The art form of cinema is changing and evolving all the time. It grows outside the boundaries we have formerly understood for it. in looking at my own work, current films and scripts, I am consistently noting that as filmmakers we seem stuck in a time warp - scripts that would have made sense and been part of a cultural moment thirty years ago don't have the same impact now that they might have once upon a time. Films like "Departed", "Little Miss Sunshine", "Little Children", "Royal Tenenbaums" are emotionally or viscerally or comedically satistfying but don't make us sit up, hair on end, and say: I've never seen that before! All are derivative (LMS particularly so, I mean c'mon the Dad forcing the family to keep driving with the dead grandparent in the car? Didn't Chevy Chase do that twenty years ago?), all are well executed, all somehow fail to leave a lasting impression.
If one writes inside the studio system, marketing is now a part of the storytelling. A story can no longer be built on a surprise that is not an absolute end of the film, usual suspects style surprise because that will now be reveald in the trailer. The first one or two surprises are going to be revealed to the audience in advance.
The immersion in reality TV and documentaries has given us the opportunity to see real people have real reactions to extreme situations. Why would anyone go see "American Dreamz", a film about an American Idol type TV show, when they could instead watch the real American Idol? Fiction is now a filter. Our methods for finding out about life through You Tube, blogs, documentary shows have radically increased our familiarity with Actual Situations. An Actual Situation could be anything from watching a You Tube clip about a moronic criminal breaking into a liquor store on surveillance tape. The guy falls down, shops, he's drunk - it's voyeuristically hilarious. Or an episode of Cops, or Top Chef, or American Idol or any of dozens of outlets. Are they artificially created many of them? Yes. But that doesn't seem to make them less appealing. The fascination of a semi-borderline personality in a high-stress situation is difficult for a creator of fiction to compete with.
There is a show I'm hooked on called "Intervention" about addicts about to face interventions. I saw "Half Nelson" the other night. Half Nelson is an extremely effective film. But does it rivet me the same way "Intervention" does? The idiosyncratic quirks of real people in real crises are so bizarrely "true" - and real human beings are so fascinating - that even a brilliant performance by Ryan Gosling is filtered, blunted by the fact that he is living in a make believe world. That the movie is a story, someting made up.
Do we need to make things up anymore? I believe the answer is yes, but I also believe that if we don't keep asking that question - we're dead.
WHY I CAN'T WRITE ORIGINAL SCRIPTS
I have come to the conclusion that I am an interpretive artist. I'm like a translator. I take something that has a kind of solidity to it, a true story, a novel, and I adapt it into a screenplay. Original scripts with made up people in made up situations are so difficult to fill with juice, it seems. I admire Guillermo Arriaga and Charlie Kaufman but I feel more kinship with Alexander Payne - because his films are mostly adaptations of novels. In a novel a deeper level of penetration is possible, in character, sociology, back story. Adapting a good one into a screenplay feels achievable. To me, Kaufman is an aberration (in his genius). And his imitators ("I Heart Huckabees", "Stranger Than Fiction") fail completely.
In historical fiction, screenplays drawn from actual events about real people, i have the feeling that there is something for my writing to push up against. You start the duel with more bullets in your gun. If I write a story with Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon as main characters, I have the mythos of those cultural figures informing the story before I've written a line. The audience now brings so much accumulated knowledge to the screen. Not just of real people and media events, but of stortelling styles (anyone noticed that there is no such thing as a "whodunit" in movies anymore? Since Joe Ezterhas went down in flames we have collectively realized that it is now basically impossible to surprise audiences with "who the killer is". There's no real way to disguise something like that anymore. Audiences are too savvy from watching CSI and Law and Order. They have read the storytelling answers at the end of the book and they need more.)
Or if A. Payne or Todd Field adapts a Tom Perrotta novel, they have Perrotta's world view and detailed fictional universe as a STARTING POINT. They don't have to arrive at it from scratch. They work against Perrotta the way theater directors bring their own sensibility and style to classic texts.
Audiences too often know what is going to happen in a story. And this is becoming less and less a failure of imagination by the screenwriter. It's because there are a finite number of ways to tell a story WHILE STILL providing an audience with revelation and emotional catharsis. Because of the speed of the world we live in, audiences have time to process ten times more unconscious information about storytelling than they did thirty years ago. Which is why M. Night Shymalayan is foundering. He is forced to go to such extreme lengths in a desperate attempt to keep his audiences surprised that his stories wind up feeling forced, fake, and his "surprise" endings either aren't surprises (The Village) or mostly we don't care about the new information (Lady in the Water) because we haven't fallen deeply into the story.
