Second Hand Elves and Used Dwarves

Jonas Kyratzes makes a very good point about the lost opportunity that is the "standard fantasy universe" in this week's Escapist. Applies mostly to games, but novelists beware too.

A Day in the Life vs. A Life in a Day

Preparing for a meeting, Lisa came up with an interesting thought.

A TV show is, fundamentally, about the sort of things that happen to your characters every day. They may be extraordinary things, but then your characters are people to whom extraordinary things happen every day.

A movie is, fundamentally, about the most remarkable time in the character's life. The turning point, the moment they change, the time they face their greatest challenge.

When you're trying to figure out if your idea is a movie or a TV show, these criteria might be helpful.

Musical

I have a question for you guys.

Pre-GLEE and pre-HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, movie musicals have been on the ropes since the 1960's.  There have been some standouts usually based on Broadway hits (HAIR, CABARET) but many have flopped disastrously (PENNIES FROM HEAVEN, I'LL DO ANYTHING, that horrible Woody Allen thing).

On the other hand there are any number of successful movies about musical performers. Every rock'n'roll biopic ever made, THIS IS SPINAL TAP, THE COMMITMENTS, A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, etc.

What all exactly is the distinction? Is it that in musicals, characters sing about their emotions, whether directly (WEST SIDE STORY) or onstage (CABARET)? Whereas in a movie with music, the story is often about how they're doing with their music, are they succeeding, are they singing the happy song with tears in their eye...

What do you think?

The Vampire Diaries, A Rant

Lisa and I made it through episode 2 of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, the CW's attempt to duplicate the TWILIGHT magic without paying for the rights. (We missed the pilot.)

Personally, I was shocked at how badly done it was, considering Kevin Williamson (DAWSON'S CREEK) is at the helm. Of five outs, three of them were SCARY VAMPIRE BARES FANGS!!!!! The third act out was a pure cheat -- just a dream sequence. The fourth act out was a qualified cheat -- real vampire, but in the next act it turns out he didn't bite anyone. The tag out was just irrelevant -- a day player about to get bit.

Not to mention the act outs all related to what I have to assume is a B story, since they had nothing to do with the girl-who-isn't-Bella and the large-foreheaded-vamp-who-isn't-Edward-and-certainly-isn't-David-Boreanaz.

C'mon, guys. This is just sloppy writing. The episode was like watching a bad spec.

Of course, there's the issue of vampires who can go out in the sun with no ill effects whatsoever. Who decided that was clever? You're messing with canon. If you give them sunlight, are they really still vampires? If they don't have to kill, is there anything left of the metaphysics and the metaphor?

And can we please, please bury the cliche that a centuries-old vampire would haunt a high school girl because she looks like a girl he was hot for back in the Old Days? Are vampires really that shallow?

Not that anyone cared. I don't doubt that the CW called up Williamson and asked for "Twilight, the series, you know, with a vampire with with a large forehead, who looks just like a young David Boreanaz" and Williamson looked at the number on the check and said, "No problem babe, my daughter needs a better pony."

The one thing I would really, really like to see come back is the notion of a vampire as a predator. Not just violent and aggressive. But a being that regards human beings as food and/or playthings. The way that your cat would regard you if you suddenly shrunk to mouse size. I'd like to see what vampire culture is really like. I bet they don't play together nicely. They probably guard their hunting grounds. They probably have trouble getting within a few yards of each other without fighting. That's probably why they haven't wiped us out: they can't cooperate.

(To be fair, Ian Somerhalder has a bit of that going on, and is the only worthwhile thing in the show. And I am having trouble believing he is not Rob Lowe's love child.)

Oh, there's lots of unmined territory in the vamp story yet. These "vampire as sparkly pony" shows haven't even opened a vein.

But that's all food for another show... heh.

Canon

(This is a rewrite of an earlier post that Lisa felt was nit-picky and unconstructive.)

I watched the BLADE series pilot. When I'm watching a show with mythology, I'm looking for two things. One is true for any show: I want convincing, compelling characters involved in entertaining, moving stories.

The other is particular to genre shows. I want a consistent, coherent mythology that rings true, and I want the stories to bring insights into that mythology.

So, for example, TWILIGHT had a consistent, coherent mythology that did not ring true for me. If all vamps do in sunlight is sparkle, then Edward is not a scary predator, he's just Bella's big sparkly pony. It's fine for teenage girl wish fulfillment; girls need stories about big, powerful ponies that will obey them. But he's not a vampire. Because to me, the vampire mythos is about the power of death, and the seductiveness of evil, and if he can go out in the sun and doesn't have to kill people, then his undeadness lacks all thematic punch. He's not a vampire, he's a "vampire."

