Favorite screenplays: The Bourne Identity part 1
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT?
Jason Bourne wants something truly fundamental: he wants to know who he is. “Who am I?” is one of the building blocks of narrative, and well-drawn characters are always asking themselves the question in one form or another. Luke Skywalker wants to know if he’s a simple farm boy or the savior of the rebellion, Chief Brody wants to know if he has what it takes to kill the shark, Clarice Starling wants to know if she can triumph in a world run by men, Danny Ocean wants to know if he is still lovable. A screenwriter is always looking for “a way in” to the material, something that is universal and strongly felt. No one has ever woken with amnesia and found out he’s a trained assassin, no one has ever had to blow up their father’s space station, no one has ever hunted a deranged killer while avoiding the advances of a second deranged killer. But the viewer identifies intensely with every protagonist here because the writer has found “a way in” to the story.
A note on Cowboys and Aliens
Cowboys & Aliens has been in development as long as I’ve been working in Hollywood. When I was working on Antz at Dreamworks, Cowboys & Aliens was already in development there.
It’s an immediately “gettable” concept — a sci-fi/western mashup with exciting and unpredictable possibilities. A perfect three-word pitch: “Cowboys and aliens.” And everyone in the room goes “Oh, wow. I get it. Cool, let’s buy that.”
My son Sam (10) and I have been going to movies all summer — Thor, Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class, Pirates, Captain America — and, in front of each one of those movies, we saw the preview for Cowboys & Aliens. Me, I was familiar with the project, I’m a big fan of Favreau’s, I loved Zathura and the Iron Man movies, I was looking forward to seeing it. But Sam, for some reason, was reticent. “That title is kind of, I don’t know, weird,” he’d say. The next time we saw the preview, he’d say again, “It looks good, but the title is, I don’t know, kind of silly or something.”
Finally, the third or fourth time we saw the preview I finally turned to him, put on my best “pitch” voice, and said “James Bond (pause) and Indiana Jones (pause) fight aliens (pause) in the Old West.” After that, he sparked up a lot more about seeing it — that sounded like a cool movie. (He’s never seen a James Bond movie, but he understands it’s something “guys do,” and Harrison Ford is the first actor he ever learned the name of from his work with George Lucas.)
Then, just last night, Sam and I were chatting at bedtime and I mentioned that I would take him to see Cowboys & Aliens soon. And again, he said “That title, I don’t know, it’s still too, I don’t know…”
I thought for a moment, “Hey, he’s never seen a Western, maybe he’s just unfamiliar with the genre.” But he reminded me that he has, in fact, seen two Westerns — Rango and Back to the Future III. (That made me smile, believe me.)
And then it hit me. Myself, I was born in 1961, which was about five years too late to have seen a Western when they were in their heyday. I myself had never played Cowboys and Indians — the earliest game I could remember playing with friends was Time Tunnel, based on the hit TV show of the same name. I was a perfect cultural symptom, like Andy in Toy Story, caught between worship of cowboys and worship of spacemen. And that was 50 years ago.
I said to Sam “Well, the title is a play on words. When I was a kid” — and then I realized not even then — “or, back before I was born, kids used to play Cowboys and Indians, that was, like, the most popular thing kids would do fifty, sixty years ago.” And I realized that, to him, “fifty, sixty years ago” might as well be “during the Napoleonic Era.”
Then his face lit up. “Oh, now I get it,” he said, “Now it’s a good title. I didn’t know it was referring to something.” Myself, it had never occurred to me that it “referred” to anything, I didn’t think “Cowboys and Indians” was a “reference” any more than The King of Queens is a “reference.”
In any case, I read in the trades yesterday that Cowboys and Aliens is getting serious box-office competition from The Smurfs, which leads me to think that Sam’s case might not be that rare, that the target audience for this movie is actually too young to be familiar with the phrase “Cowboys and Indians,” (I mean, my son has Indian friends, that is, people who hail from India, he’s barely heard of Native Americans referred to as “Indians”) and that they, too, see the posters and think “That title, I don’t know, that’s, I don’t know, weird or something.”
some thoughts on Green Lantern
The big news in Hollywood this weekend is that Green Lantern “failed,” bringing in “only” $52.6 million. “Only,” here, refers to gross-to-expectation ratio.
The reviews were scathing, and when I took my son Sam, 10, to see it on Saturday afternoon, I was fully expecting to see a movie that is thin, noisy, incoherent, poorly plotted, silly and preposterous.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the movie is none of those things. Rather, it’s entertaining, fast-moving, articulate, and very faithful to its source material. If you are curious about the character and concept of Green Lantern, you will find no better introduction than this movie.
