Category: Writing

“Sully” Sucked, But It Didn’t Have To

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I wanted to love Sully, the 2016* film starring Tom Hanks and directed by Clint Eastwood about airline pilot “Sully” Sullenberger successfully executing an emergency water landing on the Hudson River, but I couldn’t because the movie was crummy. And what grated as I watched: it didn’t have to be.

Critics and audiences liked Sully a lot more than I did. Maybe I’m being too picky. But, I suspect a significant chunk of the positive feeling toward the movie is connected to positive feelings for Sullenberger the man. I share many of those feelings, which is a reason why this crappy movie rankles. Sully deserved better.

To recap (spoiler alert): Sullenberger and crew took off from LaGuardia Airport on a cold winter morning with 155 people on board. At about 2,800 feet, the passenger jet passed through a flock of Canadian geese and suffered “bird strikes” that destroyed both engines. Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles ran through options (trying to return to LaGuardia or re-route to nearby Teterboro), and decided their best option was to attempt a water landing. They pulled it off, and all 155 on board survived.

So why did the film crash and sink? First, it suffered from the malady that afflicts many “this really happened” stories. When people already know the outcome of an event, it can be difficult for filmmakers to generate drama. When joining the project, Eastwood reportedly wondered where the antagonist was. Rather than thinking deeper about the story they should tell, Eastwood and company just made one up.

Second, it suffered from self-inflicted wounds. For example, the film opened with a sequence where a passenger jet crashed into New York City buildings. It was a frightening reminder of the 9/11 attacks, but it was a terrible choice for this film because it didn’t happen. It was a nightmare suffered by the film’s version of Sully. I haven’t read the source material, but I assume the scene was based on his actual nightmares. But…

Third, the real-life events were a triumph of teamwork, preparation, and training. The water landing was the culmination of Sullenberger’s lifetime of work and attention to detail. It was a symphony of teamwork between him and Skiles, as well as the calm, swift actions of the flight crew, air traffic controllers, ferry boat drivers and rescue workers. By focusing on Sullenberger’s nightmare and post-traumatic stress disorder, filmmakers introduced a sourness that pervaded everything.

Fourth, while making a “this happened” story, filmmakers scabbed on a happy ending by creating a preposterous scene that never happened.

In short, Sully was a bad movie because of storytelling decisions.

How could it have been good? How could the film have mined drama from a brief event where the outcome is known?

By shifting the focus.

Sully Sullenberger, the person, was extraordinary. He was among the best at nearly everything he tried to do for nearly his entire life. He studied and worked and trained, and eventually became so good at flying aircraft that he became a trainer and safety investigator.

His co-pilot, Jeff Skiles, had a story. So did the flight attendants who helped implement safety protocols that got every passenger off the plane alive.

I can see several different ways to attack the story, all of which could have been dramatic, interesting, and remained true to the lives of these heroic people.

One option would have been a biopic of Sullenger. Show his upbringing, his schooling, his learning to fly, his intense training. Those sequences can carry some drama because each of those steps is about a determined person overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal. What might have been cool was to craft the scenes in such a way that they highlight the reality that no person is truly self-made (a point Sullenberger makes in speeches), and that teamwork is essential in nearly every human endeavor (another point he makes).

Another option would have been to have multiple story lines about key figures in the water landing and safely getting all passengers out of the airplane. This could have opened rich lines for storytelling, because many people were involved in the rescue, and and at least some of them have interesting stories worth telling.

There are still other storytelling options, all of which could have centered around the core lessons to be drawn from Sullenberger’s life: work hard, prepare, and collaborate.

Movie Review: Her

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Warning: There will be spoilers.

Give Spike Jonze credit for pulling off the Pixar-like feat of spinning metaphorical gold from conceptual straw. On its face, the premise is kinda silly: A man falls in love with his operating system. Really? That’s it? I mean, I’ve talked with Siri and there was no love.

But Jonze and his collaborators not only managed to make the story believable, they showed a relationship between a man and an artificial intelligence that was real in ways that relationships between humans can be artificial. Indeed, the most “artificial” moment between Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (his OS, voiced by Scarlett Johannson) was when Samantha found a “surrogate” — a human woman who served as a body so Theodore and Samantha could have physical sex rather than virtual.