What I love is when a genre story takes itself seriously and really examines what people would do, and who they would be, in a world in which technology is more advanced or different, or magic or fantastical critters exist. So for example, I loved the difference between the Sarah Connor of TERMINATOR and the Sarah Connor of TERMINATOR II. In the first, she's nearly killed by a scary robot from a hell future. A lesser writer might have pretended that she'd try to put that horrible experience behind her, like characters in horror movie sequels. But the truth is, if you've nearly been terminated by a scary robot from a hell future, you become someone different. You remake yourself into a badass killer yourself. You learn how to use guns and explosives. And you probably come off to other people like a paranoid schizophrenic. James Cameron had the courage to pursue the logic of his science fictional universe.

On the other hand I had a bit of trouble with THE LISTENER because I felt their world wasn't self-consistent. The Listener exists in our world. He's a paramedic who can read thoughts. A paramedic? Really? Not a professional poker player, or a spy? Ditto Anna Paquin's waitress in TRUE BLOOD. What's she doing waiting tables? How about working for the FBI? Or the CIA? Or some bigshot negotiator? I mean, the guy in LIE TO ME has a whole business telling whether people are lying or not, and he doesn't even have superpowers.

By contrast, in MEDIUM, Patricia Arquette plays a mom who has visions that come true. So what does she do? Work for the police as a psychic. That makes sense. Oh, and she can't control the visions or always understand them. So she can't go playing the stock market.

I love when a genre story adds to or convincingly change canon. Canonical vampires are undead, drink human blood, and can't go out in the sun. Optionally, they fear crosses, holy water burns them, and they dislike garlic. In Stoker, as in the Buffyverse, every vamp victim becomes a vamp, but simple math shows that's implausible: there would quickly be a vamp population explosion. So, in Rice, vamps only make vamps by draining their victim and then getting the victim to drink vamp blood. That was a logical improvement to the canon; it made it easier for me to believe that vamps secretly exist in my universe. [UPDATE: I stand corrected about the Buffyverse -- it follows Rice Rules.]

And the BLADE movies introduced the daywalker: half human, half vamp, alive but fighting his blood thirst. Very cool.

I wasn't blown away by the first few BLADE: THE SERIES eps, though readers say it gets better. Sticky Fingaz, you are no Wesley Snipes, sir. But I did dig the idea of "ashers" -- human junkies who snort vamp ash, which makes them briefly vamp strong and vamp fast.

If you're working in genre, first, please, make sure you're thinking it through. What would real people do in this situation. Be brave. Pursue the ramifications as far as you can. For vamps to exist in our world without our knowing it, what would the rules of their existence have to be? How are they suppressing our knowledge of their existence? Are they showing up for the first time, as Dracula did in DRACULA -- so, in that case, no one knew about vamps because there hadn't been any in Britain. Do they cut a deal with human society -- do the rich and powerful know that they exist but they're hiding it from us? And so forth.

What would a world be like in which there were regular zombie breakouts. Well, we'd stop burying our dead, that's for sure. We'd burn them. And battlefields would be a lot scarier.

The fun of genre is in the thematic ramifications, and in the "what-if?" But don't stretch the theme so far that the human characters stop behaving like real people -- find the fun in real reactions to the outlandish circumstances. Take that all the way, and you won't be able to help yourself coming up with something convincing and fresh.

Why No Prime Time SF Hits?

Q. In Ronald D. Moore's Banff panel, a point came up that I've been pondering--the disparity of success between cinematic and televised scifi. From cinematic high art to blockbuster entertainment, scifi is well represented. Yet no television shows are big hits, and the genre struggles to be taken seriously among television critics. I can't think of another genre with such a disparity, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, Alex.

A few possible causes come to mind. Perhaps higher production costs become burdensome over a series' long run. Perhaps audiences are reluctant to commit to watching scifi on a regular basis (perhaps due to social stigma) compared to seeing a single film. I am surprised by some critics' and the Emmy's inability to recognize BSG, half-way surprised.

Why are no SF shows big hits on TV, while the most successful movies in the world are mostly SF?

I can make a few guesses. The movie audience is younger and more male. They like the big-boomy. They will tolerate idiotic plots like the past three STAR WARS pictures if there are spectacular special effects. Those effects aren't as effective on a smaller screen.

On the other hand, there are lots of SF and fantasy shows on TV, but they're generally structured to be as mundane as possible. MEDIUM is a fantasy show: the heroine has visions of the future. LOST and FRINGE and HEROES are SF. Even ALIAS had an undercurrent of SF or F.

