Why You Can't Rely on Starmeter

The IMDb has its new Starmeter rankings out. They rate actors by how often people look them up.

A few factors skew the rankings. Kids have more time to look up stuff, which put TWILIGHT's Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart at #1 and #2, not to mention a bunch of other secondary characters in the top #25. I'm pretty sure Ashley Greene isn't actually a bigger star than Leo DiCaprio.

Also, people look up actors when they have no idea who they are. Which might account for Tom Cruise's relatively low ranking (#18). Way more people go to see his movies, but who needs more information about him?

In other words, this is a distracting and misleading metric. Ah, well. You get what you pay for.

The Power of Positive Thinking

I've been giving feedback in various forms for perhaps 20 years. Because I do script evaluations over the Internet, in addition to my work for producers, I'm can run across wildly irregular material. Working with both professionals and aspiring writers has taught me a few things about giving effective feedback.

What do you do when you come across a bad script from a friend or colleague, and you want to be honest without being destructive?

When I do notes, the first draft can occasionally be horribly negative. I go through the script making little "oh, for heaven's sake!" notes to myself. There's nothing wrong with making this kind of note, so long as you don't communicate it to the writer. The notes are helpful because often I can figure out later on (from the ending of the script, or upon reflection) what the writer was trying to do. Often the writer's intentions become clearest where he succeeds least, because it's the most ambitious scenes that show what he was going for.

Then, after reading, I write up the main body of my notes. These are the real notes that I'll eventually send.

I try to always start with a compliment. We had a rule in our writing group back in LA that the entire first round had to be compliments. That helps prevent writer hara-kiri. In the rare cases where I can't find something I like about the craft -- an ear for dialog, or a clever twist -- I compliment the research, or the imagination, or how heartfelt the material is. Everyone has a tendency to jump in with criticism. If you start with something nice to say, the criticism will go down more smoothly.

Then I try to figure out what the movie is. No one writes a script without having a movie in their mind. They may not have got it on the page, but they had a vision in their mind. What was it? What is an even better version of that?

If you can make a really strong case for what the movie should be, then you can skip a good deal of your criticism; it becomes moot. I read a script recently where a lot of the scenes seemed irrelevant. But I could see that there was a potentially powerful relationship that wanted to be placed at the core of the movie; the story of that relationship was the movie the script wanted to be. So rather than saying, "a bunch of your scenes have got nothing to do with anything," I was able to say, "I think the core of the movie is the relationship between Parker and Schwartz, and if you focus on that relationship, you'll have a stronger movie." If the writer then puts the Parker-Schwartz relationship at the center of his storytelling, the irrelevant scenes will simply fall away.

If you can figure out what the movie is, and sell that movie back to the writer, then you can often skip as much as half of your criticisms. Say the movie is full of aimless scenes of dull dialog. But you've discovered a powerful story motor lurking in the background. ("I think that Kiki is really trying to get her ex-boyfriend to take her back.") If the writer brings the story motor into the foreground, that will tend to focus the dialog scenes. They won't be aimless any more. They likely will be less dull, too, since something will be going on in them.

I'd always rather say, "Here's the movie I think you're trying to write" than "the script you wrote sucks because here's why." And the former takes care of a good deal of the latter.

Note that I'm not saying, "I'd rather see a movie about Parker and Schwartz," or "If I were writing this, I'd throw all this stuff out and write about Parker and Schwartz." I'm saying, "It seems to me that the movie you're trying to tell is really about Parker and Schwartz. Their relationship propels the theme you seem to be interested in, and the failure of that relationship is what earns you the finale you wrote." You have to figure out the movie that the writer seems to be trying to write, even if he doesn't know it.

Sometimes, of course, you spot an opportunity for a stronger hook or a more accessible movie, but you can tell it's not what the writer has in mind. Then you have to say, "By the way, I think you're trying to write a dark movie about the futility of men's relationships,but if Schwartz was a girl, this could be a terrific rom-com, with a happier ending of course."

But leave it at that, and then move on to whatever the writer seems to be trying to achieve.

I think the most effective way to approach criticisms is to look at the elements of story. As I keep telling you guys, they are:

a. a character we care about
b. with an opportunity, problem or goal
c. who faces obstacles and/or an antagonist
d. who stands to win something he doesn't have (stakes)
e. and/or stands to lose something precious to him (jeopardy).

