling towards Alan by telling Stu (Ed Helms) to go easy on him because he’s upset. Again, it’s a moment where a lesser film would have ratcheted up the funny, but this quiet moment where the characters actually behave like human beings grounds the movie. Yes, Alan’s a weirdo, and yes, in a perfect world Phil and Stu might have chosen not to include him in their weekend. But he’s depicted as genuinely upset that his soon-to-be brother-in-law is possibly hurt or in danger, and that makes everything else work.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard about this. I’m not trying to suggest that The Hangover is anything more than it is, which is a decent comedy, but sometimes as a writer you can’t help but analyze someone else’s work, even if it’s a mainstream R-rated comedy, y’know?

Then again, this is why I don’t get out of the house much, or have any friends. And the drinking.