Today, over at the hard-left film site Movieline (a site that eagerly participated in the grossly dishonest character assassination and attempted blacklisting of conservative musician Jonathan Kahn), famed screenwriting teacher Robert McKee responds to Big Hollywood’s Ann McElhinney. For those of you who might have missed her terrific piece, I personally read it as a warning to anyone not a wild-eyed, narcissistic, America-bashing, religious bigot, that for the price (you pay) of $745, Mr. McKee believes he’s earned the right to prove he is one throughout a very expensive screenwriting course.

Anyway, brought to you by one of left-wing Hollywood’s chief Palace Guards and water carriers, S.T. VanAirsdale, here’s the unsurprising response from McKee, someone with a seemingly bottomless well of ego (we’re groupies?) and insecurities (really, we’re groupies?) who insults his students with unadvertised (at least until now) political sucker punches and then literally tells them to “fuck off” if they don’t like it:

Movieline:

Earlier this week, a contributor to the right-wing film and culture Web site Big Hollywood offered up the delightfully titled tale, “For $745 You Too Can Be Insulted By Famed Hollywood Screenwriting Teacher Robert McKee.” Author Ann McElhinney proceeded to recount her time in McKee’s celebrated (and, indeed, expensive) story seminar last October, time reportedly spent chafing under the instructor’s prodigious use of profanity, social criticism, “Bush bashing” and other liberal bloviation. A torrent of conservative bile followed in the site’s comments. Of course, anyone who’s seen Adaptation, featuring Brian Cox as the legendary — and legendarily irascible — writing mentor, could have warned McElhinney of at least some pedagogical turbulence ahead. So Movieline asked McKee on Wednesday: What, if anything, went wrong here?

In a nutshell: Nothing.

“These kinds of people always make me nervous, because they’re right on the edge of being a groupie,” McKee said. “Their fascination with me, my personality, my life, my feelings, my ambitions and whatnot really is misplaced. What they really should be there for is to take notes on their own writing. And instead they do some sort of biographical study of me, and I’m wondering, ‘Why were they there?’ If I’m the most fascinating thing they encountered, and not the ideas in the lecture, then maybe their heart’s not in the right place to begin with.”

McElhinney did find plenty to note in McKee’s lecture, cataloging a succession of claims like “1/3 of all women will suffer sexual abuse in their lives” (“Yeah, that’s research,” McKee told me. “That’s a fact.”), “Everybody hates everybody in the US” (“Yeah. They do”), and “Columbus killed 5 million Indians, it was genocide, chopped up Indians to feed to their dogs, we killed them because we were Christians and they were heathen.” (“I didn’t pull that out of the air,” he elaborated. “When I say it’s a fact, it’s something that I’ve read in my research of other projects. I came across the Haitian genocide by Columbus and his crew.”) McKee cited, then laughed off, his attributed “Conservatives have famously thin skins” claim from memory.

More specifically, it’s you and the other 69% or so of American citizens who agree that we should have a say in who does and doesn’t come into our country by enforcing our immigration laws.  There’s been a lot written about the race war angle of Machete, including a lot of back-pedaling from writer/director Robert Rodriguez himself.  But it’s hard to see this script as anything but a sick MEChA-approved fantasy in which every Anglo man is a slobbering borderline savage who tortures Mexicans when not slaughtering them outright, and every Anglo woman a nymphomaniac yearning to strip down and have a crack at our hero Machete’s macho Mexican manhood.

—–

Perhaps Rodriguez isn’t making an explicit plea for racial warfare, but Rodriguez’s crude racial stereotypes make Hitler’s Der Stürmer propaganda look like a subtle, sophisticated and affectionate commentary on Jewish culture.  The script does not bat an eye as Machete butchers nearly every Anglo, innocent or “guilty,” who is unfortunate enough to cross his path.  In the end, there is no doubt that Rodriguez is making the most overtly, outrageously and unrepentantly racist film in modern Hollywood history.

But Rodriguez does deserve props for one thing – in purely technical terms, this is one of the best-written scripts I’ve ever seen.  It is vivid, coherent and flows smoothly, unlike the majority of unreadable Final Draft failures out there.  There is not an ounce of flab.  The “jokes” mostly fall flat, but Rodriguez will likely direct it with flair and style.  It’s just too bad this movie combines the racial insights of a 1942 Robert Byrd with the collective moral sense of Enron’s Board of Directors.

Okay, the plot. The movie started as a fake trailer inside the largely unseen Grindhouse.  It’s been expanded to fill 98 minutes, largely through the addition of more explosions, more bloodshed, and more breasts.  Machete is a Mexican federale who gets sold out and left for dead by his compadres.  Working as an illegal day laborer, an American business man pays him to kill a senator because the senator wants to ship the illegals home and all American businesses – in this fantasy world – run solely on illegal labor.  Machete again gets sold out and left for dead by his compadres, which seems to be a theme, and promptly goes on a killing spree against pretty much everyone.  Also, many, many girls shed their clothes.  The end.

The cast is pretty solid for such a sordid little flick.  Danny Trejo is Machete, and I’m hard-pressed to begrudge this great supporting actor the chance to headline a major movie because I think it is a moral sewer.  If that was the test, pretty much no one in Hollywood would be headlining anything.  Every casting director’s inexplicable go-to “tough girl” Michelle Rodriguez is in it, playing the same boring character she’s played in every other role she’s ever done.  When it comes to always playing the same character she’s just like Michael Cera, except more masculine.

Jessica Alba is as beautiful as she is mindless and left-wing in real life.  And she is very, very beautiful.  Another lefty, Robert De Niro, fritters away still more of the nearly infinite goodwill he earned from Heat in yet another crummy role, this one as the red-neck, immigrant-hating senator.  Does Bobby owe his bookie or something?

You should know that the script’s unremitting violence is truly horrifying.  If this movie is even remotely faithful to the script, it’ll look like a guided tour through Ed Gein’s basement after a pissed-off Jackson Pollack had come through with a bucket of candy apple red Dutch Boy, a fifth of Jack Daniels and a snoot full of Bolivian coke.

