Tuesday Talkback: Where would you have ended your favorite shows?

Yesterday I talked a lot about the Chuck finale and in looking around the internet, I've seen a great many fans opine that there were early finales that they'd prefer to think of as the end of the show.  It seems to me that's a great point of discussion.  If you could have ended some of your favorite shows at an earlier point, what earlier episodes would you have chosen as the finale?

Some ground rules: you can't rewrite history.  That is to say, you can't say, "I'd end Cheers in season 8, but I'd bring Diane back for the finale."  You can stop the show at any point - it doesn't have to be at the end of a particular season, but you can't invent a new episode or plot twist for the finale. And when you set the end point, you have to be able to defend why that particular ending works for you.

As an example, I probably would have ended The Simpsons with its 11th season finale, "Behind the Laughter." That episode is told in the style of VH1's "Behind the Music" and is something of a retrospective of the series, adopting the conceit that Homer and his family are actors who have been playing themselves as characters in the long-running series.  The next season is where The Simpsons really began its decline, and "Behind the Laughter" would have been a fitting swan song.

But that's just one example. What are your picks?

Is it really a happy ending? My disappointment with the Chuck Finale

Several days after the fact, I still can't quite shake my disappointment over the final episode of Chuck. Final episodes are always hard, owing to the difficulty of matching raised expectations and providing some level of closure for devoted fans who've stuck it out across several long seasons.  We've talked before about some of the best finales and the worst finales, and if there's one universal lesson, it's that it's hard to please everyone.

For the last five years, Chuck was one of my favorite shows for pure escapism.  The series dealt with an average guy who finds himself as one of the CIA's greatest counter-terrorism assets against evil spies, and in a post-9/11 world, playing terrorism and CIA ops for laughs are pretty rare.  Even Alias, which was similarly escapist, often treated some of its villains and overarching storylines with an almost melodramatic seriousness.

Chuck pulled off the incredibly difficult balancing act of treating the characters seriously enough to invest the relationships with a great deal of depth and growth, while never letting the James Bond-ian absurdity of some of the plots ever feel ridiculous.  We live in an era where we demand that our James Bonds and our Batmans be grim, gritty and "realistic," but Chuck's world was almost always a place where the audience could go for a fun romp.  Even so, every now and then that fun would be tempered by an incredibly dramatic beat - such as when Brandon Routh's Daniel Shaw shot Chuck's father in cold blood right before Chuck's eyes.  Fewer comedies could have killed off such a beloved character and not lost the audience, but it worked, due in no small part to the talented actors involved.

I don't think anyone would dispute that Zachary Levi's Chuck and Yvonne Strahovski's Sarah were the heart of the show.  In the pilot, she was assigned to be Chuck's CIA handler and to maintain that cover, she had to pretend to be his girlfriend.  It was probably inevitable that the characters would get together for real, and Levi and Strahovski's screen chemistry was always one of the show's best assets.  And as a writer, I get why the creators chose to up the stakes in the final episodes by threatening that coupling.

To recap the final arc in brief: Sarah gets captured by a bad guy who erases the last five years worth of memories from her, convinces her that her relationship with Chuck is just an assignment, and tells her that she is to use Chuck to break into CIA Headquarters.  Once there, she is tasked with stealing "The Intersect" and killing Chuck.  Without her memories of the last five years, Sarah reverts to being the cold, efficient assassin she was before her time with Chuck softened her, and the first hour of the finale is an exercise in breaking Chuck's heart in two as he has to admit that the Sarah he knew may be lost forever.

I want to deal with one issue before getting on to my bigger disappointment with the finale. The bad guy played by Angus MacGuffin - er, I mean, MacFadyen - is probably one of the least compelling "big bads" Chuck has ever produced. He first materialized a few episodes prior to the end and has no backstory or real connection with our characters. The idea of the villain turning Chuck and Sarah against each other would have been a lot more interesting if the antagonist was someone who had a personal beef with both.  Just putting Shaw in place of McFadden would have elevated this story further.  Shaw brings a history with him and if there's one thing Brandon Routh has shown in his last few appearances on this show, it's that he is great at playing a character the audience loves to hate. MacFadyen's character was little more than a plot device and it wasn't helped by the fact at least a third of his dialogue was him talking about how much he wants "a pristine version of the Intersect."  For a show that had been so good at creating its baddies and stunt-casting them appropriately, this character felt like a big swing and a miss.  It being the finale, that disappointment is, naturally, magnified.

In the second half of the show, Sarah realizes that Chuck is on the side of angels, but without her memories of the last five years, all she wants to do is stop the bad guy and then go off on her own.  During the mission, Sarah experiences a few echoes of memories that should have been erased.  In the show's final scene, Chuck finds her on the beach and tells her every last detail of their time together.  He wraps up by saying that his friend had this crazy idea that kissing her would bring back all her memories.  Sarah, looking at Chuck as if she desperately wants to remember everything she told him about, says, "Chuck, kiss me."

