If you want to write for Hollywood, study this picture.

This faded lobby card from Charles Chaplin’s The Kid is the best lesson you’ll ever have in how to write for the movies. Despite its age, it illustrates many of the essential elements you’ll need to keep in mind today as your write your Hollywood screenplay. It’s a visual reminder of the kind of movie that producers, studios and – most importantly – audiences are looking for.

And that’s no accident. This lobby card had a specific purpose: to bring people into the theater. Chaplin chose this particular image because it effectively answers the first three questions that are always on the mind of the audience when the lights go down on a Hollywood movie.

1) Who is the hero?

2) What important thing does the hero want?

3) Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?

The First Three Questions are important to your audience because they bring into focus the central conflict of the movie. The nature of the conflict is what the audience is curious about when the show begins. And, in large part, they will judge the movie as good or bad depending on how the conflict unfolds and how the conflict is resolved.

Your audience may initially be drawn to the theater with the promise of rampaging dinosaurs or a steamy shower scene of a voluptuous movie star. And your job as a writer is to deliver the most compelling dinosaur rampage or steamy shower scene ever put on film

But your audience has another expectation – a storyline based on conflict that is dramatic and compelling. And they’ll be disappointed if you don’t deliver on that, as well.

This is true today and it was true in 1921, when The Kid was first released. And right there on the lobby card, Chaplin clearly addresses the audience’s First Three Questions…

According to the card, this movie promises a conflict between Charlie and the Cop, and their struggle will be over The Kid.

The First Three Questions in the mind of the audience are based on the primary ethical question that all heroic drama attempts to answer: What should I do? The author of a heroic screenplay says “Watch the hero and do what he does.”

That’s why, in every heroic screenplay, there are moral questions at stake. It’s these moral issues that are the source of the conflict. For our purposes, conflict is defined as the active clash between characters caused by incompatible, opposing moral principles.

In the simplest terms, the Hero and the people who oppose him represent the two sides of a moral question. Their conflict during the course of the movie is a cinematic moral argument about which side is correct. Whoever wins the conflict decides the moral question.

Cinematic should be your focus. Your movie will not be a dry, dusty, academic argument made by chin-pulling, pipe-sucking professors in a lecture hall.  Your movie will be a gripping, emotional, entertaining argument thrashed out by the dramatic actions of your main characters and supported by film technique.

What moral arguments are you going to make? There’ll be at least two.

First, your film will attempt to prove the general moral principle that “doing the right thing is worth the struggle, because it achieves or restores the good.” If your Hero struggles against his opponents to do the right thing, and by the end of the film achieves or restores the good, he’s won the argument.

But there will be a second moral argument, as well. This argument will be about the particular moral theme of the movie. For example, in The Kid, the moral theme concerns whether Charlie – alone, poverty-stricken, and with a larcenous heart – should be allowed to care for an orphaned child.

The lobby card sets ups this moral question perfectly – one one side is the issue is the Cop, who will strongly oppose the idea of Charlie caring for the child. On the other side is Charlie, who wants to hold onto the Kid. And in the middle is the Kid himself, the “important thing” that the hero wants.

In short, the lobby card is an illustration of the dramatic and compelling moral argument of the film, which accounts for its power to attract an audience.

Simple, right? The lobby card pretty much lays is all out right in front of you.

But there’s much more going on in this photo. Take another look at that Cop.

The Kid was released in 1921. In this early 20s, most cops in comedies looked like this:

Cops in comedies were…well…comedy cops. The most famous of them all were the Keystone Cops, seen above. Here is how they were described when they honored with a 29 cent American stamp several years ago:

“From 1914 through the early 1920s, moviegoers were entertained by the antics of the silent screen’s most irreverent and incompetent police force, the Keystone Cops. Dressed in ill-fitting, disheveled uniforms, this merry band of misguided gendarmes stumbled through a series of chaotic chase scenes in the name of law and disorder.”

Chaplin could have used Keystone-like Cops for his movie, but he didn’t. Take a good look at the type of cop Chaplin chose for Charlie’s opponent…

Does this Cop look “incompetent? “Disheveled?” “Stumbling?” Does he look like part of a “merry band of misguided gendarmes?”

Let’s face it…there’s nothing merry about this guy at all. This is not a comedy cop. In fact, he looks downright threatening. Consider the way he and Charlie are posed together.

Charlie is small and crouched in the gutter. The Cop is tall and looms over Charlie on the sidewalk. Charlie is slender and slight, the Cop is a manly figure.

Charlie comforts a cuddly baby in his hands. In the Cop’s hands is a hard, wooden billy-club, tightly gripped.

You can just imagine the Cop biding his time, patiently tapping the nightstick against the palm of his hand, waiting for just the right moment to give Charlie ’s head a good whack, followed by a poke in the ribs. “No vagrants on my beat, you bum. Ankle off and keep moving. Hey, wait a minute…where’d you get the brat?”

Chaplin wanted to create the impression of threatening power in the Tramp’s opponent and he succeeded. But it’s not only physical power that the Cop displays, he represents another kind of power, just as threatening.

The Cop is in uniform.

He’s got stripes on his sleeve, a cap on is head and a badge on his coat. In short, he has authority. If Charlie tangles with the Cop, he tangles with City Hall.

Charlie’s opponent is more than just this single cop. The Cop in the lobby card represents authority in The Kid. By the middle of the movie, the entire weight of government is going to come crashing down on Charlie’s head, along with the Cop’s nightstick. There will be no one in authority to protect Charlie because the people in authority are the very ones out to get him.

Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?
These guys.

By the end of the film, the entire apparatus of municipal authority – police, doctors, city social workers – are trying to take the Kid from Charlie’s care. So the authority that the Cop wields is just as powerful as his nightstick, making him an even more dangerous figure.

And for the sake of the conflict, that’s a good thing…the more threatening the opponent is to the hero, the more the story will excite and move the audience.  That’s why the hero needs strong and credible opponents, not opponents who are weak or too improbable to be believed.

By selecting a threatening Cop and the authority he represents over a Keystone Cop for his movie, Chaplin has successfully made the necessary choice for the type of heroic story he intends to tell. He’s created a credible opponent for the Tramp with a strong stake in winning.

But the hero, too, needs a strong stake in winning. Whatever it is the hero wants to achieve or hold on to, it has to be important. So important, the he will put himself on the line to keep it. Does this look important to you?

It does to most of us. Parenthood is one of the things we feel most passionately about. The forced separation of a child from his mother or father is guaranteed to arouse emotion and sympathy. (In preparation for this post, I screened the movie and my wife saw the film for the very first time a few days ago. At a key moment when the Kid is being forcibly removed from Charlie, I caught her sniffing back tears.) This nearly 90-year-old silent comedy still had the ability to move us emotionally because it’s about something that matters.

In the lobby card, Charlie is clearly bonded to the child. He holds the helpless infant tenderly, lovingly, protectively. He’s portrayed as a father figure, and we expect fathers to fight strenuously on behalf of their children.

Chaplin made a wise choice for his first Heroic movie. If the nature of the conflict is intense – if the hero chooses to struggle mightily against an opponent who seems to hold all the cards – then we are inspired by the hero’s courage and dedication to do the right thing. Our emotions are fully engaged by the conflict. In a well-constructed story, we identify with the hero. Which means that if the struggle is important to the hero, then it becomes important to us, too.

Take another look at the pose of Charlie and the Cop.

You’ve heard the term “underdog” before. It describes two dogs testing each other’s dominance over the other. Cringing, the weaker dog will roll on his back as a sign of submission while the stronger dog stands tall above him. In this way, the “top dog” asserts his dominance over the “underdog.” Likewise, the difference in posture and positioning between Charlie and the Cop illustrates the dominance of the Cop over Charlie. Charlie is the “underdog” in this story.

And that’s just what Chaplin wants the audience to believe. In public, he most often referred to his Tramp character as “The Little Fellow.” Now, you know why.

Chaplin wants the audience to identify with the “The Little Fellow.” Audiences tend to root for the underdog because, in our own lives, we identify with the underdog – we see ourselves as the underdog.

Children have parents, teachers, bullies and older siblings to battle against. Adults have bosses, government, society and mother-in-laws as their opponents. In the narrative spin we give our own lives, we always appear to be clashing with forces much greater than ourselves. Our victories seem more significant if we feel that we’ve battled the odds and won.

Surely, when facing important moral issues, we feel as if we are fighting something much more powerful than ourselves. Sometimes we feel it’s us against the world. This feeling is perfectly captured in Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down…

Well I know what’s right, I got just one life.
In a world that keeps on pushin me around.
But I’ll stand my ground
…and I won’t back down.

This is the way we feel emotionally when contemplating our struggles against the hardships and vicissitudes of life. We cast ourselves as underdogs against an entire world that keeps “dragging me down” and “pushing me around.” But we “know what’s right” (making this a moral issue…we’re not fighting for the hell of it – we’re fighting because we’re right) and that “there ain’t no easy way out” (meaning we’ll have to struggle).  So we “stand our ground” and struggle to do the right thing.

If we see ourselves as the underdog in our own life story, then, in order for us to identify with the hero, it’s often the case that the hero needs to be the underdog, too. In that way, the hero’s emotional journey of frustration, struggle and triumph, becomes our emotional journey, as well. That’s the power – and the pleasure – of identifying with the hero in stories. It’s one of the main reasons we are drawn to heroic drama.

Even someone like James Bond – as heroic a figure as you can imagine – is presented as an underdog in his movies. The screenwriters are careful not to have him struggle against criminals such as purse snatchers or shoplifters. Bond would easily defeat them; it would be no struggle at all. Instead, Bond is pitted against criminals that are powerful megalomaniacs, out to conquer the world. Only against opponents like this – a Goldfinger or a Blofeld – could Bond be considered an underdog. It’s long been noted that the best Bond films feature his strongest opponents.

So Chaplin needs his character to be perceived as an underdog because it resonates with us emotionally, and it makes his struggle significant. But being the underdog also promotes another key element that is important to the Hollywood screenplay.

Take another look at Charlie and the Cop, paying attention to the composition.

A very important element to this photo is that Charlie is unaware of the Cop. This element is so important, that Chaplin uses it in other publicity shots for The Kid. Like this one…

Chaplin even reversed the idea. Here’s the same Cop and street corner, but now it’s the Cop who is unaware of Charlie and the Kid…

And here is a French poster of the same idea.

The hidden face, Darth Vader shadow and highlighted billy-club, make the French poster even more threatening!

All these photos portray either the hero or his opponent as being unaware of the other.

In the lobby card photo, Charlie is unaware that the Cop is watching him. But we, the audience, are aware of the Cop. This means that we have knowledge that Charlie doesn’t, and this creates psychological tension within us. This tension is suspense, that is, the excited expectation of an approaching climax. In the most basic of terms, something exciting is going to happen and we want to see it.

Suspense is an extremely potent element of storytelling, pulling the audience along scene by scene from start to finish. Several times in the story, Chaplin has the boy’s mother meet the Kid, unaware that the child she’s speaking to is her own abandoned son. The suspense in these scenes is almost unbearable – you want the mother to recognize the child, at the same time you worry what will happen to Charlie when she does.

In a well-constructed screenplay, this type of gripping emotional tension can last the entire movie. But individual scenes, too, will have their arcs of tension. Look at how Chaplin brilliantly builds suspense in this short scene from The Kid below.

Twice he has the Cop appear unnoticed behind Charlie and the Kid. From the moment the Cop appears, Chaplin has constructed this scene to keep the audience wondering: what will happen next? Chaplin knew the power of suspense in his movie, and he was wise enough to include it as part of his lobby card and other images promoting the film.

The comedic cousin of suspense is anticipation, which is defined as pleasurable expectation. The emphasis here is on pleasurable, and this probably more accurately describes our response to the lobby card. Charlie and Cops have a long history of comic battle. When the audience sees an image like this, they know what’s coming and have faith that Chaplin will give them a good time.

So Chaplin has two types of suspense going for him in the lobby card – we anticipate the specific humorous revelation to Charlie of the Cop behind him, and we are filled with suspense over the more general struggle of the heroic underdog against his opponents.

But here’s another thing to consider about this card: if you didn’t know it was a Charlie Chaplin movie, would you think it was a comedy?

You’ve probably memorized it by now, but let’s take one last look at the photo of Charlie and the Cop. And this time, we’ll use the original photo that the lobby card was based on.