That reminds me.  Lindsay Lohan is in it too, so the drug-addled tramp movie-going demographic out there will have a rooting interest.

The underlying message of Machete, other than that all Anglos must die, echoes the unyielding stance of modern American liberalism that we, as a nation, are somehow morally foreclosed from performing the most basic function of a sovereign government – securing our borders.  This is expressed throughout, but particularly in recurring scenes of  “Minutemen” randomly hunting and killing illegals. I don’t expect hardcore realism from a movie called Machete, but if Rodriguez and his ilk actually cared for illegals more than as simple props in their long-running left-wing production of Why America Sucks, they might want to address the uncomfortable fact that the only people brutalizing Mexican illegals are other Mexicans.

Maybe they ought to premier Machete in Washington.  After all, over half of our Congressmen and Senators seem to think its premises are solid.  I’m still trying the get over the sight of the Democrats on their feet applauding that foreign tinpot Calderon for disrespecting our country.  However, by the time the elections roll around I’ll probably see that footage again, oh, about 10,000 times as it becomes the centerpiece of any number of Republican campaign ads.  Of course, I would not put it past the bondage club-patronizing halfwits in positions of authority at the RNC and elsewhere in the GOP establishment to talk themselves into a consensus that criticizing the liberals for siding with some foreigner against other Americans is somehow beyond the pale of respectable campaign discourse.

Called on the fact that this is shaping up to be to the reconquista nuts’ equivalent of what Birth of a Nation was to the Klan, Rodriguez has lately been arguing that his movie is just an “over-the-top” satire, though it’s unclear what he’s satirizing.  He claims his changed to the script in the final edit, though the recent trailer created by Rodriguez himself shows that any changes he made actually seem to have made the movie more racially inflammatory, not less.  Certainly, credulous media sources – including fanboy poster-behemoth Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News – have provided him cover while conservative critics like Big Hollwood’s own John Nolte have justifiably slammed him.

But Rodriguez can’t have his churros and eat them too – his movie vilifies a specific ethnic group and celebrates the indiscriminate slaughter of its members.  Come on Robbie, embrace your inner David Duke!  If you really believe your nonsense – and you do – make your racist movie and take your chances at the box office!

And yes, we’re hitting Rodriguez coming and going.  He’s a wimp for buckling under and altering his vision and he’s a half-wit for having that vision in the first place.  “Unfair,” cry the kind of people who think their application of their arbitrary and self-serving standard of “fairness” to an issue compels me to accept their shaky premises, “Rodriguez can’t win if you criticize him for his script and then also for changing it!”  Sure he can win – he can stop believing stupid things.  It’s actually astonishingly easy to do, Robert – just find a conservative and ask him how not to be an idiot.

The simple fact is that the Machete script is stunning in its overt racism.  If the designated villains were Black, not Anglo, you’d instinctively check your calendar to see if you had suddenly been sent back in time to 1958 Mississippi.

Yeah, the word “racism” gets tossed around all too much.  It’s gone from a term referring to a grossly stupid and un-American mindset where an individual’s worth is based solely upon his ancestry to an all-purpose debate-stopper employed by liberals who find themselves flailing against a tsunami of observable facts and empirical evidence demonstrating the total bankruptcy of their ideology.  But the rampant, almost presumptive, misuse of the term “racism” does not mean that there is no such thing as racism.

There is, and it’s on display on the pages of Robert Rodriguez’s Machete script.  In its pages, every Anglo man is a monster who deserves a brutal death and every Anglo woman is a whore.  As a purely technical expression of the screenwriting art, it is a model of form and technique just as Birth of a Nation was a technical masterpiece of the film-making art.  And, again like Birth of a Nation, whatever its technical qualities, Machete is also a hateful, morally bankrupt disgrace.

In Jerry Maguire, the key conflict was Jerry’s realization that he was putting a pretty facade on the moral deterioration within his profession, and was in fact complicit in it. It took an injured hockey player’s young son telling him to fuck off and a bad dream for Maguire to realize the true ugliness of who and what he had become, especially when measured against the high standards of his idol and mentor, agent Dicky Fox. Those troubling events created in Maguire a perfect storm of revulsion, introspection and a commitment to reaffirm the basic principles of his profession, which he laid out in his memo “The Things We Think and Do Not Say.” In truth, he had me at hello. Tom’s a hottie!

Like Jerry Maguire, I too started out in my chosen profession with the highest of ideals, which were sparked by a boundless love of the great stories, writers and filmmakers that inspired me. Like the best of them, I am totally dedicated to the pure craft of storytelling in film. It is all about The Story, which is bigger than all of us. That treasured craft has been handed down to us throughout human history, from Homer to Shakespeare to General Lew Wallace, Jules Verne and L. Frank Baum.

It is no surprise that epic stories like Wallace’s Ben Hur and Baum’s Wizard of Oz were made into films, or that so many of us treasure those movies like they were our own. Over time the greatest film stories become a part of us, interwoven into the very fabric of our culture and society, even our very personalities. Today in Hollywood that pure craft, though thriving on many fronts, is in deep trouble on many others. Like Jerry Maguire, I am witnessing the progressive corruption of the highest ideal of what my profession should be all about: the pure craft of storytelling in commercial film and TV.

More and more that pure craft is being poisoned by ideology, propaganda and malicious intent to insult or denigrate audience members whom certain creative film artists vehemently dislike. Tells, ideological plot points that are dead giveaways as to exactly where the story is going, ruin the viewing experience by instantly killing all tension and suspension of disbelief. How about taking viewers and audiences where they’ve never been before? It’s called high concept. Look into it.

Be it left or right, politics is artistic and box office poison. The low ratings and receipts bear me out. Bathrooms and kitchens are separate for a reason. It’s not very smart to shit where you eat. In the long and glorious history of storytelling on film in Hollywood, these developments are both modern anomalies and creative pestilences which offend me to my very core as a pure apolitical storyteller dedicated heart and soul to my craft. Who would dare tell Picasso he has to put Green in Guernica?

