This blog turns five today!

"Chief, do you remember the time we rescued Captain Picard from the Borg?"
- "How could I forget? That was touch and go for a while.  Truth is, there were a couple moments when I thought that we were all going to end up 'assimilated.'"
"I never doubted the outcome. We were like warriors from the ancient sagas. There was nothing we could not do."

- Lt. Cmdr. Worf and Chief O'Brien, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "The Way of the Warrior."

The above quote is from the 4th season opener of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, written by Ira Stephen Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe.  This scene occurs after Worf has spent some time on the station several months after the destruction of the Enterprise, and he's in the midst of a personal crisis.  On the Enterprise, victory was a given, but here, on this Cardassian-built station, everything is unfamiliar, and unfriendly.

At first glance, it probably appears to be an odd choice to kick off a post celebrating the five-year anniversary of this blog.  Fear not. All will become clear in time.

Worf's conviction in himself and his comrades is the sort of attitude that we all should strive to have.  Notice I say "conviction" and not "arrogance." There is a difference.  Both in Hollywood and out, I've run across many an arrogant person who's certainty of their superiority borders on delusional.  And out here, there are many a charlatan and life coach who make a living by peddling the lie that all one needs for success is to merely put that desire out into the universe.

Actors seem especially vulnerable to this sort of snake oil.  I'm aware of at least one "class" that requires its students to go into the same casting offices every week and drop off their headshots personally so that they might introduce themselves to the casting directors.  I believe this is supposed to either show conviction or ensure your face will be remembered by the casting directors.  If those actors are remembered at all, I assure you it will be for all the wrong reasons.

I speak of a different sort of conviction - one that recognizes there may not be any easy solutions, but there are solutions.  The difference between success and failure is the willingness to go the distance rather than will it to come to you. Difficult? Yes. But not impossible - and certainly achievable.

There have been many times in my life when I have felt as Worf did about the Borg incident, despite the odds.  I have spoken before of the TV show I created and ran in college, and how we produced two seasons of shows despite the deck stacked against us.  But the incident where I really was aware of my inner Worf came several years before that, in my junior year of high school.

It was February of my 11th grade year when the School Board announced that they had targeted seven schools for closure - and my school was one of them.  Five weeks from that announcement they would make a decision about upholding those recommendations.  Before that, there would be community forums held at each of the schools.  The intent was to give the Board an opportunity to explain their reasoning while also allowing representatives of each school to make any statements they wished.

The reasons we were targeted were primarily ones of budget and capacity.  The district needed to close schools following the failure of a levy.  They were getting beaten up in the press about all the schools with low enrollments and people were definitely calling for blood in the form of school closures.  My school had a population of a little more than 500 in a building with a reported capacity of 900.  There was another high school nearby that had a population of 900 or so, and their capacity was in the range of 1500 or 1600.

(My recollections of the exact figures might be a little off.  Suffice to say, both buildings were under capacity and it appeared the other school could absorb both populations with room to spare.)

I will never forget the experience of walking into school the morning after that announcement.  There was no chatter, no hustle and bustle in the halls.  Just silence.  It might have been the loudest silence I'd ever experienced. It was the sound of 500 people still reeling from being kicked in the balls the night before.  Someone asked my homeroom teacher, "Do you think the school board will change their minds?"

"There's about a one-percent chance of that happening," the teacher said.

I couldn't accept that. No, I didn't accept that. I believed as Worf did, that with everything we'd been through, we were like those ancient warriors.  There was nothing we could not do.  And I wasn't alone.  That night, the PTA assembled.  Parents and students had a week to prepare for their community forum.  As luck would have it, we were first.  If we did it right, we could set the tone for all who followed.  The local media was already eating up this story - surely there would be a great deal of attention given to the first of these forums.

You might think that the plan was to make an emotional appeal, to parade students before an assembly and talk about how unique our school was, what a community we had built here and how much it meant to us.  Oh yes, you can probably imagine how this would play out as a scene in a movie.  We'd tug on the heart strings, play on their emotions and the School Board's heart would grow three sizes that day.  Our devotion would inspire them to reconsider and save our school.