Adding another person to the mix threw Theodore and the encounter went badly. This makes sense in the world Jonze created: the emotional, intellectual, and even sexual relationship Theodore had with his operating system was as real as sunshine and oxygen. Going through the motions with a person not Samantha was false.

The film is carefully layered with elements that ask the question: what’s “real” and what’s “artificial”? Theodore, for example, works for a kind of custom greeting card company. He uses a computer to ghost-write personal, hand-written letters for clients. In some cases, he’d been writing intimate correspondence for people throughout their relationships. How could loving an artificial intelligence that can learn and grow be any faker than those relationships?

Or, consider a scene early in the film. Theodore, feeling lonely, calls a phone sex chat line. He connects with a woman. Both give false names and commence virtual sex. As this stranger approaches climax, she asks him to choke her with a dead cat. It’s strange, it’s off-putting, and it’s pure fantasy. It’s two anonymous strangers pretending to have sex — nothing more. There’s no human connection, no love — nothing except imagination.

The sexual encounter Theodore and Samantha have later, while similarly virtual, is the product of an emotional and intellectual intimacy — even love. The point here is that the relationship they have is real in a way that many relationships between humans are not.

One exquisite scene was when Theodore calls Samantha, and…she’s not there. (She was updating with new code collaboratively written by a group of operating systems interacting with each other online.) When it happens, Theodore becomes abruptly aware that Samantha has entire life that’s separate from him. Her virtual intelligence permits her to carry on thousands of conversations simultaneously. She “admits” to being in love with more than 600 others.

It was a revelation akin to those children have that their parents have entire lives the kids know nothing about. And it’s a painful emotional blow to Theodore:

THEODORE — You’re either mine or not mine.

SAMANTHA — I’m yours and not yours.

The film’s only false note was when Samantha presented Theodore with the gift of getting his letters published in book form. I can’t imagine how his company would permit that. Surely, those letters would fall under “work for hire” and wouldn’t belong to him in a manner that he could publish. Plus, my mind instantly went to his clients. What kind of effect would publication have on their relationships? Those hand-written letters were supposed to express the writer’s true thoughts and feelings. I can’t imagine the recipient of ghost-written letters still feeling good about them when they learn they were composed by a stranger. But this is a minor gripe that has nothing to do with the film’s core narrative.

Her deserves its many accolades and award nominations. The screenplay is as good as any I’ve read, and the actors were outstanding. It’s not the best picture, though. I’ll have a review of that film, 12 Years A Slave, up soon.

The Opening Line Problem

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I’m working on the final revision to my mystery novel, which will be available for purchase in about a month. This is supposed to more of a proofread — just double-checking for typos, misspellings, wrong words, etc. But as I keep reading, there’s a thought nagging at me: the story is starting in the wrong place.

Back story: Many revisions ago, I kidnapped a chapter from the middle and lashed it to the front of the book. Chapter 1. Why? I loved the opening line it gave me:

As best I can remember it was the first time I’d awakened naked and face down in a pool of my own blood.

See what I mean?

Chapter 1 then became about the protagonist extracting himself from a no-tell motel — an event that actually happened in the middle of the story’s timeline. Chapter 2 leaps back a few weeks to the “beginning.” From there the story is told chronologically.

This is a fairly common dramatic technique, and it worked for me as I wrote the book. But now? I’m thinking it might be better pluck what’s now Chapter 1 and replant it in its original home — Chapter 13. That means I have to write a new opening.

Which isn’t really that big of a problem. It just wasn’t what I expected to be doing at this point.

The real challenge, of course, will be crafting a new opening line. And, I admit I’m more than a little nutty about opening lines. I often wander bookstores reading opening lines to see what grabs me. I’ve read dozens (maybe hundreds) of books out of my normal reading genres based strictly on a killer opening.