And the only health care I want to see pushed on film is Nurse Ratched, Dr. Giggles and Batman giving Dr. Crane a dose of his own medicine! Writers are artists, too. So, as a screenwriter, I’ve drafted my own memo. I may not always succeed, but I will do my damndest to uphold the oaths I now put forward to the American people, my fellow creative film artists, and to film fanatics everywhere on 3 Rock. Consider this my Jerry Maguire Mission Statement for Hollywood:

1. I promise to adhere to the finest principles of pure storytelling which have riveted men, women and children around campfires since the dawn of time. Those principles have endured across the years, decades, centuries and millennia for very good reasons. They will endure long after we and Hollywood as we know it are gone. That is our great responsibility to our past, present and future.

2. I promise to proffer the greatest respect to my audiences and fellow film artists regardless of ethnicity, religion, creed, gender, sexuality or belief system. We all want the same thing: great film.

3. I promise to respect the intelligence, dignity and sensibilities of my audiences and fellow creative film artists in my work, regardless of how stupid, misguided or insensitive they may be in real life.

4. I promise to bring the best of my talents and abilities to bear in telling the greatest and most compelling four-quadrant stories with the widest possible appeal for all. Box office tells the tale.

5. I promise I will not write any script or work on any project with the intent to advance any race, creed, religion, ethnicity, belief system or non-violent ideology over any others. Basic moral themes and conflicts are universal. We are all ultimately human on the most basic and visceral of levels.

6. I promise I will not allow my personal ideological or political beliefs to infect my work. The story is bigger than I am. Where the story leads I must follow, irrespective of all other personal political or ideological considerations. It should always be about telling the best possible stories on film.

7. I will not allow others to infect my work or corrupt my pure storytelling with politics, ideology or propaganda, or to maliciously target for insult or denigration certain segments of my audiences.

8. I promise that I will do my utmost to work in harmony with those creative film artists who may not share my most righteous and ultimately correct core personal, political or ideological beliefs, but share in the dream of creating great stories for the screen. The story is bigger than all of us.

9. I will never blackball, or attempt to have blackballed, a fellow creative film artist based on his or her own personal beliefs. Film artists’ creative talents and merits, not their belief systems, should determine their place in film and TV. This is America. Besides, didn’t we go through all this already?

10. I promise I will never blame any audiences if a story I write is produced and bombs at the box office. We creative film artists alone are responsible for our celluloid failures. I will take full personal responsibility and blame only the writers, actors, directors, producers or studios that screwed it up.

These guidelines are not the be-all end-all, but I do believe they are a good start. There are, of course, notable exceptions to some of these rules in the arena of  satirical and political comedy, nonfiction and documentaries. I’m talking straight-up creative TV and feature film production here.

To be clear, I am not trying to impose restrictions here. Just the opposite. I am trying to unbridle creativity to whole new levels. Ideology is a straitjacket which suffocates artistic creativity. It’s killing the craft of storytelling and turning off a whole lot of audiences needlessly. Worst of all, it’s costing millions of viewers and truckloads of money. How self-destructive can you be?

Whether this mission statement is taken to heart in Tinseltown in the spirit in which I have presented it is not up to me. I can only take the Hollywood horses to water. I can’t make ‘em drink it. But sometimes you just gotta hang your balls out there, because doing nothing is not an option. Just as it wasn’t for Jerry Maguire. Many thanks to Cameron, Tom, Renee and Cuba for showing the way. Hell of a story, Jerry Maguire. Made a ton of dough too! And no politics. Get the Big Picture now?

And who knows? If studios and creative film artists remove politics from the celluloid equation, renew emphasis on the pure craft of compelling human storytelling, and open the doors to all with the brains and talent to be there, it may just spur a new Golden Age of Hollywood. Can’t be bad. Hope Springs Eternal on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I love Hollywood! Show me the money! End memo. Oh, and please don’t politicize SpongeBob and ruin it for me. I’d have to shoot you.

For those of you here at Big Hollywood who think you are playing a whole new game in taking on the Tinseltown establishment in force, I have news for you. Scribe Extraordinaire and futurist iconoclast Harlan Ellison beat you all to the punch by about forty-five years. And if you don’t know who Harlan Ellison is, shame on you! He is a living legend with more Hugos and Nebulas than I care to count, as well as four WGA Awards and an Emmy nod. And all that’s just for starters.

Much of Harlan’s writing defies description or genre. If I had to describe it, I would say that Harlan paints with words like Picasso and Salvador Dali painted with canvas. Even that description is severely lacking. Perhaps Dali on acid would be more apropos. Harlan’s writing does have a peyote-flavored tinge to it than can induce a trippy narcosis in readers, yet Harlan has never touched a drug in his life. Some studio execs, producers and others in the screen trade who have meddled with or lifted Harlan’s work in the past might find that news surprising, given Harlan’s reactions to those mortal offenses resembled a tiger on methamphetamine.

In point of fact, there are two kinds of Harlan Ellison people in Hollywood, and both are foaming-at-the-mouth types. There are those in the studio system who despise Harlan with every atom of their being, and those who would take a firing squad for him. I have a blindfold on standby just in case. Have for about thirty years now. But let us discuss some of the other foaming-at-the-mouth types, why that is, and why he is my Hollywood hero and role model as a writer in that regard.

As noted in the preamble, Harlan does not care who he offends for the sake of pure art. Never has. How about we start at the top with Gene Roddenberry on the set of Star Trek in 1967? Though City on the Edge of Forever won Harlan Hugo and WGA Awards and is considered by many Trekkies to be the finest episode written for that show, Harlan begged to differ at the time. See, Harlan’s original script contained various moral ambiguities (including a drug-addled Enterprise crewman) that countered producer Roddenberry’s less dark and dystopian vision of the Star Trek future.