Just as the Cop himself is not funny, this whole situation is not funny. Where’s the humor in a derelict tramp finding an abandoned baby in the gutter? This isn’t a humorous premise…this is serious stuff, and not at all what Chaplin’s audience was used to.

When Chaplin arrived at the Keystone studios in Hollywood in 1914, the silent film comedies of the time were very primitive. They were little more than 1 or 2 reels of frenetic action.

A typical plot consisted of a girl in a park being energetically and ridiculously wooed by rival suitors. It was followed by a sustained head-conking, ass-kicking, brick-tossing, rough-house battle between the boyfriends, ending with a wild chase through city streets in open-air jalopies until the road ends and everyone careens off a cliff to certain death. Except they don’t die, they just brush themselves off and continue to chase each other into the sunset. The End.

Over the years, Chaplin refined his stories and his characters, but the plots and action were still pretty wild. Silent movies especially lend themselves to a type of twilight existence – half reality, half dreamworld, where anything can happen. That’s fine for a 20 minute two-reeler, but longer narrative forms of serious purpose demand something more. They demand a story that matters.

Chaplin wanted to do a comedy with strong emotions, and that means a moral theme – a comedy where the Tramp “struggled to do the right thing” because that’s what generates the emotion. In short, he wanted to make a Heroic Hollywood movie.

Which meant Chaplin, led by his artistic ambitions, had a problem on his hands. He had to introduce moral seriousness into his brand of knock-about, rough-house comedy. But how do you accomplish such a serious purpose in a movie full of pratfalls and butt-kicking? How would the audience react to a comedy attempting pathos?

Which is probably why his marketing efforts desperately attempted to reassure his audience that The Kid was, indeed, a comedy despite it’s serious premise. More than merely humorous, the film was promoted as Six Reels of Joy! as the various posters insistently promised.

Joy, or possibly the lack thereof, in these illustrations of The Kid.

Oh, yeah…you can just feel the rib-tickling joy radiating from Charlie and the Kid in these posters, can’t you?

Well, no…you can’t.

That’s the problem Chaplin faced with his film – it was a comedy, yet heartbreakingly serious.  It was a very risky undertaking, and in the hands of a lesser artist (IYKWIM / AITYD) may well have been a disaster. But The Kid ended up being the second biggest film of the year and served as an example for other comedians of the day of how to make comedies with serious, heroic themes.

That’s the beauty of the Hollywood formula. As I’ve argued previously, the Formula appears to be inflexible and artistically stifling. But if you look deep within it, and understand the reasons behind each part of the Formula, it becomes a source of inventive inspiration. Chaplin created something new by figuring out how to wed his type of comedy with the heroic Hollywood Formula. He didn’t pursue creativity by shunning the Formula; he embraced it and found his vision within it. Heroic movie-making lifted his work to a new level of artistry.

Chaplin portrayed various types of characters in his movies – a fireman, a floorwalker, wealthy cads, drunks, and assorted rounders. But in this movie, he reprised his iconic role of the Tramp. The illustrations of Charlie and the Kid that appeared in the posters above must have been quite a shock for his audience.

After all, his Tramp character was a free spirit – roguish and vulgar. The Tramp was a vagrant with spotty employment, at home in the streets, and a lawbreaker when opportunity presented itself. Tramps, by their nature, are escaping the responsibilities of life – no job, no wife, no children.

It is not in the Tramp’s nature to make a long-term commitment to care and provide for a child. If the film had presented Charlie and the Kid as father and son from the moment the curtain rose, it would have struck the audience as terribly false.

Which is why Chaplin took great pains at the beginning of the film to show how circumstances force the freewheeling, irresponsible Tramp to “man up” and make a fundamental ethical choice to care for the child. Seeing the Tramp tenderly caring for the Kid in the lobby card is a reminder that the moral choices that a character makes are at the heart of heroic drama.

For the first time, Chaplin’s Tramp exhibited a full-fledged character arc, that is, the character moving from one viewpoint to another during the course of the movie, prodded by the ethical choices he confronts.

The amount of character arc the hero experiences will vary from film to film. For some movies, like the wonderful suspense film ffolkes the needle barely budges. (A moral theme of ffolkes is the need for rough men who “stay the course” and Roger Moore, in his best role, does exactly that…he doesn’t change very much, which is exactly why he saves the day.) For other movies, the character arc of the hero does a complete 180 – he comes to believe the exact opposite of his initial belief.

The important thing to remember is that character arc is a reflection of the shifting ethics of the hero. How much you want his ethics to shift depends on the moral point of the story you want to tell.

At the time of The Kid, Chaplin’s “Little Fellow” was not only the most famous movie character in the world, he was also the most beloved. And it is critically important to the success of heroic movies that the character is likeable.

“Likeable’ covers a lot of ground. Objectively, the Tramp character was a petty criminal, reckless and opportunistic. Yet, he made the world laugh, and that goes a long way towards creating likability for your character. A character can do the most repulsive, disgusting things – but if they’re done with humor, you can forgive him his faults.

Think of Shrek. Moments after being introduced, we see the monstrous ogre showering in mud, using bugs as toothpaste, and so on. His pointed grossness was so over-the-top that it made you laugh and instantly form a rapport with the hero. This likability carried the audience into the picture long enough for them to discover why they really liked him: his noble soul and the yearning of his heart, as the story eventually revealed.

And so it is with the Tramp in The Kid. First, Chaplin used humor to make the audience like him (despite his faults), then used his heroic struggle to earn their heartfelt love and admiration.

Whew! There’s a lot going on in that lobby card. As you outline your next screenplay, take a look at the lobby card of Charlie, the Cop and the Kid occasionally and ask yourself these questions as you consider your own story:

Who is the hero?
What scenes will I write to make the hero likable?
What important thing does the hero want?
Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?
What scenes will show them in conflict?
Is their conflict based on incompatible, opposing moral principles?
How do I show these moral principles in conflict cinematically, not through dialogue?
What scenes will I write that portray the hero as an underdog?
How will I make the hero’s opponents even stronger?
How will I make the hero’s struggle more intense?
How do I build suspense throughout the movie?
How do I build suspense within each scene?
How big is my hero’s character arc?
What scenes will I write that will shift the hero’s moral viewpoints?

It is important to note that these are not questions about a style of writing, clever wordplay or beautiful phrasing – these are questions about structure because structure is what matters in your screenplay, first and foremost.

And the First Three Questions in the mind of the audience supply the framework of the movie. They provide the key structural boxes that you will build your film around – the Hero Box, the Nemesis Box, and the Quest Box

I’ll have more to say about each of the issues above in future posts, as we get deeper into the writing process. But my next post will be about the very beginning of your screenplay – you know, that first moment when an idea pops into your head and you say to yourself, “Hey, that’d make a good movie!” I will tell you how do decide if that idea actually will make a good movie or not. See you then!

Previous Heroic Hollywood posts found here.

In this post, I want to give some advice to beginning screenwriters who are having difficulty finishing — or even starting — their first screenplay. I’ve been mulling over what to say for several weeks now, trying to come up with some inspirational words of advice to motivate you into achieving your goal. After much thought and deep-dish contemplation, I’ve boiled my advice down to this:

If you want to write for Hollywood, think like a
hack writer and stick to the Hollywood Formula.

How’s that for inspiring rhetoric?

Now, most “creative” types (that is, people who don’t actually have a job writing for Hollywood) will tell you that adhering to a formula is a bad thing because it stifles creativity.

But in the hands of a writer who knows what he is doing and why he is doing it, the standard Hollywood Formula allows the creation of inventive, daring and inspiring movies and the occasional masterpiece. Whether adhering to these principles results in hackwork or a classic movie depends entirely on the gifts of the writer doing the work and the skillfulness he brings to thinking inside the box of the Hollywood Formula.

Think Hollywood. Think inside the box.

It’s a craft I learned through trial and error. Some people pick it up faster than others because they have an intuitive feel for what needs to be done. But many people don’t quite see what is needed, or why.

That’s what this post is for. First, to convince you that sticking to the Hollywood Formula is a good thing and, second, to give you an example of how it works. Quite frankly, I wish someone had told me this stuff when I was just getting started. I think it would have helped me, so maybe it will help you. Here goes.

A man’s got to know his limitations. – Inspector Harry Callahan

To write screenplays for Hollywood, you’ve got to think small.

After all, you’ve only got about 120 pages (or less!) to tell your story. Compared to a novel, that’s not a lot of room to create a fully-formed narrative.

If you’re a beginning screenwriter, however, it appears just the opposite. The task ahead feels  overwhelming, and the blank page on your computer screen seems a bleak and disheartening void. How will you ever fill an entire stack of HP Premium 24 lb. Inkjet? You’ve got plenty of ideas, sure, but weaving all those threads together into a colorful and compelling storyline for 120 pages seems an impossible task. You’ve only just begun, and already you feel like Nicholson after 6 weeks in the Overlook Hotel.

If the road ahead seems endless, the problem is you’re thinking too big. You’ve got to think small. A man’s got to know his limitations if he’s going to write for Hollywood.

Learning to limit yourself is the key. Screenplay writing requires understanding the general limitations of the Hollywood movie, wisely choosing the particular limitations of the story you want to tell, then artfully echoing these limitations throughout the movie.

In feature films, creativity springs from thinking inside the box of these limitations.

“The Box” is actually a collection of boxes that are the central structural and thematic reference points for creating your movie. If you choose them with intelligence and purpose, everything you need will be found within them. If you dare to gaze outside these boxes…well,”to a dark place this line of thought will take us.” Just ask Jack.

The first set of boxes are already in place for you. They are the structural boxes that are inherent in the Hollywood movie; in other words, the standard Hollywood Formula. The formula boxes provide the fundamental boundaries of your screenplay and guide you toward the choices you will make. This is the stuff that producers, directors, stars and studios are looking for. When they pick up your script, they expect to see these boxes because this is what Hollywood makes, 90% of the time.

The second set of boxes are the ones that you create specifically for your screenplay. They also will guide you to the choices you’ll make. And when the producers, directors, stars and studios pick up your screenplay, they want to be knocked out by the intelligence, emotional depth and cinematic versatility in your selection of these boxes. These are the boxes that lift the Hollywood Formula out of banality and bromide. They stir the creative impulses inside the above-the-line types, and inspire them to utter those magic words: Yeah…I want to make this!

And the reassuring, wonderful secret of these boxes is: you don’t need a lot of them. A few boxes for characterization, a few boxes for types of scenes to write, a few boxes for specific thematic elements — before you know it, you’ve got what you need to fill up the screenplay.

The final step is repeating and connecting the contents of all your boxes throughout the movie.  The boxes may be few in number, but a screenwriter can keep pulling new things out of them all the time, scene after scene. This echoing effect reinforces all that came before and all that will appear afterwards.

Echoing creates threads and connections that tie the film together in a satisfying way. The audience is searching for these patterns. The audience wants these patterns because this is the way people understand the world.

Human comprehension is formed by identifying and integrating the information we receive. So we look at each piece of data and categorize it, making it fit into the scheme of things we already know. This is how we comprehend data — by weaving it into patterns that make sense to us.

When the audience discovers these patterns in your storyline, their connection with the movie clicks. If you select the right boxes — boxes that echo with significant emotional and intellectual meaning for the audience — then you are giving your audience exactly what they crave. The movie comes to life, vibrating with excitement and inspiration.

It is these threads, connections and patterns that fill up your film, not a multitude of disparate ideas. Everything a screenwriter does is compacted and then linked to other elements of the screenplay as much as possible.

The emotional and intellectual weight of your movie is achieved — not by how broad your vision is — but by how skillfully you can weave just a few simple concepts into a satisfying whole. Movies are about density.

And you achieve density by keeping your thoughts focused on the boxes of your film and echoing their contents, again and again and again. If you let your mind wander beyond these limitations, it is likely you will lose the thread of your storyline, and the creative motor of your movie will sputter and die.

That’s the secret behind working with limitations — they actually free your creativity. If you find it impossible to begin your screenplay, or if you keep hitting writer’s block, most likely the trouble is that you have not limited the choices available to you.

When the screenwriter is faced with unlimited choices, there’s no compelling reason to choose one thing over another. You get stuck. There’s a paralysis of decision-making, and that means the death of the creative process. After all, the creative process – no mater how mysterious and ineffable it may be – always boils down to an explicit decision by the artist. “I choose this idea over that idea.”