Is it perfect? No, it’s not. But, for some reason inherent to the genre, I find that very few superhero movies are. A movie like the original Spider-Man, for instance, I kind of have to push through the plot and character problems and take it for what it is before I can enjoy it, and then it’s very enjoyable. I can’t think of a single superhero movie, except perhaps The Dark Knight, that really stands up to simple tests of plot, character, motivation, chronology, plausibility, etc.
(Having worked on a number of superhero projects, I speak from experience — they’re really hard to get right, to keep all the elements in line and all the balls up in the air. A contemporary working screenwriter can only watch The Dark Knight from a position of awe.)
Why did the critics hate Green Lantern? I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s a matter of fashion. Marvel has done extremely well for itself presenting a brand of “grounded” superheroes, superheroes who work within a realistic, nuts-and-bolts world that people can recognize. “Grounded,” in fact, has become a buzzword around Hollywood, a town that loves buzzwords, that clings to buzzwords like magical talismans. Iron Man is “grounded,” and so now all movies, especially fantasy movies, must also be “grounded.”
Green Lantern, on the other hand, is not “grounded.” It asks us to buy, before the movie even starts, the concept of an intergalactic police force staffed by goofy-looking aliens and overseen by a bunch of ancient blue guys with see-through skulls who watch over the entire universe.
To a Green Lantern fan, this “buy” is easy — well of course the Green Lantern Corps exists, that’s what the whole thing is about. But to the average non-geek moviegoer, the response is, most likely, “Are you kidding me?”
Think about this:
Nine years ago, The Onion ran this editorial: “When You Are Ready to Have a Serious Conversation about Green Lantern, You Have My E-Mail address.” The piece, a classic, not only perfectly captures a certain type of comics fan, but also perfectly reflects what the average walking-around Joe knows about Green Lantern, which is: who cares?
Now, as if by magic, there is a $200 million movie based on Green Lantern, with a huge marketing campaign and all its attendant pomp and flourish.
(The Onion, not a publication to drop the ball, does it again with this lovely bit of video reporting.)
The fact is, Green Lantern is a hard character for the average moviegoer to “get.”
Why? Because Green Lantern isn’t a character, it’s a job. There is no audience response to the phrase “Green Lantern” because there isn’t any specific guy who is Green Lantern. Clark Kent is Superman, and Bruce Wayne is Batman, Tony Stark is Iron Man, but no one in particular is Green Lantern. My own son, who has no trouble with the concept, only really knows John Stewart as Green Lantern from Bruce Timm’s brilliant Justice League shows. It’s like WB made a $200 million movie called Intergalactic Beat Cop. Who would see that movie, without knowing who the character was? They didn’t make a movie called Hal Jordan: Green Lantern, they made a movie called Green Lantern and showed, on all the marketing, that this is a movie about a job, a job with thousands of other employees, with a headquarters in outer space.
That, in my opinion, is why Green Lantern underperformed this weekend. In order to sell the Green Lantern concept, you have to get the audience to understand that this is not a movie about “Peter Parker, who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and thus becomes Spider-Man.” Rather, you have to get the audience to buy the idea that there is a job, out there, somewhere, called Green Lantern, and this is the story of Hal Jordan, who gets called to fill an opening in that job.
That doesn’t sound like that much for an audience to buy, but that is what happened — the idea that Green Lantern isn’t a guy but a job make Green Lantern a tough sell for civilians. I should know, I’ve encountered this exact same problem in my own life. Sitting down to discuss superheroes with non-initiates, everyone knows who Batman is, everyone knows who Superman is, everyone knows who Wonder Woman is, everyone knows who Spider-Man is, but when you bring up Green Lantern, they draw a blank — there is no character there. And when it comes time to part with $35 for a 3D movie, the average couple will go for something they “know” over something they do not.
Blood Relative week 2
Important filmmaking lesson: real houses don’t have bathrooms you can shoot in. We had a handful of simple scenes to shoot in a bathroom, and they took hours to light and set up because there’s no room to do anything. In fact, I’m keeping a running list of things never to include in a script. Bathroom scenes are only one. Food is another one — it’s a huge pain in the neck to shoot scenes involving food.
Here, Cristin Milioti perches on a bathtub for a pivotal scene. Cristin has been exceptionally brave and unflinching in her performance, in addition to being a joy to work with.