So Roddenberry rewrote it. Harlan protested vehemently, to the point of trying to replace his own name on the script with that of his oft-used contemptuous pseudonym Cordwainer Bird, which literally translates to “He who makes shoes for birds.” Roddenberry refused to let Harlan make the change, and added insult to injury in later years by proclaiming he had saved the script.

Ten years later, while working as creative consultant and staff writer on the darkly brilliant but highly underrated Twilight Zone reboot in the mid-1980s, Harlan once again came to artistic blows with the show’s producers over his proposed episode titled ‘Nackles,’ a story of good and evil Santas having at it on a Christmas Eve most dark and dystopian. Seeing a trend here? Harlan refused to budge, so the studios canceled ‘Nackles at the last minute, fearing it was too dark for the ‘fragile’ American market. Imagine that. A dark and dystopian Twilight Zone episode. Who’d a-thunk it?

Had the studio forced a rewrite not to Harlan’s liking, Mr. Bird’s name would no doubt be on the credits. Alas, the evil St. Nick was not to be.  And we are all the lesser for it, I can assure you. I guess Bad Santa is as far as the studios will go. Harlan also sued Jim Cameron over the original Terminator film as being derivative of his two scripted Outer Limits TOS episodes Soldier and Demon With a Glass Hand, and won. A settlement was reached, and Harlan is now acknowledged in the film’s credits. Harlan also sued and won over City on the Edge of Forever residuals, and recently settled with Paramount Pictures on the matter.

For me, the toppings on the Harlan Ellison Hollywood Rebel cake are The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, Harlan’s two collections of scathing essays on television’s moral and intellectual vacuity, previously published in the Los Angeles Free Press in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even today they are enthralling reads, and are required reading in many college media classrooms. Example. Harlan thought the concept of Hogan’s Heroes, i.e. a comedy set in a German POW camp, was offensive in the extreme given the real-life brutality in those settings. In response, Harlan asked the pressing question, “What next for a studio sitcom? Bernie Goes To Auschwitz?”

Love him or hate him, Harlan Ellison cannot and will not be denied. Yet Harlan’s approach to screenwriting and storytelling as a pure art form is as relevant to Hollywood today as it was forty years ago. I can guaran-damn-tee you, even if Harlan thinks Al Gore doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in his alarmism on Global Warming, God have mercy on the poor studio bastard who would try to compel Harlan to inject An Inconvenient Truth into his scripts. I’m thinking a response less Academy Awards and more tiger on meth.

And that is what is truly disappointing to me in Hollywood today: that so many great studio writers are so willing to pervert their art and God-given storytelling talent just to keep working a show. Or worse, to corrupt it willingly for the sake of propaganda. I understand their real world concerns, but I wish at least one WGA writer would toss up a Cordwainer Bird-like pseudonym to let us all know there’s at least one ghost in Jeffrey Immelt’s Big NBC Green Machine. At the very least, lay down some wood here in the comments section. I’m 99.9% sure Harlan would. Hollywood could use a few good rebels right now. Rebels that may sell their work to make a living, but draw the line at prostitution.

And Harlan, if I’m wrong on any of this, please feel free to give me Hell. Even if you do, that get-out-of-a-firing-squad-free card will always be good with me. I would also be greatly interested in hearing from any other creative film artists tossed into the political mud pits at NBC and elsewhere who could not be more offended if they were Harlan Ellison. Your secrets are safe with us. Trust me.

Be a Hollywood Rebel! Let ‘er rip! Fight The Power! Do it for Harlan

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.

“Attack, always attack.”

My friend, the heroic Israeli tank commander, told me that in the first few days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, both fronts, The Sinai and The Golan, were so weakly defended that had the Egyptian or Syrian high command been strategically bolder, tactically smarter, and their soldiers braver, well, the Arab armies could have achieved massive breakthroughs, and Israel would have found herself facing genocide.

The torture of Reginald Denny

But small, actually tiny pockets, of brave, determined and very well trained Israeli troops, in some cases, just two or three tanks on the Golan, held their ground and attacked enemy forces sometimes a hundred times their strength.

Screenwriter Escapes DGA Building—Note the Irony

“We had no orders except to hold our ground and whenever possible to attack—always attack.”

All this whips through my mind as I aim our car—I’m already thinking of the Lexus as a tank, a Centurion—towards the exit of the parking garage. A knot of rioters are milling about at the exit. It’s hard to see clearly but, oh boy, it looks like a few of them are brandishing baseball bats.

I’m gonna make a wild guess and assume that they’re not Little League dads.

I haven’t turned on the car’s headlights. We’re still lurking in the shadows, not yet detected by the barbarians.

Good thing the car is fashionably black.

Karen says: “Maybe there’s another exit.”

“Nope.”

“How do you know?”

“DGA building. I’ve been here like a zillion times.”

“What are we going to do?”

We.

The Talmud teaches that when a husband or wife uses the collective we it means there is love in the relationship.

Is there a finer way to enter battle than with the woman I have been in love with since third grade?

Ariel, 11, says: “I have to pee.”

Offspring #2, seven-years old, doubles over with an uncontrollable fit of the giggles. She finds this absolutely hysterical.

“You’re going to have to hold it in for a while, Ariel, do you think you can do that?” Karen says.

“I guess.”

“Good boy.”

Karen and I exchange glances. Karen gives me a pale smile of encouragement.

Robert: “I just have to say it.”

Karen: “What?”

Robert: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Karen inclines her head, questioning.

Robert: “Bette Davis, All About Eve, 1950, written and directed by the great Joseph L. Mankiewicz.”

Karen sighs, tolerantly but with affection:

Karen: “Robert, Robert.”

In the back seat, the nervous giggles from Offspring #2 increase tenfold.

My Israeli buddy, the tank commander was fond of quoting Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and one of his favorite maxim’s was:

Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

Okey-dokey.

I inch the car forward, gain speed, 4 mph, 7 mph…

Now: I switch on the headlights using—surprise, Hi-Beams!—drenching the criminals in white light. I lean on the horn and —

WHOOOOOOOOO!

