Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

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  • billmarq
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    And as Craig did, I believe the "mentors" should be called "advisors."

    Leave a comment:


  • martin
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Originally posted by Craig Mazin View Post
    In reading about your problem, a potential solution occurred to me. Or, at least, it's what I would do.

    And then, when our poor King is lost, at long last this grump will reveal himself as the wisest of all the advisors. Only he will have the moral authority to tell the King that nobility and royalty must come from within. Only he has refrained all this time.

    I can even imagine an exchange... something like...

    "Why have you not counseled me until now?"

    "I am a counsel to a King. You have not been a King until now."

    That sort of thing.

    Anyway, that's what I would do, your mileage may vary... hope that helps.

    Craig's right on. The immediate question his idea highlights is 'what did he do at the end to become king in the advisor's eyes'.

    Because the flaw in your premise is that 'advisors failed him' when it is his indecisiveness that does that for him.

    Craig does something else you should pay attention to: He gave at least one advisor a persona. In other words, the more you ground your story in specifics the solution will appear.

    You can do no worse than steal from two real-life 'kings': LBJ and W.

    One trusted the advisor (McNamara) who least resembled him but distilled the 'genius' of the one he sought to overshadow (JFK).

    The other (W) went for the wily and unorthodox (Cheney, Rumsfeld) men who were dismissed by the leader HE sought to overshadow (HW).

    And as you can see the operating needs are different. One wants to top his predecessor while the other almost sees himself as 'avenging' his father's 'mistakes,' 'downfall', etc.

    The fastest you unburden the story of generalities, the clearer things will be.

    Also, it gives your protagonists a flaw that won't be obvious to start, because then it is creating empathy and coloring the character.

    I would say the more little variants you add that hide the patterns in your story, the better.

    My own idea of the 'advisor who is right,' for instance, would be a love interest - whether the queen he rarely sees, or the consort who is almost a stranger to him, a mistress or a lover in a group of escorts that he calls once in a blue moon - all this in order to hide the reason why he never thought about this person's advice, because she wasn't thought as an advisor or because she was rarely there.

    By the same token it could be that the advisor is a childhood tutor the kind thought he outgrew and ended up in trouble and in jail because of falling out of favor. And the advice was given when he was a child, and maybe he reiterates it if the king visits him in prison or wherever he is exiled at the beginning and it is dismissed by the king as 'infantile' and without substance.

    You still would have to come back to either what makes him realize and appreciate the advice, in case he heard it beforehand, or what kind of growth/ realization /development the 'silent' advisor sees that finally gives his piece of mind to the king.

    Whatever that is it would have to do with what is your thesis on what is leadership. There are many aspects you can use: Social conscience of the impact of the decisions made. Human empathy with those whose lives you must lead. How to achieve clarity of mind to convince - this could be more pertinent - warring sides to unite behind one goal. Etc.

    Leave a comment:


  • Craig Mazin
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    In reading about your problem, a potential solution occurred to me. Or, at least, it's what I would do.

    You say the King has multiple advisors. Because he does not believe in his own instincts, he trusts them... switching between them as indecisive, insecure men often do.

    They let him down, he is bereft... and then one of these advisors tells him "believe in yourself."

    Okay. My solution.

    The King has, say, five advisors.

    Four of them prey upon the King's weakness, insisting that he do as they say.

    One refuses. Perhaps he's the oldest. Maybe he's considered the most foolish. Or perhaps he's seemingly an *******. A grump who refuses to give any counsel at all, and if it weren't for his tenure/tradition/service to dear old dad, etc., he'd probably get shitcanned.

    He's the Fool on the Hill, in other words.

    And then, when our poor King is lost, at long last this grump will reveal himself as the wisest of all the advisors. Only he will have the moral authority to tell the King that nobility and royalty must come from within. Only he has refrained all this time.

    I can even imagine an exchange... something like...

    "Why have you not counseled me until now?"

    "I am a counsel to a King. You have not been a King until now."

    That sort of thing.

    Anyway, that's what I would do, your mileage may vary... hope that helps.

    Leave a comment:


  • Timmy
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Originally posted by oskar View Post
    It feels like cheating to not have the mentor understand this in the beginning, you know?
    In GOOD WILL HUNTING, Robin Williams is the mentor, who doesn't at first know what Will's problem is, and then figures it out.

    It's perfectly feasible for mentors to not know the problem and learn it along the way. It's perfectly reasonable for mentors to also learn and grow.

    Originally posted by oskar View Post
    Because it means that had the protag and mentor talked this honestly earlier, this whole movie could have been avoided.
    The mentor and protag talk honestly early on all the time, but what the mentor says is not heeded. The character has to go through the journey to learn the lesson:

    In THE KING'S SPEECH, Bertie's not listening to Lionel. Bertie doesn't even want to accept that he's got a psychological problem.