That's not what happened.  Sure, you can defeat an enemy by fighting them on your terms.  But do you know how you really win? When you kick the snot out of them and humiliate them by meeting them on their terms.

They wanted to make it a simple numbers game. Each of the targeted schools would have their populations easily absorbed... no... "assimilated" into nearby schools.  It would solve the problems of too many buildings and underpopulation all at once.  So what did we do? We shoved those numbers down their throat and up their ass at the same time.

Funny thing about capacity numbers - they hadn't been updated since the late 70s or early 80s.  They were almost 20 years out of date by this point.  You'd think that wouldn't be a problem because the structures of the building hadn't changed, but the laws that calculated capacity had. To make a long story less long, special education students had an impact on the numbers.  I don't recall the exact explanation, but the gist of it is that special ed programs require certain resources that create a ripple effect that reduces the true capacity of the school.

So that 900 figure that supposedly was the number that our school could take?  It was rather high.  The true capacity was closer to 750. And the proposed receiving school had a similar adjustment - to the point where their true capacity was too small to accommodate the enrollment numbers from both buildings.

That was the crux of our presentation. Not "Please don't take our second home away," but, "You guys have NO idea what your own study says."  Our presentation was passionate at times, but it carried much more fact than rhetoric.  It was like a closing argument in court, and the soundbite on all the local news stations was the perfect distillation of our message: "The proposed receiving school can not accommodate the enrollment numbers from both buildings."

One-percent chance, my ass.

We redefined the story right there and put them on the defensive, both in that forum and in the press.  Myself and several other students were so well prepared when the media came looking for quotes. Instead of giving them the "I don't want to leave my friends" statements they were looking for, we started rattling off facts about capacity and how the initial proposal was based on bad data.  I was particularly pleased when a statement I cribbed from the O.J. Simpson trial ended up as a soundbite in the paper.  When asked what I thought about the proposal, I noted the flawed numbers in the study's foundation, and concluded "Garbage in, garbage out."

We found out later that the day after the forum, the superintendent held a meeting where he demanded some of his people debunk the capacity argument we laid out at the meeting.  I wish I could have seen the look on his face when his underling told him he couldn't.

Three weeks after the proposal, the Board held one of their standard meetings.  I and many others from my school attended, for some of our teachers were intending to use the "open mic" time to plead our case again.  As it turned out, we didn't have to.  At the top of the meeting, the Board announced - two weeks ahead of schedule - that they were not going to be closing any schools for the following school year.

We won.  And I had never doubted the outcome.  This result - the Board crying uncle - was the only conceivable conclusion I ever allowed myself to contemplate.  As our PTA President said, "You CAN fight City Hall."

So why tell this story on my five-year anniversary of all days?  Because I was Worf.  My high school, and later my college were my Enterprise... and when I first came to Los Angeles over a decade ago, I was not unlike that Klingon trying to make sense of a much harsher environment.  It was no longer like those days when I had the luxury of believing it would always work out.  Virtually everyone who had my back before was now gone.

I eventually got a job in the industry and started climbing the ladder, but do you know when things really started turning in my favor professionally?  When I launched this blog.  It was slow-going in the early days, I won't lie.  And yet, the more I made a name for myself (one that, ironically wasn't even my real name), the more control I had over my own destiny.

The blog became a great way to network, not just with other aspirings on my level, but with writers who had earned the kind of success I was desperately pursuing for myself.  Somehow, I became someone who they were interested in meeting.  I'd created a sort of credibility for myself and even though I'd only taken a few steps, along the way I found something that had been missing for a while: The conviction that I could do this.  That this wasn't just a pipe dream that I was doomed to pine for from afar.

So those of you still at the start of your journey, I want you to remember that the most important thing you can have is that certainty that you can do this.  It doesn't mean you wait for the universe to work out for you.  We did save the school, but that was a lot of work.  I produced two seasons of TV, but that was a HELL of a lot of work.  Embrace that.  Own it.