When scripts fail, at least 80% of the time they're failing because one of these elements isn't there or doesn't work. And it's amazing how many repercussions that has. A failure at the story level will take the fun out of your action sequences. It will sap the urgency and snap out of your dialog. It will make short scenes seem tedious.

For that matter, bad story elements almost always seem ruin your story structure. You would think you could theoretically craft a perfectly well-structured plot without stakes or jeopardy, or without knowing exactly what the heroine wants, but in practice, the writer senses that's something wrong, and starts throwing extraneous plot at the movie, trying to find what's missing, and sooner or later, the whole plot train derails as it goes searching for its missing elements.

Fix the story elements, and often the plot problems fix themselves, once you rewrite towards the revised story elements.

As you can tell, I think the key to good feedback is to say less rather than more, and to say positive constructive things rather than just pointing out what's not working. A good tennis pro won't fix your grip, your stance and your swing. A good tennis pro will fix your stance, and see if that fixes your grip and your swing.

Sometimes, of course, craft is lacking. The dialog may be bad because the writer just doesn't have an ear for dialog, or because he's not even a native speaker of English. At that point you do have to criticize. But even there, you can phrase a criticism positively rather than negatively. Compare these two remarks:

"All your characters sound the same."

"Try to give each character a distinctive voice."

These are basically the exact same idea. But one hurts. The other doesn't. The key to effective criticism is telling the writer what he could do better. No one likes being told they failed. But few people mind being encouraged to do better, especially if you tell them what the standard is, and how to get there:

"Try to give each character a distinctive voice. Ideally, you should be able to tell who's speaking just from the dialog, without seeing the character name. Look at each line, and see if there's some way you can tweak it so that it reveals something about the character's personality, in addition to communicating what they want to communicate. Tweak it so it sounds not only like something they would say, but something only they would say."

I usually wrap up my notes by giving a cleaned-up version of the page notes I wrote when I first read the script. I think it's helpful for the writer to know how the read went. I don't try to make myself look smarter than I am. If I missed something important, I'll leave in the notes that show my confusion (but with a parenthetical explaning that I got it later). After all, if I missed something important, maybe the writer should hang a lantern on it. Other readers will likely be reading less carefully than I am, after all. I'm getting paid to read, but they're working through the stack of reading that is keeping them from sleep and/or sex with their beloved. It's good for a writer to get a sense of how the read went.

One thing I never do is tell writers they're no good. I might say that the script is not there yet, or that the subject seems uncommercial. I might say they have a lot of craft they need to learn. But who's qualified to judge their potential? Maybe they need to write ten more scripts, and then they'll be good. George Lucas's early drafts of THE STAR WARS were horrible. I would hate anyone to read my early stuff. And suppose you're right, and they suck. So what? If they're a writer, they'll keep writing even if they suck. And now they're mad at you.

The final thing I do is sit on the notes for at least 24 hours. Often I come up with a much better way to put something, or a crucial insight, or even a "solution" for the movie, without even really trying to. I do a final pass, upgrading any remaining negative comments that might have slipped through, unpacking remarks that aren't clear, and adding in any new insights.

It's tempting to fire off notes right away, but hold off, just like you'd hold off sending anything you just wrote. You'd think people who are anxiously awaiting your notes would appreciate your speed, but if you turn notes around too fast, they feel you didn't spend enough time on them. And you'll always have more perspective the next day.

Everything I've read has a better version hidden within it. That's the version that's in the writer's head -- maybe only in the back of his mind -- trying to get onto the page. It may not be a movie -- sometimes it's a novel. Or a comic book. But there's always something better that just isn't on the page yet. If you can draw that out and sell it to the writer, then you're giving truly great notes.

Working It

I got back after midnight last night from my train trip back from Toronto. (I knew there was a reason I try to avoid the local.) The networks and most of the production companies are there, and a lot of shows even in Montreal are staffed out of there. So I try to get up there about eight times a year. Ideally, I go when Jill Golick has one of her terrific Writers Watching TV events, or for some spectacular party.

So Thursday night was the Telefilm do from 5 to 7, and then the WGC Christmas party from 7:30 until at least midnight. That's when I left, anyway, and Christin Simms was asking me why I was leaving so early. (Because I ran out of mana, is the truth.)

I've got a point where I can spend five hours at a party and not run out of friends to talk to. That's nice. When I started out in the biz up here, and when I started out in LA, I had to force myself to go to parties, because I didn't know anyone. I find it really difficult to be at a party where I don't know people. I'm not an enormously social person by nature (which may surprise some people who only know me now). It doesn't come naturally to me. It probably doesn't come naturally to most writers. That's why we sit in front of the computer writing instead of sitting on the phone talking. (People who have a talent and a love for that become successful agents.) When you're first trying to break in, you're at a lot of parties hoping there will be somene you can talk to.

