—–

The clear winner is easy. When I heard Clint Eastwood would appear in a car commercial and have a pep talk with America, I expected something a little more light. Maybe they’d use his “Dirty Harry” image in some satirical way. Who knows. But, when the advertisement started playing, the entire room (which was previously filled with talk and laughter and some yelling) went silent. Everyone was glued and listened to every word that slipped from Eastwood’s mouth. It was a pep talk alright. And I say we band together and start a petition to nominate Eastwood for an Oscar for his little pep talk. The second he starts walking towards the screen, he consumes you in his shadow. He speaks from experience and he speaks almost as a godfather to us all. By the end of it I wanted to stand up and salute the flag. It makes one more and more excited to see Eastwood return to the front of the cameras for his next flick.

Coming in a close second would have to be the king of funny: Jerry Seinfeld. He brings the laughs in his car commercial. He never relies upon copying his “Seinfeld” image to bring the laughs. He builds on it and that’s why we love and miss him so much. His dryness and his wit and sometimes overacting are exactly what we want and he gives it to us all in the name of advertising:

—–

Coming in dead last is the advertisement relying completely on the glory days of Matthew Broderick. I love “Ferris Bueller” as much as the next guy, but the reason he and this commercial fail is because they rely completely on that image. They just simply copy act after act and line after line from the movie. It requires nothing and gets nothing in return. Eastwood and Seinfeld gave us new and that’s what we want:

—–

If there’s any meaning to take from these advertisements, it’s this: America misses the old school. We miss real men like Eastwood sitting us down and telling us: “It’s alright sonny. Don’t you worry.” We miss Seinfeld’s wit making us laugh in a genuine way. Nowadays, we are left with Taylor Lautner pretending he’s an action hero and “30 Rock” pretending it’s a hit with America like “Seinfeld.”

We don’t want these guys mimicking their old selves (hence: Matthew Broderick). We want them still rocking the screens and the hearts and minds of America. Yet, Hollywood doesn’t seem to get that we like real men and genuinely funny people.

It’s halftime, Big Hollywood, let’s send them a message.

As chance would have it, less than 12 hours ago,  I watched a documentary looking back on the “Dirty Harry” films where Carnahan said, and I am paraphrasing, “I’m liberal on a lot of things but very much a law and order right-winger.”

That’s all well and good, but I doubt present-day Hollywood has the maturity to tell this story with the same courage of conviction we saw in director Michael Winner’s 1974 genre-masterpiece. For starters, Paul Kersey’s (The Mighty Charles Bronson) vigilantism is shown to work and is portrayed as a solution to a serious crime problem the ineffectual police and liberal courts can’t solve. For emphasis, there’s a wonderful scene where we see how Kersey’s actions inspire everyday people to finally fight back.

Secondly, the Kersey character (a conscientious objector during the Korean War) is made to see up close and personal the cost of his limousine liberalism and haughty pacifism. Intolerant Hollywood giving a character that kind of arc today is inconceivable. In films like the superb 2007 remake of “The Hills Have Eyes,” we’ve seen it. But if you listen to the director’s DVD commentary, you learn it was by accident.

Finally, this first entry in what would become a fantastic five film franchise isn’t like its sequels. Here, Kersey isn’t exacting revenge on the same punks who blew a hole in his family. He’s simply working through his grief and refusing to be a victim through the awesome act of cleaning up the streets and, in the end, he is not at all repentant for his actions.

It’s very hard for me to see today’s immature industry allowing the very thematic elements that made the original (and its sequels) so satisfying to shine through again. My guess is that Carnahan goes back to the original novel, which portrays vigilantism as a more serious problem than the crime it’s meant to solve. That will give all involved the cover necessary to completely screw the remake up.

If you want to see an unapologetic “remake” of “Death Wish,” check out The Mighty Michael Caine’s almost-as-good but just as satisfying “Harry Brown.”

Note to leftists: In real life, I obviously oppose vigilantism. But this is a movie were talking about, and what I am not opposed to is wish-fulfillment or being manipulated by a crowd pleaser.

We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

Stephen Hunter, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Tom Clancy, Frank Miller, James Ellroy, and Andrew Klavan. These are just a handful of names of today’s top fiction writers. All of them have something in common: they have, admittedly, right leaning politics and philosophies. This does not mean that their books are some kind of weird right-wing propaganda. What it means is that their stories usually make the bad guys who the bad guys really are and their heroes don’t shy away from masculinity or righteous indignation. These writers also have something else in common: they are all New York Times bestselling authors. Try out Stephen Hunter’s new novel Soft Target. It’s a hundred times better and more visually striking than any new action film to hit theaters in the last year. Or try Andrew Klavan’s last adult thriller, The Identity Man. It’s more thought-provoking and more well thought out than any half-baked political thriller cooked up by George Clooney. These writers lead the fiction front in literature today. They put out bestsellers that frequently win acclaim from critics.

As for non fiction…now we are really getting to the heart of the beast. Look at the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction and you are bound to see a plethora of conservative thought. While Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham are regularly blasted in the mainstream media, they regularly put out bestsellers. Others do too. In fact, most non-fiction political books that hit shelves are written by conservatives. Why this phenomenon and why now? Is it that conservatives have been turned away by Hollywood so they have retreated to the inner workings of books? Or is it because right-leaning artists and right-leaning thinkers need more than a 90-minute film to bring across a message and/or story?

Perhaps films are more representative of a liberal approach to storytelling, while writing is a more conservative approach. Films are a collected effort. They takes hundreds, if not, thousands of people to create, and usually have a vision that is compromised by too many cooks in the kitchen. Books, on the other hand, are a celebration of individualism. It takes one person to sit and put his vision down. Maybe this is the explanation, but maybe not.

But whatever it may be, this much is true: if you hit up your local bookstore or head over to Amazon, you’ll find a world of old school storytelling and right-leaning stories. John Wayne and his films ain’t dead, they just grew up. They exist in an entirely new world: the world of books.

Check out footage from the latest Tea Party rally and you’ll see people holding signs referencing classics like 1984 by George Orwell and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Check out footage of the latest Occupy Wall Street rally and you’ll see people wearing “V for Vendetta” masks. That says it all.

The latest example of this approach by FX is the new series Justified. Produced by Graham Yost (Speed, Boomtown, The Pacific) and based on a novel by Western and crime novel master Elmore Leonard (“Three-Ten to Yuma,” Mr. Majestyk, Get Shorty, Out of Sight), Justified stars Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood) as a U.S. Marshall, Raylan Givens, exiled to his hometown area in Eastern Kentucky after his questionable killing of a mobster in Miami. 

Givens is a straightforward hero without any phony psychological complexity, which in contemporary crime dramas generally serves to undermine the heroic nature of such characters and suggest that heroism is passé, no longer possible in a world in which moral relativism is not an assumption but somehow has become a fact. This is an important point—note the show’s title. Despite any ironies that may be intended, the implication is clear: there is good, and there is evil, and we are justified in making the distinction and acting on it. That’s what Raylan Givens does.

The Leonard story on which the show was based, “Fire in the Hole,” provided the plot for the show’s pilot episode, and the adaptation followed the original novella precisely (except for the ending). There is one big difference, however: the central interest of “Fire in the Hole” is the depiction of white racist militia elements, especially self-proclaimed Christians, as a major force in the story’s rural Kentucky, setting. “Fire in the Hole” makes strong and continual connections among Christianity, far-right-wing beliefs, racism, and violence, and it emphasizes that the rural Appalachian environment generates violence, ignorance, criminality, contempt for authority, political corruption, and intense dislike for outsiders.

The pilot episode of Justified included those elements but downplayed their importance, concentrating more on the character of Givens and his relationship with childhood friend and subsequent career criminal Boyd Crowder. The latter, played with great skill by Walton Goggins (The Shield), is the leader of a self-styled Christian militia group that is clearly just an exceedingly vicious criminal gang. In the first two episodes, Yost makes sure to establish that the group’s pretensions to patriotism and religious faith are pure sham, and he makes the point much more clearly than Leonard did.

In subsequent episodes this distinction is retained and reinforced, as the villains are not predominantly white, self-professed Christian, redneck evildoers and instead are often outsiders. Thus the show’s depictions of violence and criminality suggest a wider array of motives for human evil and their manifestations than is seen in Leonard’s story.

It’s also worth noting that although there is a good deal of violence in Justified, there is also much intelligent and interesting dialogue. Each episode has at least one scene in which characters converse about fairly deep topics, and each also includes at least one scene of unusually well-written suspense. As is the convention for contemporary TV drama series, the show keeps multiple story lines going, and the writers do an excellent job of spending just enough time on them to keep them going without distracting from the unique central plot elements of each episode.

—–

Exemplifying the show’s variety of crimes and criminals, in episode three, “The Fixer,” the title character, a bookmaker and confidential informant for the Marshalls’ Bureau, is a sneaky manipulator from Brooklyn who can’t stand Kentucky, and a vicious debt-collector and killer he employs is from Detroit. The main homegrown villain is a spoiled rich man who has squandered his parents’ money and is looking to make a big score.

In this as in subsequent episodes, the crooks frequently betray one another. That’s a staple from Leonard’s novels.

Episode four, “Long in the Tooth,” exemplifies this. It takes place in Los Angeles, with a strong contrast between a low-income Latina mother, who is shown expressing gratitude to her dentist for allowing her extra time to make her payments, and an apparently well-off and obviously spoiled twenty-something who wants the dentist to fire his receptionist because she can’t persuade his insurance company to pay for his “semi-elective procedures: my caps and gold crowns.”

In the main storyline, Givens and his partner are trying to find a former mob accountant who is on the run after blowing his witness-protection cover, before his former employers can catch up to him and kill him. In addition, the same mob wants to kill Givens in revenge for the killing in Miami in the first episode of the series. In a particularly effective scene, Givens surprises the two mob hitmen in their car and nonchalantly outlines their options, most of which involve him killing them—very reminiscent of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan in his prime.

Eventually, confronted by the hitmen in the desert, Givens tells the leader of the pair, “You take one more step, and I’ll shoot you.” The mobster does, and Givens shoots him, as promised. The other hitman gets himself shot as well. “I warned you—twice,” says Givens to the dying man. Later, during his escape attempt, Rollie, the former mob accountant, ends up killing a would-be murderer and rapist “coyote.” Rollie ultimately sacrifices his life to save those of girlfriend Mindy and Marshall Givens. As that choice suggests, the characters and their motives are more complex than those of most TV crime drama characters.

Episode five, “The Lord of War and Thunder,” likewise shows a variety of villains and motives. An escaped con Givens is assigned to catch is a local, though not a member of the militia group, and Givens’s elderly father—a career criminal and ne’er-do-well—is presented as both charmingly raffish and frighteningly violent. Another evildoer, small-time drug dealer Perkins, is a transplant from some unnamed urban area who hates Harlan County and the people who live there.

Episode six, “The Collection,” takes place in Cincinnati, where Givens and his boss have been sent to seize the assets of a wealthy art collector who has several paintings allegedly painted by Adolph Hitler but are fakes. The paintings are actually part of a scheme, concocted by the man’s wife, that leads to murder. The main action of the story takes place at the man’s large, expensive house and horse farm. In this episode, Givens very smartly talks himself out of a dangerous situation in which a murderer has a hidden gun aimed at him. Givens also finds out that Crowder has undergone a supposed religious conversion in prison, which Givens is certain is insincere despite the prisoner’s persistent attempts to persuade him.

In “Blind Spot,” once again the worst villains are not lower-class locals. One is a sheriff’s deputy, and the other is a hitman from out of town who expresses open contempt for the locals. The miscreant in “Blowback” is likewise not a local but instead a prisoner in transport who has taken two guards hostage in the Marshalls’ Lexington office. The depiction of this character is quite sophisticated, allowing the viewer to understand his attitudes without condoning his behavior. The episode also visits an ongoing storyline in which the husband of Givens’s ex-wife is in danger from local gangsters of a non-militia, non-redneck variety. This is the main storyline of  the subsequent episode, “Hatless.”

Through all of these stories, Givens dispenses justice with a strong hand and fast gun, emanating a powerful Dirty Harry vibe thanks in good part to Olyphant’s soft, Eastwood-like voice and the casual, confident posture of his lanky frame. Olyphant also adds something of his own to the Eastwood style: a ready and disarming smile, rather reminiscent of John Wayne, in fact.

Also as in the Eastwood tradition, Givens finds himself continually in hot water from his superiors. Unlike the Dirty Harry films, however, in which the tough cop hardly has any life outside his work, Given’s problems in Justified result largely from problems in his personal life, such as a romance with a woman whom he’s supposed to be guarding from killers. That’s typical of contemporary crime dramas, butJustified is distinguished by its unsentimental and realistic depiction of the consequences of those choices.

The show has done well in the ratings, and FX renewed it for a second season last week. Given its intelligent writing, sound values, and smart mixture of appealing elements from previous popular crime drama series, that success is well justified.

–

What is the enduring fascination with a 55-year old flick that stars a fake Japanese reptile stomping Toyko into matchsticks?  The first thing is that Godzilla is a truly entertaining movie.  Actually, it’s two movies.  The version most Americans have seen on TV is the 1956 re-cut version of the 98-minute original Japanese movie, Gojira.  Some American producers decided it could make them a bundle, but it needed a bit of familiarization before the American audience would accept it.  They hired a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr to film some awkward footage as American reporter “Steve Martin,” cut out a lot of draggy filler, and shipped the slimmed down 80-minute final product to drive-ins all over the fruited plain.

Gojira is pretty cool on its own and is available in an awesome DVD collector’s edition (which also includes Godzilla, King of the Monsters).  Gojira is very dark, both literally and figuratively.  Black and white is really the only way to see Godzilla in action, and most of the monster attacks conveniently take place at night.  In the shadows and the flickering flames of the shattered city, you almost forget that it’s a dude in a dinosaur suit.

Under the capable, steady direction of Ishirô Honda, Gojira forgoes subtlety and is a pretty straightforward nuclear weapons allegory.  Godzilla represents the Japanese perception of what they saw as an uncaring, unstoppable and undeserved alien force of remorseless destruction wreaking havoc on their homeland, sort of like the rain of fire that descended upon Japan from American B-29s less than a decade before.

Accordingly, the central visual theme of the film is flame.  It surrounds Godzilla as he smashes through the city, it frames him on the horizon and it literally comes from within him, evoking both the pika don of the A-bomb detonations but also the even more destructive night fire bombing campaign of General Curtis LeMay.  There’s more going on here than just a monster movie – and post-WW2 Americans could not have cared less.

Of course, you don’t need to let this self-pitying revisionism get in the way of your enjoyment of the film.  I had two grandfathers bobbing out in the Pacific waiting to go in with the invasion the A-bombs ensured never happened.  I also served for nearly two decades in the 40^th Infantry Division, which was scheduled to be the first to hit the beaches and probably would have been wiped out on the sand.  Accordingly, my sympathy for the just consequences the Japanese suffered as a result of treacherously starting their brutal, savage war of conquest is distinctly limited.

But the film does provide an interesting insight into the attitude of willful indifference to the facts regarding the war that persists in Japan to this day.  For example, visiting the A-bomb museum in Nagasaki, one must search through the myriad, elaborate displays of destruction and suffering to find the most important thing any such museum might provide to its visitors – context.

Literally squirreled away near the back of the museum, I stumbled upon a small display of pictures.  They were not clearly labeled but it seemed that some were of Japanese-occupied China and one was particularly recognizable to an American – the burning hulk of the USS Arizona.  That was 2002; perhaps things have changed.  But walking out of that museum – or out of Gojira – one might be forgiven for thinking that the Japanese were just sitting around, minding their own business, enjoying some teriyaki and bottles of Asahi Super Dry, when all of a sudden these terrible things happened to them for no conceivable reason.

Sorry, Ishirô – you can try peddling that to somebody else cuz I’m not buying.

And the American producers were wise to cut that silliness out and American-ize Godzilla into something an audience that consisted of many people who had literally been shot at by the Japanese just a few years prior might want to watch.  They removed most of the allegory and, as the trailer shows, they gave Godzilla the full P.T. Barnum treatment, promising – and delivering – “dynamic violence” and “savage action.”

But they left the essential story elements in – Raymond Burr’s crudely inserted scenes simply frame the action and clarify the story so the movie can get right to the landscape-wrecking fun.  The movie starts off with some mysterious events going on out in the Pacific.  You don’t see the big guy at first – you just see shadows, bubbles, flashes, and huge footprints and you hear his legendary roar.  When Godzilla finally shows up in all his glory – the special effects here really are terrific – it’s just awesome.

There are still no laughs – well, no intentional ones – in Godzilla.  The people of Tokyo look and act terrified, and the movie plays the threat of the creature straight.  You see the injured and the dying – it’s not graphic, but the movie does show the figurative fallout of the monster’s rampage.  In the end, one character makes a noble sacrifice that will put a lump in your throat.  And, as with all the best monsters, you sympathize with Godzilla as he meets his fate.  It’s actually quite moving.

Sadly, after Gojira, the Godzilla series followed a regrettable pattern common to great genre flicks.  The first movie is a serious, uncompromising film made by serious people for serious people (but sometimes, as with Godzilla, fully appropriate for and beloved by kids too).  Then the series starts heading south.  Pretty soon your terrifying, mysterious, darkness-swathed wraith becomes a fat guy in a lizard suit wrestling King Kong for laughs in broad daylight.

It happens all the time.  The 1931 classic Frankenstein was a disturbing meditation on man and the limits of science.  By 1948, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was chasing Abbott & Costello around while Dracula and the Wolf Man looked on.  The original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is a very tough, very creepy little horror flick.  I think Freddy Krueger fights Jason in the last sequel.  Or maybe Chucky.  Or Optimus Primus the Transformerzoid.  Who knows?  Who cares?

I haven’t seen any other Godzilla films in years, and it appears I have not missed much.  The movies reached their nadir after 1969’s Godzilla’s Revenge, where the big guy stopped stomping cities and started helping out lonely latch-key children.  Yawn.  From its very loud, very explodey trailer, 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars looks more like Godzilla v. The Matrix.

And don’t even mention the awful 1998 re-boot.  The new Godzilla featured a redesigned, doofy-looking monster plus some transplanted pseudo-raptors ripped-off from Jurassic Park chasing Matthew Broderick all over Manhattan.  This only reinforced one of the five key principles that guide my life – never see a movie starring Matthew Broderick that does not also feature Ben Stein.  Well, to be fair, Glory is pretty badass too – and itself no doubt a future “Movie We Like.”

Now, that is not to say that the later Godzilla films do not provide their guilty pleasures.  Godzilla v. The Thing (1964) is a lot of fun.  For some reason, a few years ago they insisted on re-titling it Godzilla v. Mothra, but to those of us who, in the 70’s, waited up late for Creature Features to see it, it will always be known by its original TV moniker.  And, as a bonus, it features the miniature Mothra twins’ ear-melting Mothra song.  And some of Godzilla’s later antics have a kind of goofy charm:

Another delightful Godzilla-related musical interlude is provided by the mind-boggling tune Save the Earth from 1971’s terrible, terrible Godzilla v. The Smog Monster. This is the one where Godzilla battles what appears to be a sentient, flying cow pie.  The song is the true lowlight.  It’s this combination of over-earnest 70’s enviro-nonsense and 60’s Japanopop that is mistranslated into English and served up for your listening pleasure.  You can almost see Al Gore sitting alone in his mansion, nodding his head, grinning, and snapping his fingers to its big beat as he gazes upon his Oscar and Nobel Prize.

Forget the rest of the series.  Stick with the original – okay, the second original.  Godzilla, King of the Monsters is a terrific 80-minute thrill ride mercifully free of the kind of clichéd movie industry nonsense that ruins so many movies today.  There’s no nauseating shaky-cam, the shots last longer than 0.35 seconds, and the whole thing is just plain cool.  The kids dug it big time.  Plus there’s a guy in a rubber dinosaur costume smashing up Tokyo who represents the awesome, righteous wrath of the American people – what’s not to like?

Conservative’s favorite vigilantes know that no justice system is perfect just like “Dirty Harry” Callahan knows there is no time for due process when people’s lives are at stake. These heroes always draw a distinct line between good and evil, and we trust them to do the right thing.

Watchmen, which was recently released on DVD, gives us a darker view of our heroes. It suggests that maybe we shouldn’t trust them, and takes a very cynical view of the fight of good versus evil. The characters are pitched as superheroes but most of them are as human as any of us.

The film takes place in a fictional 1985 where Richard Nixon is still the president. Over the years, “watchmen” had been working with the government to keep the world a safe place but eventually became outlawed. While President Nixon is trying to avoid nuclear warfare with the soviets, some “watchmen” see a world that is not worth saving anymore while others continue to operate as vigilantes.

The story is driven by the murder of Edward Blake/The Comedian (Jeffery Dean Morgan), who was a cynical hero who felt that there was no point to fighting anymore. Blake represents the kind of “reality of heroism” that liberals want to push on the rest of us. Too often it seems that they feel there are no truly good people or heroes.

Edward Blake was the most corrupt superhero, with a past of heartless murder of women and children. Once he realized there was a plan in place to kill thousands of innocent people to save millions, he decided to right his past by alerting his fellow “watchmen.” This decision ultimately leads to his murder.

The hunt for Blake’s murderer was spearheaded by Walter Kovacs/Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), who refused to give up the fight for the greater good. He has zero tolerance for those who are soft on crime, often complaining about “liberal sensibilities.” In one scene he confronts a man who murdered and hacked up a child. When the man admits his crime and says “Take me in. I need help,” Rorschach puts a meat cleaver through his skull.

Some characters fell out of the crime fighting business because they managed to lose faith in humans as well as their own ability to rid the world of evil. This explains why the diegetic world is so dark and corrupt and also shows us what the world will be if criminals continue to be treated like victims.

Parts of this story do not want us to look up at any one person or group to “save us.” The original graphic novel was written as a critique to those looking up at Ronald Reagan as a superhero. Ironically, the same critique can be placed towards those who look up at President Obama as some sort of all knowing producer of good.

Most certainly a conservative’s favorite character will be Rorschach, whose actions are anything but soft on crime. He is programmed to fight evil, both foreign and domestic. Rorschach eventually sacrificed himself since he could not live with the decision to sacrifice thousands to save millions.

In the end, the “watchmen” decide to let the plan continue, or else the end result will surely be a nuclear apocalypse. This decision was a tough one and was in no way one of self interest. Regardless, film still tries to leave us questioning our heroes on some level.

Of course, anyone who believes the world has no heroes is looking through a polarized lens. There actually are people who fight for good and succeed. The USA hasn’t had a terrorist attack since 2001, and that is because we have our own heroes fighting for the greater good of the free world both here and abroad.

We don’t have one single hero, but rather hundreds of thousands of them. They are at every military base, fire station, police station, and every other institution that helps keep us safe every day. Without them, we would live in the dystopic world that occurs in the film once “watchmen” are outlawed.

Obviously no one is perfect and we all have flaws, but I want to believe that most of us know the difference between good and evil. The line between the two is not always blurred, like those on the left want you to think. Certain elements of Watchmen want us to believe the world is not worth fighting for, however, it most certainly is.

I wrote about this two years ago, just when Hasbro and Paramount execs decided to give GI Joe a makeover. Back then they felt the world would be too pissed at us for getting rid of Saddam Hussein to go see a movie about an American hero. As it turns out, they were wrong – the backlash over Saddam’s death had less impact than Norman Fell’s.

But for a moment, let’s attempt to use Donny’s logic on other flicks. “Sex and the City,” my favorite film – made a pile of money around the world, and it was about five American chicks exercising their rights to both unfettered capitalism and sex. According to Deutsch, it would have been better to make them all multi-racial, transgendered dolphins – and stationed them in Brussels in a cool undersea condo shaped like Earth. Granted, that does sound awesome – but it probably would have been less successful than the original concept (which made me cry).

Fact is, our mainstream media feels awkward about anything “American,” and finds the idea of an international force (made up of everybody!) stamping out evil far more palatable than America running the show. But hey, that fantasy doesn’t exist – and if it ever did, Americans would have to run it.

The ugly truth: the world loves America more than MSNBC talking heads are willing to admit. And they like our heroes even more: our Rambos, John McClanes, Supermans, Dirty Harrys and Charlotte Yorks. We make great heroes, because our country is full of them.

Unlike MSNBC.

They’re just full of it.

Tonight we’ve got: Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, comedian Paul Mercurio and Patti Ann Browne. Plus more junk!

People, this is OUR Fortress Hollywood! This is OUR sanctuary! Since when the hell do we care about what demagogues like Keith Olbermann think or say? Or any other mental tinfoil hat Lefties like Garofalo for that matter? It’s like Churchill worrying about Hitler calling him a fat cigar-chomping drunk! Who won that fight, and why? And who was in the right, despite all the insipid name-calling?

Time to grow a pair, people. It’s also time to raise the stakes. Now, I’ve heard from some contributors here at BH that it is really bad in Hollywood in places. That people might even lose their jobs if they spoke up like I do here. If true, that’s McCarthyism at its worst. Fortunately, that’s not my experience. I still have great relationships with people in the biz who could care less about politics. All they care about is finding great scripts or literary works to adapt, and telling great stories on film.

And that is where the battle really needs to be fought: on their playing ground. An insurgency of ideas, if you will. Example. Just under the Big Hollywood sign today, I saw the banner “TNT’s ‘The Closer’ Thrives on Strong Moral Foundation.” That PJM-linked article describes how The Closer, a show that portrays the border, the illegals situation, and even the cops themselves in very gritty and realistic fashion, is the top-rated scripted show on ad-supported cable since its inception.

The Pajamas Media reviewer, Jim Kearney, finished off his glowing review with this statement:

Perhaps if we spent more time following positive stories about law enforcement professionals, it would elevate consciousness and support for crime fighters in our culture.

Bingo! Give that man a Kewpie doll! Because he just threw down the same gauntlet I’m about to throw down to all of you conservative creative types, and it extends far beyond just cop stories. Screw what Lefties think! No changing minds there. But we conservatives believe what we believe for good reasons. In fact, only 21% of Americans identify themselves as liberal, the majority conservative. That’s a lot of box office just waiting to be tapped.

We conservatives need to address our talents not only to making better films than Hollywood Lefties do, but better films than anyone. The foundations are already there. How we can succeed in Hollywood, and reel ‘em in at the box office, is by telling great compelling stories with universal themes that in and of themselves advance our values systems, like the aformentioned The Closer. In the end, Hollywood is a business. If You Write It, They Will Come. Box office talks and BS walks.

The story should always come first. It is great compelling stories that should drive a film’s politics, not the other way around. That is the big mistake Hollywood Lefties make, and why they bomb so badly with politically-motivated films. The best way we can succeed is with desperately compelling stories that demand to be told. Success is the best revenge. And with the best stories, the morality and politics are already embedded. Just like Geraldo Rivera in Iraq, remember?

