John_Truby Reviews

Lost (2004–2010)

Lost, The Final Season

[9/10 · 30 March 2010]

The last season of Lost is upon us, and it gives writers of every medium an opportunity to watch masters of the craft push the television medium to places it has never gone. Lost is the first example of video game story structure transposed to TV, and the results have revolutionized the medium.

The old model of television involved the stand-alone episode, best exemplified in a crime or detective show. A murder was committed at the beginning of the episode, and then the cop uncovered the criminal and brought him to justice by the end. The next week a new crime was committed and solved. So plot was limited to what could be unraveled in 45 minutes.

With shows like Hill Street Blues and ER, the technique of the serial was added to TV. The cops, lawyers or doctors now had ongoing personal problems that extended over many episodes while retaining the stand-alone elements where a crime or medical emergency was solved by the end of the episode.

The creators of Lost had a big realization: the TV medium has not been used to its full potential, especially in the area of plot. So they shifted their focus from the single episode to the entire season. If you multiply 45 minutes per week by the 24 weeks of a network season, you have a story that is 9 times the length of a movie!

That's Dickens' territory. But the model the Lost creators used to construct this mega-canvas was not the 19th century novel, because that doesn't take advantage of the crosscutting power of film and TV. Instead they cross-pollinated TV structure with video game structure, potentially the most plot intensive of all story forms. This meant three things above all:

1. the huge importance of the story world 2. an almost infinite number of characters 3. tremendous plot, because you can keep going deeper into the same world and find more reveals.

Like all multi-main character stories, the storytelling in Lost is all about juxtaposition and story weave. In the first three seasons, the writers were funneling out, adding layers and layers of plot, increasing the story's scope by increasing the number of characters. But by the end of the third season the writers had reached the limit of plot: first, there were so many characters that they seemed like pawns and not people, and second, plot came to feel like a huge stall where further complications were just pointless.

That's why, in the last two seasons, the writers have been funneling down, concentrating on the six "survivors" as well as John, Jack and Ben. This speeded up the plot by giving the many strands a convergent point, and switched the emphasis from the puzzle of plot to the emotional satisfaction of character.

In the first four seasons, the conflict focused on characters in space. Last season Lost shifted to conflict in time. In other words, time travel. Time travel is always a fun plot device. But what does it really mean? The ultimate thematic point of time travel is to compress into one view a character's moral failings vs. the final moral judgment against him or her. Through the crosscut, the viewer can suddenly see in one view a single character's life span, and the choices that make all the difference in the quality of a human life.

Sure enough, in the middle of season five, we saw a series of episodes in which each of the main characters had their own show. Instead of strictly plot reveals for a mass of characters within the world, time travel allowed the writers to create strong emotional character payoffs for each of the nine major characters. At the same time the plot reveals for the entire show continued to come over the course of the whole season, which satisfied the plot cravings of the die-hard viewer.

If last season was about time travel, this season the writers are using the story technique of alternative history, contrasting actions on the island with an alternative present for each of the major characters back in the real world. The purpose of the alternative history technique is the same as it is for time travel. Both contrast the moral choices that caused these characters to come to the island in the first place. Each episode gives a character a chance at two paths, the island that tests their great flaw and real life where each person can finally make things right.

Besides being a lot of fun to watch, Lost gives writers a chance to see some of the best storytellers in the world, in the middle of their creative process, working the craft and pushing the magnificent medium of television. I've been saying for years that the best writers in America are working in TV. Even if you've never watched this show, you owe yourself the pleasure of seeing what great writing can do before Lost is gone forever.

Alice in Wonderland (I) (2010)

Alice in Wonderland

[5/10 · 30 March 2010]

Alice in Wonderland is one of the greatest stories of all time, with arguably the best story world ever invented. It is also notoriously difficult to turn into a film. And the reasons all have to do with the script. The most recent version of Alice, written by Linda Woolverton, is the latest disappointment, and a close look at the choices she made are very instructive to those of us who love the craft of screen writing.

Alice is a classic fantasy story, and in many ways it set the form. A little girl, living in a highly organized, mundane world, travels to an upside-down fantasy world of illogic and returns to the real world freer and a little more grown up as a result. The overall structure of the original story is very tight. The problem comes in the middle, because the middle is structured according to the myth form, not fantasy.

Alice is on a journey in Wonderland, which means that the story is highly episodic. Each scene is a new encounter with strange new characters. While these individual scenes are invariably fun and extremely creative, they do not build. This is the great challenge of any writer using what I call "journey plot" (see "The Anatomy of Story"). It has stumped writers from Cervantes (Don Quixote) to Dickens (Oliver Twist) to Twain (Huckleberry Finn). The main reason the episodic element doesn't hurt the original Alice in Wonderland is that the book is so short. But that won't work for a feature-length film.

If we look at what Woolverton did in adapting the original story, we can see that almost all her choices were designed to overcome this episodic quality. The problem is that while her choices decrease the episodic quality, they also represent paint-by-number storytelling that gets increasingly boring as the story goes on.

It's ten years later. The new Alice is a young woman trapped in the same stifling world and facing the prospect of a stultifying marriage to a rich fool. The trip to the fantasy world is supposed to force the heroine to confront her personal weakness. But notice in this set up, the craziness of Wonderland won't force Alice to change because she's a rebel from the beginning. The single greatest feature of the original Alice in Wonderland is that the fantasy world is based on illogic. So it attacks the very way that logical Alice and the audience think, the way we construct the world. Because this new Alice is never shown to be part of the "normal" worldview, fantastical Wonderland is just a series of strange landscapes.

To focus the story, Woolverton suggests the ending by showing a scroll in which Alice kills the Jabberwocky in the final battle. This sets up the vortex of the story that is supposed to sequence events at increasing speed. Now Alice's journey has an endpoint, so each stop is not a stand-alone moment but a step on the path to her final destiny where she will save the kingdom.

But by turning Alice into an action hero, Woolverton has made a pact with the story devil. Action stories typically have even less plot than myth stories, not just because big action set pieces stop plot but also because the audience knows that nothing big is going to happen until the final showdown. And in this film nothing does. Woolverton is still stuck with the journey plot, which makes it extremely difficult to add plot through reveals. Without surprises, the plot must die.

The other major technique Woolverton adds to overcome the episodic quality of the original story is to bring some of the major characters along for the ride. So, for example, instead of leaving the Mad Hatter after the tea party, he comes along as an important ally to help Alice kill the Jabberwocky and defeat the Red Queen. Bringing characters along on the journey and having a single ongoing opponent is always a good idea when you're writing a myth story. It allows the audience to care about the characters more intensely and increases the power of the opposition. But the value of these two techniques is largely removed when the heroine's goal is so predictable and mundane as fighting a dragon in a big final battle.

Many people have expressed disappointment with director Tim Burton for this visually stunning but boring film. But visuals have always been what Burton is good at, not story. I find it fascinating to compare how a visual artist like Burton (Batman and Batman Returns) and master screenwriter-storytellers like Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) handled the same Batman story material. Frankly, there is no comparison, and it's one more proof that movies aren't a "visual" medium, they are a story medium.

Ironically, screenwriter Woolverton's efforts to unify and build the story stripped the film of the great strength of the original story, which are the breathtakingly original characters and scenes. And Burton's vaunted ability to create strong visual worlds totally misfired when he failed to base his visuals on the defining principle of the Alice in Wonderland story world, which is the brilliant illogic and nonsense that only a professor of logic could create.

One day a screenwriter may solve the riddle of making a great Alice in Wonderland film. That will be a great accomplishment that I would love to see.

American Beauty (1999)

Screen writing as art

[10/10 · 8 January 2010]

Every once in a while a screenwriter creates an original script that manages to maintain its originality all the way to the screen. Alan Ball's American Beauty is such a script. Though it is not obviously filmic in a "Star Wars" kind of way, it is a classic example of the screenwriter's art.

To see how it works, you first have to see how it deviates from the traditional Hollywood movie structure. If there is any one story element that defines the classic Hollywood movie it is a strong desire line. The hero comes up with a goal early in the story and then goes after that goal with great speed and intensity.

But American Beauty cannot use this strategy because it is the story of a man who is purposeless. In other words, his problem through much of the story is precisely that he has no desire line. What's more, his wife, Carolyn, and his teenage daughter, Jane, can't stand him. So instead of a hero with a single, driving story line we have a family where centrifugal force is pulling everyone apart.

The writer, Ball, thus faces some crucial questions: How do you create narrative drive for a character with no desire and a family that is exploding? How do you show the journey the hero takes internally when he is literally going nowhere? How do you take the time to show the forces destroying this family when there is no forward momentum to keep the audience interested? Ball's solution is the storytelling structure. Conventional wisdom looks down on the voice-over in movies as uncinematic. Conventional wisdom has never been more wrong. The storyteller is one of the great film techniques because it allows you to sequence a story by deep structure, not simple chronology.

In American Beauty, the first-person voice-over tells the audience almost immediately that the hero will be dead within a year. This puts a sensational piece of information up front that is also somewhat mysterious.

The writer gains two great benefits from this strategy. First, he tells the audience that big things are going to happen later, so they don't become anxious in the first half of the film while the hero has no desire line. That allows Ball to spend more time detailing the mini-society surrounding the hero and so show the causes of its breakdown.

Second, this information forces the audience to focus on the steps of the hero's journey - both his fall and rise - instead of on what's going to happen at the end. In other words, Ball sacrifices suspense for understanding, texture and depth.