— and the rioters are captured in powerful light—G-d bless those Japanese engineers. The shrieking horn is amplified by the concrete garage walls. As I bear down on them at what seems like Formula One speed the knuckleheads are blinded, frozen, and now they fall back like bowling pins and —

Steve McQueen in Bullitt; taught me everything I know.

— and we blow right past them, make a sharp left turn—we’re ordered by a street sign to turn right, but that would deliver us to the front of the DGA building and directly into the eye of the mob, and so, tires screeching—hey, just like Steve McQueen in Bullitt—we race away from the theater.

Heaving a great sigh, I realize that I have not taken a breath in, gee willikers, a long time.

I zoom down the block, pull over, and gulp oxygen.

“You okay?” Karen asks.

I nod.

But my heart is slamming in my chest like a Ginger Baker solo.

Hey, Los Angeles is Just Like Fatah Land—Only More Fashionable

Karen snaps on her little flashlight, studies the Thomas Guide. Using her index finger, she traces a route home.

“I think we should stick to the main streets, it’ll probably be safer.” Karen says.

“You navigate. I’ll pilot.”

“Let’s get moving.” Karen cautions.

“Check.”

Karen’s like: Huh?

I have seen way too many movies. Seriously.

Anyhoo:

As we cruise through the chaotic streets we spot fires burning all over the city. A canopy of red and orange spreads through the velvety darkness. It’s kind of beautiful, like a romantic J.M. W. Turner canvas.

Small businesses are deliberately torched.

Orange streaks of fire inscribe themselves against the velvety sky. It takes me a moment to recognize the distinctive signature of Molotov cocktails.

Los Angeles has turned into Fatah Land.

“Where’s the Fire Department?” Karen asks.

Looters help themselves to everything from television sets and stereos to diapers and liquor.

Every so often we hear the distinctive flat crack of gun fire.

Nowhere do we see any police.

Trying to avoid a massive traffic jam, I turn down a side-street, Karen leans forward, peers through the darkness, spots something and cries:

“No!”

Thirty yards separate us from a group of thugs who are chilling in the street. They watch us with flinty eyes. All wicked and street savvy, they shuffle in our direction.

They’re all: yo, yo, yo.

And I’m all: oy, oy, oy.

Call me crazy, but I have a sneaking suspicion they’re not looking to discuss the cinema of Oscar Micheaux.

“Let’s get out of here,” Karen says.

Who am I to disagree with the love of my life?

I shift into reverse. Back up a few feet, shift into drive, angling for a sharp U turn, but the thugs are coming up awfully fast in my rear-view mirror.

I’m pretty sure one of the locals is toting a Tec 9. Or maybe it’s just a chunk of lumber.

All I’ve got is a Swiss Army Knife.

Repeat after me, kids: Out-numbered, out-gunned.

Do not mess with Gloria Grahame.

“Robert…” says Karen through clenched teeth.

No time for a neat, Driver’s Ed. three-point turn.

I blast forward, hurtle right up on the sidewalk, and then, ca-runch! yet another bone rattling dive down the high curb, back into the street and:

Away.

We.

Go.

“Some move,” says Karen.

She touches my shoulder.

It’s Karen’s way of saying, “My hero.”

Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Entry in Robert’s Official Screenwriting Notebook: write this extremely scary, axle-cracking maneuver into your next script—no matter what the subject matter.

“I really, really, really have to pee,” Ariel reminds us.

I hand him an empty Styrofoam coffee cup.

Twenty Minutes to Get Anywhere in Los Angeles—Except During, Ahem, Civil Unrest

It takes us over an hour to get home. Normally, this drive would take maybe twenty minutes.

But we have to circle round and double-back countless times in order to avoid choked arteries, major intersections where madness reigns—traffic lights are ignored—and then there are unknown side streets that cause Karen to observe:

“We’ll never get out of there alive.”

Listening to the radio we hear about the Rodney King verdict. So that’s the grievance du jour.

The Fire Department, we learn, is not being deployed because their men have come under intense gun fire.

We hear—and I have trouble believing this report—that the Los Angeles Police Department has been,”Pulled back for their own safety.”

Huh?

I thought that was part of the job description.

Dopey me.

Casa Avrech: I carry Offspring # 2 to her bed where she recites the Sh’ma and then promptly falls asleep. We tell Ariel how proud of him we are. He shrugs. No big deal. Five minutes later he’s fast asleep.

Karen, crisp and efficient, pins a bed sheet over the large picture window in the living room. We cannot be too careful. I search the house for a weapon, settle on an old ice ax from my mountain climbing days. It’s an elegant tool with wicked potential in hand to hand combat, but obviously useless against firearms or a hail of Molotov cocktails.

Abruptly, I feel a burning pain—a white hot spike—shooting through both my arms. Did I get hit by a stray bullet?

I examine my hands and gosh, my fingers are curled into claws; it takes me a moment to realize that gripping the steering wheel so hard and for so long is causing severe muscle cramps.

On the TV, Karen and I watch as Reginald Denny gets his brains bashed in; we gaze in horror and disbelief as the barbarians dance over his broken body. Tears in our eyes, we see, G-d bless them, pious citizens step in and halt this atrocity.

There’s video of Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant. He, like Denny, is pulled from his truck and robbed. But theft is almost beside the point. The rioters slash torturers smash open his head then slice off an ear. The mob graffiti his chest, torso and genitals.

Take my word for it, graffiti is not an art form.

Between fifty and fifty-six citizens are murdered in the riots; two-thousand are seriously injured.

At last, the LAPD are deployed and approximately 10,000 arrests are made.

Estimates of between 800 million and a billion dollars of property damage have been reported. Approximately 3,600 fires were deliberately set, destroying 1,100 buildings.

Korean shopkeepers were specifically targeted by black rioters. But the Koreans owned guns and heroically defended their property and lives through force of arms.

It was a lesson that should have reverberated nationally, but some commentators labeled the Koreans, vigilantes. Just another case of the mainstream media getting it wrong.