What you don't see a lot of is space opera. You don't see hit primetime series about people bopping around in spacecraft. Sure, the STAR TREK franchise has spawned four long-running spinoff shows (TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise), but they've always had relatively low ratings.

Partly that's a budget issue. It's cheap to blow stuff up, and reasonably affordable to stick a latex mask on an actor, but you can't really do something visually spectacular every week. And if you don't have spectacle, you run the risk of having a workplace drama with spandex uniforms.

I hate to say it, for I do love SF, but I think most people find the idea of bopping around on spacecraft to be fairly far from their own experience. They have a family at home; they have a family at work. The problems they deal with, the fears they face, are fairly concrete. SF operates at a level of abstraction. Sure, great SF is always grounded in our human experience. But it requires a little bit of mental work to connect what's going on in a STAR TREK episode with your daily life. So does absorbing a space opera's mythos. Most people don't want to have to work to enjoy their TV. For some reason, people find crime shows very easy to relate to, even though the average TV viewer probably will not have anyone close to them murdered. So maybe that's it.

But that's just a guess. Maybe someone will come up with a big, mainstream, hit primetime show, and we'll stop asking this question.

Vamps Like Shade

Slate has an article about how movie vampires break the rules. Garlic - useless. Mirrors -- no problem. Crosses -- gornisht helfen.

I have to say, some movies and TV shows I like are quite cavalier with the vamp canon, to the point where we see Angel showing up at Buffy's house steaming a bit because he's run through sunlight with his coat over his head. And in BLADE, vamps can go out in motorcycle leathers and helmets.

It's fun to muck reinterpret the legend. After all, what exactly is the physics of vamps not showing up in mirrors? Makes no sense. And if every vamp bite creates a new vamp (as seems to happen in Stoker), math suggests we'd all be undead by now. So there has to be mutual blood suckage to create a new vamp.

But it's dangerous to muck with canon too much.

If vamps can go out in full sunlight with, say, sunblock on, they're not vampires any more. Why? Because losing sunlight is part of the devil's bargain of being a vamp. You gain indefinite life span, but you can't go out in the sun any more. So it's not the UV rays, dig?

Your reinterpretation should feel more true emotionally than canon. That's why it's a reinterpretation. Not "what would fit my story," but "this is the legend as we know it; but what is the reality behind it?"

Half Hour Is a Pain in the Brent Butt

Q. You mentioned that an hour show is no more work than a half hour show. How do you mean? Is it that once you're already rolling on a show idea, its easy to keep pumping out pages? Any other reasons?

When I signed on to CHARLIE JADE, I'd just spent a year fussing over eight half-hour scripts for NAKED JOSH with my co-creator. I landed in Cape Town, and our writing room immediately started banging out hour scripts, three in the first week, then one a week for every week after that.

My impression is that a contemporary half hour script has almost as much story as an hour does. On NAKED JOSH, we had A, B and C stories. Sometimes we even had a runner on top of that. In CHARLIE JADE we had an A, B and C story. We simply had to work harder to fit that much story into 22 minutes.

The stories in NAKED JOSH were smaller stories -- more about observing the vagaries of metro life than, say, saving the multiverse -- but you could easily have unpacked them to hour stories to make a FELICITY-esque hour show.

When I started in writing CHARLIE JADE scripts, I found that I had a few more beats in each story than on NAKED JOSH, but not that many more. We were doing four acts instead of three. But the scenes could breathe more. Instead of the scenes being 45 seconds long, say, they were a minute to a minute and a quarter. (I'm guessing.)

I think it's telling that half hour sitcom staffs are much larger than hour drama staffs. Of course comedy is harder than drama. But I think if you take a typical half hour and plot it out, you'll wind up with almost as much story as you do for a drama.

I have some half hour pitches I would love to set up. But I know that if they do, I'll wind up working just as hard or harder on them as I will on my hour material!

Wrong Format?

Q. I was curious about your thoughts on a new series on Fox: The Return of Jezebel James. The format seems off or just plain wrong. This very well could be me but it feels like a one camera show and not a sit-com with a laugh track. If it is a little awkward in its format would this be a creator issue or a network issue? Once a show is bought can it's whole format be made to change to fit into something else entirely?

I haven't seen the show, but there could be a genre problem like you're seeing. The creator could have conceived of it wrong, for creative reasons, or because a network exec asked for a sitcom. Or, the network could have asked him to turn a single camera comedy into a sitcom for budget reasons, or because of market research, or because of the mix of programming they're looking for.

Denis Leary's half hour series THE JOB failed. If you watch it, you can clearly see its similarities to the later, successful RESCUE ME. What didn't work in a half hour format worked very well in hour.