    In WALL STREET (1987), Carl Fox shows his son the right way from the get go, but Bud's not listening because Gekko's world is more alluring.

    Telling Dorothy at the beginning when she's on the farm in Kansas that "there's no place like home" would be pointless.

    Leave a comment:


  • nmstevens
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Originally posted by oskar View Post
    Hi guys,

    I think I might be in a mess and I would like to know what this is a sign of:

    My protag is basically a king who thinks he doesn't deserve to be the king.
    His kingdom is under attack.
    He has smart mentors, who try to influence him differently.
    He's trusting one, then trusting the other, while making death-or-life-decisions.
    He's happy with those decisions, until he loses everything because of them.
    When he loses his kingdom, the protag has his speech, wanting to die for having taken the wrong approach. If only he had had somebody smarter to guide him! Now he has nobody. Now he can die.
    For the first time one of the mentors understands the psychological problem the protag is in, tells him he should believe in himself and the protag is able to get out of this mess alive by believing in himself. He doesn't get his kingdom back, it's too late for that, but maybe another kingdom will come one day.

    This is a violent comedy in a small-time-criminal-world. Character- & Dialogue-driven. It's a movie about changing your view of yourself and the world.

    And I don't understand why this structure sucks. Because it does. Because it means that had the protag and mentor talked this honestly earlier, this whole movie could have been avoided. It feels like cheating to not have the mentor understand this in the beginning, you know?


    Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
    os
    Generally, in stories that have mentors, there inevitably comes a parting of the ways between Protagonist and Mentor. In order for the Protagonist to achieve his/her goal (which in stories that contain a mentor is often a rite of passage) it is necessary for the Protagonist to either internalize the Mentor's advise and set out on his own or to turn away from the Mentor relationship, for better or worse, and set out on his own and to accept the consequences of moving from a dependent to an independent state, making his own decisions and accepting the consequences of his own actions.

    Ultimately, is shouldn't matter what the Mentor understands or fails to understand.

    What should matter is what the *Protagonist* comes to understand and how that moment is dramatized.

    NMS

    Leave a comment:


  • oskar
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Thank you again.

    Yes to the whole image of the 30yr-old not being able to suck mommies teat anymore. It's an extremely late moment for somebody to be standing on his own feet. Yes, it is Tony Soprano's, Will Hunting's and that boy from Spectacular Now's problem of low self-esteem because of a missing separation from their parents. In my script the characters aren't moping about it, but try to remain strong and invulnerable for as long as possible.

    But I think the emotional thought-process is still right, even if it usually happens in puberty? :

    Thinking everyone wants your best and you have great parents.

    Your parents disagreeing with you and leaving you.

    The will to die because you're still thinking your parents are good only you weren't worthy enough for them to stay.

    The realization that nobody is good.

    The realization that everybody has an agenda and you just need to live with it
    and forgive them and believe in yourself.


    Am I missing a part?



    The question of whether you would commit suicide over that, is a question of what you think you need in your future. Because that's, where this thought creeps in: When you don't think that there is any way you'll ever be happy.
    At least I think of it that way.


    Concerning Comedy, I don't know.
    It's strange crooks who think they are tragic figures and behave that way, while the outside world is just scratching their heads. I think it's the contrast that makes it funny.
    He would be a tragic figure if he was doing all this stuff out of hubris and then failing because of it, right?

    Leave a comment:


  • sc111
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Originally posted by oskar View Post
    Hi guys,

    I think I might be in a mess and I would like to know what this is a sign of:

    My protag is basically a king who thinks he doesn't deserve to be the king.
    His kingdom is under attack.
    He has smart mentors, who try to influence him differently.
    He's trusting one, then trusting the other, while making death-or-life-decisions.
    He's happy with those decisions, until he loses everything because of them.
    When he loses his kingdom, the protag has his speech, wanting to die for having taken the wrong approach. If only he had had somebody smarter to guide him! Now he has nobody. Now he can die.
    For the first time one of the mentors understands the psychological problem the protag is in, tells him he should believe in himself and the protag is able to get out of this mess alive by believing in himself. He doesn't get his kingdom back, it's too late for that, but maybe another kingdom will come one day.

    This is a violent comedy in a small-time-criminal-world. Character- & Dialogue-driven. It's a movie about changing your view of yourself and the world.

    And I don't understand why this structure sucks. Because it does. Because it means that had the protag and mentor talked this honestly earlier, this whole movie could have been avoided. It feels like cheating to not have the mentor understand this in the beginning, you know?


    Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
    os
    Your protag's inner struggle sort of reminds me of Tony Soprano on one level. Or, for that matter, Othello, who's mentor, Iago, hated him.

    Re: BF ... Since you say the "kingdom" is a small-time criminal world, he's not dealing with honorable well-meaning mentors. Everyone could have their own agenda.

    In this criminal world, the issue you're concerned about -- the mentor waiting so long to tell him what he needed to know -- is not so strange if the mentor, at first, had reason to undermine him.

    Or, you could go the Godfather route when Sonny Corleone, taking over for his father, disregards the mentor, Tom Hagen, because he wants revenge and it leads to disastrous ends.

    Now, it may only be me, but, as I understand you, your protag is a classic tragic figure and I'm wondering how the "comedy" works into that.

    Leave a comment:


  • MoviePen
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Originally posted by oskar View Post
    Thank you for your questions and ideas, which got me thinking:

    Maybe my story ends, where scripts with active leads go into their second act?
    And I'm just dragging out the whole -you cannot go to your old world anymore-part, where the protag still thinks, he can be passive?

    To answer your questions:

    This story comes from myself, having followed a lot of people, sometimes blindly, and am now being afraid of taking the step to becoming a man, who has to believe that his actions are as good as those of the people before him. So it's about teenage angst, about the separation from mother- and father-figures or idols.
    But in your outline, the actions of the people before him were NOT good. If they were good, they would have worked together for the benefit of your king, but they did not. They worked for their own benefit and resulted in the dissolution of his empire.

    So while I understand the personal genesis of your story, I think you can step away from that. Good parents give their kids the skills, encouragement, and gently pushes to be independent people, but they always remain the background to support them with advice, emotional support, and sometimes just plain hard cash. Your protag does not have good parents. Your protag isn't really dealing with the separation of a parent figure. Your protag is a 30-year-old who's been crashing in his parent's house for twelve years, and wakes up on the lawn to find the house and parents have vanished and he's got no Wii, no bank account and no job skills. He wouldn't even know what tool to use to flip a burger.

    So the low-point, why he wants to die, is because he's alone for the first time. He's been leading somebody else's life and was punished for that. The mentors have left at that point and he goes to the last remaining one who decides to leave him too but gives him this advice. The leaving has to occur, because otherwise he'll never stand on his own feet. Yes, I do not believe he needs to have another kingdom. He'll be fine without it.
    Yes, the leaving has to occur. But why "death". Why is he basically looking to commit suicide -- because that's a pretty damn low point in a person's life, and just having all of your human crutches disappear isn't quite enough to make that work for me. People who rely on others to make their lives work usually try to find someone else to replace that enabler, they don't nose-dive off a bridge.

    And it can be satisfying to have the king abdicate... if he does it for reasons of strength, of taking up a challenge rather than giving up his title.

    Still, it is something I see a lot in my most personal writing. Protagonists, who can't see what needs to be done and others doing the changing and telling them. I can write active characters, when it's not hitting so close to home. But here with this one, it doesn't work.
    Be very aware of this tendency in your scripts. One of the MOST frustrating thing I experience as a viewer is being ahead of the protag. If everyone is telling your protag "the sky is falling" and the protag just ignores the blue pieces of sky lying on the road, I want to pound him over the head -- I've got no patience for that.

    Leave a comment:


  • oskar
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Thank you for your questions and ideas, which got me thinking:

    Maybe my story ends, where scripts with active leads go into their second act?
    And I'm just dragging out the whole -you cannot go to your old world anymore-part, where the protag stil thinks, he can be passive?


    To answer your questions:

    This story comes from myself, having followed a lot of people, sometimes blindly, and am now being afraid of taking the step to becoming a man, who has to believe that his actions are as good as those of the people before him. So it's about teenage angst, about the separation from mother- and father-figures or idols.

    So the low-point, why he wants to die, is because he's alone for the first time. He's been leading somebody else's life and was punished for that. The mentors have left at that point and he goes to the last remaining one who decides to leave him too but gives him this advice. The leaving has to occur, because otherwise he'll never stand on his own feet. Yes, I do not believe he needs to have another kingdom. He'll be fine without it.

    So, yes, everybody else makes decisions but him almost until the very end. Now this works, because the stakes are emotionally high from the beginning and you want to know how it all plays out.

    Still, it is something I see a lot in my most personal writing. Protagonists, who can't see what needs to be done and others doing the changing and telling them. I can write active characters, when it's not hitting so close to home. But here with this one, it doesn't work.