Problem/Need: After the initial voice-over information, Ball uses the first few scenes to depict a man living a suburban nightmare. Not only is Lester hated by his wife and daughter, he has a dead-end job from which he is about to be fired.

Opponent: With the voice-over structure buying him time, Ball has the luxury of detailing the hero's intimate opponents. In a wonderful filmic sequence, wife Carolyn cleans, then shows a house she represents to a number of uninterested buyers. The process ends with her breaking into tears of frustration, then slapping herself to get back on the track to success. This is an opponent with a strong desire of her own, but she is so lost in the hollow optimism and denial of the salesman's life she can only psych herself back up and try again.

Daughter Jane is an opponent who loathes her weak, purposeless father, but she has no purpose of her own, other than to go to school the way she's supposed to.

Desire: In the midst of this family nightmare, Lester gains a desire line that galvanizes him. But it is a desire line he cannot act upon. He falls head-over-heels for dream teen, Angela, his daughter's blond cheerleader friend. Every effort he takes to accomplish his desire - fawning over her, calling her, fantasizing about her - only makes him more pathetic. The inappropriateness of his desire is underlined when we hear Angela speak. She is a walking stereotype who likes when men drool over her because it means she has a chance to become a model.

To kick this story to the next level, Ball introduces another ring of society. Frank, an army colonel who hates gays, and his obedient wife move in next door, along with their weird son Ricky who shoots videos. A gay couple lives across the street and Carolyn is attracted to her idol, real estate king, Buddy King.

Ricky becomes the catalyst for the freedom of both Lester and Jane. He gets Lester high and shows him the liberation that comes from telling your boss to screw off. Through his camera, he literally opens Jane's eyes to the beauty that is all around her, even in the "dance" of a grocery bag.

Lester's desire alone cannot drive the story because he cannot act upon it. So Ball extends the story by tracking the desire lines of all the characters in this society. Carolyn wants Buddy, Jane wants Ricky, Ricky wants Jane, Angela wants to be adored by men, and Frank wants to control his son.

These often conflicting desire lines have the ironic effect of both liberating many of these characters and making them hate Lester even more. Lester is still infatuated with Angela, but he is also becoming stronger, challenging his wife and turning the tables on his boss.

This complex of conflicting desires leads to a pivotal scene. Carolyn, feeling great from having sex with Buddy and shooting her pistol at the firing range, returns home to find Lester feeling great too. He is dazzled by how she looks and comes onto her, reminding her of her wild college days.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006–2007)

Not the big hit it was hoped to be

[8 January 2010]

Studio 60 has not been the big hit everyone at NBC hoped it would be. And it's taken more than a few shots, mostly from insiders who say that it's not an authentic view of a sketch comedy show. Why? Because it's not funny. And they're right; it's not funny. That could be because creator and writer Aaron Sorkin can't write funny. Or more likely it's because the show's not a comedy. It's a drama about working in a corporation, a corporation that just happens to be in the business of making culture.

Sometimes Sorkin gets too cute in his writing, typically from updating a classic story beat. He always does the beat well, but it's still a recognizable beat. And I get the feeling that he is writing so much so fast that for long stretches he just puts it on automatic and lets his considerable knowledge of story carry him along.

To see one of the reasons why Studio 60 may be having trouble with audiences, let's look at a technique that is crucial to a TV drama: the episodic desire line. In other words, what is accomplished in each episode? In a classic cop show, it's solving the crime. In a courtroom drama, it's winning the case. In a doctor show, it's saving the patient. On Studio 60 it's … Well, we know what it isn't. It's not putting on a 90-minute comedy show. So what is it? The desire line in each episode is what gives the story its shape, and is one of the key elements of a show's DNA. You can create a show in which the desire line extends over many episodes, but you will have more difficulty holding a mass audience. So many shows provide at least one desire line that is accomplished by the end of the episode, and extend the others. Aaron Sorkin doesn't do that on Studio 60. It's not a bad thing. It's just not popular. Regardless of Studio 60's essential structure, there is a lot to like and learn from by watching it.

For example, we see a great technique in the second part of a two-part episode in which Harriet gets an award. It's the technique I call the "dialogue of equals." Good conflict dialogue should be a heavyweight fight. Punch/counter-punch. One throws a hammer blow. The other comes right back with a hammer blow of his own. Not only does each line have dramatic power, the scene builds in the sequence of the blows (lines), ending in a knockout punch.

To create a building punch/counter-punch, you have to have two equals, by which I mean two characters with an equal ability to verbally attack. If one is too strong, he or she will get in the most blows and the scene will not build. In the concluding episode of the two-parter, Matt and Harriet go at each other with ferocity. Matt is the obviously more aggressive and nastier of the two. But Harriet does not shrink back and ends up having the more powerful blows, including the lethal knockout punch.

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Grey's Anatomy (2005– )

The best show about high school in years

[8 January 2010]

TV drama is ascendant right now and Grey's Anatomy is at the top of the heap. It's worth taking a look at how this show works to get a clue about writing for a drama show and maybe even creating one of your own.

Grey's Anatomy is the best show about high school to come along in a while. The interns are the freshmen, "the Nazi" is a junior, Burke and McDreamy are seniors, and the Chief Surgeon is the principal. The fact that this is high school in a hospital only affects what the characters do for their class projects. Think bio class with human guinea pigs.

Besides being brilliant, this high concept premise for a TV show indicates that the show's creator, Shonda Rhimes, understood the first rule about TV: it's about a community of opponents. Sure we bring in guest characters every week. But the audience tunes in so it can live for a moment in this community, in this extended family. We watch the family members fight but we love them anyway and know that they love each other. They just have a hard time living together under the same roof (just like us).

High school has all the highs and lows of living in a community, but taken to the nth degree. As Charles Dickens, a notorious nerd, once remarked about his own high school, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." (He was also the first to write that line in the school yearbook.) By pushing high school into the adult world of the hospital, Rhimes lets the viewer relive that heightened state, at its best and its worst, without limiting the audience to actual high school students.

There are many elements that go into a well-constructed show. Let's look at one of the more important ones, setting up the oppositions.

One reason Grey's Anatomy is so popular is that it has very clear oppositions among the ongoing characters, and it has a lot of them. The first set of oppositions is between the "freshmen," the interns. There are three women and two men, and each is very different from the others. In fact they are so schematically different they border on cliché. But then high school is famous for the various groups with the simplistic labels. The two guys here aren't just two young doctors. One is the narcissistic ladies man who wants to be a plastic surgeon, while the other is such a pathetic hang-dog (he even looks like a St. Bernard) I keep waiting for the writers to hang a keg of whiskey around his neck. The women are just as extreme. That can make for some ludicrous scenes on occasion. But the important point is that in TV your characters have to begin recognizably different. You've got plenty of time to add texture to these people as the seasons progress. What you don't have is time to identify how your main characters oppose each other in fundamental ways.

Having five unique interns would be enough for most shows. But Grey's adds a second set of oppositions between the interns and the doctors. This is an opposition based on experience, on learning the craft of medicine. And that focuses primarily on how the doctors and the interns deal with their patients in life-and-death situations. The nice touch here is that while the doctors know best how to operate and deal with the patients, in love they are just as dumb as the freshmen. The basic concept here is that when love comes to town we are all in high school for the rest of our lives.

Which leads to the third set of oppositions. These doctors are involved in all kinds of twisted opposition in their love lives. They are led by the nominal main character of the show, Meredith, who is a revolutionary character for TV. Meredith is the first girl-next-door prom princess who loves sex (ie, she's a slut) and isn't ashamed of it. But it does cause her all sorts of complications, which the audience loves to watch. Meredith looks and sounds like a high school girl, and she's in over her head with the cutest senior in school. Who can resist that? Using love as a major opposition is a two-edged sword on a TV show. It generates intense passion, which is great for drama and comedy. But it also forces the writers to constantly rip characters apart and put them into new relationships. The sense of farce and soap opera has already begun to take over the story lines.

Still this is a beautifully constructed TV show for the long haul. If you would like to write TV drama, or even create your own show, take a look at the TV Drama Class and the TV Drama Blockbuster add-on, where you can find out all the structural elements that make a hit.

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CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015)

All the police departments in American are populated by beautiful people

[8 January 2010]

The police procedural has always been one of the most popular sub-genres in TV Drama, and CSI is the ultimate police procedural. This form emphasizes the crime fighting process, and focuses on the scientific gathering and analysis of evidence. One of the keys to the success of CSI is that it takes the police procedural form to its logical extreme, using microscopic imaging of the effect of the weapon on the human body. This microscopic evidence then serves as the foundation for a recreation of the crime using one or more of the suspects.

CSI Las Vegas is the original and still best of this popular franchise. One of the reasons for that is the character web. In the TV Drama class I talk about a key distinctions between movies and TV. Hollywood blockbuster films emphasize a single main character going after a single goal with relentless speed and energy. TV, on the other hand, emphasizes a group of characters in a community that the audience enjoys visiting once a week.

The character web in CSI Las Vegas is an outgrowth of its unique genre, the police procedural. Team leader Gil Grissom is a modern Sherlock Holmes, extremely cerebral, master of detail and the inductive method that goes from the small to the big. For the rest of the team, CSI uses the basic technique that goes back through ER all the way to Hill Street Blues. This is a veritable United Nations of characters, men and women, white and black, with the only absolute being the TV requirement that they all be really attractive.

Funny how all the police departments in America are populated by beautiful people.

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Michael Clayton (2007)

Screenwriter Accomplishes Rare Feat!