When you limit yourself, you’ll find it much easier to make a creative decision. And when you limit yourself to the boxes of the Hollywood Formula, you’ll find it much easier to make the right creative decision.

Now, this advice may seem counter-intuitive. All your life you’ve been taught that creativity lies in thinking outside the box. Creative thinking became synonymous with looking beyond the conceptual framework of the problem. In other words, the opposite of “hackwork,” which simply follows a formula.

This may work well in other areas, but if you want to write for Hollywood, hackwork is called for. Paradoxically, creative thinking begins with embracing the conceptual framework of Hollywood movie-making and finding your inspiration within it.

I say “paradoxically” because creativity is not often associated with limitations and a narrowing of focus. Instead, the creative process is often pictured as a wide-ranging, freewheeling daydream where the mind wanders over a landscape of unlimited possibilities until inspiration strikes and the right idea suddenly appears before you, fully formed, and you simply snag it out of the air. Kinda like this…

Wheee! Creativity!

When it comes to Hollywood movie-making, however, the creative process is the exact opposite. Writing the Hollywood screenplay is a narrowly focused search within the boxes of the Hollywood Formula and the particular boxes of your screenplay. No daydreaming is allowed and wandering is a punishable offense. (The punishment being either an uncompleted screenplay or a screenplay nobody wants to buy.)

The creativity of screenwriting lies in figuring out how to expand and reinforce the few ideas found inside the boxes that make up your movie.

Again, you may rebel at this idea because it sounds too limiting. But the box is deceptive this way. Every well-chosen box is much bigger than it appears from the outside.

If you pick a good box and open it up to reveal its contents, you’d see that a single idea rests inside, but that idea is reflected and refracted endlessly into the same idea seen from many different angles. Kinda like this…

Inside the Box. No smoke…all mirrors.

Each box has only a single idea, but it is echoed in as many ways as possible throughout the film, intersecting with and enhancing the other boxes in your movie. In this way, you deepen and expand each idea to the max, creating patterns and density to your story that the audience responds to. Kinda like this…

Goldfinger is one of my favorite movies, and it’s a great example of how thinking inside the box leads to creative thinking. Here’s a look at how the authors of Goldfinger deliberately set up the echoes and patterns in their storyline, bringing density and completeness to their film.

As with the others movies in the 007 series, Goldfinger has several boxes that are particular to Bond films — the Megalomaniac Villain Box, the Playboy-era “Bond Women” Box, the “Clever Quip after a Kill” Box, and so on. But I’m going to focus on the box most associated with this movie in particular — the Gold Box.

(Throughout the following I speak of the screenwriters as making all the decisions, but the primary source material is, of course, the book by Ian Fleming.)

Even before you enter the theater, the movie poster entices you by pulling its creative inspiration out of the various boxes that make up the film.

The graphic artist who created the poster above had every color imaginable at his disposal, every scene in the movie to pick from and all the words in the English language to create this advertisement. Why did he choose these particular colors, images and text?

Because he limited his thinking to inside the Boxes of the film. He deliberately focused his thoughts on the  structural and thematic elements found in the movie, which guided his creative decisions.

The first box he chose was the Gold Box. With black as his base, and white as his highlight, he limited his color palette to hues suggestive of gold — a deep, rich orange and bright yellow . And he chose the golden girl as his primary image of the poster. Visually, the poster is all about gold.

For scenes in the movie, he again limited his choices by looking inside the Bond Boxes associated with the 007 series — Connery himself, violence and sex. By limiting himself to the boxes strongly associated with Bond pictures, he created a poster that captured the essence of this Bond movie.

The meaning of the text – EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES TURNS TO EXCITEMENT – is also an obvious allusion to gold, as well as a comment on a Box to be expected in a Bond film.

In sum, the artist’s limited color palette and limited Bond boxes in no way compromised the effectiveness of his poster. Quite the opposite, they pointed him towards the right artistic decisions.

At this point, you may be thinking, “Well, yeah…what else was he going to do? It’s a James Bond movie about a villain obsessed with gold.”

Exactly.

Just as it seems obvious that the graphic designer would make these choices, it should be just as obvious to you what choices to make in your own screenplay. 

If it is not obvious what your screenplay choices should be, it’s because you have no boxes, or you aren’t looking inside them, or your boxes are poorly chosen.

When the screenwriters of the film wrote FADE IN: the first thing they reminded themselves was: This is a James Bond movie about a villain obsessed with gold. Everything else in the screenplay flowed from that.

The movie itself begins with a self-contained sequence full of Bond Boxes as 007 completes a mission in a Latin American country. But the Gold Box soon appears, providing inspiration for an unforgettable credit sequence and equally unforgettable theme song.

One of the points I want to emphasize is that creative screenwriting requires connecting and echoing the contents of one box with the contents of other boxes within the film. The title sequence does just that, brilliantly.

In the Goldfinger title sequence, scenes from the movie (featuring the hero, the villain, sex, explosions and gunplay) are projected onto a beautiful, semi-naked golden girl. Here we have the Gold Box intersecting with the Sex and Violence Boxes associated with Bond films in general, and the character Boxes of this film in particular. Gold, sex, violence, hero and villain all work together in this sequence to reinforce the themes of the film. The result is one of the most famous title sequences in movie history…a brilliant visual example of how one box can be made to intersect and reinforce the other boxes of your film.

All this time, of course, Shirley Bassey is belting out the lyrics of the title song.

Golden words he will pour in your ear
But his lies can’t disguise what you fear
For a golden girl knows when he’s kissed her
It’s the kiss of death from Mister

Goldfinger
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold

He loves only gold

Bassey sings of sex, death and gold — the major boxes of the film are all echoed and reinforced in the lyrics of the title song.

Do you sense a pattern here?

After the gold-themed credits, the plot of the movie is set in motion as CIA agent Felix Leiter delivers a message to Bond from M.

Bond is assigned to observe Auric Goldfinger.

The name “Goldfinger,” of course, evokes the story of King Midas, the legendary figure who’s finger-touch turned everything into gold.

Even Goldfinger’s first name “Auric” is a term pertaining to both gold metal and its color. So even something as simple as deciding what to name the villain is solved by looking inside the Gold Box.

And when we get our first glimpse of the villain, he’s decked out in gold — gold shirt, gold ring, gold watch. Even his hair — what’s left of it — is gold. 

With a golden-haired girl as his hired help…

…who dies as the daughter of Midas died, with a touch that turned her to gold.

The naked, golden body of Jill Masterson is one of the most famous images in the whole Bond series.

Why? Because of its Supreme Boxiness.

First, the image of the dead, nearly naked golden girl is found inside many of the boxes that make up the Hollywood Formula:

• it heightens conflict between the two main characters
• it personalizes the conflict
• it establishes that the stakes of the struggle as life and death
• it reveals Goldfinger’s character traits, in this case, cruel indifference and morbid humor

Second, it’s found inside many of the boxes that make up a James Bond picture in particular:

• a woman that Bond makes love to gets killed
• unusual death
• as much sex and nakedness as PG13 will allow
• an over-the-top villain with a streak of megalomania

Third, it’s found inside a box that is particular to this movie:

• The Gold Box

The gold motif doesn’t stop with Masterson’s death, of course. Gold figures directly into the plot.

In a dinner meeting at the Bank of England (holder of Great Britain’s gold reserves), Bond is briefed on his mission by M and others. Goldfinger is smuggling the precious metal out of England. Bond’s assignment is to find out how.  

Bond is given a bar of gold as bait. 

Gold, it seems, is an integral part of the plot…there’s be no Goldfinger without it. With gold front and center in the picture, it’s no wonder that gold is chosen as the story’s primary thematic image. Which provides us with another lesson: your particular boxes must reflect the major themes of the movie.

The next time we see Goldfinger, he is again dressed in golden hues on the links of St. Marks. It seems that movie’s costume designer is always looking inside the Gold Box, too.

Bond has wrangled his way into a golf match with the villain.  James pretends to have gold to sell and, to get Auric’s attention, Bond drops the bar of gold at the man’s feet during the match, just as he’s about to putt.

Bond’s gesture is mischievously designed to break Goldfinger’s concentration.

And now, a terrific, telling moment from the screenplay authors.

Goldfinger eyes the gleaming ingot, but refrains from saying anything. Auric is certainly aware that Bond’s gesture is a bold attempt to rattle him and get his attention at the same time. Goldfinger attempts to act cool…but we see something in the covetous squint of he eye. He says nothing and with the bar beside the hole, Goldfinger calmly lines up a short putt that should drop easily into the cup.

But his putt misses the hole, and it veers off to the right, towards the glittering metal.

Wow! The Gold Box has now been used to establish an important personality trait for the antagonist. Despite his attempt to be cool and in control, the sudden appearance of gold has rattled the man, indicating its significance to him. It’s a clue to the man’s character. The lust for gold has made the villain wealthy and powerful, but it may also be a weakness.

They screenplay authors follow up on this idea, in Goldfinger’s own words:

This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life, I’ve been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I welcome any enterprise that will increase my stock, which is considerable.

The gold, indeed, turns out to be a weakness. Goldfinger plays Bond for the gold bar. It allows Bond to get close to Goldfinger and bug the villain’s Rolls Royce with a homing device, which starts the beginning of Goldfinger’s downfall.

Note that even the color of the villain’s auto echoes Goldfinger’s obsession.

The color of the Rolls makes it fit inside the Gold Box of the movie. But a good screenwriter knows that the quest for patterns and density requires that the writer attempt to place each part of the movie into as many boxes as possible in as many ways as possible.

Such is the case with the Rolls Royce. It turns out that Goldfinger is smuggling his gold out in the body of the Rolls, right under the noses of the authorities. Bond discovers this when he tails the Rolls to Goldfinger’s metal processing plant in Switzerland. The Rolls is not only a golden hue and a symbol of Goldfinger’s wealth, it’s a plot device. This kind of triple-duty is exactly what screenwriters are looking for to bring density to the film and tie different elements together.

Inside the plant, Goldfinger removes the gold from his Rolls and ships it off to the highest bidder. A legitimate bullion dealer, Goldfinger has a metallurgical installation, which uses an industrial laser to cut the metal.

The laser also makes a great torture/killing device for Bond.

One of the boxes of a James Bond movie is to have 007 in physical jeopardy at the hands of the villain. (Parodied so well in the first Austin Powers picture as “an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.”)

The scene of Bond lying on a plate of gold while a laser threatens to cut him in two is another brilliant intersection of boxes — The Gold Box and the Physical Jeopardy Box. It’s also a modern, updated version of the “girl chained to a buzz saw” cliche from old-time melodramas.

Bond is spared death and awakens to find himself held prisoner in Goldfinger’s private plane. The set and costume designers continue to plunder the Gold Box. The plane’s interior is trimmed with gold, and the stewardess is, too.  Even the silverware isn’t silver — it’s gold!

Another Bond Girl, a…ahem…golden-haired Pussy. Who leads…

…another clutch of golden-haired Bond Girls, wearing uniforms accented with gold.

 OK…so you’re a megalomaniac villain obsessed with gold. What would you plan for your greatest criminal enterprise?

Break into Fort Knox, of course. Goldfinger reveals his plan, which comes straight out of the Gold Box.

 But first, a change of clothes into something a little more golden-hued.

Even the color of his mint julep compliments the color of his cuff links and ostentatiously displayed gold ring.

Eventually, the film moves towards the actual break-in of Fort Knox, an iconic location symbolizing America’s most conspicuous concentration of gold.

Do you think the art director stayed up nights worrying what color to paint the knock-out gas bottles?

Neither do I.

That’s one of the points I’m hoping to get across with all this. Once you decide on a box, you’ve also decided many other things about the film.

Page after page, you find that the plot points, character traits, locations, action sequences, and other things your film needs have already been set up for you by the boxes of your film. Whether it’s something minor that only the art director would worry about (“What color for the bottles?”) or something important that elegantly solves a script problem, the answer you’re looking for will be found inside your boxes.

Like this one, below:

If you’re writing about a Bond villain plotting to break into Fort Knox, you need a big, splashy way for him to bust inside. If you were alive in the mid 60s, you’d know that a giant laser is just the thing. Lasers, having only been invented a few years before, were considered exotic hi-tech in those days.