I've occasionally come in with a pitch that could go either half hour or hour. That way, if the exec "hears" a half hour show, it's a half hour show. If they hear an hour show, it's an hour. They tend to hear the kind of the show their network has room for. My preference is to do hour shows -- they're no more work to write than a half hour, but they pay twice as well. But I'd rather have a show than no show. Bear in mind, though, that Canada has half-hour dramas, a form that barely exists in the US.

It's good that you're thinking this way. Don't just tune out a show, "this sucks!" Think about why it sucks. The makers must have had something in mind. Where did they go wrong? Sometimes (COP ROCK) it's easy to figure out. Sometimes it's harder. I'm convinced that FIREFLY failed not because it was a space western, but because Joss Whedon's storytelling might have been a bit too surprising for the broadcast audience. You just never knew where an episode was going to end up. And on broacast, that's not necessarily a plus.

What's Become of Alex?

You may have noticed I'm blogging a bit less, and shorter, lately.

I'm in the middle of a writing room. I have three weeks to break down episodes 4-10 of the pay cable series I'm developing. And rebuild the pilot better, stronger, faster.

It takes a lot out of you. This show in particular is part dysfunctional family drama, part metaphysical fantasy. Mixing mythology and reality is tough, especially within the limitations of TV. Too many monsters and you're hokey. Not enough monsters and you're not really delivering the goods. Every time you give someone a power, you have to make sure it's not something that will overwhelm the plot -- or would overwhelm the plot except you just keep ignoring it. (E.g.: if Superman can fly faster than the speed of light and go back in time ... why doesn't he do that every single time he's in a bind?) But if your characters have only minor powers, what makes them interesting?

It's a fine line. In THE SANDMAN comics, I manage to believe that Dream is an entity of unutterable power and knowledge and age... and he's got the hots for a human witch and gets upset when she no longer loves him. It feels right even though it seems inconsistent.

You're looking for the logic of a fable. There are a lot of great stories you could pick holes in. The trick is, I guess, something like prestidigitation. Don't look over here -- look over there! Sparkly!

How you actually do that is the surprisingly hard work of a story room.

Teasers in Movies

As we continue working on the plot of this haunted house movie, one question that keeps coming up is whether to put a teaser at the beginning.

A teaser in a tv show, you'll recall, is a high-key opening sequence that grabs the audience and makes it want to watch the whole show. Someone's running, someone's fighting, someone is killed. It often sets up the story. In HOUSE, someone becomes ill. In CSI, they find the bodies.

A teaser in a theatrical movie functions differently from a teaser in a TV show. If you've paid $12 to see a movie, you're not likely to walk out if the first twenty minutes are slow. All a teaser does is get your blood pumping. Think of the Bond movie opening sequences. Sometimes they have nothing to do with the plot of the movie; they're just an excuse to have a neato action sequence.

Arguably a teaser does have the same function in a movie you're watching on DVD. If you've rented a bunch of DVD's from Netflix or Zip, and the first twenty minutes don't do it for you, you'll go on to the next one. Netflix doesn't lose any money, but you lose word of mouth.

A teaser can be enormously valuable in a spec script, of course. If you don't grab the reader within the first five pages, she'll dump your script and pick the next one off the stack; or, if she's required to read through, she'll start skimming. Skimming is the death of most scripts.

But we're not writing a spec script. And I've noticed that a teaser seems to function much differently in a horror movie.

One of the biggest challenges in a horror movie is pacing. You want to reach a crescendo of fear. But you can't stay there long. A crescendo wears out its welcome pretty fast. So you have to carefully ramp up the pace, from the first stirrings in the shadows up through the climax. A horror movie is a symphony of fear. You start with the tinglings of dread. Slowly you build to a level of alarm. Soon there's whammy. But then you back off to a lull where the characters react. Then you begin building again to a bigger whammy, and so on until finally you're on a home stretch to the climax -- with plenty of twists and turns to stretch out the finale.

(There is a really clever recording I heard on the radio once that I haven't been able to find since. It's Beethoven's 9th Symphony with baseball style color commentary. "And he's coming up to the crescendo -- no, wait! I think he's going into a minor key! Folks, this is incredible!" Anybody know where to find it?)

So what happens when you have a teaser?

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR opens with a kid murdering his whole family with a shotgun. This sets up the curse on the house. Then we have a big lull while the Lutz family moves in. We're killing time getting to know the family and their issues, waiting for the first scare. A spectral voice tells a priest to "get out," the dog is nervous, etc.

The biggest problem for me was that the most horrifying thing in the movie happened in the first two minutes. Blood seeping out of the stairs has nothing on kinslaying.

The problem with a teaser in a horror movie is that it spoils the build. It's like starting a symphony with the whole horn section blasting away.

