I Blame Ninjas

I’m taking the day off to carve pumpkins and watch classic horror movies. I now have DVDs of all the classic Universal monsters, except Karloff’s The Mummy, so I’ll be doing my own marathon with those. I’ve also been catching up on a lot of ’50s giant monster movies this month courtesy of Netflix – Them!, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, It Came From Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth and others from my own collection – Gojira, King Kong,  King Kong vs. Godzilla.

A great analysis of a director’s guild event in which James Cameron and JJ Abrams talk about Steven Spielberg’s films, this one dealing with the importance of tone and emotional resonance in his movies. Basically, having a human story of some kind at the core of your screenplay.

Or, as Pete Docter puts it in the production notes for Up, talking about Disney animator Joe Grant:

I got to know Joe when he was in his 90s. He was a friend of mine-this great old wise guy. Every time I would show him something we were working on he’d say, ‘What are you giving the audience to take home?’ That was his way of telling me it’s the emotion-the character-based emotions that people are going to remember.

That’s something I really work on in my own scripts – you can have all the action and spectacle in the world, but if there’s no heart, you don’t have much of a movie.

I caught a second viewing of Thor on blu-ray the other night with friends, and I’m reminded once again of how perfectly it follows standard screenplay structure. Spoilers follow:

In Act I, we meet Thor and the other characters. Thor’s a brash, arrogant gloryhound, but we like him anyway. He impulsively endangers Asgard, so Odin strips him of his powers and exiles him to Earth. In Act IIa, Thor seeks to solve his external problem – losing his powers – without resolving his internal problem – thinking only of himself. So he tries to take the easy way out, believing that simply recovering his hammer will restore his powers without any messy soul-searching required. At the Midpoint, we have a false victory – Thor battles his way to his hammer, only to discover he’s not yet worthy of it or his powers. It’s a crushing blow. In Act IIb, Thor’s enemies close in. Loki lies to him about Odin’s supposed death and his permanent exile. Thor learns humility and begins to think of others. At the All is Lost beat, Thor even sacrifices himself to save his friends and, by proving himself worthy, regains his hammer & powers. In Act III, Thor returns to Asgard for the final confrontation with his enemies – not for personal glory or revenge, but to save his people.

Insidious (2010): A family looks to prevent evil spirits from trapping their comatose child in a realm called The Further. Latest from Saw creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan. An awesomely creepy first half that mostly falls apart at the end, though it still manages to deliver a few more scares.

What I learned: Trying to define or explain the horror in a horror movie’s almost always a mistake. I’m not saying you, as the screenwriter, ought to be in the dark about what’s going on in your own screenplay – just that we, as the audience, will be more frightened if you don’t tell us what’s going on. The unknown’s always more frightening. Look at the two Paranormal Activity movies. In the first, the couple has no idea why this evil spirit’s after them, and neither do we.  They uncover a few clues and consult a psychic, except he’s more frightened than they are. Terrifying. In Paranormal Activity 2, we get a convoluted backstory about a grandmother’s deal with a demon in exchange for the souls of her descendants or something, plus a lot of pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about transferring curses and so forth. Still a fun movie, but way less scary. It’s the same in Insidious – in the first half of the movie, when we’re just as baffled as the family about these bizarre events & strange apparitions, we’re totally freaked out. Once a psychic shows up for a long talking heads scene explaining everything, way less scary.

I wrote about reading The Hunger Games trilogy the other day – finished the third book over the weekend, by the way – and mentioned the upcoming movie of the first book. The first trailer debuted Sunday at the MTV Video Music Awards. Take a look:

Well, it’s sure not having your blockbuster movie flop. Sean Hood, brought in as a script doctor to rewrite the screenplay during production, shares what it’s like to discover you’ve written a bomb.

A noir Lord of the Rings. Now there’s an odd thought. I started catching up on classic movies I’ve missed earlier this year with Sunset Boulevard and Gone with the Wind, then got sidetracked onto monster and contained horror flicks as research for various scripts. Now I’m back to the classics. I recently saw Casablanca, Chinatown, and The Maltese Falcon (which I had seen but not for something like 25 years). After the last two, I decided to continue focusing on classic film noir, which meant finally signing up for Netflix as the Blockbuster selection of classics is pretty abysmal (for however much longer they’re even in business). My copy of The Big Sleep (Bogart version) arrived the other day. Also in the queue are Double Indemnity, High Sierra, Vertigo, Laura, The Big Heat, and The Killing. I’m open to other suggestions, too.

I actually have seen most of the AFI Top 100 Films list, so it’s not like I’m entirely uneducated in my chosen field — I just have some odd gaps to fill. (I blame ninjas.) After I finish off the noir films, I might work on the other missing Hitchcock films in my portfolio.