some thoughts on why I’m doing this at all

scooterjockey   writes:

“I understand this is a blog about the story of films – but for some reason with Spielberg movies, the movie can’t be judged on story alone. Obviously visuals are the cornerstone to every film (otherwise, we’d be satisfied with simply reading the stories) and few can match the perfection that Spielberg brings visually.”

The main body of Mr. Jockey’s comment is about the importance of John Williams’ music in Spielberg’s movies, but his preamble set off a chain of reasoning in my head that became too complicated to be confined to the comments margin.

There is no mysterious “some reason” that Spielberg movies can’t be judged on story alone. No movie can be judged by story alone. A screenplay is, as they like to say in story meetings, only a blueprint. The “meaning” of the movie may be consonant with the blueprint or it may comment on it, or contradict it. Visuals can compress, expand, redact, re-arrange, re-value, devalue and undermine whatever is in the script. The screenwriter is helpless before the primacy of the visual, and the smart screenwriter finds a director who more or less shares his vision and lets him do the job of bringing the screenplay to visual life — which involves changing things. As John Logan said about writing The Aviator (I paraphrase) “I learned that a crease in Leonardo DiCaprio’s brow says more than a page of description.”

Movies are, of course, about the visual. Spielberg’s movies, with their stunning images and masterfully choreographed action, tend to be more about the visual than others. (The reader will note that he is not putting his hand to his ear in the above photograph.) The visual fluency of Spielberg’s movies is so abundant and seductive that I can easily get caught up in a compelling camera move, a bit of editing, a spectacular effort of production design, a dazzling piece of choreography, and lose track of the blueprint entirely. The purpose of this series is to track the protagonists of Spielberg’s movies through the narratives of their respective movies, relying as much as possible on their simple actions, that is, “what they do” as opposed to “how they are shot” or “what is the cumulative impact.”

(Or, for that matter, “how is the music.” And let me just say right now that I’m sick and tired of people who are sick and tired of John Williams. What position for a composer to be in — his talent and sensibility are so well-matched to his director that people take him as a given and pretend to disdain him — “Ho hum, another score by John Williams.” Where would Spielberg be without Williams? More to the point, where does Spielberg end and Williams begin? That’s how closely married their sensibilities are, you can’t imagine Spielberg’s movies without Williams’s music and you can’t hear Williams’s music without seeing the visuals they accompany.)

(One thing I’ve learned, for instance: the “three-act narrative” has become such a rule of Hollywood development that anything else is looked upon with suspicion or dread, yet few of Spielberg’s movies have a three-act structure. His most popular movies have four, and some even have five.)

The purpose, for me, of this Spielberg series is specifically to examine the blueprints of his movies and figure out how they’re designed and built — before the dazzling visuals come into play. Since the dawn of my moviegoing days I’ve known that Spielberg’s movies work, now I want to know why they work.