There is a trailer for a movie called "Premonition" in the theater right now. Sandra Bullock movie about a woman who's husband dies in a car accident. But she wakes up the next morning and he is there again. Next day, he's dead again, next day he's there. The story seems to have an interesting premise, but the trailer basically takes us through the second act turn! We can make a very good guess about "who the killer is" or about the ontological foundations of the story just from the trailer.
Which is why I am not interested in the "what", I'm interested in the "how".
In pretty much all the screenplays I've written except for my first film (which, interestingly enough, was criticized (fairly) in some quarters as having a shock ending that was predictable) I focus on the "how".
Not "what will happen to Clifford Irving, the man who tells a lie about writing a book about Howard Hughes?" The audience probably knows from the trailer, from articles or from memory that he gets caught in the end. The audience instead is interested in "how" did this happen? How did this man get away with this lie? In what way was he caught? Did he screw himself up or was there some savvy person that figured him out? Was Hughes actually involved?
The "how" questions are the future of narrative in film. A movie like "Basic Instinct" or even "Sixth Sense" is no longer a genre. Not that we'll never be surprised in an original script again, that would be a nonsensical claim...it's just that we should expect to be truly shocked by the conclusion of a story (in the way we were shocked by Usual Suspects and Sixth Sense) once every five years instead of a few times a year.
I beleve that formal experiments ala Tarantino/Kaufman will continue to evolve by writers exploiting structural techniques they have stolen and championed and applying these techniques to adapting true life stories and novels. The blurring between fact and fiction will become more and more seamless. A film like American Splendor, part documentary, part monologue, part fictional film, part comic book - this is a work of art that can engage us fully as we move forward.
Before very long, I expect that mediums will start mixing. "LonelyGirl" is the wave of the future. Web hoaxes, stories that seem to be accidentally discovered and utterly "true", will entrance viewers because the hoax's creators know viewers are more susceptible to storytelling techniques (conflict, resolution, rising tension, character development) if they AREN'T AWARE THEY'RE WATCHING A STORY. Or the really strong fiction writers will move to gaming, because gaming engages the participant's decision making and physicality, again, making them more susceptible to the same old bag of tricks we storytellers have been lugging around for thousands of years. The hard part is: no one has yet improved upon Aristotle. "Poetics". Same ****, different day. I don't care if you're reading "Oedipus Rex" or "Brokeback Mountain". Aristotle had all options covered.
Makes you wonder what medium Orson Welles would be working in if he were alive today.
It's getting trickier, isn't it?
If one writes inside the studio system, marketing is now a part of the storytelling. A story can no longer be built on a surprise that is not an absolute end of the film, usual suspects style surprise because that will now be reveald in the trailer. The first one or two surprises are going to be revealed to the audience in advance.
The immersion in reality TV and documentaries has given us the opportunity to see real people have real reactions to extreme situations. Why would anyone go see "American Dreamz", a film about an American Idol type TV show, when they could instead watch the real American Idol? Fiction is now a filter. Our methods for finding out about life through You Tube, blogs, documentary shows have radically increased our familiarity with Actual Situations. An Actual Situation could be anything from watching a You Tube clip about a moronic criminal breaking into a liquor store on surveillance tape. The guy falls down, shops, he's drunk - it's voyeuristically hilarious. Or an episode of Cops, or Top Chef, or American Idol or any of dozens of outlets. Are they artificially created many of them? Yes. But that doesn't seem to make them less appealing. The fascination of a semi-borderline personality in a high-stress situation is difficult for a creator of fiction to compete with.
There is a show I'm hooked on called "Intervention" about addicts about to face interventions. I saw "Half Nelson" the other night. Half Nelson is an extremely effective film. But does it rivet me the same way "Intervention" does? The idiosyncratic quirks of real people in real crises are so bizarrely "true" - and real human beings are so fascinating - that even a brilliant performance by Ryan Gosling is filtered, blunted by the fact that he is living in a make believe world. That the movie is a story, someting made up.
Do we need to make things up anymore? I believe the answer is yes, but I also believe that if we don't keep asking that question - we're dead.