I noticed that in a lot of the movies we're watching for research -- THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, THE HAUNTING, THE OTHERS -- there is no teaser. The movie is a long build from the smallest, rationally explainable events, to the scares at the end.

(These can be of different pitch. THE OTHERS and BLAIR WITCH stay in the land of dread, while THE HAUNTING turns into a special effects lollapalooza.)

So what keeps us watching?

I think it's important to remember that neither the reader's nor the audience's experience begins with the script or the movie. The reader's experience begins with the cover letter, which mentions the hook. The audience's experience begins with the marketing campaign.

The most important fact that the audience knows coming into a horror movie is that they are seeing a horror movie. So they don't, strictly, need a teaser. They know bad things are going to happen. If you go see THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, you know that kids are going to be cut apart with a chainsaw. So you're going to stick around at least until the chainsaws come out. Until then, you'll make do with hints and suggestions. It's enough to see that one character is very, very scared; we don't have to see what she's scared of, yet.

Likewise, in ALIEN, we know there's going to be an alien hunting down the members of the crew. So we know to be scared going into the crashed spacecraft. We know to be scared of those eggs. We know that the dark corridors of the ship are scary, even if we haven't seen the beastie yet.

In fact, one of the hardest things to watch in a horror movie is where the characters needlessly put themselves in danger. What kind of idiot would poke his nose into that egg? And we have to remember that the characters don't know they're in a horror movie. They can't hear the scary music. Who's scared of an egg? Who's scared of a corridor?

We're writing this script in 7 act structure. No one dies until mid-3rd act. I've had the note that peril comes late. But I'm not sure that's right. The audience knows what the hook to this story is. They know this is a haunted house. So if I give them clever hints, they should experience dread. And I need to play with their dread for a while before I start killing off the characters, or the picture will climax too soon. On the kind of budget I'm working with, there aren't going to be any big special effects.

Oh, okay, one character gets sucked into a Maw of Hell®. But that's at the very end.

I'm using a seven act structure because it helps me make sure that each act raises the horror level and the pitch. In the first act, the villagers are scared of the house. In the second act, the characters see weird things in the house. In the third act, someone dies, but the characters don't know it yet. In the fourth act, they know the house is haunted, and try to escape, but can't. In the fifth, they're up front and personal with the house's evil. In the sixth, the outside world becomes involved. In the seventh, they discover what makes the house evil, and lay the evil to rest.

We did consider various teasers. One would have shown that the house was haunted; but we know the house is haunted. One would have set up the curse; but we know the house is cursed. All would have introduced extra characters that we'd never see again. All would have told the audience what they already essentially knew.

So, we ditched the teaser.

Of course, there are horror movies with teasers. The dreadful AN AMERICAN HAUNTING tells a haunting story set in the 1800s which begins in dread and ends in death; but it starts with a girl in the present running from nameless horror, in a bookending scene. It doesn't quite work but I see what they were trying to do.

There are also terror movies, which I'm leaving out of this equation. In CRAFTY SCREENWRITING I distinguished between horror and terror as: In a terror story, you're scared you'll end up dead. In a horror story, you should be so lucky. SCREAM has a clever teaser that kills off the movie's only name actress. But SCREAM isn't really about scaring the audience. You can watch SCREAM and eat popcorn all the way through. Try doing that the first time you see ALIEN. I'm not sure my definition holds up entirely.

I'm not sure how all this relates to the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies. They are technically horror movies. The victims do wind up in nightmarish fates, though they seem more cartoonish than horrifying. The horror movies I like violate the laws of God in primal ways; the deaths in the Freddy movies seem more clever than primal. But they don't have the same slow pacing. We see Freddy in the first reel, I think, and the pacing is mostly dread punctuated by horror, dread, horror, dread, horror, etc. rather than dread, dread, dread, dread, horror, horror, horror.

But I don't really grok the whole Freddy/Jason/Pinhead franchisable demon killer subgenre, so I'll leave its analysis as an exercise.

Maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe there isn't a rule that a horror movie doesn't need or want a teaser; maybe just a horror movie that depends on a long slow build. But I am pretty sure that the haunted house movie I'm writing now doesn't want one. And I think it is very important to remember that almost no one is going to see the movie you're writing without knowing what kind of movie it is. The audience is coming in to see it with certain expectations.

This incidentally is one reason the right title is so important. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION suggests a movie about a convict who comes to terms with his imprisonment, which is not what the movie's about. Whereas if a movie has "haunt" in its title, or "horror," or "nightmare," or is simply called POLTERGEIST, then at least we're clear what kinda movie we're watching.