[8 January 2010]

With Michael Clayton, writer Tony Gilroy proves once again that he is a master of the thriller form. As the author of the Bourne films, Gilroy took the action thriller to a new level, a feat made even more impressive by the fact that he was writing a trilogy. Now he has seamlessly connected the thriller genre to the social drama, and that may be an even greater accomplishment.

Stories about corporate malfeasance are quite common, and when they are done as straight social drama they are usually dull. Writers typically try to up the excitement by turning the story into a courtroom battle. While this approach gives the story suspense near the end, it does nothing to relieve the plodding steps leading up to the battle.

That's where the thriller comes in. This form makes the entire story a crisis, with the hero in great danger throughout. Sounds like a good idea. But combining thriller with social drama is not easy. These forms are about as far from each other as two forms can be. Thriller is rushed. Drama is deliberate. Thriller keeps everything obscure until the big reveal. Drama lays out all sides of the issue in discussion.

Gilroy uses all kinds of techniques in this script that show he is a master storyteller. Let's look at two that are especially important if you want to write a good thriller. The first has to do with the need of the hero. A good thriller establishes the weakness-need of the main character (the first major story structure step) and then connects it with the crime or case the hero must solve. When writing your thriller, always begin by making a one-to-one connection between the lead character and the crime. This allows you to give the audience a double success: the hero solves his personal problem and accomplishes the action line at the same time. It also allows you to play out the larger theme of the story through the personal struggle of the main character.

Through quick but precise brush strokes, Gilroy establishes that Michael is a purposeless man. He has a gambling problem, he is $85,000 in debt (from trusting his brother), and he's a "janitor" lawyer. He does fix-it jobs for his firm, cleaning up the mess when someone screws up. He is assigned a case in which one of the firm's lawyers has a crisis of conscience involving a client company whose use of pesticides may have killed a number of people. As the case plays out, it becomes clear that all the characters have some flaw at work that is crippling their lives. The lead attorney for the company, Karen, is obsessed with success. Michael's boss, Marty, has always known the case was dirty, and is desperate to make a merger go through before any dirt comes to light. Everyone's life is way out of balance. But the mantra they all repeat to themselves is "I'm just doing my job." Notice that the main plot line having to do with a company in which everyone was just doing their job is expressed in the psychological flaw of not only the hero but all the minor characters as well. Even more important, each character is a variation on the central moral problem of the hero and the company. This is one of the marks of an advanced thriller.

A second technique that Gilroy handles beautifully has to do with plot. Most writers have great difficulty constructing a good thriller plot. That's because the thriller hero is always under intense assault. The opponent tends to be all-powerful, knocking the hero back on the defensive. Result: a passive hero and a weak plot.

For a good thriller plot, you have to balance an active hero investigating the case with an aggressive opposition that puts the hero in constant danger. This is a very tricky balance to maintain. A hero who is too forceful going after the desire line doesn't make the audience fear for his or her safety. An opposition that is too aggressive paralyzes the hero and stops the plot.

In Michael Clayton, Gilroy knows just how to strike the right balance. He uses a flashback structure, rare in thrillers, so that he can jumpstart the story with a car bomb. This tells the audience that Michael is in grave danger and will be for the entire film. The writer can then go on with a quieter part of the story in which Michael is actively seeking his desire line and driving the plot.

Gilroy also breaks from the usual thriller technique of staying within the hero's point of view, which makes it unclear if the apparent opponent is really guilty. By occasionally cutting to the opposition, he shows that the opponent is indeed extremely deadly and that Michael is blithely walking into a trap. As a result, Michael continues to drive the plot while generating even more fear in the audience who sees just how much danger he's in.

If you're interested in writing the thriller form, study Michael Clayton to see how a top screenwriter accomplishes the rare feat of effectively weaving social drama with thriller.

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Changeling (2008)

Feels like two movies cobbled together

[8 January 2010]

Changeling is a harrowing story of one woman's nightmare when she tries to find her missing son. For screenwriters it shows the benefits, but also the difficulty, of combining the thriller with the social drama.

Drama is one of the great storytelling forms, but it has become rare in a Hollywood that requires all its movies to have blockbuster potential. Most writers of classic drama have moved to television where the level of writing has never been higher. But to get a drama made in film, you have to combine it with a more sensational genre that can pull in the big audience. Enter the thriller.

At first glance, this marriage of forms looks like a good idea. Social drama lets you explore human nature and social conflict in depth, while the thriller gives the story excitement, jeopardy and narrative drive. But these same qualities dictate virtually opposite story movements. Drama wants to slow down and dig deep, find the underlying causes and explore the subtleties of human character. Thriller wants to charge ahead, to find out who is attacking the hero. No subtlety here; it's yes or no, he did it or he didn't.

This is the crux of the problem that Changeling writer, J. Michael Straczynski, had to solve to make this film work. The story begins with the social drama. The hero, Christine Collins, returns home from work to find her son missing. Months later the police bring her a boy they claim is her son, even though she insists he isn't. Her desire is simple: she wants her son back. But that creates a big structural problem for the writer. She can't act on her desire. All she can do is repeat it to the corrupt cops. And while this generates anger in the audience at the arrogant injustice of the police who treat her as an incompetent child, it doesn't drive the story forward.

This early part of the film also highlights another flaw common to the social drama. The hero has no moral need. All immorality is located in the opposition, the corrupt cops. This creates a good vs. evil contrast that is the kiss of death for good social drama, and exacerbates the hero's position as a victim already established by her reactive desire line.

With the social drama line slowing to a halt, Straczynski introduces the investigation line and the story takes off with a burst of energy that's palpable. A cop in the same precinct as the corrupt captain follows up on a kid's claim that he helped a serial killer murder boys. The resulting investigation is not complicated, but it doesn't have to be. It gives the story a goal with clear action beats. The writer then cross-cuts this line with a thriller line that comes from the corrupt captain sending Christine to an insane asylum for claiming the police gave her the wrong boy.

Does this story have a double desire line, and therefore two spines? You bet. And it does feel like two movies that have been cobbled together. But we also see here a writer making a unique story work on its own terms. Most stories have one or more structural roadblocks built in; they are part of the animal. If, as a professional, you have to make a story work, you pull from your bag of techniques and get the job done. Straczynski knows that neither desire line will support the story on its own. But by cross-cutting them, he creates a track with enough narrative drive to take us to the end of the social drama.

But not without severe costs. The story's structural flaws prevent this from being a great social drama. Yes, the corrupt captain and chief of police are brought low and the mother is publicly redeemed. But subtlety and an exploration of deeper causes are nowhere to be found.

So what can we learn from Changeling? I've already mentioned the importance of making the story work, even if you have to break a few of the rules of good drama. The lesson of never letting perfection get in the way of success is always good for writers to remember. Changeling also shows us the power, and the difficulty, of combining drama with thriller. The key structural element is desire. If possible, try to turn the two desire lines - of drama and thriller - into one. Each line should help solve the other: investigating the crime should lead to deeper layers of the social conflict while the argument about the social issue should lead the hero to new clues about the crime.

Finally, Changeling shows us one of the keys to dramatizing a real-life story: finding the right frame. A true story must hit the same seven major structure steps as a fictional story. But a true story restricts you in how you find those steps, since you can't just create them from thin air. Instead you have to focus on the frame, where to begin and end the story, and that means you have to start by identifying your battle scene. In Changeling, everything comes to a dramatic head at the trial, actually a cross-cut between the trial of the killer and the trial of the LA police. This battle brings a convergence of the two lines that this real-life drama-thriller desperately needs.

If you are interested in how to tell any story with maximum dramatic power, regardless of genre, look at our 22 Step Great Screen writing Class. For tips on advanced drama and structuring true stories, check out the Advanced Screen writing Class.

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A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

A bunch of pieces looking for a whole

[8 January 2010]

One of the main screen writing strategies since Star Wars is to grab from a number of story forms and weave them together. Unfortunately this technique is much harder than it looks.

AI shows the episodic and bloated script that results when you don't know how to connect all the story pieces in an organic whole. Writer Steven Spielberg combines elements of Pinocchio, Cain and Abel, The Wizard of Oz, Hansel and Gretel, Joan of Arc, the Holocaust, Christian sacrifice in the Roman Collosseum, fairy tale, science fiction, horror, and drama. But the center does not hold.

This script, and film, is like a suspension bridge that is so long it collapses the line. AI pulls most heavily from Pinocchio, but Pinocchio is a simple fairy tale. Both its structure and theme are too slight to sustain anything longer or more important than a short story.

But Spielberg has tried to turn Pinocchio into an epic. Collapse was inevitable. First because a puppet or robot boy cannot generate enough audience empathy for an epic. Sure, the boy is cute, and I'd prefer he get back with his "mother." But he is a robot, and I know he is programmed to want her. After about an hour, I need to move on to bigger stakes.

This hole where a powerful main character should be also limits the structure. You can't drive an epic structure, especially one made up of so many distinct story units, without a great hero at the wheel.

Third, an epic requires an epic theme, in both scope and moral complexity. This has neither. If you remember the original definition of an epic - the fate of a nation rests on the actions of a single individual - you can see how this tale of a machine boy trying to find mom is bound to grow tiresome long before it is over.

There are some wonderful scenes and visuals in the film, especially hollowed-out, flooded New York City.

But a movie built of pieces can only give momentary pleasure. And when the writer keeps adding pieces with no regard to the audience, the odor of self-indulgence starts to overwhelm. When Spielberg brings in the advanced intellect aliens, followed by the boy's creepy, all-day reunion with mom, the audience with whom I saw the film had clearly had enough.