But what about basic storyline credibility? How would Goldfinger acquire such a machine without drawing attention to himself?  You want him to use something over the top because he’s an over the top villain, but you need to establish some sense of reality behind the outlandishness.

This can often be accomplished by simply setting things up beforehand. Lay the groundwork for it, and it becomes more believable. Especially if the groundwork involves a major box of your film.

Which makes me think…haven’t we seen that laser before?

Right! It’s the industrial laser that was used to threaten Bond in Goldfinger’s gold processing plant.

This is exactly type of thread and connection that the screenwriter is looking for. Industrial lasers cut gold. As owner of a metallurgic plant, it makes sense that Goldfinger would have one and it would not draw attention from authorities. The laser is also tied to the plot point of how Goldfinger smuggles his gold. Thus, Bond’s method of torture is tied to the villain’s gold obsession and the plot of the movie.  And finally, the laser is tied to Goldfinger’s plot to break into Fort Knox.  Setting up the laser at the beginning of the film establishes the credibility of using the machine later on. All these screenplay problems were solved by simply looking inside the Gold Box.

Gold is stored in vaults, so the production designer came up with a giant vault door to rival Jack Benny’s for the entrance to the Fort Knox storage bays.

Production designer Ken Adam was told to limit his thinking when creating the Fort Knox stage. The producers gave him the assignment to design a “cathedral of gold.” Do you think that limitation to look inside the Gold Box helped or hurt his creative thinking? The result is below.

I still get chills every time the gleaming, modernistic gold vault is revealed on screen in its full glory. What a fantastic set!

Heaps of gold are stacked within the room. And as Hitchcock said, “I make it a rule to exploit elements that are connected with a character or a location; I would feel that I’d be remiss if I hadn’t made maximum use of those elements.” Which is another way of saying, look inside your boxes for inspiration in every aspect of your movie.

For Hitchcock, that means photographer Jimmy Stewart defends himself with flashbulbs against the villain in Rear Window. For Goldfinger, that means James Bond defending himself by heaving bars of gold against OddJob as they battle hand-to-hand inside Fort Knox.

The screenwriters used Hitchcock’s dictim by exploiting things that are connected to both character and location!

It also means attempting to use the gold bricks to smash open the lock to a ticking atom bomb.

Bond, of course, saves the day. And as 007 wings his way back home, Goldfinger manages to make a final threatening appearance.

Hmmm. I thought The Man with the Golden Gun starred Roger Moore?  Oh well, never waste a good symbol. I imagine the bullets are made of gold, too.

And at the end of it all, a final wave goodbye from a Bond Girl dressed in gold galore.

Alright, let’s review all the ways in which the creators of the movie – limited by thinking inside the Gold Box — decided on various elements of their screenplay.

The Gold Box inspired decisions about marketing, theme music, title design, credit sequence, set design, set dressing, character names, costuming, hairstyling, props, dialogue, character traits, innumerable plot points (such as playing the golf match for gold, smuggling the gold out through the Rolls Royce, breaking into Fort Knox, fighting Odd Job, etc.) an innumerable links to various other Bond Boxes (death, sex, villains, etc.)

I’m sure I’m missing something. Oh, yeah, I just remembered…the putter in Goldfinger’s golf match is made of gold, too. What else am I missing? I’m sure you’ll tell me in comments.

Traditionally, “hack” has the connotation of a mediocre or disdained writer who sticks to formula thinking.

In recent years, however, the word “hack” has acquired a new meaning: “to program a computer in a clever, virtuosic, and wizardly manner.”

Just as a skilled and knowledgeable programmer uses the same code available to everyone to create something new and exciting, a skilled and knowledgeable screenwriter uses the Hollywood Formula, also available to everyone, to create something new and exciting.

That’s the spirit of hackwork I’m recommending in this post. Goldfinger and countless other films from Hollywood prove it can be done. Bad writing is not a problem caused by the Hollywood Formula. It’s a problem caused by the writer not knowing how to make the Formula work for his picture.

The secret to making the Formula work is to limit yourself to the boxes that make up the Formula and your movie in particular.

OK, but what are the Hollywood Formula Boxes? How do you choose Boxes specific to your screenplay? And how do you know you’ve made the right choice? In my next few posts, I’ll take a detailed look at just those problems as I describe what goes through my mind as I gaze into the Boxes and write a screenplay.

See you then!

Previous Heroic Hollywood screenwriting posts are found here, here, and here.

For nearly a century now, Hollywood has inspired generations of Americans with the central truth behind the American Dream: in this country, people are free to choose their own destiny. It’s the moral message found in every film that features the classic Hollywood Hero. Here’s a look at how our movie heroes were shaped by American values, a personal look at how the Hollywood Hero can inspire our lives, and the belief that, despite the rise of explicitly anti-American movies, the Hollywood Hero will continue to ride to the rescue.

The late Stanley Kubrick awakened my interest in films. But it was a one-eyed fat man that launched my career in the movies.

The first time I started thinking about films as something more than Saturday afternoon’s amusement was in 1968 with the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was a Midwestern boy in the 8th grade at the time, and it was the first film I kept thinking about after I left the theater: Who made it? How was it done? What does it mean?

2001 was unconventional, modern filmmaking and I was fascinated by it, discussing it endlessly with friends and family. Yet, as much as I admired and was intrigued by what Kubrick had done, the film held no personal message for me.

The following year, however, I saw a very different type of movie that did have a message…an inspiring call to action that changed my life.

Unlike 2001, this movie was conventional – even retrograde – Hollywood moviemaking and I was ashamed to let anyone know I was going to see it.  As I stood in line at the box-office near my high school, I furtively scanned the crowd, hoping none of my classmates would see me. My social crime? I was about to buy a ticket for a John Wayne movie.

True Grit was released in June of 1969. In those days, we still wore onions on our belts and the “New Hollywood” was just getting started, fueled by the rise of the “New Left.” At that time, the New Left was a catch-all phrase for the youth movement, the counter-culture movement, the anti-war movement…in sum, the entire political shift of the left towards radical social activism. In the 60s, the New Left was a minority, but they understood that influencing the culture was key becoming a majority.
 
Hollywood, of course, was one of their targets. Films that featured heroic figures were replaced by a surge of anti-hero movies such as Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider. In the growing counter-culture, a movie like True Grit was hopelessly old fashioned and out-of-date. Not only did the movie feature John Wayne – considered by New Hollywood to be an embarrassing cultural and political throwback – but the picture was a western.

By 1969, the western, once a staple of Hollywood, had become a threadbare, dying genre fit only for radicalizing, like the shocking bloodlust featured in The Wild Bunch released the same year.  The only other picture with a cowboy I remember from that year was Midnight Cowboy, which tells you a lot about the times!

           This is a cowboy.                                     This is not a cowboy.   

What drew me to the movie that day was actress Kim Darby, who in the newspaper ads looked very much like a girl I had a crush on at the time. It was her I was going to see, not John Wayne. Aside from Darby, I was certain I would hate True Grit, but the movie turned out to be a revelation to me.

The story and characters were terrific, both Wayne’s part as an old, disreputable yet cagey U.S. Marshall called Rooster Cogburn and Darby, who played the part of a girl named Mattie who hires Cogburn to find the man that killed her father. What made them fascinating was that both characters had different moral perspectives, yet the same unyielding strength at the core of their personalities. Rooster was a heavy-drinking, violence-prone lawman, and Mattie was raised as a Christian moralist. The central characteristics of each, however, were perseverance, resolution and courage in the face of danger. Both characters showed true grit in the course of the movie…and it was inspiring to see.

The moral theme of the movie was the importance of fortitude, as reflected in the title. No matter if you were an old man or a young girl, sometimes only fortitude – the strength of mind that enables one to endure adversity with courage – will get you through the rough spots in life. Watching the film was an exhilarating experience, and for the first time it struck me that writing and directing movies was something I’d like to do…and the inspiring message of True Grit gave me the courage to pursue it. Walking out of the theater, I knew I was going to be a filmmaker.

Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch!

But, of course, I couldn’t tell that to anyone. How shameful it would have been to admit to my friends in 1969 that I was inspired by a John Wayne movie. How doubly shameful to admit that I was inspired by a 15-year-old girl! And yet I was inspired, and I wasn’t the only one. At a time when John Wayne and what he represented was considered by many to be corny and embarrassing, True Grit came in at #3 overall at the box office that year and Wayne won a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance.

My point is that nearly everybody – even sophomoric 15 year olds – needs the emotional and ethical inspiration that the dramatic arts offer. When asked about the success of her book, and later hit movie, Seabiscuit, author Laura Hillenbrand said “I think people need to see examples of individuals succeeding in spite of all the obstacles in front of them.”

In other words, people need heroes. In Hollywood, the films that make the most money are usually the ones with just this type of heroic inspiration.

Take a look at the all-time world-wide box office champions here. Nearly every one is a Hollywood movie and nearly every one features a heroic main character who succeeds, despite all the obstacles in front of him. Even the lightweight comedies on the list such as Night at the Museum features a main character who succeeds in changing his life for the better after a heroic showdown with his antagonists.

In the classic sense, a hero is defined as somebody who commits an act of remarkable bravery or who has shown great courage, strength of character, or another admirable quality. In a dramatic sense, the hero is the main character of a story who is “good,” that is, he exhibits some admirable moral quality that relates to the moral theme of the work.

The character doesn’t have to be (although he frequently is) a hero in the classic sense, that is, someone who has remarkable bravery or great courage. But he does have to possess some quality that the author defines as “good” and this “good” quality must impact the choices he makes in the story, ultimately supporting the moral theme of the work. In True Grit, Rooster and Mattie had their faults, but the ethical choices they made – especially the choice of fortitude – achieved their goal of bringing justice to a murderer.

Don’t forget that the author’s purpose of drama is to answer the question What should I do? for the audience. Heroes serve as a clear and vivid example of what the audience should do…and why.

One of the reasons movie heroes move our emotions so strongly is because film is a potent medium for identification, that is, the attribution to yourself of the characteristics of another person. Most films are constructed so that we experience the drama though the eyes of the main character. We get inside the character’s thoughts and emotions, and so we judge things the way the character judges them.

As a result, when heroes like Indiana Jones feels frightened, we feel frightened. When Indy feels angry, we feel angry. When Indy acts bravely, we feel brave. Most dramatic works allow identification with its characters, especially its main character. So it’s not surprising when, after experiencing the same thoughts and emotions as the main character, we understand and agree with the ethical actions and moral conclusions that the character expresses at the end of the story. Identification leads to emulation – this is one of the methods by which the author gets us to agree with the moral theme of the work and to adopt the theme in our own lives.

Cinema seems to heighten our emotional identification because film is paradoxically both highly realistic and highly stylized. On screen, the photographic image of Indy makes him appear real to our eyes, yet he stands two stories high. We can hear him speak just like a real person, yet he has his own theme song whenever he appears. This combination of realism and stylization heightens the emotional impact of film. We feel the bravery of Indy deep inside our hearts in a way that a mere textbook description of bravery could never accomplish.

Now, it is quite possible that anti-heroic films can be inspirational to you, if you live in a culture where anti-heroism is celebrated. From the late 60s to the mid-seventies, large segments in America were in a distinctly anti-heroic mood, thanks to the cultural and political turbulence of the 60s followed by the malaise-ridden, downsized expectations of the 70s. Many films reflected this anti-heroic mood back to their audience with characters and plots that argued that life is absurd, the good times are over and it’s useless to struggle against the collapse of the American Dream. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jimmy Carter!

But this is, after all, America – where anti-heroic inspiration is a passing fad for most people and of enduring interest only to the leftist elite. The need for heroic inspiration re-asserted itself and the spell was finally broken in 1977 with the release of Star Wars. After that, heroes were in fashion, again. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ronald Reagan!

I don’t think it was a coincidence that, in the wake of Jimmy Carter, America embraced as president a figure from the movies who exemplified the iconic American hero: the cowboy. Paraphrasing Yankee Doodle Dandy, Ronald Reagan was the whole darned country squeezed into one pair of cowboy boots.

I have to laugh at European intellectuals who sneer at cowboy movies, and think they insult Americans when they call us “cowboys,” call Bush and Reagan “cowboy” presidents, or complain about a “cowboy foreign policy.”

They don’t get it. They don’t understand that most Americans – indeed, most of the non-elite of the world – love cowboys and what they represent. To be called a cowboy is a compliment. It means heroic qualities such as individualism, integrity, risk taking, strength, courage and…well…fortitude.