    Leave a comment:


  • MoviePen
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Your protag's internal conflict: he thinks he doesn't deserve to be king. He can't be told to believe in himself. He needs to earn that belief. Your mentor can tell him that from the get-go; the king simply doesn't believe in it until he earns it himself.

    Why do you select the low point as the king wanting to die? How does that relate to his internal conflict?

    Also, why would the king believe this final mentor, when all of the other mentors have failed him? Has he not learned his lesson in trusting the advice of others?


    Originally posted by oskar View Post
    Hi guys,

    I think I might be in a mess and I would like to know what this is a sign of:

    My protag is basically a king who thinks he doesn't deserve to be the king.
    His kingdom is under attack.
    He has smart mentors, who try to influence him differently.
    He's trusting one, then trusting the other, while making death-or-life-decisions.
    He's happy with those decisions, until he loses everything because of them.
    When he loses his kingdom, the protag has his speech, wanting to die for having taken the wrong approach. If only he had had somebody smarter to guide him! Now he has nobody. Now he can die.
    For the first time one of the mentors understands the psychological problem the protag is in, tells him he should believe in himself and the protag is able to get out of this mess alive by believing in himself. He doesn't get his kingdom back, it's too late for that, but maybe another kingdom will come one day.

    This is a violent comedy in a small-time-criminal-world. Character- & Dialogue-driven. It's a movie about changing your view of yourself and the world.

    And I don't understand why this structure sucks. Because it does. Because it means that had the protag and mentor talked this honestly earlier, this whole movie could have been avoided. It feels like cheating to not have the mentor understand this in the beginning, you know?


    Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
    os

    Leave a comment:


  • Jon Jay
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Originally posted by oskar View Post
    ... it means that had the protag and mentor talked this honestly earlier, this whole movie could have been avoided. It feels like cheating to not have the mentor understand this in the beginning, you know?
    Some of the best stories have an element of this. In fact it can be incredibly satisfying for an audience to realise that Keyser Soze was there all along or that the groom in The Hangover was at the hotel all along. Yes, protagonist and mentor could have talked this through at the beginning, just as Brody and the whole of Amity could have taken the shark seriously from the beginning, just as the Nostromo crew could obey orders and not let Kane on board at the beginning...

    Which is a long way of saying that I don't think this element, in isolation, is the problem with your story. From the very brief outline you've given here, my issues with the story are more that you have a passive hero who relies on advice, can't decide which advice to take, whines when he follows bad advice, leading up to the massive earth-shaking revelation that... he should believe in himself. Which has to be delivered by some other dude for him to believe it. None of it really leaps out at me, I'm afraid.

    But that's only based on what you've put here, and if it's a dialogue/character driven piece with tonnes of snappy lines and vivid characters then this might not matter much anyway.

    Leave a comment:


  • RogerOThornhill
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    One does not need a kingdom to be kingly. He may lose his physical empire, but in the end must not lose his own soul.

    Leave a comment:


  • Writerperson12
    replied
    Re: Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    The mentor shouldn't help in the realization. Instead mentors should maintain that the king needs them. Otherwise, they'd be useless.

    The King should come to the realization on his own. Maybe after doing a small thing right. Maybe after discovering all his mentors undermine each other to gain favor with the King, at the expense of doing what's right.

    If the King was set on dying prior to this realization, maybe he has the courage to take matters into his own hands and comically joins the battlefield even though he's old and decrepit. He swings too far in the other direction after doing it wrong for so long. Shortly into battle, after nearly dying several times (his soldiers save him, but they die as a result), he'll also realize he's getting too hands on and falls back.

    Leave a comment:


  • Mentor suddenly understands what the problem was all along

    Hi guys,

    I think I might be in a mess and I would like to know what this is a sign of:

    My protag is basically a king who thinks he doesn't deserve to be the king.
    His kingdom is under attack.
    He has smart mentors, who try to influence him differently.
    He's trusting one, then trusting the other, while making death-or-life-decisions.
    He's happy with those decisions, until he loses everything because of them.
    When he loses his kingdom, the protag has his speech, wanting to die for having taken the wrong approach. If only he had had somebody smarter to guide him! Now he has nobody. Now he can die.
    For the first time one of the mentors understands the psychological problem the protag is in, tells him he should believe in himself and the protag is able to get out of this mess alive by believing in himself. He doesn't get his kingdom back, it's too late for that, but maybe another kingdom will come one day.

    This is a violent comedy in a small-time-criminal-world. Character- & Dialogue-driven. It's a movie about changing your view of yourself and the world.

    And I don't understand why this structure sucks. Because it does. Because it means that had the protag and mentor talked this honestly earlier, this whole movie could have been avoided. It feels like cheating to not have the mentor understand this in the beginning, you know?


    Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
    os
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