All the critical commentary about uniting the sensibilities of Kubrick and Spielberg is a bunch of auteur nonsense. This film's structure is a bunch of pieces looking for a whole, and no amount of arresting images can make up for it.

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Children of Men (2006)

Gets the big picture but fails in the details

[8 January 2010]

As the most creative, literally, of all genres, science fiction places a tremendous burden on the writer. You have to create the world, in detail. Children of Men gets some of this right. But there's a lot missing, too.

The first rule of science fiction is to remember that you're writing about the present world, not the future. Indeed, the biggest mistake science fiction writers make is they place the story in such a bizarre and unrecognizable world that the audience can't identify with it. The viewer takes a clinical attitude toward the story, and all emotion is gone.

The world of Children of Men is just weird enough to feel like the future, but it is also horrifyingly present tense. Immigrants are outcasts, torture is justified, bombs explode anywhere for no apparent reason.

It is in the details, however, that Children of Men runs into problems. The most important detail of any science fiction world is the basic rules by which the society works, and that is not clear here. Why all the deportations? Why the war with the immigrants? Why is a baby born to this woman and no others? I can guess at these things. But the writer doesn't want the audience to guess, because that means they are thinking about the construction of the story and not the story itself.

Children of Men also fails to explain or justify the desire line. This is the motive for the quest. Everything else relies on it. So it must be very strong and completely believable. Why is this guy facing almost certain death to escort a woman he doesn't know? Telling us he needs money and is a former activist doesn't cut it. Why does the woman have to go on this trek at all? Saying the British government won't recognize a baby born to an immigrant woman is absurd.

And that leads to the biggest problem with the script, one that is very common to science fiction stories. Science fiction often borrows the journey technique from the myth genre in order to structure the story. The problem with the journey is that it can easily become episodic. The hero encounters a series of opponents on the road but each attack is essentially the same beat. Which means that this kind of science fiction story has no plot. Sure enough the plot in Children of Men quickly becomes tiresome. The two leads drive for a while and then get attacked. Then they drive some more and get attacked again.

This film has some amazing cinematography that goes a long way toward making this world seem intensely real. There is a single take during the battle scene - about ten minutes long - that will take your breath away. But ultimately any film, including science fiction, comes down to story. If you don't set up the story world and the plot properly, no amount of camera work will cover the holes.

If you would like to learn all the techniques for setting up a detailed world and a plot that builds steadily to the end, take a look at the Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Class or the Science Fiction add-on to Blockbuster.

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Star Trek (2009)

Takes this tremendous challenge head-on

[8 January 2010]

Renewing an old series is one of the most difficult challenges for a screenwriter. The audience is familiar with all of the previous stories and the series' complete iconography. So the bar is very high. Plus, the reason you are renewing series is because the mythology has been told to death. So coming up with a new story that both pleases and surprises the die-hards is extremely difficult.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman chose to go with an origin story, which seems so obvious I wondered why the Star Trek powers hadn't done this a long time ago. Oftentimes the origin of a superhero or superhero team is the most fun part, not only because we get to see how this special magic first came into being but also because the story is, literally, original. Every other story after the origin is essentially the same tale but with a different opponent.

But origin stories are also a lot more difficult than they appear, as the writers of Watchmen discovered. Audiences love seeing the formation of the original team, but if you take too long doing it you kill narrative drive. And once you kill it it's real hard to get it back.

Star Trek's writers solved the problem of renewing this ancient (by Hollywood's standards) series, and executing a good origin story, by grabbing some of the best techniques of science fiction, myth and drama. Science fiction often piggy-backs on the myth form. That's why so many science fiction stories use Greek and Roman names, stories and history. Myth is the best genre for telling a story that covers a great deal of space and time, and science fiction is the futuristic form that typically covers huge amounts of space and time.

Like all genres, myth has certain unique story beats that must be present if you want to execute the genre properly. For example, many myth stories begin with the birth of the hero, followed immediately by the death of the father. Sure enough that beat happens in the opening scene of Star Trek. And its followed by every other major beat in the myth form.

The writers keep the story from being a predictable myth-repeat by adding some of the key beats of the science fiction form, especially the elements of time travel. Due to Gene Roddenberry's original premise of "Wagon Train in space," Star Trek has always emphasized the spatial aspects of science fiction, as the Enterprise visits one new world after another. As the show's tag line states, "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before." But this Star Trek is directed by J. J. Abrams, co-creator of Lost, whose brilliant fifth season has used the element of time travel better than it's ever been done before. In many ways, time travel is the key to rejuvenating the Star Trek franchise and making the origin story work. Time travel allows the writers to emphasize character change in a very plot-heavy genre – of many of the major characters – by jamming the characters' beginning and ending selves close together in time. It also lets the writers keep the narrative drive going fast and furious from the very opening on. Instead of spending the abnormally long time collecting allies that origin stories usually require, the Star Trek writers can sprinkle the introduction of the various team members throughout the story.

The final genre the authors of Star Trek used was drama. Mixing in drama elements is the main way you transcend any genre, because you are essentially taking a mythic hero and adding psychological depth and individuality. This is the main technique writer Tony Gilroy used in writing the Bourne films, and what Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis did when called on to rejuvenate and rewrite the origin story for James Bond in Casino Royale. In Star Trek the writers not only highlighted the moral and psychological needs of main characters Kirk and Spock, they also made the brilliant dramatic move of turning Kirk and Spock into lead opponents for a good part of the story.

Most of us writers never get the opportunity to rejuvenate a classic like Star Trek. But we can take on the challenge of telling a science fiction story so it has tremendous emotional impact on the audience. The choices the writers made in the new and improved Star Trek can teach us a lot about why science fiction has become one of the most popular genres in mainstream Hollywood film.

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District 9 (2009)

A great story strategy

[8 January 2010]

District 9 is a perfect example of the primary story strategy on which the worldwide entertainment business is based: use a popular genre as a vehicle to carry a larger theme.

A genre is a story model, but to understand the supreme power of genre in international cinema you have to break down both of those words.

"Model" involves the meaning package, like love, action, detective and science fiction. Why are there different story models? Because each expresses a different theme, each gives the audience a different strategy for how to live a good life.

"Story" means narrative drive, by far the single biggest element in a movie's popularity worldwide. District 9 is more proof that movie stars don't cause blockbusters, narrative does. For years I've been crying in the wilderness that the movie star strategy is the second biggest fallacy in movie history, right after the French auteur theory that says that the director, not the writer, is the author of the film.

If you want to see why a movie succeeds or fails with audiences worldwide, you'll find 90% of your answer in the success or failure of its narrative drive. Besides expressing a unique thematic package to the audience, each genre presents a highly streamlined form of narrative drive. Genres remove the padding that kills most scripts, which is why you need to master the story beats of your genre, along with its thematic package, if you want to win the international screenplay sweepstakes.

So what is the narrative strategy and thematic package of the surprise blockbuster, District 9? District 9 is a combination of science fiction and horror, with strong action elements thrown in. Putting science fiction and horror together is quite common because their thematic packages have a number of important similarities. Horror is about defeating the monster, the outsider, the inhuman trying to enter the human community, especially when that community is on the small scale of the family or the hero's own mind.

Science fiction often deals with encountering the alien, the outsider on the social or universal scale. Here the opposition is not between the hero and the intimate, but terrifying other, it is between mankind and some other life form, or mankind and robot, or machine man.

When you look at how similar these two genres are in their deeper thematic package, the surprise of District 9 is not that it is a futuristic apartheid story set in Johannesburg, South Africa, but that it took so long for a writer to do it. South Africa, of course, was the site of the worst apartheid since the Nazis.

Those of us who like to think we aren't racist tend to associate racism with demeaning and hurtful words, and that's so passé now that we have a black President. But racism is really about how people live, or don't live, and that is far from passé in the world today. It's officially sanctioned slavery, resulting in such poverty that the oppressed race literally lives like animals, beasts of burden living in pens. And racism is always justified by the dominant race thinking of the "other" as less than human.

Writers Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell could have expressed this worldwide systemic nightmare using the drama form, which explores psychological and social issues with depth and complexity. But where's the entertainment in that? And where's the audience? So Blomkamp and Tatchell sacrificed complexity for narrative drive, and chose the perfect genres, horror and science fiction, to drive the story home with a worldwide audience.

The great trick to the narrative drive of District 9 is that the writers didn't just hit the standard science fiction-horror story beats. They knew their genres so well they were able to transcend them, something I emphasize a lot in the Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Class. They used the classic structural twist found in the best horror, going back to the first and still greatest horror story of all time, Frankenstein: at some point in the story, the hero becomes the monster and the monster becomes the hero.

The main character, Wikus, starts off as an extremely likable but somewhat dense man who is put in charge of moving the aliens from their ghetto in Johannesburg to a new ghetto many miles away. These aliens are monstrous, terrifying creatures to us – both characters and audience -- forced to live like animals and referred to as "prawns." The structural flip occurs when Wikus and his men attempt to force these aliens out of the shacks they call home. And a strange thing begins to happen to the audience. At first we side with our sympathetic but dim main character as he tries to evict these disgusting creatures. I certainly wouldn't want them living near my house. But when our hero and the other humans are "forced" to escalate their methods to move the creatures, the audience starts to root for the non-humans and sees the humans as the real monsters.

The writers realized that the horror story is an extremely small-scale form that would run out of narrative fuel fairly quickly. After all, how many times can you hit the same story beat of humans persecuting aliens. So, about half way in, they turned the script into an action picture, which they accomplished by changing the hero's desire line. Instead of persecuting the aliens, now he wants to get the cylinder, and he will use whatever firepower he can find to blow the bad guys away.