 
Even commies like cowboys.
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev meets The Rifleman.

John Wayne was a film star, not only in America, but around the world. His films sold tickets and inspired millions of people in every country where they ran. European films about nihilism or the absurdity of life inspire hardly anyone, which is why there aren’t any Nihilist film stars of comparable fame.

Cowboys hold our imagination because they are the embodiment of the American sense of life. That’s no accident. Hollywood movies were not born in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or the Middle East. They were not born in Canada or Mexico.

They were not even born in Hollywood.

The first “Hollywood” movie was shot 3000 miles away from Hollywood in New York City and in the countryside of New Jersey, in 1903. It was called The Great Train Robbery and it is considered by many to be the world’s first narrative movie.

What made it a Hollywood movie was not the location it was shot, but the moral theme it expressed. It was born in America because, at that time, the people in America were the most likely to express that moral theme. And that first dramatic film was – significantly – a western. Few genres are more up-front about their moral values than the American western.

In an image that startled audiences in 1903, a bad guy
from The Great Train Robbery draws a gun
on the audience and shoots! The effect was
so sensational that nearly 100 years later
the moment was commemorated on a postage stamp.

The film only lasted 10 minutes, but it managed to establish most of the vocabulary of the classic Hollywood western: horses, hold ups, dance halls, posses, shoot-outs – and the beginning vocabulary of classic film technique: parallel editing, location shooting, pan shots and so on.

Just as importantly, however, it established the moral vocabulary of the western and the Hollywood movie in general: good guys, bad guys, the moral choices they make and the consequences of their choices. In short, it created the Hollywood Hero.

When motion pictures were born at the turn of the last century, cinema was viewed as merely a curious novelty. People were entertained by movies the same way they were entertained by jugglers and magic acts. Moving images of trains, waves breaking on the shore, famous people and so on were new and surprising amusements, but nothing more.

Movies did not become a phenomena of mass entertainment until the filmmakers began to tell stories in film. Only then did people become passionate about cinema. That’s because the story contains the stuff we really care about, which means, it’s the stuff we can really get emotional about. Cinema was a new way of creating drama that expanded the vocabulary of storytelling.

Almost from the beginning, and certainly by the mid-1920s, America dominated world cinema. The classic Hollywood Hero was a potent inspirational figure because it represented a unique moral force in the world – American Exceptionalism.

American exceptionlism can been defined as:

…the idea that the Untied States and the American people hold a special place in the world, by offering opportunity and hope for humanity, derived from a unique balance of public and private interests governed by constitutional ideals that are focused on personal and economic freedom.

Freedom is fundamental to American Exceptionalism. The central moral idea of America is that individuals, by right, should be free to choose their own destiny and that the purpose of government is to insure the freedom of individuals.

And freedom is fundamental to the Hollywood Hero. Hollywood filmmaking assumes that the hero has free will. The Hero is presented with numerous moral choices during the course of the movie, just as we are faced with moral choices in life. When he makes the wrong moral choice, things go badly. When he makes the right moral choice…well, things may still go badly and it will be a tough fight, but in the end the good will win out.

The blessings of Freedom are the “opportunity and hope” that America Exceptionalism brings to humanity. And freedom is the inspirational message behind the Hollywood Hero.

As one example, there’s this 2005 shot from a huge protest rally in Beirut after Syria brazenly assassinated a Lebanese politician.

The two things I want you to focus on…er, ah…I mean the one thing I want you to focus on is the sign. It reads “They can take our lives…but they can never take our freedom.”

It is, of course, a quote from this scene in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. And it is one example of how the American movie culture influences politics – not just here in America, but across the globe.

Modern authoritarian leaders from Stalin to Hugo Chavez (aided by their useful idiots) understand the need to control the production of movies within their countries and limit the influence of American films. Why? Because they fear the call to freedom that the Hollywood Hero can inspire in their audiences.

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush believed in American Exceptionalism. Both men believed that freedom can inspire the hearts of all humanity, whether they lived behind the Iron Curtain or the beneath the heel of despotic Arab/Islamic rule.

And what of the current President?

Barack Obama recently traveled overseas and was asked by a reporter if he believed in American Exceptionalism. As he so often does, he tried to please everybody with carefully worded nonsense.

First, he admitted that America has a leading role in the world by virtue of its political principles and past sacrifices. But the politician in him quickly followed up with boilerplate internationalist palavar, saying that Americans should be “humble” and create “partnerships” and “compromise” with other countries. However, he prefaced his remarks with the following, which tips us off to his real state of mind:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Even a cartoon character knows enough to call Barbara Streisand on this political blather. Quoting from The Incredibles:

Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

Obama doesn’t really believe in American Exceptionalism because every nation thinks it is exceptional, which as Dash rightly points out, means nobody is.

For Obama – as it is with all leftists – values are subjective and relative; one nation’s values are as good as another, which is why compromise is always the ultimate virtue. That’s why Obama has no misgivings about “fundamentally transforming” our nation away from it’s traditional American values and towards the values of socialist Europe. It’s better to be just another humble, compromising, partner nation of the G20 than a “shining city upon a hill.”

But even then, he gets it spectacularly wrong when he “suspects” all nations believe in their own exceptionalism.

They don’t. And that’s one of the things that makes America exceptional.

The Pew Research Center conducted a polls of 91,000 people in fifty nations and found that “Three-quarters of Americans say they are proud to be Americans; only one-third of the people in France, Italy, Germany, and Japan give that response about their own countries.”

And more: “Two-thirds of Americans believe that success in life depends on one’s own efforts; only one-third of Europeans say that.”

This is precisely why the Hollywood Hero was not born in France, Italy, Germany or Japan. We Americans take pride in the moral principles that guide our country and the Hollywood Hero is the cinematic expression of these American values. And since we believe that our success in life depends on our own efforts, we give our heroes a Hollywood Ending.

Along with “The American Dream” and “The American Way of Life,” “The Hollywood Ending” is a favorite epithet of intellectuals – both American and European – to heap scorn on the inspirational principles that shape the American experience.

That’s because the Hollywood Ending is the very definition of inspiration. The Hollywood Ending makes us feel that we want to do something and believe that we can do it.

When the guy gets the girl, it’s a Hollywood Ending, and it makes us makes us feel that getting the girl is worthwhile and we can get the girl in our own lives.

When the soldier wins the battle, it’s a Hollywood Ending, and it makes us feel that winning battles is worthwhile and we can win the battles against our enemies.

When Rooster and Mattie bring the killer of Mattie’s father to justice, it’s a Hollywood Ending, and it makes us feel that showing fortitude like Rooster and Mattie is worthwhile and we can call on fortitude in our own lives.

All of these are Hollywood Endings, that is, a story ending where the hero’s moral choices lead logically to happiness. Often the hero is fighting for more than his own personal happiness; he is fighting for the happiness of his loved ones, his friends or his country. And, as is often the case in real life, he will sacrifice himself for the sake of others. The deaths of Walt Kowalski in Gran Tornio and William Wallace in Braveheart are examples of the sacrifices heroes suffer so that others may benefit from freedom. It’s no accident that the final shout of defiance from Wallace before his death – Freedom! – is achieved by the film’s ending. The hero dies, but the audience still gets its Hollywood Ending.

There is one sense in which it is proper to sneer at a Hollywood Ending…when the ending is not justified by what has gone before it, that is, it is not a logical plot outcome. But then, that’s a knock on bad writing, not the Hollywood Ending itself.

The Hollywood Ending is identified with American movie making and American moral values. The Hollywood Ending is a reflection of the basic American optimism. It is not a blind optimism, which is a belief that things will work out no matter what, but it is a pragmatic optimism, which is a belief that things will work out if we apply ourselves towards that end. It’s the difference between an unjustified Hollywood Ending and a justified one.

Americans believe that individuals are efficacious, that is, producing or capable of producing an intended result. Because individuals are efficacious, the main characters are able to influence the outcome of the plot. This is the justification for the Hollywood Ending…because we are free to choose, we are able to influence the course of our lives. This is the central inspiration that the Hollywood Hero and the Hollywood Ending offers.

In many ways, the Hollywood Hero is alive and well today. He may no longer work as a cowboy, but he’s found new employment in dramas, police thrillers, science-fiction and fantasy movies. While modern film heroes often embrace conservative (and I would argue, fundamental) American values, the leftist filmmakers themselves are loath to admit it.  (Remember the “Is Batman Bush?“ debate?) Creating a heroic character whose virtue is fortitude is something people want to see. But it’s hard to create an inspiring hero out of someone who wants to be “humble” and create “partnerships” and “compromise.” There’s Ghandi and…um…well, there’s Ghandi. That’s why leftist screenwriters in Hollywood always talk like Obama in public, but write like Reagan on their scriptwriting word processors.

I believe that Hollywood Hero will continue to thrive because there is something that Hollywood loves and respects more than leftist ideology.

It’s called money. You may have heard of it. 

The producers of Hollywood can read the all-time top-grossing film chart as well as you. They know that the Hollywood Hero is a good bet, and they will continue to back that horse. After all, they won’t get to keep their front lot production bungalow if they keep betting the rent money on last-place anti-America nags like Rendition, Redacted, Syriana, and Stop Loss.

That’s why I’m optimistic about boss Andrew Breitbart’s belief that “The revolution must begin in Hollywood.”  My advice to conservative/libertarian/Republican screenwriters is to simply keep writing the Hollywood Hero, with moral themes that emphasize conservative/libertarian/Republican principles that will inspire the audience. Remember: everyone in Hollywood talks like a socialist, but acts like a capitalist. Use that to your advantage.

Oh, and give your hero a Hollywood Ending…he deserves it, and so does your audience.

Enough theory! Next time, some practical advice on how to write your screenplay.

If you’re a writer struggling to put together a screenplay, but it’s a big mess and you don’t know where to begin, this is the post for you. I’m going to explain the easiest way I know how to bring structure to your screenplay and solve the problems you’re having.

In my last post, I suggested that “doing the right thing is worth the struggle” is a common inspirational message found in many of the most stirring Hollywood movies. However, each individual film has it’s own particular moral theme that it wants to get across to the audience. And it’s this moral theme that will be your guide to figuring out how to solve the problems in your screenplay.

A moral theme is a unifying, ethical idea that both shapes and brings meaning to the story. For the Wizard of Oz the moral theme is: happiness can be found in your own backyard. For Spider-Man the moral theme is: with great power comes great responsibility. For Plan 9 From Outer Space the moral theme is: how many times can I run fake footage of Béla Lugosi and still claim it’s a Béla Lugosi movie?

Now, talk of ethics and morality may have you feeling a bit jittery. Most screenwriters are cautioned early on to avoid grand themes of “good versus evil” in their work because it smacks of pretentiousness. And in a postmodern age where all forms of art seem to favor ironic detachment and ethical ambivalence, nobody wants to be accused of old-school, sentimental moralizing. If nothing else, morals and ethics sound like worthless, airy theorizing and of no practical use in getting words on paper.

But the vast majority of Hollywood movies use characters to tell a story. And these stories exist as a way to answer the question What should I do? for the audience. And storytelling that attempts to answer the question What should I do? will necessarily have to deal with ethics or morality.

The fact is, if you’re writing a Hollywood movie, you’re moralizing. Your only choice is to be a clueless, haphazard moralizer or a purposeful, successful one.

And let me emphasize that word “successful.” The “moral of the story” is not a theoretical afterthought of your screenplay; it’s the most important and practical tool I can think of to get ideas out of your head and onto paper.

And it doesn’t matter what the subject matter of your story is. The subject matter can be just about anything, but it’s the force of the moral theme that will give structure to the story. And if you’re a screenwriter struggling to find a hook for all the characters and scenes you want to write, structure is what you’re looking for.

My dictionary defines structure as the way in which parts are arranged or put together to form a whole and the interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity.

Selecting a moral theme for your movie will suggest how to go about arranging the elements of drama – the conflict, emotion, action and dialogue of your characters – to form the “complex entity” of the story. That’s why selecting a moral theme points the way towards solving many problems for you. It suggests what kind of characters you need, the situations to put them in, how they should act, the progression of their character, their conflict with other characters, the decisions they’ll make, the things that they’ll say and so on. It’s the most helpful way I know to order your thoughts and bring order to the work itself.

Let me give you an example of how a moral theme can structure the story by analyzing Jurassic Park, a film that I don’t really like (except for the T. Rex sequence), but which has a strong moral theme suitable for study.

When author Michael Crichton dreamt up Jurassic Park he imagined scenes of terror and jaw-dropping spectacle as monsters like T. Rex stomped and chomped their way through everyone in their path.

Scenes like the photo above – full of high emotion and stunning, dreamlike imagery – are what movies do best. So the subject matter for Jurassic Park was “rampaging dinosaurs.” That was the central idea that made everyone eager to read the book and see the movie. This is what drew Spielberg and his producers to the material – the thrill of bringing realistic “rampaging dinosaurs’ to life on the screen.

And yet, the book was not simply 300 pages of dinosaurs on a rampage. Likewise, the movie was not a 90-minute special effects sequence of a T. Rex attacking and killing people.

That’s because, although the “rampaging dinosaurs’ are important and will bring the first wave of people to the theater, when people read a book or see a movie, they are looking for something more…they’re looking for a story. And if the story doesn’t engage them, all the stunts and explosions and CGI won’t matter a bit.

So, what exactly is a story? Well, my dictionary defines story as the plot of a narrative or dramatic work.

OK…so what’s a plot? My dictionary defines plot as the main story of a narrative or dramatic work.

Hmmm…I can see we’re not going to make much headway by relying on the dictionary.

Let me instead use the definition of plot developed by the novelist Ayn Rand. She writes that a plot is “a purposeful progression of events…. Such events must be logically connected, each being the outgrowth of the preceding and all leading up to a final climax.”

This is why watching a dinosaur chow down on people for 90 minutes is not a story. There is no “purposeful progression of events” that leads to a climax.

Apparently, Crichton had a number of false starts on the work, and the movie is significantly different from the book. In this analysis, I’ll stick to the Hollywood movie version.

Once Crichton knew that the subject was going to be “rampaging dinosaurs” he was faced with the task of constructing a story out of the subject. Somehow he would have to create a “purposeful progression of events” that lead to a climax.

Where do you begin such a task? What is there that the writer can grab onto that will help him construct the storyline?

As a solid craftsman, Crichton knew that whatever story he constructed, the force that structured the story would be a moral one.

So Crichton began the task of constructing a storyline by thinking about a possible ethical theme of the book, that is, a moral idea he wanted to express; something that he thought people should – or should not – do…all connected, somehow, to rampaging dinosaurs.

As it happened, Crichton didn’t have to think too hard about what that moral idea would be that would shape his story. He fell back on a moral idea that had already been at the root of several of his previous novels and motion pictures. It’s an idea as old as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein…

Man is too ignorant and too immoral to control the destructive forces that high-tech science unleashes on the world when he tampers with nature. Therefore, man should refrain from using high-tech science to tamper with nature.

This is a theme that Crichton has returned to over and over again.

In his later years, Crichton was a welcome voice in the growing skepticism of man-made global warming. But in his early years, his stock-in-trade was cautionary tales of science spinning wildly out of control and killing people.

For example, in Crichton’s novel The Andromeda Strain, the subject was biological warfare. In his book Prey, the subject was nanotechnology. And in The Terminal Man the subject was cybernetics.

Each of these books had a different high-tech science subject but a similar moral theme and storyline – characters working with high technology made ignorant or immoral choices that lead to their work running amok like Frankenstein’s monster, threatening the lives of the scientific creators and innocent bystanders alike.

Could this favorite Crichton theme be applied to ‘rampaging dinosaurs?’ Well, it just so happened that “high-tech science’ is the very thing that got Crichton thinking about dinosaurs in the first place.

Crichton heard about the possibility of finding dinosaur DNA inside the bodies of blood-sucking insects trapped in amber. Scientists speculated that someday it might be possible through genetic engineering of the DNA to bring the dinosaurs back to life.

Bingo! The marriage of “genetic engineering” (high-tech science tampering with nature) and rampaging dinosaurs (destructive forces) was ready made for him.

This is the kind of Eureka! moment that every writer is on the lookout for – suddenly you know that you’ve got a story you can work on. That’s the shaping power that a good theme can bring to a dramatic work – it crystallizes a vague notion into a cast of characters and a solid chain of events.

So, the story of Jurassic Park would be characters making ignorant and immoral choices in genetic engineering, which unleashed destructive forces – i.e., the dinosaurs running amok – and leading to the conclusion that man shouldn’t used high-tech to tamper with nature.

That’s why, although the subject of the movie was about rampaging dinosaurs, the story was about the men who, in Crichton’s view, made the moral mistake of tampering with nature to bring the beasts back to life, creating dangerous monsters.

Now that the shaping theme of the story was set, Crichton had the task of creating characters with the required moral values to take the story where he wanted to go – in other words, to actually show the actions of ignorant and immoral men using technology and letting loose disaster.

Recall that in Rand’s definition of plot, she makes the point that the events in the story are purposeful, logically connected and leading to a climax.

The very nature of a plot imposes a certain structure on your story. This is partly because events in our own lives are purposeful (our actions are goal-oriented), logically connected (“cause and effect” exits in reality) and climactic (our actions either achieve our goals or they don’t). We make sense of our own lives and the lives of others in the same way we that we make sense about the rest of the world – we look for the logic and purpose behind human events. You can play around and have fun with these notions, like Memento does, but by and large Hollywood movies stick to this classic plot structure.

So plots have purpose and logic because they attempt to re-create the reality of human life. But in addition, plots follow purpose and logic because the writer is, in a way, attempting to prove his moral theme by making an argument in favor of it. And good arguments are, by their nature, purposeful and logical.

Screenwriters use the conflicts, emotions, actions and dialogue of their characters – the “elements of drama” – to make their moral arguments. And each of these elements spring from the values and moral code assigned to each character.

That’s why when an author creates his characters, he gives them a value and a moral code that fits the demands of his story/argument. In this sense, his characters are the argument.

Let me put it this way: if Crichton is going to prove that mankind is too ignorant and immoral to tamper with nature, he’s got to create characters who are ignorant and immoral and tampering with nature.

You can’t expect a character whose moral values are shaped by the Sierra Club or Earth First! to act the way Crichton needs. Their code of ethics would forbid them tampering with nature. So you’ve got to come up with characters whose moral values allow them to pursue genetic research.

What kind of men does Crichton need? In the first draft of his work, he used a graduate student. In later drafts, this was changed to business men…men in the business of tampering with nature using genetic research. So it’s not surprising that Crichton creates a Big Business genetics company for his plot to supply people with the moral values he needs to prove his theme.

Part of his theme is that men are too immoral to be allowed to tamper with nature. The “immoral” part of the argument is represented by the character DENNIS NEDRY, who works for In-Gen, the huge corporation that runs the genetics lab and is building Jurassic Park. Conspiring with Nedry is LEWIS DODGSON who works for a genetics company competing with In-Gen. Dodgson pays Nedry to steal dino embryos from the In-Gen lab. Their immoral behavior, born of greed, is a large reason why the beasts escape and start terrorizing the Park.

A lot of writers would be satisfied with what these characters represent – that men are too immoral to be trusted with the responsibilities of genetic research. But Crichton has bigger fish to fry. His moral argument is that man’s basic ignorance also disqualifies him from doing genetic research. So he needs to come up with a character whose ignorance leads to disaster.

That’s why Crichton created the character of JOHN HAMMOND, the wealthy naturalist/showman who is the head of In-Gen, overseeing the entire dino project.

Hammond is portrayed quite sympathetically in the movie. Hammond is written as bright, enthusiastic, generous, creative, and really in love with his dinosaurs. He is dedicated to their welfare. He’s even taken precautions to make sure that they don’t start breeding without him – all the dinos are female.

Add “motherly” to the list of positive qualities the Crichton
uses in his portrayal of Hammond. There’s no doubt about it –
the filmmakers want us to like this guy!

Crichton goes out of his way to make Hammond a sympathetic fellow because he wants to show that even very good people are ignorant of the disasters that await them when they start tampering with nature. So even though Hammond is a good man and has taken precautions, disaster strikes.

The moral argument of the story begins with the actions of Hammond, Nedry and Dodgson. Their values and codes of ethics – the things that guide their actions – made it possible for the dinos to be created and let loose.

And just to make doubly sure that the audience understands that man’s basic ignorance is dangerous, Crichton created the Jeff Goldblum character of IAN MALCOLM.

Malcolm spends a lot of time talking about “chaos theory’ in the movie. My dictionary defines “Chaos theory” as:

“a theory that complex natural systems obey certain rules but are so sensitive that small initial changes can cause unexpected final effects, thus giving an impression of randomness.”

In other words, it is not possible for man to comprehend all the initial conditions of complex natural systems, and that leads to unexpected consequences when tampering with nature – like rampaging dinosaurs!

Crichton decided that this idea needed to be stated explicitly in the film in order to get the theme element of ignorance across. That’s why Malcolm is given lines like:

                                                            MALCOLM
John, the kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even.. dangerously, but and…well, there it is.

He speaks these lines directly to Hammond because Crichton wants to emphasize the clash of values between the two characters.

With lines like these, there’s no mistaking Malcolm’s values; when man thinks he’s smart enough to tamper with nature, monsters start “crashing through barriers. Painfully, maybe even…dangerously.” And, indeed they do, because Crichton wants them to, to make his argument.

The last part of Crichton’s argument is that because of the probability of disaster, “man should refrain from using high-tech science to tamper with nature.”

This is the “moral of the story” that Crichton wants the audience to take home with them. After witnessing several scenes of rampaging dinosaurs, it’s not surprising if the audience is persuaded to see things Crichton’s way. But to really drive home the point, Crichton does something more – he has his character Hammond see the errors of his ways.

During the course of the story, Hammond witnesses the disastrous consequences of his actions and the actions of Nedry and Dodgson, and decides that he needs to re-think his values.

When the movie begins, Hammond is gung-ho for the Park and what it represents. By the end of the movie, however, opening the Park is no longer a value to him.

                                                         GRANT
Mr. Hammond, I’ve decided not to endorse your Park.

                                                        HAMMOND
After careful consideration, Dr. Grant – - so have I.

These are the last spoken words in the screenplay, which is meant to emphasize their importance.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the ways that the author of a drama says to his audience “This is what you should do” or “This is what you should not do” is showing the consequences of the moral decisions of the characters. One of the strongest arguments against acting immorally is that, ultimately, your bad behavior hurts you. Most often, this is true in real life: if you are habitually dishonest, no one will trust you; if you are habitually lazy, no one will hire you.

And one of the strongest arguments for acting morally is that, ultimately, your moral behavior is beneficial to you. Most often, this is true in real life: if you are honest, people will trust you; if you are hard-working, people will hire you.

A rough definition of justice is “getting what you deserve.” By and large, in screenplays the main  characters get what they deserve – for good or ill – because this idea reflects the moral ideal of justice that we strive for. In free societies, it’s generally true that people get what they deserve. It’s up to each one of us whether that’s a blessing or a curse.

In drama, authors often use the death of a character as a consequence of immoral choices. The argument is, “Act immorally in this way and you suffer the ultimate penalty.” In short, they “got what they deserved.”

So who lives and who dies in Jurassic Park? For the most part, it is the people who acted immorally that meet a bad end. In fact, Crichton condemns them to the worst ending I can think of – being eaten alive!

Of the four characters I’ve mentioned, here’s who dies in the film:

And here’s who lives.

Other characters live and die in the film, but let’s just focus on these four.

It’s clear why Crichton chose to kill off Nedry and Dodgson – their immoral deeds sealed their fate. And it’s clear why Malcolm lives – his values and ethical code is rewarded by having him escape death.

But why did Crichton keep Hammond alive until the end of the film? Why wasn’t he killed like the others for his immoral behavior?

There are several reasons. One might be that Hammond’s inability to realize the danger of his ignorance is not quite so bad as the willful malevolence of Nedry and Dodgson. But perhaps the principal reason Crichton kept Hammond alive is because he wanted him to say his final line.

The audience is supposed to think, “Hmmm…if this bright, sympathetic and well-meaning scientist thinks that he was wrong about genetic engineering, then that’s good enough for me!”

And here’s another fact about Hammond that drives home this point. In the book, Hammond is written as a cynical and greedy person. As a result, in the book, he too gets eaten alive by the dinosaurs. But the filmmakers realized it would be better to keep him alive, which meant they had to re-think his character. Changing him to a sympathetic figure was necessary to fit the moral argument they were making and making sure he “gets what he deserves” when he escapes death.

By doing this, Crichton has made his argument much stronger in the mind of his audience by showing a character that the audience likes and respects as changing his mind and admitting he was wrong. It also sends a signal to the audience that they, too, can change their mind about genetic engineering and be saved. So write your Congressman and ban genetically engineered food from the stores! You never know what kind of Frankenstein monster our ignorance is creating!

As you can see, choosing the values and moral code of your characters is critical to the story. It helps define the structure and strongly shapes your characters, dictating their actions, dialogue, emotions and conflicts – the elements of drama you use to make your argument.

John Hammond’s change of values at the end of the movie would make it impossible for him set in motion the same storyline. You need no further proof of this than looking at the storyline of the movie’s sequel: Jurassic Park II: The Lost World.

The sequel begins with Hammond begging his board of directors to shut down the Park and let the dinosaurs be. He’s learned Crichton’s lesson, that man shouldn’t tamper with nature:

                                                     HAMMOND
The hurricane seemed like a disaster at the time, but now I think it was a blessing, nature’s way of freeing those animals from their human confines. Of giving them another chance to survive, but this time as they were meant to, without man’s interference.

But since the storyline for Jurassic Park II isn’t going to go anywhere with that kind of value, Crichton creates the character of Hammond’s nephew, PETER LUDLOW.

Ludlow begins the film by kicking Hammond off the board and taking control of In-Gen. And in case the audience has any doubts about Ludlow’s values, he states them explicitly in the first few pages of the script:

                                                                LUDLOW
This corporation has been bleeding from the throat for four years. You, our board of directors, have sat patiently and listened to ecology lectures while Mr. Hammond signed your checks and spent your money. You have watched your stock drop from seventy-eight and a quarter to nineteen flat with no good end in sight. And all along, we have held a significant product asset that we could have safely harvested and displayed for profit. Enormous profit.

Yep. To get the plot of the second movie going, Crichton once again needs a character who is ignorant and/or immoral and tampering with nature. If he can’t uses Hammond anymore, then he’ll create someone new – and for the liberal sensitivities of Hollywood, what could be more immoral than a man driven by the profit motive?

And if you guess that Ludlow gets eaten for his immorality, you’d be right!

And so it goes. Your choice of characters, their actions and their fates are dictated by the moral argument you’re making. They need to have values that permit them to act in such a way as to prove your argument.

Quite possibly, all this talk about “ethics,” “morality,” “values,” and “argument” may make it seem like every movie should be made into a preachy, moralistic, too-earnest bore. Or it may scare you off and think that you need a degree in moral philosophy before you can begin to write a movie.

But you’ll find that even the most light-hearted of comedies has a moral theme that shapes the story, and you don’t need a doctorate degree to understand it or create your own moral themes. So don’t let all this talk of morality scare you. Not only are you are perfectly capable of handling moral themes in your work, it is essential to creating a successful movie.

Like The Godfather, Jurassic Park is a classic example of a cautionary tale that tells the audience “This is what you should not do.” As a result, there is no clear heroic figure in the movie. Heroes are for stories that say “This is what you should do.” I’ll talk about those stories, next.

I’m going to take the boss at his word that the modest objective of Big Hollywood is “to change the entertainment industry. To make Hollywood something we can believe in – again. In order to give millions of Americans hope.” And further: “Until conservatives, libertarians and Republicans…recognize that (pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary, there will be no victory in this important battle.”

But what is it, culturally, that Hollywood can do that will make us believe in it again and give millions of Americans hope? What is it we can do win the battle for pop culture?

It’s nothing Hollywood hasn’t done before. The only problem is, it’s doing far too little of it lately. Which is a shame, because it’s something that Hollywood does better than anyplace on earth.

Hollywood’s gift to America – and the world – is the Hollywood Hero.

Cue laughter from the Left: “How quaint! How primitive! How typical of lowbrow, right-wing culture! We give our Best Picture awards to nihilist movies like No Country for Old Men and Best Actor awards to anti-heroes like Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. No hope for millions of Americans there!”

And yet, when good films come along with good heroic stars, the box-office goes through the roof – The Dark Night, Ironman and Spider-Man trilogy are obvious examples…and conspicuous shutouts for Best Picture.

There is a thirst for heroic characters in America and throughout the world, yet today’s Hollywood elites only seems comfortable with the idea of heroism in a comic book setting. Screenwriters need to relearn the appeal and necessity of the Hollywood hero in every setting imaginable.

If you are a screenwriter or someone who would like to become a screenwriter, you can be the tip of the spear for changing the leftist culture that Hollywood promotes by writing heroic characters that embody traditional American values.

This post, and I hope several more, is addressed to you. I hope to inspire you to write the kind of heroic characters that will push back against the leftist cultural tide that is the reason for Big Hollywood’s existence.

Many of you have probably taken courses in screenwriting and read several of books on the subject. You know about character arcs, emotional beats, and mid-point reversals. Yet, when it comes to putting words to paper, you falter and don’t know where to begin…or how to finish. The trouble is, you may have been taught how to write screenplays, but you’ve never been taught why.

Believe me – once you understand why, you’ll do everything in your power to figure out how.

So let’s begin. But be warned: you’re about to take writing advice from a screenwriter who’s been kicked out of Hollywood.

Screenwriting is an art. Although an artist can use his work to express any idea or feeling he wishes, there are several key ideas that artists throughout human history have returned to again and again. These ideas are philosophical in nature; that is, they are the fundamental questions of human existence that every culture – and every thinking individual – asks:

What is there?

What am I?

What should I do?

All of these are central issues of human existence, which is why they keep popping up time and time again in the arts.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where the artist Michelangelo attempted to answer all three questions – What is there? What am I? What should I do? – in a single work.

Although artworks such as painting, sculpture and music used to answer each of these questions, screenwriting is especially suited to answering the third question; What should I do?

That’s because screenwriting is a dramatic art. A drama is a composition that uses characters to tell a story – usually involving conflicts and emotions – through action and dialogue.

The author of the story uses the elements of drama as his way of answering the question What should I do? for his audience. He uses them to show by example what people should – or shouldn’t – do.

Storytelling that attempts to answer the question What should I do? will necessarily have to deal with ethics or morality, which is defined as the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group.

When human beings are confronted with a moral choice, i.e., What should I do?, they act in accordance with their values. A value is something we seek to achieve or hold on to. Each man determines for himself what his values are and how to achieve them, leading to his own principles of conduct, often called a code of ethics or a moral code.

Just as every human being has a set of values and a moral code which guides his actions, the screenwriter creates a cast of characters for his story that are also guided by their values and moral code. For the most part, the clash of competing values and different moral codes between the principal characters is what creates the story.

It’s no accident that these two John Travolta posters share a similar image of face-to-face confrontation between the main characters. The advertising agencies know what the public is looking for. The graphics of these posters promise the audience a clash of competing values and different moral codes of the principal characters. In other words…a story!

By showing how his characters deal with moral decisions and their consequences, the author of a story says to his audience, “This is what you should do” or, in a cautionary tale (such as The Godfather), “This is what you should not do.”

At their heart, screenplays are all about the choices that the charters face.

From the Star Wars saga…

“Join me and we can rule the galaxy as father and son.”

…to The Mask of Zorro…

“Now if you want to kill this man, I can help you. I can teach you how…
how to move, how to think, how to take your revenge with honor and live to celebrate it.”

…to The Matrix…

“This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill,
the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes….”

…the characters of drama are faced with important choices. Making a choice is the essence of drama because it is the essence of human life. Gandalf said it best in The Fellowship of the Ring:

All we have to decide is what to do with the time we are given.

Nothing is more important in our lives than deciding what to do with the time we are given, and then acting on our decisions. Our choices are shaped by our values, and our most important choices are shaped by our deepest values.

Yes, we go to the movies for the pretty girl, the big explosion and the booming soundtrack. But the films that we love – the ones we see over and over again – are movies with storylines that touch our deepest values. We know that we need to make the right choices in our lives, and the best movies inspire us to do just that.

Human beings are not born knowing “what to do with the time we are given.” Each man must discover for himself what his moral choices should be. The dramatic arts are a great aid in this most important task because they crystallize abstract moral concepts into a vivid and compelling form – so vivid and compelling that we hold it in our hearts and spirits, not just in our minds. Films like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Casablanca enter our souls because they not only move our emotions intensely, but they move our emotions on the subject that is most important to us…what should I do?

In short, our favorite Hollywood movies inspire us. And they inspire us towards heroic values.

The word “inspire” has several meanings. Inspire means to make someone have a particular strong feeling or reaction. In this sense, the best movies are inspirational because they always provoke strong feelings in us. But inspire also has the meaning of to make someone feel that they want to do something…and can do it.

The best movies are inspiring in both meanings of the word. They not only provoke a strong emotional reaction in us, but this emotion makes us want to do something and believe that we can do it.

If the main character is courageous and determined, then we walk out of the theater feeling courageous and determined, too. If the main character finds love, we believe that we can find love, as well. If struggle and sacrifice achieve a happy ending, then we resolve to struggle and sacrifice to achieve our own happy endings.

In this sense, movies that inspire us make us want to emulate the main character of the story, that is, to strive to equal or match what the character accomplishes.

But more than that, there is an underlying moral theme to most Hollywood movies that accounts for their ability to inspire and emotionally connect with audiences world-wide.

When it comes to the question What should I do?, Hollywood says there are a thousand-and-one ways to answer that question. But, no matter what…

Doing the right thing is worth the struggle.

Life is a struggle. Acting morally can often make the struggle harder for you. But in the end, if you want the good to prevail and receive its blessings for yourself, your family and your nation, you have to do the right thing.

The struggles of life can be discouraging. Art is an antidote to discouragement. People need the encouragement that art offers, in particular, the encouragement that drama offers. We need to know that our choices have meaning, that our choices can make a difference in our lives. We need to know that acting morally is worth the struggle. And that’s what Hollywood movies do. That is the inspiration they give to the audience.

Nowhere are these ideas better expressed than in an amazingly audacious yet moving scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

It’s the scene near the end of the movie where, at the ruins of Osgiliath, Faramir and the Hobbits escape from the clutches of a Ringwraith and his fell beast. Under the spell of the Ring, Frodo attacks Sam, nearly plunging his sword into Sam’s neck before coming to his senses. Totally dispirited, Frodo’s resolve weakens. (In the following, I speak of Tolkien as the author, but the filmmakers altered the material and context.)

FRODO: (slowly and with despair) I can’t do this, Sam.

SAM: (getting up slowly) I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are.

Here, I think Tolkien, through Sam, is summing up the basic problem of human existence: none of us asked to be born into this world, and yet here we are. For good or bad, fair or not, all of us must confront this basic fact of reality…we’re here in this world, and only for the time we are given. And as Gandalf says, while we are here we must decide what to do. There is no escaping our need to make choices.

We can choose to do what we know is wrong, or we can choose to do what we know is right. And our decision to do the right thing can demand a great struggle that may lead us to lose heart and give up the fight to do the right thing. In this scene, Frodo is at the point of giving up…his decision to do the right thing by casting the Ring back into the fire has caused him great hardship and he is losing heart. He wants to stop struggling.

What is Sam’s response to Frodo’s loss of spirit? Sam could answer Frodo is any number of ways, but look at how Tolkien chooses to have Sam reply:

Sam stands and leans against a wall, looking out into the distance.

SAM: It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy?  How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

Out of all the possible things Sam could say at this moment in the story, Tolkien has him speak about…stories.

That Tolkien chooses this moment in the story to speak about…well, stories themselves…indicates the importance he places on the subject at this critical point of the plot, where Frodo says he can’t go on. This is something Tolkien wants us to pay attention to. Stories have something to do with Frodo and his struggle.

Tolkien has Sam look out into the distance as he speaks…not at Frodo. That’s because Sam is not thinking about the present moment. He’s thinking about the past. His own past. He’s remembering the stories he heard in his youth. The “great” stories…”the ones that really mattered.”