But it's your job. If you're not meeting people, you're not doing your job. Writing great stuff is necessary to break in. But it's not sufficient. If no one knows you, they're not going to "see" you in their writing room.

But it won't be your job forever. Eventually you'll make friends, and then it becomes fun. Like the writing, it stops being work as soon as you're enjoying yourself.

What's really fun about showbiz -- and probably any business that's also a calling, art, sports, music -- you get to be friends with people whose work you also admire. I'm friends with many of the best TV and feature writers in Canada. it adds something to the friendship when you can share the work you love.

Seven Writer's Rules for Survival in Animation

Rob Edwards, writer of THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, has an interesting post called Seven Writer's Rules for Survival in Animation at MakingOf. I liked these points:

RULE 3. THINK IN SEQUENCES
Animated features are usually divided into about 30 3-5 minute sequences. Each Story Artist is “cast” to do various sequences according to their abilities with action, comedy or dramatic moments. If you’ve followed Rule #2, you’ll quickly figure out how to write to the strength of the particular artists. If she’s great with physical comedy, take it as a challenge to create dynamic physical gags. If he’s good with drama, go for it and allow the tone of the film to change a bit. It will help give the film a variety and pace that will ultimately add to its overall entertainment.

RULE 4. REMEMBER WHY IT’S ANIMATED
The current state of special effects is so advanced that it’s become increasingly difficult to impress even the least theatrically experienced 8-year-old. But take heart, there are still things animation can do that can’t be matched by the most skilled effects wizards in the world. The key is to know what those things are and use them as tools to make your story as fun as possible.
Good animation looks for an “animation hook” – essentially a reason why the movie is being animated in the first place: Toys coming to life after you leave the room is a hook that bursts with possibilities. The ascension of a rat to the pinnacle of Parisian gastronomy would probably lose a bit of its charm in live action, but Ratatouille stands out as one of my favorite animated films of all time. The key is to squeeze as much mileage out of that hook as you can.

Good points to remember as we try to work up some animation pitches.

Got a Feeling 2010 is Gonna Be A Good Year

It's the week of Christmas parties, so it's perfect that there's a foot of snow scheduled for today. This is the time of year that we trade experiences and realize that, wow, everyone else had a terrible year, too. Which is reassuring. If you're not making your nut in a good year, either you're no good, or no one likes you, or no one knows you exist. If you talk to some of your extremely accomplished friends, all in various corners of the biz, and they made a quarter as much this year as last year, then you're in good company, and it will probably get better next year.

There's been a lot of talk about whether the Canadian networks would manage to sink the last few Cancon requirements and gut Canadian-made TV entirely. (Because why does Canada protect them from US competition, if not so that they can buy as many US series as possible?) It was reassuring to hear that Konrad von Finckenstein, Chairman of the CRTC, thinks the 1999 decision to dilute Cancon requirements (which turned 12 homemade dramas a year into 2) was a "mistake." So I'm feeling reasonably sanguine that there will still be jobs in my local industry next year, and I won't have to move back to LA.

I'm also feeling reasonably sanguine because Lisa and I wrote a pilot for an American cable channel this year, and we have a bunch of projects being pitched to studios right now, one with a Big Name Showrunner attached. Come to think of it, pretty much every TV project I have out there currently has a US component. That's the direction things seem to be going. Which is mostly a good thing, I think.

Next year I'm also hoping to branch out a bit. I'm directing another short, and if all goes well a romantic comedy feature. I'm also hoping to do some more work on videogames. That's fun work, and it lets me use all my sf and fantasy and mythological thoughts that are way out of budget range for any of the TV or feature producers I work with. Of course if one of my series goes, then that's what I'll be doing. It's all about irons in the fire, and keeping the fire stoked.

I hope you survived the year in good shape, and are enjoying your own Christmas parties. (Some of you I'll see you at the WGC party in Toronto tomorrow.) Next year's going to be a good one, God willing.

Hook vs. Story

Q. Can you give me an example or examples of film where there was a good hook and story but they were underdeveloped or and the theme and subplots were highly developed? Perhaps a better way of putting it is where the hook plays second to the theme and substories of the characters. I want to see if this can still work and how if feels when it does not work.