To finish reading this review please visit http://www.truby.com/im_district9.php

The Constant Gardener (2005)

You can't montage love

[8 January 2010]

The Constant Gardener shows us what happens when a film's moral argument outweighs its story. The film has a serious thesis it wants to express concerning the plight of Africans and the responsibility of pharmaceutical companies that supply them with drugs. There's nothing wrong with starting with a theme and creating a story from that. But it had better be a good story.

In The Constant Gardener the writer chooses the thriller and love story on which to hang the thematic line. A diplomat's wife is killed and he sets out to find out who did it and why. This brings him into considerable danger of being killed himself. He learns that his wife had discovered truly horrible crimes committed by drug companies in Africa.

To make this work, the writer has two big requirements. First he has to show that this was a great love between husband and wife, because the husband must risk his own death to finish the job his wife started. Second, the writer must come up with a detective plot that is full of reveals and surprises, or else the audience is going to see early on that this story is just an excuse to attack international drug companies in Africa.

Unfortunately the writer fails in both of these requirements. The husband and wife meet at a lecture, go to bed together in the next scene, and then head off to Africa as husband and wife. The wife doesn't trust her husband enough to tell him about the secret investigation she is pursuing. And there is little evidence that their marriage is anything but a convenient connection between two good friends.

It's one of the great rules of storytelling that you can't montage love. An audience can't intellectually know that two people love each other. They have to feel it, and that takes screen time. Without the foundation of a strong love between the two characters, the husband's quest to uncover the injustice, in the face of almost certain death, is emotionally unbelievable. And the quest driving three quarters of the movie just falls apart.

The writer also fails to come up with a detective plot to justify the length of the story. Detective stories work by withholding information from the audience. If that information, in the form of reveals, is not surprising or shocking, the story feels like a giant stall. The wheels of the mechanism show and the audience gets impatient and bored. If the theme is top-heavy to boot, the lack of storytelling ability is fatal.

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Runaway Jury (2003)

Runaway Script

[8 January 2010]

John Grisham is a master of plot, specializing in the courtroom thriller. And in this complicated and underestimated writing skill, he has a lot to teach us.

Runaway Jury sets up as a battle royal between Dustin Hoffman's Wendall Rohr and Gene Hackman's Rankin Fitch, with Fitch the powerful opponent. Most writers would work their plot from there, using the hidden powers of the main opponent to provide most of the surprise upon which plot is based.

But Grisham adds another element that magnifies his plot tremendously. John Cusack's Nick Easter seems to be the innocent little guy who will, in classic thriller form, come under intense attack from the powerful opponent. But instead of using the reactive victim, Grisham gives Easter his own desire line, his own hidden agenda. The result: three sources of action and massive plot (see the Great Screen writing Class for details on plotting, opposition, surprise, the reveals sequence and plot weave).

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Insomnia (2002)

Too obvious

[8 January 2010]

Insomnia shows one of the dangers of writing the thriller form. This is a very popular genre, but it is extremely narrow. Most writers of thrillers have great difficulty creating plot because there is usually just one suspect. The audience learns fairly soon who probably committed the crime.

In this film, casting compounds the problem of the single suspect. The audience knows you don't cast Robin Williams as the bad guy unless he's really the bad guy. The only surprise comes from how the opponent attacks the hero - which isn't much - and how the hero catches him.

The writer tries to compensate for this basic deficiency by making the hero morally culpable. But the result is that both the main plot line and the hero's moral decline are given short shrift.

Bottom line: if you are going to do a thriller, pay the dues and do the genre right. Hit the beats that make it a surprising plot. Without them, you have a small film that lasts way too long.

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Mad Men (2007–2015)

Ambitious with good cause

[8 January 2010]

Mad Men is one of the best-written and most ambitious TV shows in some time. It is worth close study, not just for learning how to create a well-structured show but also how to write one that is truly original and potentially groundbreaking. Story world, or arena, is one of the key structural elements in any TV drama (see the TV Drama Class for how to create this element, as well as the other essential structural elements of a successful show). It is where the story takes place and it usually exists within some specific arena that not only delineates a recognizable unit but also has a set of rules, activities and values that defines the characters. One of the strengths of Mad Men is its story world. Instead of the usual arena of cops, lawyers, or doctors, Mad Men takes us into a Manhattan advertising agency in 1960. Besides being totally unique in TV, this story world is extremely detailed. And the detailing isn't simply a matter of the set design, which is fabulous. It is written into every episode. The writers weave all manner of cultural icons of the late 50s-early 60s, including TV shows, ads, and fashion. This has two great advantages. One is the pleasure of recognition. If you were a kid at that time, as I was, the show is a virtual time machine. And even if you weren't, the authenticity and texture immerse you in the world and make you feel that "You are there!" The other great advantage is that this past world tricks the audience into believing that this is how it really was back then. The first thing we notice when we see all of these details is how much the world has changed. Everybody smoked back then. The men were in charge and the women were all secretaries and housewives. That sets up the kicker. By first thinking how much we've changed, we then realize, with even more impact, all the ways we haven't. This story, set in 1960, is really about today, or more exactly, the ways that human nature only puts on a new skin and the same fundamental challenges of creating a meaningful life must be faced by each of us, every moment of every day. Another structural element that immediately jumps out at you if you want to create a TV show or write for one is the desire line. In Mad Men the desire that structures each episode is fairly nebulous, and that's probably going to cut into the show's popularity (I hope I'm wrong on this one). Desire is the main reason almost all TV shows are set in the cop, lawyer, and doctor arenas. These jobs give their shows a simple and repeatable desire line that tracks the episode every week. Catch the criminal. Win the case. Save the life. But of course this is extremely limiting. Most people don't spend their daily lives solving crimes, prosecuting bad guys, and saving lives. So while the desire line on this show may be more nebulous, it is far closer to what most Americans do in their daily lives. These Mad Men are in the business of selling, which, as Arthur Miller pointed out long ago, is the archetypal American action. But they aren't selling a particular product. They're selling desire, some image of the good life that, because it is a fabricated ideal, is always just out of reach. Writer Matthew Weiner's brilliant conception for this show is to connect the selling of desire to America to the personal and work lives of the ad men themselves. The ad men want the image of the good life in America that they are selling to be true, even if they intellectually make fun of the poor suckers out there who buy it. Main character Don Draper is handsome and talented, with a beautiful wife and two cute little kids. But he has some secrets he's keeping – like a mistress in the city – and he feels a terrible void he has no idea how to shake. Draper is a master at manipulating desire and creating facades, so when he tries to live the promise for real, the "good life" falls apart in his hands. We are in Far from Heaven and American Beauty territory here. And the second episode even had Draper give his own version of the Existentialist credo of Sartre and Camus that was seeping into pop culture during the late 50s (how's that for a sweet detail on a TV show?). We'll have to see whether Mad Men can extend beyond a few episodes without imploding. Besides the lack of a clean desire line, the subject of hollow suburban existence will make it extremely difficult for the writers to develop the show over the long term without beating a spiritually dead horse. In the meantime, I'm going to sit back and enjoy some great dramatic writing, and nowadays TV is the only place you'll find it.

Life (I) (2007–2009)

Fun twists to the police procedural

[8 January 2010]

Life is a 1-hour drama that has been trying to break through after a strike-shortened season last year. I hope it does because it adds a number of fun twists to the police procedural that is the staple of American TV drama.

In the TV Drama Class, I go into all of the structural elements that must be present to construct a successful show. One of these has to do with the genre. Like film, TV requires that you take an existing popular genre or combination of genres and give it a unique twist. Life is a mix of detective, crime and buddy picture, and that's a pretty strong combination. Yes, we've seen cop shows with partners many times before (for example, Law and Order SVU), but they aren't using the buddy picture techniques. A buddy picture is a kind of action comedy in which the buddies form some kind of odd couple. The buddies love each other in a platonic way, but they act like a married couple, with constant lighthearted bickering.

In Life, the odd couple is Charlie Crews, a cop who was framed for a multiple murder-robbery and sent to jail before gaining his freedom and returning to the force along with $50,000,000 in "We're sorry" money. He's gained a Zen sensibility during his twelve years behind bars. And that drives his partner nuts. She's Dani Reese, a practical, by-the-book cop who also just happens to be drop-dead gorgeous, like any number of other drop-dead gorgeous cops in Hollywood crime shows (for example, Law and Order SVU). Just once I'd love it if a character on one of these shows would ask our investigator if she realizes she's beautiful enough to be an actress.

The two lead characters play well off each other, and I believe one of the reasons this show hasn't done better is that the writers have not played this element up even further. One reason might be that the Reese character lacks detail. For a buddy picture to work the buddies must be equal. The writers have given Crews tremendous detail, to such a degree that he is clearly the hero of the show. This imbalance is a big mistake. William Goldman once told me that when they were shooting the early scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Butch has to fight Harvey for leadership of the gang, director George Roy Hill kept Sundance on his horse to visually increase Sundance's stature relative to Butch. We forget that before the movie came out, Robert Redford was a nobody and Paul Newman was Paul Newman.

This may be why Life's writers retooled the show this season by giving Reese and Crews a new boss, Captain Tidwell, with whom Reese could get romantically involved. Donal Logue, who plays the boss, is a funny actor and a welcome addition to the show. But while the move has boosted Reese's importance a bit, the relationship between her and the boss is completely unbelievable. Hopefully the writers will strengthen this line, while also highlighting the more important buddy relationship between Reese and Crews.

Another structural element that determines a successful TV drama is the weave of the desire line. In other words, what gets accomplished in each episode and how are the episode's goals intercut? Life uses a technique found in most cop shows of combining two main goals, one short-term and one long-term. The short-term goal is to solve the crime of that episode. The long-term goal is Crews's determination to find the cops who framed him for the murder-robbery. The individual investigations all have a quirky quality that sets them apart from the standard crimes we see on most procedurals. For example, in a recent episode, Crews and Reese had to solve the murder of a mall Santa they find five minutes before the department store opens for holiday rush on Black Friday. They realize too late that the horde of hungry shoppers is going to trample their crime scene, and then discover that the shoppers have apparently taken Santa's body as well.

The long-term investigation is more problematic. The conspiracy behind the murder-robbery and Crews' frame-up is full of juicy possibilities, including one suspect who is Reese's father. The brilliant Zen cop who sits in his mansion trying to unravel the conspiracy that took twelve years of his life is, besides being very un-Zen, great stuff. Which is why it's been frustrating that the writers have done relatively little with it. I suspect that's because they realize that once Crews figures out who did it, this line is over. The show's creator has painted himself into a bit of a corner here. This concept is central to the premise of the show, and probably a good part of the reason Life got on the air in the first place. But it's a big dead end when it comes to the extendability of the show.

Still, the writers must deal with this line. Giving it one or two scenes a show doesn't work. Ignoring the line only makes it seem half-baked and unrelated to the main investigation in each episode. If the writers can expand this conspiracy from a single event in the past where Crews was framed to an ongoing, present-day corruption in the LAPD, this buddy picture of a Zen mind-master and his pragmatic, beautiful partner will turn into the hottest show on TV.

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30 Rock (2006–2013)

Improved immensely from the pilot episode

[8 January 2010]

September 2007 30 Rock just pulled off a big upset by winning the Emmy for best sitcom. No matter what you think of the result, this represents a stunning improvement over the show's initial start. Let's see why.

I wrote my previous breakdown of 30 Rock after watching their first episode, a big mistake for them and for me. In the first episode, show runner Liz ran all over the city looking for movie comedy star Tracy so he could head the cast of her Saturday Night Live-like show. Sitcoms require a large number of comic oppositions, which play off each other in rapid succession and which can generate comedy for at least 100 episodes. By taking the story out of the studio arena, the 30 Rock writers not only reduced the show to one (fairly weak) comic opposition, they gave the audience the wrong impression of what a typical 30 Rock experience would entail.

Subsequent episodes became much more focused in the studio, and that allowed the writers to generate different comic oppositions between regular characters at a much faster pace. That move alone was worth plenty. But the biggest improvement came from a season-long effort to sharpen the comic differences between characters. The opposition between Liz (played by Tina Fey) and Jack (played by Alec Baldwin) continued to be the primary one, but it improved dramatically. The Jack character is terrific, and Baldwin plays it brilliantly. But if he has no one to work off of, this character is wasted. So the writers sharpened Liz, making her more of a "machine" comic, undercutting the over-the-top "crazies" on the show. Fey also stepped up her game noticeably as a comic actor.

Keeping the stories more within the studio arena also allowed the writers to heighten the secondary comic oppositions. For example, "child" comic Kenneth - the innocent, idealistic and totally naïve page - became a perfect foil for both Tracy and Jack. This was tremendously valuable. Those of you who wish to create sitcoms or simply write a good one, notice that every time you create a new valid comic opposition like this, you get a magnified benefit: the primary opposition doesn't have to carry the whole load, you have more available story turns and the comic density of the show increases.

Another comic opposition that improved over the course of the season was the one between Liz and Jenna (played by Jane Krakowski). The episode that featured Jenna getting in trouble talking about the war in Iraq was one of the funniest of the season and showed that she still has a lot of potential in her oppositions, especially with Jack.

Now that the writers have found their groove, look for the show to focus even more on the in-studio oppositions. 30 Rock may not be the best comedy on television - in my opinion, The Office is a notch above it - but it's one of the funniest in a long time and it's getting better.

---------- Sitcoms don't have the stature they had ten years ago, but they are still the second biggest form in television. What's crucial to understand about a sitcom is its success doesn't come from a list of good jokes. It comes from the original set up of the show, from what makes the jokes possible.

Again, there are a large number of structural elements required to set up a sitcom successfully, with one of the most important being the oppositions within the community. In sitcoms, that opposition is comedic, and each one must be an essential comedic opposition that never disappears over the course of entire show.

By this standard, 30 Rock is in trouble. There aren't enough essential oppositions and I don't see how the ones they do have are going to last. The first opposition is between Liz (played by Tina Fey) and Tracy (played by Tracy Morgan). This has an obvious visual opposition, but not a comedic one. Liz occasionally cracks wise, but as a character she is not funny. She is not pompous, nor does she go to the other extreme of deadpan (like a Bill Murray, for example) needed to make other characters funny. Tracy is mildly over-the-top, but in a limited, one-note way.

The one comedic opposition that does work, between Liz and Jack (played by Alec Baldwin), will be hard to sustain. Jack is the pompous corporate bastard who is both a narcissist and a creative idiot. Even the tame Liz will be able to cut him down to size, only to see him re-inflate within seconds. But how often can this corporate honcho appear on the set and create havoc? The real ongoing comedic oppositions on a show about Saturday Night Live should be within the cast and crew. But so far these characters, like the cat wrangler and the pretty, do-nothing receptionist, are defined by a single comic note. They may have an occasional funny line but they are not comic pillars. They do not stand in essential comic opposition with any other fundamental comic character.

30 Rock does have two real strengths: a number of funny lines and no laugh track. But neither of these can overcome the weakness of bad comic opposition. I'll keep watching, for a while at least, and hope they prove me wrong.

If you are interested in writing sitcoms, or creating a successful one, you'll find all the techniques in the Sitcom Writing Class and the Sitcom Blockbuster add-on.

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Falling Down (1993)

An advanced social criticism

[8 January 2010]

Falling Down is probably the funniest movie of the year. It is also a serious, though not totally successful, attempt at social drama. What is useful for us as writers is to see why this strange mix works so well.

All good writing begins with design, and Falling Down is no exception. Let's look at some choices.

The typical writer who wanted to tell a story of a man who faced the lie of the American dream would probably place the hero in a crumbling neighborhood or a brutal company. The larger forces of society would attack relentlessly, the hero would fight back valiantly. The result: a one-beat social issue story that no one sees.

The writer of Falling Down chose a very different structure. First, and most importantly, he gives the story a myth foundation. This automatically gives the film an epic quality and kicks it up to an American scale. In particular, this is the ever-popular Odyssey story in which the hero must get home.

Second, the writer turns the myth structure/Odyssey story on its head; the home is a broken one, the man is slightly wacky, and the wife doesn't want him. This makes the film an anti-Odyssey story, which means that the overall structure will itself express the theme of the lie of the American dream.

Third, the writer makes most of the social conflict scenes comedic. Not only does this relieve the monotony of the usual social drama, it moves the story into the realm of the black comedy, which is the most devastating of all social fiction. But the writer goes further still. Had he simply made this a black comedy, it would likely have fallen victim to the usual vice of the black comedy: being too rarefied for the audience. The brilliant design move in Falling Down was combining the black comedy with the myth structure, making the film universal, accessible and thematically powerful at the same time. Let's look at the structure of this film in more detail to see how it really works.

Problem/Need: The main character, Bill (aka DeFens), is in trouble from the opening scene. Stuck in a traffic jam, Bill is invaded from all sides by the sights and sounds of social crush. He is indeed on the defensive, and when he runs away from his car, he finds not relief but rather more assault. Even worse, Bill has also lost his job at the defense plant and his ex-wife has a restraining order that prevents him from seeing the little daughter he loves.

Bill's need - what is lacking within the character - is where this film hits its first stumbling block. In order to show a man who is willing to use weapons in response to social slights, the writer has had to make him psychotic. Not only does this prevent the audience from identifying with the hero, it reduces the ultimate impact of the social commentary. It also makes it impossible for the hero to have a real moral need. This man has no control over his actions, so he cannot be blamed, even when he terrorizes his wife. The film partly overcomes this weakness by making Bill's complaints so reasonable and his attackers so recognizable. But the fact remains that this man has a few screws loose.

Desire: Bill's goal, like Dorothy's and Ulysses', is to get home to his family. Myth stories have a tendency to be episodic, so the writer wisely adds a time element to the hero's journey to add momentum. Bill must get home in time for his daughter's birthday party. The irony of course is that this is no longer Bill's home. Notice how the use of an ironic goal allows the structure to carry the theme. Bill's goal, which is nothing less than the idealized American dream, is in reality an ugly nightmare of divorce and separation. And the fragmentation that the hero experiences in the city at large is found in even worse form at the endpoint of his journey.

Opposition: As in any myth structure, Bill encounters a succession of opponents in his journey home. The strength of the myth form is that the journey gives the story a vast scope; the hero meets an array of people who represent a number of ethnic and economic categories. The weakness of the form is that it makes all of these opponents superficial. Since each opponent can only be seen for a brief time, the writer can give no one real definition. The film has rightfully been criticized for taking easy shots: the Latino gangbangers, the Korean grocer, the plastic surgeon. This lack of deep targets is the primary reason why the film remains superficial in its social commentary.

