John August

Rave

Terminator Forever

Rave

Kudos to the National Film Registry, who [just added Terminator](http://www.loc.gov/film/nfr2008.html) to the permanent collection at the Library of Congress. Years from now, when Skynet is defeated, humankind will be able to look to Cameron’s masterpiece and realize, *shit, we shoulda known.*

Other laudable additions include Deliverance and A Face In the Crowd. If you haven’t seen the latter, add it to your Netflix queue. Half the young actors I know idolize this movie, so if you can work it into a conversation, you’re halfway to casting your feature.

Lessons of the summer, so far

Adaptation, Rant, Rave

Between deadlines, travel and wedding plans, I haven’t had the chance to blog about this first batch of summer movies, and more importantly, What We Can Learn. So before I get any further behind, let’s pick three of the most notable films to date.

(Mild spoiler warnings throughout.)

Heroes are more important than villains
—

Iron Man spent 85% of its storytelling energy on Tony Stark. It had the requisite set pieces, all of which were well-staged, but for an action movie it didn’t really break new ground. Where it succeeded was in creating a funny, flawed hero who propelled the story by his own ambitions. He wasn’t just responding to outside threats.

Did the villain get short-changed? Yes — to the degree that his motivations didn’t really make sense. Did it matter? Not much. In order to better establish the villain, we would have needed to spend more time away from Stark, which would have been counter-productive.

*The lesson: There’s no equal-time rule for antagonists.*

Leo ex machina
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Price Caspian featured a terrific and surprising defeat at the movie’s mid-point, which gave me hope that the movie would transcend its kid-lit roots. But when another lengthy battle sequence ((I call shenanigans on that PG rating. It may be the most violent “family” movie ever.)) also ended on the south side of success, my worst fears were confirmed: the fricken lion suddenly showed up to save them. And teach them humility. Or something.

Yes, I know: it’s a Christian parable. But that doesn’t make it any less maddening. If it weren’t based on a famous book, no screenwriter would ever get away with that ending.

*The lesson: Let your heroes succeed or fail on their own merits.* ((And without interference by supernatural beings who could have shown up in the first reel, sparing a few hundred lives. Thanks.))

Why is he doing that?
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I don’t want to pile on the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hate-parade. But beyond the tonal issues, I was often at a loss to say why Indy was doing what he was doing. Is he trying to take the crystal skull *to* the cave, or keep it *out of* the cave? Does he think Mac is a traitor, an ally, or not really care one way or the other? (Sadly, I think the last option is probably correct.)

It’s this kind of granular motivation I’ve [written about before](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/rethinking-motivation). It’s not psychoanalysis. It’s making sure the audience understands what’s happening in any given moment, so they can anticipate what might happen next. Without this ability to anticipate, the audience is just flung around helplessly, wondering why the great Indiana Jones is just standing there watching special effects.

*The lesson: Every scene, every moment, ask the question: What is my hero doing, and why? If it’s not obvious, stop and rethink it.*

Failed his last saving throw

Rave

Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, [died this morning](http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8XyHnUHsOBoCofRxK-5waWoAGrAD8V6PL180) at age 69.

I haven’t played the game in 15 years, but it remains the single biggest influence in my career as a screenwriter. And I’m not alone: a quick poll of my writer friends revealed a huge number of teenage rangers and magic-users. That’s no coincidence. Building an adventure in D&D requires the same imagination as constructing a screenplay. Running a campaign is like running a TV show, with weekly sessions at the ping-pong table in the basement.

D&D isn’t where we learned to write, but where we learned to think epic. A game could last all night. Or all year. By the time my friends and I stopped playing, our characters had three generations of mythology behind them, with family trees that would bewilder Faulkner.

The game is also where future accountants learned to obsess over convoluted rules. Particularly in the early editions, there were more charts and figures than you’d think a seventh-grader could handle. But we ate it up. In a pre-internet age, a few hundred pages of dense data on mistletoe-gathering and the restrictions on Limited Wish spells was like info-crack. Even when you weren’t playing D&D, you were thinking about the next character you wanted to roll. The next adventure you wanted to build.

I’m sure I’ve read Gygax’s AD&D books — notably, the original Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide — more than any other printed matter I’ve owned, probably by a factor of 10. It’s where I learned what c.f., i.e. and e.g. meant.

I’ve moved 10 times since college, but the crate of D&D books has always come with me, unopened but somehow indispensable.

So, my sincere thanks to Mr. Gygax for what he brought into the world. We live on after death by creating things that outlast us. By that metric, Gygax is nearly immortal.