Can you clarify your question?

Q. Ok, I have heard it said that if a film is not good "if it is about what it is about". So to make it good, it has to have a strong underlying meaning and not just focus only on the hook and premise. If the script is written and there is not as much technical detail and time spent on the hook but there is much more effort applied (succesfully) to the characters and how the hook affects and changes their lives, can this work and do you know if any films that show this? It seems it may make the audience feel like it was a bait and switch.

The point of the hook is to get people in the door. It isn't necessarily what the movie is about.

A strong example is FREE ENTERPRISE. The hook is "Two Trekkies meet William Shatner and agree to help him put on a rap version of JULIUS CAESAR, with Shatner playing all the parts." (I think the movie, incidentally, is where Shatner discovered that he could have a lot of fun playing a blowhard.) The movie is actually a romantic comedy about a geek guy who meets a geek girl.

It works. I really enjoyed FREE ENTERPRISE.

At a less obvious level, many movies develop far beyond their hooks. THE FULL MONTY is about a bunch of unemployed Sheffield steelworkers putting on a strip show, but a good bit of the movie is about the guys and their relationships and their personal problems. Those problems do affect the strip show, so the scenes aren't irrelevant, but you could make the case that the filmmakers were at least as interested in telling a story about unemployed steelworkers as a story about them putting on a show.

You have to serve your hook. At the end of FREE ENTERPRISE, there's Shatner, rapping about Calpurnia. If the movie didn't satisfy the hook, the audience would feel cheated. But you are always welcome to give the audience more than they signed up for.

How NBC Can Get Its Groove Back

In today's episode, Friend of the Blog Paul William Tenny, author of Media Pundit considers how NBC can get its groove back. (Complications Ensue does not necessarily endorse the opinion piece below, but it's food for thought.)

How NBC can get its groove back

By Paul William Tenny

NBC is almost certainly better off today than it was with Ben Silverman helming the network -- which isn't saying much -- but he's not the only exec that needs to go, and NBC is still pretty far from playing on a competitive level with the other networks. A number of mistakes have been made that go much deeper than entertainment direction. Although his new show may end up playing an insignificant role in the network's future, the debacle involving Jay Leno perfectly illustrates how a lack of leadership at NBC has resulted in a network that cares more about not losing than it does winning.

Despite all of that, nobody should be writing them off. And despite what I've written below about what NBC needs to do to get back on top, their biggest obstacle might be getting rid of this perception that they're already ancient history. The more I think about the way people react to this network, the more it reminds me to the way I thought about the Red Sox. Here was a baseball team that was on top of the sport a really long time ago, but hadn't won it all in some 86 years. Then out of nowhere, they were back on top in 2007.

It won't take NBC that long, but the message ought to be pretty clear. Where you are today is not a guarantee of where you're going to be tomorrow.

No amount of effort or good intentions can replace talent. In NBC's case, it's not creative talent that's been lacking these last few years, it's back-to-basics business sense that's been missing.

Here's how to fix it.

Acknowledging The Problem

It's natural to be cautious after getting knocked on your rear. You question your ability to make decisions and begin doubting your ability to accomplish goals. A bad leader will use their failure as an excuse to exhibit a "stop losing ground" mentality. That becomes the ultimate goal. Forget trying to win, you're now obsessed with not losing.

A good leader, on the other hand, will use these tools to find and address their flaws so that they can go back on offense.

This may sound simplistic and not really all that related to NBC's most visible failure: they can't put out any good shows. That's because NBC's problems are fundamental to their business. Putting terrible shows on the air is simply the result of timid business decisions, it has nothing to do with creative drought.

Pardon my hubris as I am not an expert on business management, but one doesn't have to be an expert to identify problems at this level. Ask yourself this, when was the last time that NBC was ever accused of being too aggressive?

The big problem I identified while building a narrative for this story in my mind was the concession that NBC has already lost, and is giving up. Everyone could see that putting Jay Leno on for five nights a week was a step backwards. It doesn't matter if Leno's program makes money, it will never make enough money to enable NBC to take any real risks, and what's worse, it consistently robs the network of a chance to find a breakout hit. And that's the bottom line here. Leno doesn't enable NBC to attack the competition, doesn't get it any closer to third place.

Leno enables NBC to pretend that it's playing a different game than everyone else, and if that's the way they want to do it, fine, but they should quit and find something else to do.