On the other hand, another important filmmaking lesson is to cast good actors who show up on time, understand what they’re doing, know without asking what the scene is about, don’t complain about low-budget privations, remain in good cheer and have real talent. We’ve been very blessed on this project. Our leads — Cristin Milioti (super above), Michael Rady (above), Toby Huss (below) and James Urbaniak (super below) have all been astonishing. In the case of Mr. Rady, he does all of this while also being handsome, polite, funny, open and generous. Plus he’s a vegan. I’m guessing he also saves kittens from burning buildings in his spare time.
Here’s Toby Huss, as our nominal bad guy. I’ve seen Toby be side-splittingly funny on stage and in movies and TV shows, and I honestly thought I’d have a difficult time getting him to tone down his anarchic spirit. But it never even came up — he understood immediately what the role required and has been absolutely terrifying in every shot, no questions asked.
Here is Mr. Urbaniak during an outdoor setup. He has a face in real life. There are many pictures I could post of him on set, but they would give away crucial plot points.
The bulk of James’s work comes in Week 3, where he will be required to sit at a table, walk down a street and wield a pen.
This shed is also an important character in the movie, although it’s hard to tell from here.
Ah, there we go.
Stunt baby meets real baby. Real baby is on the right.
My co-writer and producer, Holly Golden, in addition to serving a million different production needs, also stands in for Cristin during lighting. Here she is on the camera monitor in what our DP, Mr. George Su, calls “Predator Vision.”
Blood Relative rehearsals: day 1
Cristin Milioti and Marypat Farrell rehearse a scene in the kitchen of our primary location. Cristin plays a distraught young mother who seeks the advice of a psychic — and gets more than she bargained for!
If you haven’t heard of Cristin Milioti, that will change. She gave a clobbering great performance on a recent episode of 30 Rock, and this fall she’s scheduled to be the female lead in the Broadway production of Once. She’s been in all kinds of New York theater and, although she is a generation younger than your humble journal-keeper, knows everyone in New York that I know.
Blood Relative: the party
To celebrate the beginning of production, we had a party for the cast and crew of Blood Relative at our primary location, a house in Topanga Canyon. A splendid time was had by all, and then we all sat down to read through the script. Which is a scary thriller with lots of twists!
Left to right: James Urbaniak, Toby Huss, your humble correspondent and Cristin Milioti. Mr. Urbaniak’s left hand is still whole: the blurring is an effect of the camera’s shutter speed. For those interested, Mr. Urbaniak here models his Order of the Triad t-shirt. (Mr. Urbaniak informs me that he doesn’t actually intend to wear Venture Bros clothes everywhere he goes, he just gets dressed in the dark, like any other aging slacker.)
Ms. Milioti contemplates calling her agent to see if there’s any way she can get out of this project.
Mr. Urbaniak, on the other hand, is an old hand at dealing with the director, and calms down with a nice brewski.
Blood Relative
Greetings, faithful blog readers —
I am directing a movie, titled Blood Relative. We start shooting in a little more than a week. This is one reason why I’ve been posting a lot recently.
It’s a psychological thriller, starring the wonderful actors Cristin Milioti and Michael Rady, plus old pals James Urbaniak and Toby Huss.
I wrote the screenplay with my new writing partner, Holly Golden, who is also handling the producing part of the thing, and quite well I might add.
The house pictured is our primary location.
It’s kind of a haunted house movie.
Watch this space for updates!
True Grit part 10
So here we are. Mattie has set out to avenge the death of her father, to achieve “retribution,” and this is where it has gotten her: pinned down atop a rocky outcropping with a knife to her throat held by the very man who killed her father. She is surely done for.
True Grit part 9
At the beginning of Act III of True Grit, Mattie Ross is all alone. She has hired a bad man to track a bad man, thinking that the rightness of her cause makes up the difference between Tom Chaney and Rooster Cogburn. Mattie’s sense of rightness, or of righteousness, is, in a way, the only thing she has going for her. If she passionately loved her father, she has never shown that. If she is truly religious, she has a funny way of expressing it. It seems to me that she is the sort of person who believes herself to be right because God is on her side, and that God is on her side because she believes it to be so. (And she has money.) And even though she is a Presbyterian, she sees no problem with bringing Old Testament-style “retribution” down upon her enemies. She’s seen men murdered from a sniper’s nest and has seen one man shot in the face and another stabbed through the heart (after having his fingers chopped off), and none of it has affected her. She’s placed her faith in a man who is a killer, a drunk and a cheat, and he has failed her, leaving them both lost in a savage, lawless world. But at no time has she ever doubted the rightness of her course.
True Grit part 8
So, Rooster has planned an ambush at the cabin, and now LaBoeuf, who we’ve been seeing so far as a threat to Mattie’s goal of retribution, returns not as a threat but as a witless buffoon.