WHY I CAN'T WRITE ORIGINAL SCRIPTS
I have come to the conclusion that I am an interpretive artist. I'm like a translator. I take something that has a kind of solidity to it, a true story, a novel, and I adapt it into a screenplay. Original scripts with made up people in made up situations are so difficult to fill with juice, it seems. I admire Guillermo Arriaga and Charlie Kaufman but I feel more kinship with Alexander Payne - because his films are mostly adaptations of novels. In a novel a deeper level of penetration is possible, in character, sociology, back story. Adapting a good one into a screenplay feels achievable. To me, Kaufman is an aberration (in his genius). And his imitators ("I Heart Huckabees", "Stranger Than Fiction") fail completely.
In historical fiction, screenplays drawn from actual events about real people, i have the feeling that there is something for my writing to push up against. You start the duel with more bullets in your gun. If I write a story with Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon as main characters, I have the mythos of those cultural figures informing the story before I've written a line. The audience now brings so much accumulated knowledge to the screen. Not just of real people and media events, but of stortelling styles (anyone noticed that there is no such thing as a "whodunit" in movies anymore? Since Joe Ezterhas went down in flames we have collectively realized that it is now basically impossible to surprise audiences with "who the killer is". There's no real way to disguise something like that anymore. Audiences are too savvy from watching CSI and Law and Order. They have read the storytelling answers at the end of the book and they need more.)
Or if A. Payne or Todd Field adapts a Tom Perrotta novel, they have Perrotta's world view and detailed fictional universe as a STARTING POINT. They don't have to arrive at it from scratch. They work against Perrotta the way theater directors bring their own sensibility and style to classic texts.
Audiences too often know what is going to happen in a story. And this is becoming less and less a failure of imagination by the screenwriter. It's because there are a finite number of ways to tell a story WHILE STILL providing an audience with revelation and emotional catharsis. Because of the speed of the world we live in, audiences have time to process ten times more unconscious information about storytelling than they did thirty years ago. Which is why M. Night Shymalayan is foundering. He is forced to go to such extreme lengths in a desperate attempt to keep his audiences surprised that his stories wind up feeling forced, fake, and his "surprise" endings either aren't surprises (The Village) or mostly we don't care about the new information (Lady in the Water) because we haven't fallen deeply into the story.
There is a trailer for a movie called "Premonition" in the theater right now. Sandra Bullock movie about a woman who's husband dies in a car accident. But she wakes up the next morning and he is there again. Next day, he's dead again, next day he's there. The story seems to have an interesting premise, but the trailer basically takes us through the second act turn! We can make a very good guess about "who the killer is" or about the ontological foundations of the story just from the trailer.
Which is why I am not interested in the "what", I'm interested in the "how".
In pretty much all the screenplays I've written except for my first film (which, interestingly enough, was criticized (fairly) in some quarters as having a shock ending that was predictable) I focus on the "how".
Not "what will happen to Clifford Irving, the man who tells a lie about writing a book about Howard Hughes?" The audience probably knows from the trailer, from articles or from memory that he gets caught in the end. The audience instead is interested in "how" did this happen? How did this man get away with this lie? In what way was he caught? Did he screw himself up or was there some savvy person that figured him out? Was Hughes actually involved?
The "how" questions are the future of narrative in film. A movie like "Basic Instinct" or even "Sixth Sense" is no longer a genre. Not that we'll never be surprised in an original script again, that would be a nonsensical claim...it's just that we should expect to be truly shocked by the conclusion of a story (in the way we were shocked by Usual Suspects and Sixth Sense) once every five years instead of a few times a year.
I beleve that formal experiments ala Tarantino/Kaufman will continue to evolve by writers exploiting structural techniques they have stolen and championed and applying these techniques to adapting true life stories and novels. The blurring between fact and fiction will become more and more seamless. A film like American Splendor, part documentary, part monologue, part fictional film, part comic book - this is a work of art that can engage us fully as we move forward.
Before very long, I expect that mediums will start mixing. "LonelyGirl" is the wave of the future. Web hoaxes, stories that seem to be accidentally discovered and utterly "true", will entrance viewers because the hoax's creators know viewers are more susceptible to storytelling techniques (conflict, resolution, rising tension, character development) if they AREN'T AWARE THEY'RE WATCHING A STORY. Or the really strong fiction writers will move to gaming, because gaming engages the participant's decision making and physicality, again, making them more susceptible to the same old bag of tricks we storytellers have been lugging around for thousands of years. The hard part is: no one has yet improved upon Aristotle. "Poetics". Same ****, different day. I don't care if you're reading "Oedipus Rex" or "Brokeback Mountain". Aristotle had all options covered.
Makes you wonder what medium Orson Welles would be working in if he were alive today.
It's getting trickier, isn't it?
Comment