Liberal totalitarians demand increased gun control, if not the outright banning of gun sales to citizens.

Second Amendment, what’s that?

And then, of course, the race hustlers, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Maxine Waters, the usual suspects—vulgar demagogues—parade across TV screens informing the citizens of Los Angeles that the riots were really “an uprising.”

Oh, really?

As in: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

My Hollywood Gun

Gazing from our bedroom window, we watch orange flames lick at the darkness, pillars of black smoke climbing into the sky. We can actually smell the acrid odor of burning rubber.

“Look how close they are,” says Karen.

“Just past La Cienega. Maybe eight blocks away.”

Karen gives me a long penetrating gaze:

“What do we do if they come here?”

“After this is all over,” I vow, “I’m going to buy a pistol.”

Karen says: “How about a shotgun?”

Springfield .45. My Hollywood Gun.

If the Los Angeles riots taught us anything it’s that you’re a fool if you count on the authorities to protect you in times of civil chaos — in fact, at any time. In the end, only I can protect my family.

I’m never, ever going to allow myself to be outgunned by the bad guys. All the gun laws that are on the books—and there are thousands of them—just make it that much easier for the barbarians to amass weapons, and for law-abiding people like you and me to be at their mercy.

If you outlaw weapons, as so many squishy liberals yearn to do, well then, only the state and the outlaws will be armed. Which leaves ordinary citizens at the mercy of an all powerful government and a variety of merciless criminal sub cultures.

When Hitler and Stalin snatched power, one of their first moves was to outlaw private gun ownership. They understood that armed citizens are a mortal threat to totalitarian rule.

Imagine history if several million Jews owned firearms between 1938 and 1945.

Is the mind capable of such a leap of faith, or is it too painful?

One week after the riots I legally purchased a pistol: A 1911 Springfield .45. It’s the pistol I trained with in Israel. Yes, it’s heavy, and yes, the recoil kicks like a Rockette; but this is the weapon I know best, and I cordially invite any mugger, rioter, criminal, and gun-hating “progressive” to get on the wrong side of my Hollywood gun.

FADE TO BLACK

For this is

The End

To read Hollywood is Burning, Part I, please click here.

To read Hollywood is Burning, Part II, please click here.

Note: I’m frequently asked how I’m able to remember incidents in such detail, including dialogue, from so many years ago? It’s simple. I do not rely on my memory. I have been keeping a detailed diary for over 20 years. This post, as so many others, is based on my diaries. If there are gaps in my entries, I check with Karen. She was also keeping a diary, plus Karen has a phenomenal memory.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

Note: Links to previous chapters can be found at the end of the article.

“My ladies will probably try and slip you some letters, ask you to mail them on the outside. Do not do that. It is contraband, you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“One or two might try and hug you goodbye, in that hug, there might be an inappropriate touch. Resist the temptation.”

“Yes, M’am.”

It’s my last day as visitor slash researcher in the prison. I’m being debriefed by the Supervisor, a tough, no-nonsense lady who still manages to retain her femininity—and sense of humor.

“You got what you wanted?”

“Yes, thank you. Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Ask, but I may not answer.”

“Your opinion of the Pet Program.”

She sighs wearily: “It’s fine.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“Mr. Hollywood, I’m dealing in numbers here, big numbers. I got thousands of mis-creants within these walls. In the program, five, maybe six women. What does that solve?”

“Five, six women.”

She waves her hand as if swatting away a fly. She has no time for singular redemptions, she is dealing with multitudes.

“Was it always like this?”

“Meaning?”

“So many female prisoners?”

“Oh, no. When I first started in the system, this prison was a backwater, a few hundred shop-lifters, petty felons, check forgers, disorderly conduct drunkards, your basic sad prostitute junkies.”

“And now?”

“Hard-core killers. More like men.”

“And that’s because?”

“Drugs, gangs. Almost all my ladies are mixed up somehow in the drug trade. Oh, sure, they don’t have fathers, there’s that too, and they all pick loser troll boyfriends who just beat hell outta them. But it’s the drug world that puts ‘em over the line.”

Irene Dunne and Helyn Elry-Rock in Ann Vickers, 1933

“Would you legalize drugs?”

“I will not answer that question.”

“Fair enough. How about this: would you decriminalize certain classes of drugs?”

The Supervisor chuckles: “You trying to lose me my po-sition? Move on Mr. Hollywood.”

“You have any hope for rehabilitating these women?”

She bursts into laughter: “Get outta my office.”

As I leave, I suppress an overwhelming urge to salute.

C.O. Cindy is waiting for me outside the Supervisor’s office. My baby sitter, as I’ve come to think of her, walks me across the massive yard, towards the shed where the animals are trained as companion dogs for people with severe physical disabilities.

“You’re awfully quiet, Cindy.”

She shrugs.

Her helmet of red hair kicks light in the bright morning sun.

Cindy spots an inmate sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, eyes closed, head tipped back.

“Wait here,” she says to me.

Cindy approaches the inmate.

“You’re supposed to be haulin’ garbage.”

“I’m takin’ a break.”

“Get back to work, skank.”

The inmate crushes the cigarette between her fingers, stores the butt in her pocket, coolly glares at Cindy.

This is the first time I’ve seen Cindy be anything less than respectful towards an inmate.

We continue our walk back to the dog-training shed.

“What was that about?”

“I’m doing my f*****g job, Robert, y’got a problem with that?”

Silence all the way to the shed.

Dog training is not going well today. The atmosphere is strained. The inmates, normally giggly, relaxed and chatty, are impatient as the dogs make mistakes and drop on their bellies, not sure what their beloved masters want from them.

I step outside.

I know exactly what’s going on.

“I’m sorry,” says Cindy.

I turn around. “It’s okay. I understand. I’ve been here a while now.”

“We got used to you.”

“Now I’m leaving.”

“You are.”

“I have to write the movie.”

“Do you know what you’re going to write?”

“I’ll find out as I write it.”

“Like I know what that means.”