And that's where the writers leave us, with Chuck and Sarah's kiss.

As a writer, I get what they were going for.  They wanted to leave it up to the audience to decide if Sarah got her memories back right then and there, or if she got them back at all.  When pressed about it in an interview, writer Chris Fedek said, "I would certainly say it's not erased. It's not all gone. It hasn't been five seasons all for naught. It's in there. And the fun will be remembering it and falling in love again. How could you imagine anything better?"

My take: I get what the writers were going for.  Hell, I'll even conceded that it's the sort of romantic idea that sounds like a brilliant concept when you come up with it.  One of the clever conceits about Sarah's memory loss was that it allowed the show to harken back to its beginnings and explore just how much the characters have grown and changed. It's always a good idea to find a way to bring things full circle in a finale.

As my list of Best Finales shows, I'm not adverse to dark or ambiguous twists in a finale.  The Angel finale is a great example of both, as it ends with our heroes overwhelmed, but still ready to take on thousands of opponents in a battle that makes 300 look like an even match.  But then, that ending honored the tone and the style of the series.  Chuck is a different case, as it was never a show that seemed designed to end on such an open note.  Across its run, the show produced several episodes that nearly served as series finales and none of them left the status of the Chuck/Sarah relationship in quite so ambiguous a state.

I can't help but think this might have been a more interesting course of action to take at the start of this final season. (Comic book/novelist Peter David actually postulated last season that the 4th season finale could have gone in the direction of erasing Sarah's memory.)  If the writers wanted to use amnesia to explore the show's history, it could have been an arc that streatched across the entire season, or even just half the season.

Heck, even just confining Sarah's mind-wipe to the final episode might have worked better had there been more of a coda.  This article exploring what it takes for a film to have a satisfying ending has been making the rounds.  Several other bloggers have written articles about it, so I won't go in depth here.  One of major points that script doctor and producer Lindsay Doran makes is that an audience has a better reaction to a happy ending when they see the heroes celebrating their success as opposed to just seeing the success itself.

Doran says, "Audiences don’t care about an accomplishment unless it’s shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory but the moment afterwards when the winners shares that victory with someone they love."

That's what was missing on Chuck. By fading away on the kiss, we don't see Sarah's reaction.  We don't see her and Chuck truly celebrating whatever connection they've rediscovered.  We don't get to see their friends happy for them in whatever life they end up building.  The show denies us a wrap-up that shows them finally moving into their dream home, settling down, raising the children they talked about.  We're shown the kiss, but not a hint of the happily-ever-after.  The writers have given us enough that we can intellectualize that happy ending is possible, but do we feel it?  A brief coda could have made all the difference.

"Give the audience what they need, not what they want," was a favorite motto of writer Joss Whedon.  Even though I can respect that Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedek may have made a bolder, less conventional choice in how they resolved the Chuck/Sarah relationship, I can't help but feel that in this case, what the audience wanted (Sarah to be restored as the person Chuck knew and loved) was exactly what they needed.

There was a lot I liked in the finale, too much for even that one moment to totally smear, but yet I can't help but feel that the ending hits a double when the writers have shown they were more than capable of hitting home runs.

For Chuck fans, Alan Sepinwall did a great 5-part interview over on HitFix.com.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Hire me as your writer's assistant! And other favors

It's favor time!

Pilot season is in full swing, so I'll renew a plea I made last pilot/staffing season that anyone who's looking for a writer's assistant, please contact me.  I realize that a fair number of my readers are my competition for those jobs, but I'm sure that there's a percentage of my readership who might be doing the hiring than the job seeking. If you're enough of a fan that you read my blog regularly, you'll probably like me in person.  Another blogger whom I won't embarass by naming once told me that in person, I'm not the asshole I sometimes come across as here.

Favor #2 - Anyone have any insight into how I might be able to get press credentials for San Diego Comic Con?  I know there are some smaller outfits that have managed to pull this off in the past.

I could have sworn I had a third favor to ask.  Dammit, it's definitely Friday.

Oh yeah!  I've been reinstated on Google+. Feel free to add me.

You're not imagining it - the Oscars have gotten lamer and more out of step

Twenty years ago the Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards were an Animated family film, a tearjerker drama based on a best selling novel, a compelling drama based on one of the most significant moments of the 20th Century, and a period crime drama about the rise of a mobster. Those films went home empty-handed, losing to an intense serial killer procedural-thriller based on a popular best seller.

(For those too lazy to go to Wikipedia, the films were Beauty & The Beast, The Prince of Tides, JFK, Bugsy, and The Silence of the Lambs, respectively.)

Looking at the offerings in yesterday's nominations, I feel confident in saying that not only would the staid squares who comprise the voting members of the Academy not give The Silence of the Lambs the top prize, they'd probably never let it be nominated in the first place.  For that matter, I'd be shocked if Beauty & The Beast would be nominated either.

The Silence of the Lambs basically invented the serial killer genre.  Without it, there might not have been a Se7en, and without either of those films, there'd probably be far fewer serial killer thrillers made today.  You can feel the influence of The Silence of the Lambs across many films and even TV shows such as Criminal Minds. It wasn't just a well-made film, it became a part of pop culture.  You can toss off a Hannibal Lector one-liner and be pretty confidant that someone around you will recognize it.

Can you say that about any of the nominees this year?

This year's list of nominees is: The Help, Moneyball, War Horse, Midnight in Paris, Hugo, The Descendants, Tree of Life, The Artist, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Six of the nine are based on novels, but unlike the 1991 slate, the genres are significantly weighted towards drama.  In 1991, The Descendants probably would have been a dark horse like The Prince of Tides was - today, it's the only one that can challenge the presumed front-runner of The Artist.

I don't get the feeling that any of those films will penetrate popular culture.  There are some well-made films in there, but is there anything that's iconic or defining in the way that The Silence of the Lambs or JFK was?  That list is about as un-mainstream as you can get.  There's no Harry Potter, no Bridesmaids, no The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, no The Muppets - all well-reviewed films that were generally strong entries in their respective genres.  The variety of 1991 has given way to a nomination slate that seems to scoff at anything popular.  

To back that up, let's look at some domestic gross figures

Beauty & the Beast - $145 million domestic gross
The Prince of Tides - $74 million domestic gross
JFK - $70 million domestic gross
Bugsy - $49 million domestic gross
The Silence of the Lambs - $130 million

Five films that averaged $93 million - in 1991 dollars!  Two of the five films (40% of the nominated slate) crossed the $100 million mark.  If we adjusted for inflation, look at how that changes.

In 2012 dollars via BoxOfficeMojo.com:
Beauty & The Beast - $277 million
The Prince of Tides - $143 million
JFK - $134 million
Bugsy - $93 million
The Silence of the Lambs - $246 million

Average gross: $178 million in 2012 dollars

There are nine films that are nominated this year, and only one - ONE - made more than $75.5 million.  (That's about 11% of the slate.)  Their average gross comes out to $57 million.  Only one of the five 1991 nominees took in less than that in 1991 dollars.

Something has to change with the way the Oscar nominees are selected.  The films are significantly out of step with audience tastes.  If anything, the choices are even more conservative than they were two decades ago.  Granted, the Oscars have always had this problem, overlooking ground-breaking films like Citizen Kane and Star Wars in favor of more conventional choices.  But at least those two films got nominated in their respective years.  This year, some of the worthy mainstream choices didn't even get that far with almost twice as many slots available!

With results like this, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences membership comes off like a collection of film snobs more concerned with with rewarding what they see as "serious films" instead of recognizing that good film can encompass a wide spectrum of work.  These nominees aren't a good representation of release year 2011 - but merely a small segment of that calendar.

Today's filmmakers deserve Oscar voters unafraid to cast a ballot for the modern equivalent of The Silence of the Lambs.  The Academy Award is an honor that should be open to all films - not just the "important" and "safe" ones.

UPDATE: a since-deleted comment suggested that I was being unfair by not allowing for the possibility that the nominated films would see a bump in attendance due to their nominations. That's a point covered by this article.


Just earning an Oscar nom can mean big bucks for studios. Best picture nominees that did not win the award earned on average $17.7 million once they were nominated before the awards show, and then another $4 million after the show, according to IBISWorld.


And of course a box office win yields a bigger boost—an average of $27.5 million between nominations and the awards show, and another $15.4 million after winning an Oscar.

I should point out that 2010 Best Picture Winner The Hurt Locker only got a bump of about $4 million from the time of its nomination through the end of its theatrical run, while last year's The King's Speech pretty much doubled its $57 million gross during the six weeks leading up to the Oscars, and then left its run with $134 million.

Just for comparison, The Silence of the Lambs wasn't even IN theaters during or after the nominations, having opened the prior February.  It spent its first five weeks at number one in the box office, taking in $68.8 million in that time frame alone!

Tuesday Talkback: Oscar nominations

Oscar nominations will likely have been announced by the time most of you get around to reading this, so let's get some reactions.  What surprised you the most?  Which film deserved to be nominated but wasn't?  Which nominations were the most richly deserved?

And perhaps most importantly of all - how many of the nominated films have you seen? I still have way too many front-runners to see.

Have seen:
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Descendants
Drive
Moneyball

Haven't seen (among many others):
Midnight in Paris
The Artist
Hugo
My Week With Marilyn
Young Adult
The Help
War Horse

For whatever reason, this isn't a year where I've been compelled to check out most of the front-runners. Anyone else feel that way?

The problem with the third act is the first two acts

Cary left this question on the Facebook page a while ago:

"I'm writing a horror screenplay. In watching a lot of horror movies, I find that so many of them have fantastic setups, but often fall apart in the third act. Any general thoughts on how to avoid that?"

I struggle with this answer a bit because Cary didn't offer any specifics as far as his assessment of "fall[ing] apart in the third act."  Without knowing precisely what I'm responding to, it's hard to come up with an effective course of action.

There's an old joke: "The problem with the third act is the first two acts."  Essentially, the reason an ending might suck is because there's not been an effective set-up for any sort of destination.  A film might have a cool set-up and it might even have some engaging set-pieces to keep things going in the second act, but if it's all smoke and mirrors, it becomes tricky to conclude something that was lacking in depth to begin with.

This is why a lot of guys like me say you need to know your ending before you start writing.  You wouldn't jump in your car and just start driving for days on end without planning your endpoint.  If you don't have a destination, how can you develop any sort of route?  Sure, you might end up somewhere, but without knowing that at the outset, how can you stumble upon the best path to that endpoint?

The horror movies that fall apart in the end are often the movies that don't have much going for them beyond a cool hook.  I think I've complained before about The Unborn, which starts off with a clever idea about a college-aged girl being haunted by the twin she never knew about because the baby died in the womb, strangled by the girl's umbilical cord.  Eventually we learn that the twin's spirit is trying to be born into the world.  Along the way, it terrorizes the girl, killing several people around her and eventually going so far that the girl, played by Odette Yustman, submits to an exorcism.

There's some interesting use of Jewish folklore here and for a while the film holds together.  And then we get to the ending.  Remember - throughout the film, the main girl has been haunted, terrorized, threatened and attacked by this evil spirit.  We're left with the impression he's trying to kill her.  The final scenes involve Odette Yustman's character learning that she's pregnant with twins, presumably from a sexual encounter with her boyfriend shown early in the film.  It's been a while since I saw this, but I remember feeling that there was a pretty clear implication that the spirit was going to be born into one of those babies.

Wait, what?  So this spirit's been doing time in Odette's womb since early in the first act.  Presumably, all it has to do is wait out the next nine months and he can pop out alive.  Maybe - MAYBE - if Odette was considering having an abortion, the spirit might decide drastic measures are needed to sidetrack her, but she doesn't even know about the pregnancy until the film's final minutes.  Given that, why the hell is the spirit pulling all these parlor tricks that will lead Odette on a path to figuring out the truth, and why on several occasions does it all but attack her, placing her life in danger?

I want writer/director David Goyer to explain to me what his thinking was here.  Maybe I misunderstood some critical plot point, but the script leads the audience by the nose in so many other places, I doubt I'm too far off base.  I chalk this one up to Goyer being taken with the idea that the girl not only fails to banish the spirit, but that (in a Twilight Zone-type ending) she'll actually give birth to it.  In this case, the third act falls apart because the writer fell in love with a clever idea that doesn't work within the logic of the film's first two acts.

Overall, the key to not having a third act fall apart in a horror film is the same as not having any film fall apart in the third act: have a story to tell - not just a cool hook or premise.  If the third act sucks, it's often because something in it isn't meshing well with the rest of the script

Friday Free-for-All: Vertigoed movies

You might have heard about Kim Novak's, um, issues with Oscar favorite The Artist reusing some of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score in it's climax.  The internet being what it is, it didn't take long for that to inspire an internet meme.  The blog "Press Play" kicked things off:


Press Play contributor and film editor Kevin Lee followed this Novak/Lucas line of thought to its logical -- or illogical -- end. Just for the hell of it, he matched the Vertigo cue used in The Artist with the last three minutes of the Death Star battle in Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope, uploaded it, and sent the link to several Press Play contributors to get their reactions. 

And it's here that things got interesting: rather than generate cheap laughs at the expense of Novak, Lucas, The Artist or Star Wars, the mash-up inspired delight. Simply put: Kevin's experiment confirmed that Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score is so passionate and powerful that it can elevate an already good scene -- and a familiar one at that -- to a higher plane of expression. Score one for the master of film scoring! 

We encouraged Kevin to put the same piece of music under a bit from Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace and the training sequences from Rocky and Rocky IV. Same result: The scenes seemed deeper, subtler and more haunting, solely because of Herrmann's music. 

Check out their Star Wars/Vertigo mash-up below, and click here to see the full article with dozens of submissions.