That move was a classic blunder. The only thing Leno's new show is doing -- or trying to do -- is temporarily stop NBC from losing more ground, but it does nothing to gain back anything they've lost. If that mentality is prevailing within NBC's highest levels of management, then everyone needs to be fired. It's not personal or arbitrary, but there's really no getting around it. This is worse than good people making bad decisions or having bad luck, these are people who are fundamentally incompetent. It doesn't matter how hard they try or how badly they want to succeed, it's long past time to recognize that they simply aren't capable of doing their jobs.

A New Game Plan

I've seen the television industry accused of being risk averse in any number of areas and for any number of reasons, some justified, some not. NBC should dismiss a lot of this "conventional wisdom" which often turns out to be completely worthless and wrong. Conventional wisdom once said that year-around schedules wouldn't work, and then cable came along and proved that it can (while neither the networks nor cable have truly embraced year-around programming on their own, together they do cover the entire year proving that there are always people looking for something good to watch.)

Being NBC right now shouldn't be all that hard. You're in last place, so you've got very little to lose. Nobody expects you to succeed so there really shouldn't be any real pressure, either.

Going year-around would satisfy at least two requirements of good leadership:

1. It's an offensive move that will attempt to take advantage of potential weaknesses in the other networks who aren't airing original programming during certain times of the year. Put more simply, when the enemy is standing still, you need to be on the move. If even marginally successful this would mean NBC gaining ground on all of its rivals, something it hasn't put any serious effort into in who knows how long.

2. This will reverse the trend of having less original programming. Leno was a mistake not because NBC execs thought or hoped he would have good ratings or be more profitable -- only to find out that his ratings would sink -- but because it didn't address NBC's problem: no scripted hits. It the end it doesn't matter at all what NBC put on at 10PM, or why. They don't seem to understand what their problems are.

There are surely a lot of problems and circumstances that are unique to the television industry, but it is not so unique that the basic precepts of math and common sense don't apply.

TV and film share something in common: Sturgeon's Law, which states that 90% of everything is crap. If you make 10 movies or 10 TV shows, nine of them are going to suck.

It would therefore follow that in order to make more great movies and TV shows, you have to make more TV shows and movies overall. This logic is stark in its simplicity and surely subject to certain exceptions, but it is sound nonetheless. If NBC wants more successful shows, it needs to start putting more pilots on the air.

Period.

It'll cost them more money but at the end of the day they'll also end up with more successful shows.

I covered the upfronts for the first time a couple of years ago and was shocked at just how few new shows each network puts on the air each year. I don't think any network had more than four in any genre, and some genres only had a single show. I seem to remember NBC having the fewest, which made sense. They've become so risk averse that they'd probably rather not put any new shows on the air at all. It's seems eerily similar to the results of domestic abuse.

It will cost a lot of money -- money that GE and NBC's possible new parent Comcast can undoubtedly afford -- and everyone except myself will call them crazy, but NBC needs to come out of the upfronts with enough programming to cover the entire year. They need to put triple the number of pilots on the air than anyone else, do whatever it takes to give themselves a reasonable shot at gaining ground. If that means pulling Leno off the air while still paying out the rest of his contract, so be it. It happens every single year in sports.

If that means putting programming on the weekends again, so be it. Whatever they do can't possibly perform worse than a musical tribute to ice skating, which was on a weekend or two ago.

I'm not kidding.

There's been talk of expanding the NBC Nightly News to a full hour. It beats every other evening news program in the ratings, so why not build on a winner? If it gains against the competition in the ratings by even a point, then mission accomplished. Small steps add up.

There are any number of greater risks that NBC could and probably should start taking. The accountants may tell you that it makes more sense to only order eight or nine episodes from a new series, so that you can cut it lose before building up a lot of debt if it's not working out, but by definition the only thing accountants will tell you is how to save money. They can't tell you how to run your business successfully and can't tell you how to make money. Making money means taking risks, and executing risks safely via mitigation takes skill and experience that accountants don't have -- and sadly neither does the current crop of NBC execs.

The only network experimenting with full season orders right off the bat is FOX, and their experiments could be fairly described as halfhearted at best. Although the economies of scale are different, I've never heard of a cable network going out of business because they ordered a full season from a new series, and a ton of them are already doing that. With little to lose and no one else really looking at that territory, it seems ripe for NBC to give it an honest try.

The benefits seem apparent. Audiences should be more apt to stick with a show they know is going to be around by next spring. The creative talent should theoretically perform better under less pressure, and by default will not have to unnaturally structure their series to be front-loaded with crap that will excite the network execs but just freak out the audience. The value of those two benefits are far too often underestimated. A show that sticks around for a full season, even if it's only mediocre, is still keeping eyeballs on your network instead of someone else's.