The stories that mattered were about darkness and danger. The great stories were about struggles so intense – against forces so strong – that it seemed impossible that the hero would win. How is it possible for the good to win when evil seems so powerful? And even if victory is achieved, was it really worth all the suffering? When listening to the story, the outcome is in doubt…and a happy, Hollywood ending seems impossible. This is what Frodo is thinking now. And those are the stories that Sam is remembering now. He continues:

SAM: But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.

Tolkien is making several points here. First, that Sam has learned from the stories that the darkness can be overcome, no matter how bleak it looks. There can be a happy, Hollywood ending. In Sam’s childhood stories, the heroes won, and the darkness passed. And when the light returned, it illuminated life making it dearer. The stories where the hero prevailed – where light overcame the darkness – are the ones that mattered to Sam. They “meant something.” These are the stories that he remembers now in a time of crisis, not stories where men failed and heroic struggle was useless against the darkness .

Second, even as a young boy, when Sam really didn’t understand intellectually the full meaning of the stories, there was something in them that touched his spirit. This may be Tolkien’s way of expressing the idea that sometimes we understand things emotionally before we understand them intellectually. Dramatic stories can teach us their lessons by our emotional reaction to them. Even at an early age, human beings can understand the necessity for light to overcome the dark, even if they are not intellectually capable of explaining why. That’s why it’s important for the young to be exposed to heroic stories, even though they may not have a clear idea of why it is necessary to struggle against the darkness. They will feel it in their spirit all the same, as Sam did. Now, as an adult who has experienced light and darkness first hand, Sam at last understands the importance of the stories of his youth.

SAM: But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.

These stories of Sam’s youth were all about one thing: what should I do? And the answer was: struggle to do the right thing. Struggle forward, even when it is tempting to turn back, as Frodo is tempted now. Struggle forward, because there is something you hold on to that that makes it worth the struggle.

FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?

SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

Or as another not-so-famous writer once said: doing the right thing is worth the struggle, because it will restore the good.

The purpose of those stories from Sam’s past are for just this moment – when Frodo and Sam are tempted to turn back, they find the strength to continue because of what the stories promise. These stories provide the inspiration necessary to continue. It is an inspiration carried not only in their minds, but in their hearts. Tolkien was confident enough to be able to say to his readers, “Just as it was critical for Sam and Frodo to be inspired by stories, it is critical that you find inspiration in theirs.”

Tolkien knew that men need inspiration. We need to know – in our hearts and minds – that, no matter what the difficulty we face, doing the right thing is worth the struggle.

This is the message of Hollywood movies and this is why we love them. But what, specifically, is the right thing to do?

That’s the message of the Hollywood Hero.

I’ll write about the Hollywood Hero next, if you want. Let me know in the comments below!

From the late 70’s to early 90s I made my living as a Hollywood screenwriter. I’m best known as co-writer of cult film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, which features the seminal punk band The Ramones. 

My writing partner and I worked every day on the set of the film, and we spent a lot of time with the band, including a 22-hour marathon Ramones concert at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. As a souvenir of that day, I still carry around a 40% hearing loss and white-noise tinnitus in both ears. 

Over the years, I’ve been approached by many Ramones fans wanting to know what it was like to work with band members Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Ringo. Of the four, the most interesting, approachable and, yes, intelligent glue-sniffer was Johnny Ramone, and my partner and I would often spend time talking with him about his film collection and our shared affection for Buster Keaton movies. 

One thing Johnny and I didn’t talk about, however, was our shared dislike of liberal politics. I’m not sure exactly how conservative or how socially constrained Johnny felt at the time, but I never heard him say anything of political consequence on the set. And certainly, for most people in the rock music scene, conservatism was the political love that dare not lip-sync its name. 

It was the same way in the movie business, of course. Social networking (of the pre-Facebook kind) was key to finding work, and at a Hollywood party you never deviated from the Hollywood party line or you would be frozen out. Whenever President Reagan was vilified or unilateral nuclear disarmament praised, often in the same breath, I said nothing and let others do the heavy breathing. In my silence, they simply assumed I shared the Hollywood groupthink. I discovered that, even if you don’t believe in modern liberalism, it’s still possible to make all of Hollywood your oyster…but first you need to clam up. 

Johnny Ramone famously came out of his own political shell in 2002 during the Ramones’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While on stage receiving the award, Johnny leaned into the microphone and proclaimed himself a conservative Republican shouting “God bless President Bush and God Bless America!” – a rebel yell in the heart of the (Musicians) Union. 

It must have been a liberating moment for him. 

I not-so-famously came out myself as a radical capitalist a decade earlier when I wrote a politically incorrect screenplay called Global Village Idiot. For me, too, it was a liberating moment, as it freed me from the possibility of making a living in the only business I ever loved. 

The great liberal sin of Global Village Idiot was that it made fun of the environmental movement, and for that I was cast into the Hollywood wilderness, which is roughly east of Normandie Avenue. At the time, environmentalism had officially replaced the “peace” movement as the official religion of Hollywood. This was unsurprising, as the high priests of both religions – such as John McConnell and Hellen Caldicott – were exactly the same. 

At that particular moment, however, Hollywood had just suffered its first defeat in their religious war against the State of California with the electoral failure of Proposition 128, the “Big Green” initiative. 

Cobbled together by environmentalist groups and state legislators such as former SDS radical Tom Hayden, Big Green was a grab for power by leftists who yearned for control of California business and industry by passing the nation’s most stringent environmental regulations. 

Big Green would have included the creation of an Environment Czar with the power to sue any polluter, even the government itself. It was thought by many that Hayden was angling to be the Czar. Unconfirmed sources reported that he appeared giddy at the prospect. Apparently Hayden special-ordered a top hat to wear on the job that said “Czar” on it, but became disillusioned and lost interest in the position when his hat was delivered and the letters mistakenly spelled out “Tsar” instead. But, again, this is unconfirmed and quite possibly invented a few moments ago for comic effect. 

The usual Hollywood celebrities and movie moguls campaigned for the proposition. Chevy Chase, Ted Dansen, Meryl Streep, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Susan Sarandon, and dozens of others made the rounds of fundraising cocktail parties, or shot commercials for Prop 128, or crafted their TV show storylines to support the message of Big Green. 

The Hollywood effort to pass the initiative was spearheaded by Jane Fonda, who was recently divorced from Hayden. It was rumored that, as part of the divorce settlement, Fonda was awarded custody of the hat. 

My screenplay had its own version of Big Green called “Blue Skies,” and it mocked the politicians and Hollywood celebrities who rallied ‘round its cause. 

So yes, I knew the subject matter of Global Village Idiot was a little “touchy” for Hollywood. But I felt I had established myself as a writer; I was selling regularly and for the last 5 years I was represented by a William Morris agent. And it was, after all, just a low-budget comedy film, full of sight gags and dumb jokes. Moreover, the script itself was so good-natured that I was sure Hollywood would take the subject matter in stride and accept it as impish, amiable joshing and all in good fun. 

Yeah…I’m just that stupid. 

The screenplay I handed into my William Morris agent turned out to be a 110-page pink slip. 

I knew I was in trouble when my agent didn’t take my phone calls. Well, actually, even in the best of times he never took my phone calls. He was, after all, a Hollywood agent. But when I finally did connect with him, his terse assessment was that the screenplay stunk and he refused to show it to anyone. A few days after that, I was officially notified that I would no longer be represented by the agency. In later months, I learned that William Morris happened to be of the biggest financial backers of Big Green. 

The reaction of my Hollywood friends was no better. They uniformly hated it, thought I was crazy to have written it, and argued vehemently against its underlying philosophy. 

For more than a year, I attempted to find new representation. My resume opened doors to other agencies, but after I insisted that Global Village Idiot be the script they showed around, the same door was swiftly slammed shut, and they didn’t bother to express the traditional concern about not letting it hit my ass on the way out. 

A good friend of mine, who was also an agent, hated the script as well and refused to handle it, advising that I forget all about my 3-brad bundle of Hollywood Kryptonite and write something else. 

But the damage was done. As a writer, whether you get the next job or not depends in large part on whether you got the previous job. 

It works like this. If you’re a producer, you want a reason to believe that the money you spend on a screenplay will result in financial success. But success relies on talent, and talent is intangible, mysterious and hard to judge. As a result, fear runs rampant through the industry because, as screenwriter William Goldman accurately wrote, “Nobody knows anything.” As a result, few people in Hollywood trust their own judgment. 

Success in the movie business is not only uncertain, but it often seems random and maddeningly ephemeral. So if nobody knows anything, how can you judge whether to take a risk with a particular writer, or actor or director when there are thousands of similar, equally talented people vying for the same job? 

Easy: you depend on the judgment of somebody else. 

If you’ve got talent and someone else has recently spent money on your services, you’re golden. Money changes everything. Executive “A” doesn’t have to justify the reason he hired you because Executive “B” has already given him the best reason there is: somebody believes they can make money with you. So one job leads to the next and that’s how careers get hot. 

Over the next few years, my agent friend kindly represented me on new projects, but the magic mojo power of steady work was gone and I never worked in Hollywood again. 

That was the end of the story for fifteen years, until October of 2005, when I got word of a screenplay contest sponsored by American Film Renaissance. AFR is a film institute that was created by founders Jim and Ellen Hubbard to “promote inspiring and enduring American principles in cinema.” 

Every other year, AFR runs a film festival showcasing films that celebrate the American Spirit, and in 2006 the fest was held in Hollywood. As part of the festival, AFR sponsored the screenplay contest. 

As it happened, Global Village Idiot reflected exactly those enduring American principles. It was pro-capitalist, pro-individualist, pro-freedom – in short, it was pro-American, which is precisely why Hollywood hated it. So I submitted the script. 

On January 1st, 2006 AFR announced ten finalists…and I was one of the Hollywood Ten. 

Two weeks later, I attended the festival for the announcement of the winner. Among the judges were Academy Award nominees Lionel Chetwynd, John Milius and Roger L Simon. Am I allowed to say “man-crush” on this blog? As a bonus, Milius pledged to personally slaughter an ox for the winner. 

That evening, at a theater inside the Hollywood and Highland Center, Ellen Hubbard announced to the crowd that Global Village Idiot won first prize. I received applause and a check for $2,000 which, when pro-rated over my time on the new Hollywood blacklist, worked out to about 35 cents per day in exile. 

Dalton Trumbo did considerably better, and he was a communist. 

For three years after winning the prize, I didn’t do much to promote the script or try to get it produced. What was the point? When it comes to the environmental alarmism, Hollywood is still Hollywood, only more so and with an extra helping of hypocrisy. In a time when they give Academy Awards to Al Gore films and talent agencies boast of their commitment to the environment, what agent would represent it? What studio would make it? 

But the worries and passions that aroused me enough to risk my career all those years ago have only enlarged with time. 

Not letting the current economic crisis go to waste, the Obama administration has plans to regulate business that go beyond Big Green’s wildest dreams. As expected, the EPA has found global warming to be a threat to the public, setting the stage for the regulation of all greenhouse gases, which means a “devastating effect on the economy.” And what Tom Hayden couldn’t get for California, Obama got for the entire nation – an Environment Czar. Surprisingly, she’s a socialist, one of the leaders of a group that called for shrinking the economy to control climate change. When it comes to shrinking the economy, she’s doing a great job! 

No word yet on the hat. 

It wasn’t until I stumbled upon Big Hollywood that it began to dawn on me that other avenues to getting the screenplay seen and produced were opening up. There were like-minded people inside the business raising their voices who might be receptive to the script. And the established Hollywood gatekeepers of agents and script readers, who had been so effective in keeping me out of their offices and off the back lots of Hollywood, might be eluded by going online. 

So the same day I discovered Big Hollywood, I grabbed a domain and started my own site called globalvillageidiot.org. I threw my screenplay online for anyone to see and started blogging about it. 

Things have changed since I was banished from Hollywood. Newspapers such as The Seattle P.I. and the Rocky Mountain News no longer get to decide the news.  And talent agencies such as The William Morris Agency, which claims to be green while servicing the egregious carbon-burning, corporate-jet-and-limousine besotted clients of Hollywood, no longer gets to decide who can read Global Village Idiot. 

We’re at a tipping point now. By growing margins, the public is beginning to see through the global warming alarmism promoted by government and the media. And yet the present administration is on the cusp of pushing through radical changes to our way of life based on that global warming alarmism. 

I’d like to think that a world premiere of Global Village Idiot in the heart of Hollywood might help tip things in the right direction. 

Yeah…I’m just that stupid.