“Cindy, I want to thank you for all your help. You’ve been, well, unbelievable.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“No, really. I couldn’t have done this without all your help.”

“You really wanna thank me?”

“I do.”

“Tell me one true thing about yourself.”

I look at her long and hard and offer her my core.

“I have been in love with my wife since I was nine-years old.”

Cindy squints and searches my face:

“No f*****g way.”

I nod, assuring her that it’s the truth.

“Is that like normal?”

“Um, probably not.”

Cindy grins: “What’s your wife’s name, what’s she do, what’s Mrs. Robert look like, do you guys have kids?”

“One question, Cindy. I answered it, right?”

“Jesus f*****g Christ, you are a piece of work. And by the way, stop making that face every time I say f**k. What, the little lady never lets loose?”

In fact, Karen’s a lady and she never curses—beyond an occasional, blistering, Oy-vey.

Inside, I bid goodbye to the lovely Eden. I wish her good luck. She does not try and slip me any contraband, does not try to hug me. Not one of the inmates touches me inappropriately.

They are all perfect ladies.

Every single murderer.

Cindy accompanies me to the front gate.

“I been thinking,” she says.

“About what?”

“Doing something else.”

“I’m happy. You should. You don’t belong here.”

She holds my gaze.

“’Cause I’m like this fine sword, right?”

“Right.”

She shakes my hand, gives me that shy smile.

“Robert?”

“What?”

Cindy starts to say something, then just shakes her head and mumbles:

“Nothing, nothing.”

I climb into my rental car and drive away. The last I see of C.O. Cindy is her image in the rear-view mirror. She waves to me, hitches up her thick leather utility belt and heads back inside prison.

Back home.

FADE TO BLACK

For this is

THE END

To read Part I, please click here.

To read Part II, please click here.

To read Part III, please click here.

To read Part IV, please click here.

To read Part V, please click here.

To read part VI, please click here.

To order a copy of Within These Walls, nominated for the Humanitas Award, starring Ellen Burstyn and Laura Dern, please click here.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

Note: Links to previous chapters can be found at the end of this post.

EXT. PRISON YARD – DAY

The Screenwriter and the Corrections Officer are chatting about the list of prison movies Robert has promised to compile. Screenwriter and C.O. share a companionable relationship that is occasionally rattled by Cindy’s insatiable curiosity about her visitor’s private life.

“Okay Cindy, you ready?”

“Lay it on me.”

“My Ten Favorite Prison Movies.”

I’ve been hired to write a  film, Within These Walls, for Lifetime Network about the prison pet program. Cindy has been my guide, babysitter, bodyguard, my eyes into this hellish world.

My job is to dig into these people’s lives, but it’s a one-way relationship. I have learned, through years of experience and several awkward stumbles, that I must withdraw a central portion of myself in order to be effective. The true me has to remain locked away, or it will be used in the power struggle that exists between author and subject.

And so yours truly, the Orthodox Jew, is gone. Robert, adoring husband to Karen and doting father to three children, is locked away.

It is a disorienting experience.

Casually, I deflect almost all personal questions, answering in the most evasive manner, hopefully without insulting Cindy.

Let’s take a look at several typical exchanges:

Cindy

“So, Robert, you married?”

Robert

“What do you think?”

Cindy

“I think you’re wearing a gold band.”

Robert

“Detective Cindy.”

Cindy

“How long you married?”

Robert

“C’mon…”

Cindy

“Maybe you’re really a homo?”

Robert

“No!”

Cindy aims her index finger at me, squeezes an invisible trigger.

Cindy

“Gotcha.”

I can’t help but chuckle. C.O. Cindy is smart and quick, and unlike so many women—the over-educated and over-bred—she understands the vast gulf that separates male and female nature.

CUT TO:

Cindy

“So, what’s Mrs. Robert do? Is she like pretty or some brainy bow-wow?”

I remain tight-lipped.

Cindy barks: “Woof-woof.”

My inner resolve collapses.

Robert

“She’s brainy and beautiful.”

Cindy nails me with a cool, level gaze. It’s the look she uses to intimidate “the skanks.”

And:

Cindy

“You a Jew?”

INTERTITLE: Oy-vey!

Robert

“Why do you ask?”

Cindy

“Y’know, Hollywood… Jews.”

I would so love to continue this conversation, explore Cindy’s mind-set, but:

Robert

“What do you think?”

Cindy

“I think, yeah.”

Robert

“And if I am Jewish?”

Cindy gives an exaggerated shrug of the shoulders.

DISSOLVE TO:

Cindy

“Robert, are you like this important screenplaywriter?”

Robert

“Cindy, you ever hear the story of the Polish actress?”

Cindy

“Uh, I have the feeling I’m about to.”

Robert

“She slept with the screenwriter.”

Cindy hesitates a second, then cracks up. It’s the oldest, dumbest joke in Hollywood, but it spreads through the entire prison like a virus. And before I know, an inmate repeats it to me.

After a while, Cindy gives up trying to know who I am. Sorta.

Instead of personal information, I substitute Hollywood gossip and legend.

Which does the job just fine. For everyone is fascinated by Hollywood. Even a tough little corrections officer like Cindy.

“Robert, do you know — ?”

She names a female star.

“I do.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’d absolutely kill to have your complexion.”

Cindy blushes.

And the thing is, it’s the absolute truth.

Okay, I’m hanging loose, giving Cindy my list of ten favorite prison movies. It’s a tactic really, a way of creating the illusion of intimacy without the emotional risks.

Not so simple because I like Cindy. Enormously. Guilt weighs heavily on my conscience for deploying such a cold blooded strategy.

“Understand Cindy, I’m mixing genres.”

“Genres?”

“Types of prison films. You’ve got prison dramas, prison action films, you’ve got prison comedies, prison musicals, escape films, riot films, prison war films, and that most durable of all genres: women in prison flicks.”

“Women in prison, coolness.”

“In no particular order, okay?”

“Go on, you’re such a fuss-pot.”

