Story and Plot

Why does it seem that there are maybe 6 templates for Hollywood movies? As
a writer you pick one of those, fill in the check boxes, and poof the next
movie of the week. Is it because of the money to be made, or a lack of talented
writers getting their scripts to the right people, or is it due to producers
and directors not getting the ‘picture’, or is it because those mentioned above
don’t really give a rats butt about the people going out to see a movie?

–Niall

While I can’t offer an apologia for everything that is wrong with the state
of film, I can suggest a few theories for this nagging sense of sameness you
feel about movies. As I started writing this column, it got so long that I
needed to break it into two pieces.

Before I start, I should stress that this isn’t a Hollywood-specific problem;
if you look at the combined film output of France or Germany or India you’re
going to find the same percentage of mindless retreads. Nor is this a recent
problem. To me, the only thing more torturous than the slow pace of most movies
in the 1940’s and 50’s is their utter predictability.

Theory 1: There really are only a few basic plots.

While I don’t support the kind of reductionism you see in a lot of film books,
which boil down the entire canon of Western literature into three or seven
or thirteen plots (Revenge, Fatal Love, etc.), the truth is that for any scenario
you create, there’s only a few ways it’s going to resolve. While there might
be many detours and diversions along the way, the course of your story is going
to end up at one of several possible outcomes.

For instance, let’s say you’re writing a movie about a young woman who is
looking for her father. All the details of the story – why she’s looking for
him, how long he’s been gone, the nature of their relationship, the setting,
the obstacles, the other characters involved – these details make the story
unique, and hopefully interesting. But from the minute the movie begins, we
know there’s only two possible outcomes: either she finds him, or she doesn’t.
"Aha!" you say. The only reason we know the two possible outcomes
is because we’ve been told she’s looking for her father. If we didn’t say that
at the start of the movie, it wouldn’t be so predictable. And you’re absolutely
right. But the movie would also be incredibly, annoyingly frustrating. The
next time you’re in a movie theater squirming around and checking your watch,
ask yourself, "Do I know what the main character is trying to do?" More
likely than not, you’ll answer no. That’s why the movie seems to be wandering
around aimlessly, because it hasn’t given you any sense of where you’re going,
or how to know when you get there.

Are there exceptions? Sort of. Last year’s BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and AMERICAN
BEAUTY both seemed to get by without the usual goal-driven plotting. But AMERICAN
BEAUTY actually went through a lot of changes in the editing room to give it
more set-up than it originally had: the opening was scrapped completely and
a voice-over was added from Kevin Spacey talking about his death, letting the
audience know from the start the movie was going to be about Lester’s transformation
and murder.

As far as BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, the movie was incredibly inventive, with good
characters and interesting themes. But I know I wasn’t the only one getting
restless by hour two, simply because I had no idea where it was going. I didn’t
need to know how the story would end, just that it would end. It became so arbitrary, it felt like you could cut it off at any point.
Of course, all this is only talking about the rough structure of movies, not
the details that make them unique and vibrant or hackneyed and cliché.
In the next column, I’ll talk about Theory 2: Audiences want hamburger.