A more advanced form of social criticism would have searched for the web connecting all these disparate opponents under the surface. For while these people are clearly part of a fragmented world, they are also part of a system that creates fragmentation. The writer's job is to find that system. Indeed the great power of the black comedy, as a story form, is not that it shows painful comedy, but that it explores the logic system that governs a society. This attention to logic, or more precisely illogic, is what sets Goodfellas apart as a great black comedy.

To finish reading this review and to find others, please visit http://www.truby.com/im_fd.html

Crash (I) (2004)

Thematically heavy-handed

[8 January 2010]

Crash is an excellent example of horizontal storytelling, for both what works and what doesn't. Horizontal storytelling is everything happening at the same time. Vertical, or linear, storytelling is what happens next. Horizontal storytelling works primarily by comparison. Vertical storytelling shows the development of one thing, usually a central character.

Horizontal storytelling causes all kinds of problems, which is why it is very rare. First, there's so much cross-cutting between approximately equal events in time that narrative drive stops.

Second, you have to present so many characters that you can't explore any of them in much depth.

Third, you have to rely too much on coincidence to bring characters together and give the story some shape, some vertical development. Otherwise the horizontal spirals out to infinity.

Fourth, you often can't find a way to end the story other than to just stop. When one story event doesn't follow necessarily from another, there is no 'right' final scene, just the last thing that happened in time.

To deal with these problems, the first thing the horizontal storyteller has to do is come up with an organizing principle, an underlying unifier that gives a logic to the unfolding. Writers Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco use a subject, and this immediately causes problems of its own.

The first problem these writers encounter by using a subject is that the one they choose, racism, is likely to blow up in their face. Any story that tries to talk about racism will appear to many in the audience to be racist. If the strategy is to show characters believing the stereotypes of the various races in order to reverse or upset them, the author may seem to believe the stereotypes himself.

A second problem the writers encounter by using a social subject as their organizing principle is that the story feels heavy-handed from the opening scene. When you are writing an extremely horizontal story, you have to do many more scenes of racial set-up, so the first third at least of the movie is in grave danger of infuriating the audience into giving up.

Crash shows all of these problems of the horizontal form at the beginning. But Haggis and Moresco know how to use the benefits of the form as well. For example, they know that the horizontal story, while running the risk of superficiality, allows them to set up a giant moral accounting system. Each character, with his unique moral flaw, gets his poetic justice through the help of every other character. This is cosmic, Twilight Zone accounting, like Vertigo, but on a much grander scale.

With the thematic heavy-handedness in the beginning of the story, Crash's grand accounting program may feel a bit schematic. The more you push the horizontal, the more you stretch the skin and bones of the organic body to its breaking point, the more you show the contrivance, the mechanism, of the author underneath.

But about a third of the way into this film, the benefits of the horizontal story form start to kick in. Much of the pleasure of the grand accounting comes in the pleasures of the comparisons, of who will show up to give a character his comeuppance. This is the pleasure of the grand story weave. It requires top plotting ability, and these writers have it.

The story weave, in the form of reveals and reversals, is also what saves the film from being too morally top-heavy. Having done the difficult set-up work, the film can run a series of great flips: the car on fire, the little girl, the guy releasing the slaves, etc.

Another benefit of the horizontal form is that you can set the firing pins to go off for all the characters about the same time, so you can give a succession of hard shots to the head and body of the audience. By the end of the film, these shots come with terrific intensity.

There is one more bonus to the horizontal story, and it's a thematic one. This complex social weave is the story equivalent of a Breughel painting, for example, the large canvas of the village in winter where pockets of individuals and groups go about their daily affairs, largely unaware of each other, but as part of a diverse community where the hidden hand of mutual benefit is always working. In Crash, the characters are divided off from one another by their city and their cars. But in the rare moments of connection, these people, each with the same moral blind spot, show their essential humanity.

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The Joy Luck Club (1993)

The branching structure of storytelling

[8 January 2010]

The Joy Luck Club shows writers the commercial and critical success that is possible by using the structures and techniques of advanced screen writing. I have long argued that the old 3-act structure is too elementary for anyone wanting to write a mainstream Hollywood script that will actually sell. Trying to write an advanced film like The Joy Luck Club with it would be laughable.

Here is a film that tells the story of eight women over the course of approximately sixty years. Does this film have three acts with plot twists on page 27 and page 87? Of course not. You could try to impose such a system - and I'm sure someone will - but what good would it do? The 3-act structure was never designed to help writers create a script. Its main use has been in demarcating a script after it's written.

To see how this film is put together - and how you might write a film like it - we have to look at how the seven steps of every story interact with advanced structures.

Every good story is founded on seven dramatic steps: problem/need, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self-revelation, and new equilibrium. Sure enough, the first thing we notice when exploring the structure of The Joy Luck Club is that each of the eight stories works through the seven steps.

Clearly some of the stories in the film fulfill the seven steps better than others. In general I found the mothers' stories more compelling than the daughters'. That may be due in part to the nature of history and geography. The mothers' stories take place in a brutally patriarchal China that is going through vast social and political upheaval. As a result, the mothers' stories have an epic canvas, and the problems these women face are more tragic and profound.

The daughters, on the other hand, face the problems of the affluent American, of what has also been called the "end of history." Without the burden of war, famine, and slavery, these "modern" women are free to concentrate on the psychological, on the painful bond between parent and child, or in these cases, mother and daughter.

Indeed, the biggest flaw of the film for me is that the psychological needs and self-revelations of the daughters are virtually identical. Each woman feels inadequate in the face of her mother's expectations of her. And each learns, through the help of her mother, that she is a valuable and unique individual. I don't mean to diminish the importance of this problem or revelation. On the contrary, I was overjoyed to see such a powerful feminine perspective coming from a film industry that is so excessively masculine. But the sameness of the daughters' problems makes these parts of the film drag.

To see the power of this film, we must go beyond a simple seven step breakdown of each of the eight stories. The trick to this film is the way these stories are tied together. And for this, we need to look at advanced structures.

Unlike the linear seven or twenty-two step structure used by almost all Hollywood films to track a single main character, advanced films require specialized structures that can tie a number of characters and stories together into an organic whole. This is a complex subject; there are over 15 different advanced structures (see the Advanced Screen writing Class), and each serves a different thematic purpose.

The Joy Luck Club uses a variation of the branching structure. In branching structures, the author sets up a main trunk, then takes the story out to a series of branches that can be organized in an infinite number of ways. The problem with branching structures is: how do you sequence the branches to avoid repetition and the sense that the story is stopping and starting all the time.

The Joy Luck Club strategy is to center the story within a communal event where we can meet all the characters and return after each story to get anchored. The main trunk of the story is provided by the desire line of June. She wants to visit her long-lost sisters in China. This single line creates the reason for the communal event, returns again and again throughout the story, and gives the story the ending that not only completes June's story but thematically completes the stories of the other seven characters as well.

To finish reading this review and to find others, please visit http://www.truby.com/im_jlc.html

Willow (1988)

The myth-based story

[8 January 2010]

Author's Predicament: Let's begin to look at this film by focusing on the author's predicament. Say you're faced with the task of writing this script. What do you think would be the great difficulty that you'd have to overcome? Clearly these writers are trying to hit all the myth elements. But getting all the elements in isn't as difficult as making those elements meaningful for a modern audience. Especially an audience that has been inundated with myth-based films. It's one thing to know the structure of the myth story. It's another thing to make it unique and subtle.

To see if the writers are able to meet this challenge, let's begin at the structural end point. Is there a self-revelation in this script? The main character, Willow, learns to be a sorcerer. He learns that he has power and he has to follow his instincts. These are big words. Power. Instincts. Sorcerer.

A big question when you're looking at a self-revelation is, what does it mean? What am I going to take from this? How will it have an impact on me? And having a character say, "I believe in myself now. I am a sorcerer and am at one with the world of power," sounds good, but may not mean anything.

This is one of the key problems of the myth story. Because you're dealing in the big concepts, the concepts often have the form of meaning, but not necessarily any content.

Another problem with this self-revelation is that it doesn't seem to be moral. When the hero says he is now a sorcerer and understands the ways of power, what does that have to do with how he acts toward other people? That isn't to say that the hero doesn't have a moral need. We don't know yet. But in and of itself, his self-revelation is not moral.

Let's go back to the beginning and see how this story works.

Ghost: We start off with a kind of ghost. There is an evil queen and a newborn baby who is supposed to cause the end of the queen's reign. That immediately raises a question. How is this baby going to cause the overthrow of the queen? And the second question: why do we care? This refers to the stakes of the story, and you better be very clear about the stakes. Why should the audience care about the consequences? What will be the effect if this happens or if it doesn't happen? You have to provide details.

Problem/Need: First , Willow's got a baby at his doorstep he doesn't want to deal with. That is a problem. The community is a bit oppressive. Willow seems to owe a debt to the mayor. So he's got to get his crop in.

What about his need? What is missing inside of this man? Possibly courage, but that's not established up front. He really wants some position, and it's clear that he hasn't been all that confident in the past. He needs to prove himself. That's a psychological need. It's not all that well-defined, unfortunately. Because, again, what does it mean not to be able to be a sorcerer, or not to believe in whatever it takes to be a sorcerer? Is there a moral need established at the beginning of this story? There is a suggestion of a moral need when he is reluctant to take care of the baby that has been placed on his doorstep. But that doesn't really work as a deep moral flaw. Willow seems to be a pretty good guy. It's the town that has the moral problem because it's oppressive, especially the mayor.

By the way, when I first saw the woman put the baby in the basket, I laughed out loud. This being Lucas we're going to steal from every popular story in history. But the Moses trick is too obvious, and it's the first sign that this story is going to suffer from Myth 101-paint-by-numbers disease. Myth works best as a story structure when it is under the surface. This film hits you over the top of the head with it.

Desire: First and foremost, Willow wants to be the sorcerer's apprentice. But that desire doesn't carry all the way through the story. In fact, it ends pretty quickly. He fails. That's how they establish that he doesn't have faith in himself.

So what's his next desire line? He wants to get rid of the baby, but in a proper way. He wants to take this child to the crossroads to protect his village. Now we've got a a problem there. This is not a personal desire. "Here is a strange baby. I must take him to the crossroads because the village says I must." Whenever you don't have a personal desire, your story is going to be considerably weaker. I'm sure the writer knew this problem. So after Willow gets rid of the baby the first time, the writer heightens the stakes. First, Willow finds out the baby was kidnapped. And the woman in white comes down. The kind helper from fairy tales. The woman in white gives him a choice. You can leave this baby, but if you do, the queen will take over, your village will be in danger and your children will suffer. So there's an attempt to make it a more personal desire by couching it in terms of his children. But it's still an abstraction because the consequences have been stated but not shown.

Another problem with myth-based stories is that the desire line is not based on the hero's choice. By saying that it is your destiny to do this, even though it's presented as a choice, it really isn't one.

To finish reading this review and to find others, please visit http://www.truby.com/im_willow.html

Anastasia (1997)

Storytelling is king in animation

[8 January 2010]

The animation world has been taking off the last couple of years and that is cause for rejoicing among writers. With Anastasia, we have a new studio, Fox, entering the big-time, and they've done a nice job with the animated Broadway musical form that Disney, until now, has owned.

Like live action, animation depends above all on structure and genre. The first and most important choice for the animation film is whether to base it on the myth, fairy tale, or drama form. I believe for animation to have the greatest commercial potential it requires the fairy tale form. Which is why the choice of the Anastasia story is at first peculiar. This drama, presented years ago in an Ingrid Bergman movie, is predictable, slow and unappealing to children.

Not to be hemmed in by historical truth, the writers of Anastasia, the animated movie, make a number of changes to turn this drama into a myth/fairy tale. First, they begin with the Sleeping Beauty opening: everyone is having a grand time at a communal event when the uninvited evil guest, Rasputin, appears and curses the proceedings. This allows the writers to use the unique powers of animation to present social landscape, in this case the aristocratic world of kings and queens. They also get to rewrite history; instead of having to explain those messy, boring details of Communist takeover of a corrupt, brutal czarist state, they get to blame it all on an evil spell. (I always suspected that was the real reason anyway.) Now the writers get to use a myth foundation for the desire line: Anastasia wants to find her home. But the writers wisely avoid the episodic problems that plague the myth form (and substantially hurt the success of "Hercules") by layering a second genre, love, onto the story. Anastasia's second desire, which occasionally conflicts with the first, is Dmitri. He becomes the second opponent (and first ally), and they experience all the classic love story beats on their journey to Paris. Instead of encountering a number of successive opponents, the lovers' conflicts unify the middle of the script.

Having Rasputin return from the dead as the main opponent also solidifies the fairy tale form and avoids the episodic problems of myth. The writers use the Wizard of Oz trick of having the opponent watch the heroes on their journey and send minions to waylay them. This strengthens Rasputin as the central opposition and sets up the final battle. The writers also use the Disney comical ally trick with Rasputin's bat, Bartok, easily the best character in the story.

Anastasia defeats Rasputin in the battle and she and Dmitri have self- revelations. Anastasia learns her true identity and her preference for love over riches, while Dmitri turns down the money for the woman he loves.

Anastasia shows that craft is as important to the success of animation as it is to live action. The writers know their myth, fairy tale, and love story genres and how to blend them in a seamless single strand. The characters begin with clear needs and end with self-revelations and moral decisions. For animation writers the lesson is clear: storytelling is king.

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Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

A Picaresque Tale

[8/10 · 7 January 2010]

All the praise for Slumdog Millionaire has been focused on Danny Boyle for his energetic and colorful direction. No question Boyle's direction is terrific. But the real key to the film's success is the script by Simon Beaufoy. Using a unique story structure and scene weave, Beaufoy combines the myth and love genres with some advanced screen writing techniques to build his story to a stunning climax.

To appreciate Beaufoy's accomplishment, we first have to look at his challenge. This is the story of a "slumdog" orphan boy who grows up in Mumbai with his older brother and ends up competing for the big prize on the game show, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Here are just some of the difficulties inherent in the premise: a boy as main character, a story that covers ten years, a mix of myth and love story forms - two genres that are notoriously tough to put together - and keeping the hero's desire for the girl believable and strong. In the Great Screen writing Class I spend a lot of time on specific techniques for developing the premise, since this is where 99% of writers fail. To win the premise game, you first have to identify the structural problems buried in the idea, then come up with structural solutions to solve them. And you have to be able to do this before you write the script.

Beaufoy's solution to the daunting challenges of his premise is a triple cross-cut framing device. In this advanced technique (see the Advanced Screen writing Class and the Blockbuster story software for details), the writer cuts between the hero, Jamal, being tortured by the cops who suspect he has been cheating, his performance on the game show, and the story of his life. This is a classic example of how a non-chronological structure is often the right one for a story. But it is very risky, because this much cross-cutting can suck out all the narrative drive.

So why does it work here? One of the big problems of telling a myth story that covers many years in a character's life is that it becomes extremely episodic, meaning that individual events stand out and don't build in a single, narrative whole. A storytelling framing device literally puts brackets around these events. They are told from the mind of the hero, so they gain a unity they would not have if told chronologically from an omniscient narrator.

Using a child as the main character poses all kinds of problems. A child has limited awareness, he is usually a victim and the audience senses that the most dramatic elements will come near the end of the depicted life. That's why Beaufoy uses the other two cross-cut lines. By beginning with the boy grown-up, being tortured, then cutting quickly to his performance on the game show, Beaufoy brings the most dramatic element of this boy's life story to the front of the tale. Structurally, he has taken the battle step - one of the seven major structure steps that usually occurs at the end of the story - and cut it into pieces. The audience is constantly reminded of the most dramatic moment of the story, and it too builds slowly and steadily as the hero moves closer to winning the big prize.

This also allows Beaufoy to connect the game show questions to the key events of the boy's life, a technique that not only undercuts the episodic quality of the story but also makes the thematic point that any life is a combination of chance, freedom and necessity.

The torture and game show lines solve another problem inherent in the premise: they are the primary way Beaufoy connects the myth form to the love story. Myth usually covers vast time and space. Love is compact, driven by white-hot passion that tends to dissipate if the story travels. The torture and game show frame allows Beaufoy to establish Jamal's love desire at the very beginning of the story, even though chronologically the hero encounters the girl of his dreams when he is a little boy and then doesn't see her for long stretches of his life. This makes the love story the primary genre, which is a much more unified form than myth.

The writer was also fortunate that the writer of the original novel, Vikas Swarup, chose the picaresque tale as the basis of the original story. A picaresque tale is a kind of comic myth in which the hero is a rogue-trickster character from the lower class who succeeds by his wits and in so doing highlights the corruption of the society. This sub-genre is the basis of such classics as Tom Jones, Oliver Twist, and Huckleberry Finn. In the "greatest techniques" section of the Blockbuster software, I talk about this rogue-trickster character as possibly the single important element in blockbuster films. From the very beginning this boy is a schemer, able to succeed and even escape death through his quick mind. Faced with terrible poverty and corruption, he nonetheless survives and flourishes. There is even an Indian version of Oliver Twist when a man saves the brothers from their poverty only to force them into his society of beggars.

This film is worth careful study by any writer hoping to master advanced storytelling techniques, as well as to learn how to bring together genre forms in unique combinations.

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Syriana (2005)

Horizontal Storytelling

[7 January 2010]

Stephen Gaghan's Syriana is one of the most ambitious scripts to come out of Hollywood in a long time. His story strategy is a strange combination of showing the audience an extremely big picture while also placing them in extreme ignorance. He tells a very horizontal story, showing many elements and forces working at one time, but also puts the audience in the same position as a cop trying to figure out a crime.

Gaghan is clearly within the storytelling tradition of the last hundred years in which the viewer comes to understand over the course of the story. This approach reached its apex in such European films as Last Year at Marienbad and The Conformist. It makes the audience work hard, but the endpoint is supposed to be a deeper learning of the real patterns of the world.

Unfortunately, that never happens in Syriana. What comes together at the end is the idea that the powerful of the world conspire together to increase and perpetuate the powers that be. But we know that from the beginning. The specifics of what happens remain confusing and there is almost no emotional completion.

When you make the audience work this hard to figure out so many strands, and force them to sit in ignorance for almost the entire film, you had better have a fantastic plot revelation at the end. In effect, if you make them take their medicine, you have to give them a great treat for their effort. But we never get the treat. Gaghan might argue that he is purposely trying to cut against a big Hollywood finish, with everything tied up neatly. But giving the audience a great plot isn't "going Hollywood." It's good writing.

Even if you accept this excuse for a flat plot payoff, Gaghan has to justify taking the medicine with something. With an intellectual, multi-strand movie like this, the payoff isn't going to be emotional. It has to be a great thematic revelation. But this too is missing. We know from the beginning that big corporations run the world and get most of what they want. So learning that at the end is not learning anything.

Study this script carefully if you want to see the strengths and weaknesses of horizontal storytelling. Perhaps the biggest insight a writer can take from Syriana is: the more characters you track in a story, the harder it is to make an emotional impact on the audience.

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