“Number One: The Big House, 1930, with Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, and the lovely Leila Hyams. The big daddy of all prison movies. This was probably the first big studio movie to make the genre respectable and profitable. Inmate falls in love with his cellmate’s sister, gets caught up in an escape plan sure to go bad. Drama ensues. It’s a bit slow for modern audiences, but it’s a keeper.

“Number Two: I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, 1932, starring the great Paul Muni. This guy suffers for like ten-years in the most brutal southern prison you have ever seen. Unrelenting and grim. Hollywood used to do grim really well.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

Burt Lancaster as The Birdman of Alcatraz

“Number Three: The Bird Man of Alcatraz, 1962 with Burt Lancaster. This is a movie you should show here. The prisoner, a cold blooded murderer, redeems his soul by taking care of birds.”

“Birds.”

“Tweet-tweet.”

Cindy shakes her head as if to say, some things are just too dumb to be believed.

“Number Four: The Great Escape, 1963, with Steve McQueen, a crackerjack World War II escape movie. McQueen has a great scene where he tries to jump barbed wire on a motorcycle.”

“I drive a Harley.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Want a ride?”

“Nope.”

“Pu-ssy.”

“Number Five: Cool Hand Luke, 1967 with the young and handsome Paul Newman. This film has the single greatest line of dialogue ever in a prison movie: ‘What we’ve got he-are, is a fa-ail-ure to commu-ni-cate.’”

Cindy’s face brightens:

“My Uncle Chris used to say that all the time, a few beers and he’d be like totally hammered, walking around saying it over and over again. I thought he made it up. It’s from a movie?”

“A great movie.”

Cindy heaves a sigh. I’m pretty sure I have just diminished her life by a small but significant degree.

“Number Six: Stalag 17, 1953, another great prison war movie, starring William Holden, directed by the great Billy Wilder. Beautiful structure. Machine gun dialogue. Dark humor. An exquisite machine.

“Number Seven: Papillon, 1973, Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman are prisoners on a Devil’s Island run by, get this, the French. Horrifying stuff happens. Things get so bad Dustin and McQueen eat cockroaches. This one’s got everything, starvation, escape, capture, torture, leper colonies. Hugely entertaining.”

“The French?”

“It’s in English, trust me, fun film.”

“You ever meet Dustin Hoffman?”

“Yup.”

“What’s he really like?”

“Really short.”

“You are sooo funny.”

“Number Eight: Oh this is a good one, Chained Heat, 1983.”

“Linda Blair. The broom stick scene. Jesus, we all know that one.”

“A true women in prison classic.”

Cindy smiles hugely. Finally, a film Cindy recognizes.

“Number Nine: Caged, 1950, the spiritual godmother of all sleazy women in prison flicks.”

“Listen to you, all like movie professor.”

“Guilty. A beautiful young bride is thrown into prison.”

“Oh, yeah, we got a lot of those, beautiful young brides.”

“And the C.O.’s I gotta tell you, are just sadistic beyond words. Sadistic and like totally lesbo.”

Cindy, all ironic. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that goin’ around.”

“They shave her head, take away her pet pussycat. Great performance by the underrated Eleanor Parker. Unbelievably dark and depressing. She gives birth in prison, her baby is taken away and put up for adoption. She turns into a hardened criminal.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Number Ten: I’ve saved the best for last. Drum roll please: Caged Heat, 1974, the very best women in prison movie evuh. Produced by the great Roger Corman, and directed by none other than Jonathan Demme. I think it was his first film. Probably made for about fifty thousand dollars. Which only goes to show that it’s not money that makes a good film but vision. Great sleazo film with all this socially conscious nonsense on top of the obligatory nudity. Riveting.”

Cindy just stares at me for a long moment.

“So, what else do you want to know, Mr. Screenplaywriter?”

“How come you’re a C.O?”

“For Chrissake, Robert, I’m a f*****g townie.”

“Ever think of doing something else?”

“I was thinking of being a glamorous movie star, but that s**t seemed kinda out of my reach, y’know? How’d you get to be a screenplaywriter?”

I owe Cindy this truth:

“Worked hard, never gave up, got lucky.”

“Your family rich, Robert?”

“Being with these women day in day out, how does it make you feel?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

This is killing me. But I’m not going to give in to temptation and tell her that my father is an Orthodox Rabbi, that I’m from Brooklyn where my family lived a modest, middle class life; that a Hollywood career was a mad dream that, against all odds, I have managed to achieve.

“How does it affect you, this work?”

Cindy shrugs. “It’s work, a paycheck. No big deal.”

“Really.”

“Hey, you know, I ain’t all that different than these skanks.”

“How do you mean?”

“I have done time with loser trolls who I felt like killing. I just, y’know, didn’t.”

“There’s a big difference.Thinking is not doing.”

Cindy hooks her index finger into her mouth, yanks back her cheek. There’s a black space where a tooth should be.

“My last lover boy.”

“What’d you do?”

“Pow. Right back at him.”

Long silence.

“Hey, Robert, don’t look so f*****g sad. I’m home.”

Home. It’s what the inmates call prison.

C.O. Cindy and I make our way back to the dog training shed. Just as we reach the door I turn to her.

“Remember that book I told you about?”

“That Chinese thing?”

“The Art of War, yeah. Sun Tzu says something else, something that’s always stayed with me.”

“Go on, my friend.”

“He says that even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.”

Cindy ponders this a long moment.

“You think I’m like this fine sword, Robert?”

“I do, Cindy, I really do.”

Demurely, C.O. Cindy smiles.

Priscilla Bonner, The Red Kimono, 1925.

Stay tuned for next week’s concluding chapter in which yours truly bids goodbye to the amiable Cindy and the 10,000 violent but surprisingly well behaved inmates.

To read Part I, please click here.

To read Part II, please click here.

To read Part III, please click here.

To read part IV, please click here.

To read Part V, please click here.

To order a copy of the film, Within These Walls, starring Ellen Burstyn and Laura Dern, please click here.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech