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.

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.