Some of my favorites:

  • Call me Ishmael. — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
  • The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse. — Robert B. Parker, The Godwulf Manuscript
  • Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure. — Albert Camus, The Stranger
  • When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through the wrinkled hood, Glock first. — Richard Start (Donald Westlake), Backflash
  • All this happened, more or less. — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
  • You better not never tell nobody but God. — Alice Walker, The Color Purple
  • He was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken. — Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. — John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meaney
  • It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell, 1984
  • I am an invisible man. — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
  • If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
  • I was arrested in Eno’s Diner. — Lee Child, The Killing Floor
  • I sat across the table from the man who had battered and tortured and brutalized me nearly thirty years ago. — Lorenzo Carcaterra, Sleepers
  • It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick wall. — Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse
  • When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man. — Richard Stark (Donald Westlake), Firebreak

That’s enough for now.

Writing Lessons from Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival

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On Monday, the Kennedy Center dropped curtain on its 12th Annual Page-to-Stage festival — a weekend of script readings and open rehearsals of plays and musicals being developed by DC-area theater companies. I’ve been going for awhile now, and I watched all of two live reads and part of another this weekend.

The two I watched in full — Ella Fitzgerald: First Lady of Song and The Music of Nina Simone — have great potential as the individuals involved in those productions continue to raise money and do the work necessary to bring them to the stage. The “partial watch” play — Civilizing Lusby — has a good premise (and therefore good potential), but didn’t hold my attention.

For a writer, live reads are useful because they put the spotlight on the written word. There’s no staging or pyrotechnics or spectacle to distract from what the writer has put to paper. That’s slightly less true in musicals, such as the two diva plays, because there’s singing (and the singing was fantastic), but most of the audience’s experience is in hearing actors speak words and in hearing a narrator read scene descriptions.

Here are some writing lessons I took from the weekend:

  1. Thou shalt avoid exposition. Don’t write anything “so the audience will understand.” A couple years ago, I saw a Page-to-Stage read of a play about Lincoln. There were lines like, “Hello Mary, my dear wife of 19 years…” In the Ella production, there were multiple lines of dialogue that had characters saying they were backstage at X venue or saying what year it was or talking about another character using first and last name. The trouble with these lines is that a) they’re boring; and b) the delivery ends up being stilted because they’re not words actual humans would speak. Work necessary exposition into the story as ammunition for conflicts.
  2. Thou shalt get to the point. In Civilizing Lusby, the first 10 pages or so were devoted to a family dispute about a rambunctious teen aged girl who smiled at too many men for her mother’s comfort. Yawn. There was a little tidbit thrown in about the father needing some banker’s son on his side for something, which I assume they got to later on because I left at that point. According to the description in the program, the play was about a Chesapeake waterman taking his revenge after a couple businessmen have his shack condemned so they could build a railroad. The high-spirited daughter flirting with every man she meets was worth a couple minutes — not the first 10.
  3. Thou shalt present characters, not characterization. Civilizing Lusby did this best. The wild girl, the disapproving mother, the adoring father trying to be stern for the sake of his wife but not quite making it — these felt like real people. The Nina Simone show did a reasonable job as well, presenting a first-person “as told by” story that gave her take on her story. The Ella Fitzgerald show — not so much. They characterized her by talking about the pictures on her dressing room wall, having her fire her cousin/assistant, and having her say “shit” now and then. But, the non-linear presentation left the feeling that Ella mainly had stuff happen to her — NOT that she was an active and aggressive force in achieving personal goals. Which leads me to…
  4. Thou shalt give your protagonist clear goals. The contrast between the Nina Simone and Ella scripts couldn’t be more evident on this one. At any point, the director could have called a stop and asked the audience what Simone wanted. The answers would have flowed — to be the first black classical pianist, to get into Curtis, to find love, to avoid the IRS, to come to peace with her father, to contribute to the Civil Rights Movement…and so on. Simone had a series of goals that shifted as she moved through her life — many of which she failed to achieve. But, the point here is that the audience always knew what they were. Not so, in Ella’s story where she never seemed to want anything except to “sing pretty for the people.” They presented major events in her life, of course, but Ella seemed almost a bystander to them, not the cause of those events. While that can happen “in real life,” it a) makes for bad drama, and b) is unlikely for someone who accomplished as much as she did in life.

Those are the lessons I got from Page-to-Stage this year — avoid exposition, get to the point, create characters NOT characterization, and give your characters clear goals.

 

Tim Tebow and the Value of Using the Right Words

Mark Twain once said that the difference between the right word and the wrong one is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. The latest proof of Twain’s comment is the furor of Tim Tebow.