Examples. Even today Ben Hur, which still ranks #13 all-time in adjusted dollars, retains wide and astonishing popularity fifty years on. The other Biblical Charlton Heston classic, the Demille-directed Ten Commandments, is holding steady at #5 all-time adjusted. It also remains a very popular film. The over-the-top success of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, a film project every major studio in Hollywood turned its collective noses up at, is confirmation that there is still a huge religious market just waiting to spend their money on great moral Biblically-themed films.

If they’re done right. They must first and foremost be great compelling stories with universal themes.

The irony here is, I am not a religious person. But my Dad was a Baptist deacon, and I know vast swaths of the Bible inside out. And I LOVE Ben Hur! Who doesn’t? From purely business and film perspectives, I see great stories there just waiting to be told. But they have to be told in the right way. Ben Hur, despite its Biblical underpinnings, is perhaps the greatest epic revenge tale of all time. Who didn’t pump their fists when Massalah fell under his chariot and got trampled underfoot?

Ultimately, films should reveal their morality without being preachy. Ben Hur does not advocate conversion to Christianity. Nor does Passion of the Christ. But what both of those extraordinarily successful films share is great storytelling in a moral Biblical context. Story is all. In the framework of great marketable stories, we can advance our ideals of, say, true lifelong romance as opposed to freestyle sex. Huge market. Harlequin didn’t become the mega-empire it is today by promoting the zipless fuck. They did it by tapping into every woman’s deep inner yearning for True Romance.

In short, the best films don’t preach. They don’t even tell. They throw moral monkey wrenches at us during moments of extreme conflict. They make we, the audience, judge and jury. To me, the best dramatic films are morally ambiguous in the extreme. A Clockwork Orange, for example. Kubrick just threw it all in our faces and left us to ponder all the dark moral conundrums. The moral dividing line in film, as I see it, isn’t right and left. It’s right and wrong. Even between very wrong and evilly wrong.

Examples. What would you do differently as Denzel Washington’s John Creasey character in Man On Fire? Or Dirty Harry? Or Liam Neeson in Taken? Or Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle character in The French Connection, with New York about to be flooded with potentially fatal high-grade heroin? Would you push the envelope of the law as Popeye did? Perhaps most relevant to today, and which fellow BH contributor Matt Patterson so eloquently examined in his post The Dark Knight: Year One, what would you NOT do to stop Heath Ledger’s Satanic megalomaniac Joker?

Isn’t even American Gangster an epic American tale of good and evil? Super Cop vs. Superfly? Even Pulp Fiction, as decadent as all the characters in that brilliant film are, contains a gritty street morality we can all understand, as does The Shield. And what gritty gin-soaked smoke-clouded morality could possibly be higher than that of Casablanca? Yet I also believe that most of those films, not by design but by default, actually advocate the conservative position of imperfect people making tough, often distasteful decisions, and taking violent action with resolute determination when necessary.

All of those films and TV shows I’ve listed are populated with dark, troubled anti-heroes who make very unsavory choices, and aren’t necessarily people we’d want marrying our daughters. Yet in each case, varying degrees of evil are put side by side, and we are left to decide which is the lesser. If you are repulsed by, but deep-down agree with, the brutal actions of such outside-the-law characters as Vic Mackey, Dirty Harry and John Creasey, and what they do to enact vengeance and street justice on the slimiest of perps to either save or avenge their victims, you just might be a conservative.

By contrast, do you really think many Lefties, especially the ACLU, would have given Bruce Wayne the same slack on omniscient cellphone monitoring, no matter what the threat, as Lucius Fox gave Batman to take down the Joker, however personally unpleasant that choice was to Mr. Fox? Or given The Shield’s Vic Mackey the green light to pummel a sick child molester to find out where Dr. Perv had a young girl locked away and possibly dying?

Or given Man On Fire’s John Creasey carte blanche to jam a C-4 Easter egg up a corrupt Mexican cop’s ass in order to extract information on the kidnapping and presumed murder of Dakota Fanning’s Pita Ramos? Ya, as if! Yet in all those cases, those characters get right in our faces and demand of us, “what would YOU do in this situation?”

Sometimes the questions themselves are way more important than any answers. In fact, sometimes the questions ARE the point. The greatest, most compelling stories have moralities and politics all their own and tell us what they are, not by preaching or shoving the answers in our faces, but by raising troubling questions that force us to ask, “what would we do?”

Even in comedy, there is a deep morality in Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin pounding the crap out of the Ayatollah Khomeini and wiping the birthmark off Gorbachev’s forehead in Naked Gun, or Stewie giving Osama bin Laden a Naked Gun-like beatdown in Family Guy. But that morality is just a side benefit of writing great comedy that everybody gets deep-down, like Team America: World Police. It’s the ultimate in vicarious fun. What Americans, besides Lefties, wouldn’t want to do all that?

The larger point here being, we should always strive to make the best movies and documentaries possible that expound on and examine closely our ideas and values as conservative Americans, without actually expounding on or examining them. Just present the story, the facts and the evidence, and all else follows. It’s the Art of Fighting Without Fighting, as Bruce Lee so eloquently put it.

A lot of great compelling stories for documentaries, too. The Iraqi national soccer team, once tortured, now heroes. Played their first home game in Iraq last week since the Saddam era. Was a smash hit. A great human interest story, with political overtones that go way beyond soccer. If they lose now, they’re still heroes. As opposed to Uday Hussein making them kick concrete soccer balls.

For much darker subjects, there is the ethnic cleansing of black Americans from LA neighborhoods by illegal racist Mexican gangs. Of how Los Zetas and the drug cartels now control and use our southern border like the Taliban and Al Qaeda use Pakistan’s. Or how Phoenix is now the second-ranking kidnapping capitol of the world, behind only Mexico City. Again, all you have to do is present the ugly stories on the ground and let the viewers decide. The human stories drive the politics, see?

Another great doc subject would be Iran’s Green Revolution and the regime’s iron-fisted response. I would include in such a documentary the fate of the dead and imprisoned protesters, the role of modern technology in fostering a democratic uprising in a fascist state, and how it all symbolizes the eternal struggle between those who seek freedom, and those who seek to crush it to remain in power. But it is the personal accounts and tragedies that should reveal its morality, not a narrator.

As to purely feature films, I am very much looking forward to the upcoming Lone Survivor hitting theaters. Peter Berg, who is slated to direct the project for Universal, seems a most capable director, and the producers can’t fail if they stick to what made Lone Survivor a huge bestseller. In other words, if they just tell the story and leave politics out of it. That said, I sure would have liked to have seen what Spielberg and Michael Bay could have done with that story on film.

Inglourious Basterds is also high on my must-see list this summer. Makes a nice bloody contrast to all that liberal Lefty nailbiting about CIA hit teams lately. What’s the big problem there, anyway? I LOVED the Dirty Dozen! Looked like a plan. Why shouldn’t we unleash all our condemned Maggotts on Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in exchange for a shot at freedom? Liberals are such pussies!

Lastly, being conservative doesn’t mean being a stuffed-shirt Polly Prim. I’m as rude and raunchy a bastard as they come, just like Mozart. Six years Navy, okay? My writing reflects that. For those of you out in BigHollywoodLand who took such offense at my taking the name of the Lord in vain, you’re in the wrong place. Now, I don’t curse just to offend. But like my idol Gen. George S. Patton Jr., when I want it to stick, I give it to ‘em loud and dirty. Just like my Baptist deacon Dad did behind the wheel.

But just as you can tell a very high moral tale by creating a landscape of pure evil and forcing characters to make desperate and irrevocable choices, you can also tell a story with a romantic or moral heart with the crudest humor and language imaginable. Wedding Crashers, anyone? By the way, Rotten Tomatoes favorably reviews Wedding Crashers as “both raunchy and sweet.”

I rest my case.

I am fully on the same page with one scribe who said, “I write extreme right-wing material with extremely raunchy language.” I could have been looking in a mirror when I read that. But in the end, it’s all about great films and great stories. Yet all the greats have contained within them important moral and political themes and parables, be it A Bugs’s Life or Taken.

By writing or adapting great stories that contain within them the core values we as conservatives believe, as do most Americans, we can take control of the fight. If we’re lucky, control of the box office, too. Far more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. We have a distinct advantage. We can wage our insurgency of ideas within the system. And we can do it with great stories in so subtle a way even Hollywood Lefties wouldn’t know they’re making a conservative-themed film. Best of all, they won’t even care if the story’s a total can’t-miss winner.

A lot of it starts with conservative writers like me, or like-minded producers and other Hollywood professionals choosing great stories to adapt from existing literary works or screenplays, and pushing hard until they’re made. The Stoning of Soraya M. is one good example. The Passion of the Christ is perhaps the gold standard. No major studio in Hollywood would touch it, but who was right? The studios or Mel Gibson? Whose minds were closed there?

Most important, who laughed all the way to the bank? Box office talks and BS walks, and I believe there is a ton of box office yet to be reaped from some great stories that are just dying to be made. So if I don’t show up here at Big Hollywood for awhile, y’all know what I’m doin’. Break a leg, All!

P.S. As an entertaining aside I’ve just discovered, it seems the founder of Air America is on the same page as Rush Limbaugh when it comes to the Orwellian Fairness Doctrine.

Hope Springs Eternal

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.

Sure some of the shots taken at Michael Moore are cheap, but to you I say; Let he who is without disdain for the man, fire the first round.