Again, small steps. How can you gain viewers when you can't even figure out how to keep the ones you've already got?

Incentives

Sports teams love to cannibalize talent from their opponents. It's a zero sum game; their loss is your gain. NBC should do the same as ruthlessly as possible. If you're a hot shot exec-prod who has a good relationship with FOX and offers on the table for more action, why would you ever leave for a loser like NBC?

If you're NBC, the answer is that you're going to start giving people things that nobody else will. Start offering hot talent working for your competitors higher residuals. Offer full season orders. Promise -- and mean it -- that you won't syndicate their shows to a sibling cable network below market value. Don't preempt their shows or dump them in death slots. Don't change their time slot. Since you're putting more pilots on the air you can give these people something that FOX can't: airtime. If they stay with FOX they might get one pilot on the air this fall. If they come to NBC, you'll give them two, and maybe one on USA as well.

Swallow your pride and give people what they want so that they'll come to your side and give you the next CSI instead of the next Trauma.

Some of these things will cost the network money but they'll also serve as investments that should pay back everything they cost and more. So what, you'll make a little less on having the next CSI than such a show makes for its network/studio elsewhere (because you stopped being greedy on residuals), but at least you'll have the next CSI. And you'll have potentially taken that show from your rivals, to boot.

Promotion

I read somewhere (and ended up writing about this some time ago) that USA Network was more profitable for NBC-U than NBC was. Although this probably would better fall under "game plan", perhaps USA would be a good place to start mining for talent to replace all the execs at NBC that need to go. And while they're at it, it wouldn't hurt to try promoting some of USA's most successful shows (and perhaps SyFy?) to NBC to see how they do (or at least the talent behind them.)

NBC seemed pretty desperate to build a theme for Monday nights for a while, I can't think of a better fit right now for what they've got on Monday's than Stargate Universe, or Warehouse 13 which is doing very well for them. Maybe it's time that NBC and the other networks started using cable as a form of minor leagues from which they can mine shows and talent both on the creative and executive level.

It also wouldn't hurt if they hooked up with Joss Whedon, if not just so that we can stop watching him get repeatedly murdered by FOX.

Check out the feisty discussion in the comments!

If you're interested in guest-blogging, drop me a line.

Kill Your Hero?

Q. Is it a bad idea to kill your protagonist? This morning I had one of those moments that come to you when you're writing…things are humming along and then you write something and realize that you can go somewhere else entirely.

Anyways, my moment involved possibly killing my protaganist right near the end of the story. There's a twist following the climax, and just when everything seems resolved the protaganist is fed to the wolves by a character he thought was on his side. This character gets away…the credits roll…basically I'm afraid the audience has too much at stake with the protaganist and will be pissed off if he dies. But at the same time I think the twist could be good enough to satisfy them.

This is really a gut check question. Are you in the right genre? Does it make it a more satisfying story? Does it deliver the goods on the concept? Have you set this up throughout the movie so that it is a surprising but inevitable ending? Then go for it.

I think the key thing with a surprise downer ending is it has to be, somehow, not a true surprise. It can't come out of nowhere. It has to be set up emotionally. The hero has a death wish. The hero is getting away with something that we know, deep down, he can't really get away with. Or shouldn't. There have been intimations of death all along. The resolution of the movie is really about what the hero accomplished, not whether he survives. The hero is a bad bad man and we really want him dead.

The posters for a certain Mel Gibson movie say, "Every man dies; not every man really lives." So you know going in that the odds aren't good for Mr. William Wallace.

In a horror movie I saw a few years ago, the heroine loses her child in the opening. She never really gets over that. In one version of the ending (the European one, of course), she doesn't make it out alive because dying (and being reunited with her dead daughter) is a better result for her than going on living.

In a long-running HBO series, the main character (arguably) winds up dead in the finale. But he's talked about it and he lives in a world where it's normal.

You shouldn't end on a twist for the sake of a twist. But if you can surprise us, yet leave us with a feeling afterwards that this was the natural conclusion of the story -- then go for it.

(Incidentally, if you are pitching your movie out loud before you write it, then this question will answer itself. When you tell your listener that the hero's dead, do they go, "Cool!" or "WTF???")

NOTE: The comments are rife with SPOILERS, since it's impossible to talk about surprise endings otherwise!