Let me say right from the start that I like and admire Tebow. I enjoy watching him play, and I’m enjoying the unconventional success Denver is having this season. It’s been fascinating to see the Broncos pull wins out when all looks lost.

The issue I have is with the “all Tebow does is win” folks. This is the same kind of reductive “analysis” that results in absurdities like measuring the full value of an individual player’s career by the number of championship rings he’s won. Championships is (and should be) a criterion.

Back to Tebow, when he plays poorly and the Broncos win, it’s not because Tebow is a “winner” or he has some mystical knowledge about how to win. It’s because he has good teammates — in particular a good defense.

I am not discounting some of the big plays he’s made late in games — those have been critical. But, those plays were necessary in part because Tebow played like crap earlier in the game. And, those plays were possible because Tebow’s teammates made countless other plays throughout the game to keep the game close.

Tebow doesn’t win — the Broncos do. Just like the Bears did with Rex Grossman a few years back. Tebow contributes. He’s an important leader and he makes some big plays. But Denver’s success this season is properly credited to the team, not one guy.

Plot Spackle

Basic stuff from Writer’s Digest, but sometimes when I’m stuck, that’s what I need. Thankfully, getting stuck doesn’t happen that often.

The opening questions read almost like the “guide” I give to my readers. The main things I want from a reader during my writing process are these:

  • Are there any points at which you feel like putting the book down?
  • Do the characters feel like real people behaving as people would in the situation they’re in, or are their action forced or unrealistic?
  • Anything that just doesn’t feel right?

The reader doesn’t have to offer a solution — that’s my job. And, sometimes I don’t agree that the “problem” they’ve identified is actually a problem. But, usually when a trusted reader senses something is off, they’re right that something is wrong, even if they haven’t hit the target on exactly what that Something is.

The six plot fixes offered:

  1. Keep Nabbing Ideas — basically, this is “be ready for an idea whenever it strikes.” This is probably easier than ever with smart phones, I-Pads, tablets, etc. I go the low-tech route and just carry a notebook with me wherever I go.
  2. Create Two Trajectories — The main character should have a personal problem and a plot problem, which are not the same thing. In my soon-to-be-published mystery, the main character (Leonard) has the problem of solving a murder (plot) along with multiple personal problems related to the death of his wife, the relationship with his brother, a struggling business, and a budding romance.
  3. Add another level of complication — The key here is the mantra, “Torture your protagonist.” Nothing should be easy for the main character.
  4. Add a character — I don’t agree with this one very much. Adding characters because the plot is dragging seems like a good way to pollute the story with unnecessary characters. The key here is to make sure the story is properly cast. An interlude with a fun or interesting character can be good, but a little goes a long way here.
  5. Beware of unmotivated actions — This one is huge. When I read amateur screenplays or manuscripts, I encounter this problem (plus on-the-nose dialog) constantly. As a rule, people take the minimum action possible to achieve their goal. Characters in stories are no different. While “minimum” will vary depending on the character and the situation, the action should make sense to that character. If the character has to do something to “make the story work,” there’s a problem that needs to be fixed.
  6. Change a setting — If scenes feel tired and familiar, moving to a different location can help. This is the power of subtext. A love scene can be set ANYWHERE. So can any scene. Use that power wisely to break free from the cliched settings readers have seen repeatedly.

Stephen King to Write for ‘Walking Dead’?

I’m not normally a horror consumer, but I could not resist a zombie show run by The Shawshank Redemption writer Frank Darabont. Viewer reaction was mixed, but I thought The Walking Dead was terrific.

So, I admit to being more than a little geeked up when I saw this news: that Stephen King might write an episode in the upcoming season. One more reason to keep watching.

Everything Is A Remix

So, you sit down to write that killer story idea that’s been rattling around in your head for awhile.  It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  And then, after you’ve finished, you see a movie and there’s your stunningly creative idea — not identical, but close enough to make you wonder if someone’s been spying on your hard drive.

Preemptive plagiarism?  Bad luck?  Or something else?

Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson examines critical questions for writers, filmmakers, musicians — artists of any kind.  What’s original?  Is there such a thing?  Or, is the creative process by definition derivative?  Is even the most original story really a kind of mash-up of other stories already written?

What do you think?

And here’s part one.