Those of you coming to L.A. will probably find it scary at first.  But if you stay strong, you will reach the point when you can look at yourself in the mirror and know, "I can do this.  All I need is the will to discover the way."

I didn't truly find that will until I took control of my destiny and created this little spot on the internet.  This blog has forced me to reflect on what I've learned in the industry, it's made me more aware of my own shortcomings as a writer... and it's brought me a lot of friends.  It's definitely helped my career in ways I couldn't have foreseen.

There are a lot of people I'd like to thank for their support and friendship over the years.  The problem is that I'm certain that the more comprehensive I try to make the list, the more likely I am to leave someone important out.  So instead, I think I'll pay tribute to one of my earliest supporters and the man who was critical in drawing an audience to my blog in the early days - Scott Myers.  After Scott plugged my blog, my hits jumped from about 50 a day to 500 - and they kept rising.  He's been a constant supporter and a good friend in the years since.  If you're not already reading his blog, Go Into the Story, add it to your bookmarks immediately.

To all of you who have come here regularly, either from the beginning or starting more recently, thank you for being a part of these last five years. And good luck in finding whatever it will take to own your own path.

Webshow: Voiceover

Going in concert with a Scott Myers post that goes live later today, today's video deals with when and when not to use voiceover.  There's conventional wisdom that voiceover is a lazy crutch that good writers shouldn't use. Is that accurate?

Everything Wrong with Modern Film Criticism

I've debated if I should post what I'm about to say.  I think that reviewing other reviews is often a dangerous road to go down.  Whether you're the person behind the work that's being critiqued or just an interested party, there's rarely any good that can come from providing a dissection of other people's reviews.

But for the past week I've been annoyed by a trend that popped up in the reviews for my friends' movie Devil's Due.  Critics didn't receive it terribly well, though that's not unusual for a found-footage horror film.  As much as I liked it and hoped it would be well-received, I wasn't completely blindsided by the fact that critics made a meal of it.

But what did get under my skin is that I saw a number of reviews where it was clear that the reviewer didn't even give the film a chance.  When several paragraphs of a review focus not so much on the specifics of the film, but rather the reviewer's fatigue with found-footage, I think we have a problem.  I think when you're hired to review a specific movie, the focus should be reviewing the movie - not using the film as an excuse to get into your specific issues with a genre.

And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that my issues with these reviews were just scratching the surface of what was wrong with the way films today are examined.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start off by looking at statements like this one from Todd Gilchrist of The Wrap:

Generally speaking, I have no problem suspending disbelief in order to enjoy found-footage horror – of course there’s no good reason for them to film all of the time. But “Devil’s Due” distinguishes itself, much to its detriment, by making a huge show of the characters’ reasoning, and then packaging their entirely self-sustaining “home movies” in between recordings of a police interrogation of one of the survivors. 

And the fact that the police don’t seem to believe the suspect, despite what is very obviously a mountain of footage evidencing their innocence, suggests that they didn’t find, or see, the material we’re watching. So how exactly can you have a found footage movie, if no one finds it?

Unlike The Blair Witch Project, Devil's Due makes no claims that the footage we are seeing is an assembled documentary.  It merely uses the technique of telling the story through cameras that capture the action.  It's an approach that was used rather effectively in Chronicle, and it's apparent from the first time the film cuts to the perspective of a supermarket security camera that we aren't going to be wedded to Zach's own camera.

And yet Gilchrist wasn't the only reviewer who got hung up on this non-issue.  FlickFilosopher.com spent half their review digging into this:

This is the problem: A found-footage movie is supposedly more than merely a film for our putative enjoyment. It’s supposed to be a document, an artifact, of the world it’s set in. If the found footage is from one source — say, the memory card from the videocam some idiot used to record an investigation into a witch legend, or a monster attack, or, ahem, his own honeymoon — then, sure, this one tape was literally “found.” But when the “found-footage” consists of material edited together from multiple sources in ways that fail all plausibility tests, then something is badly wrong. 

I mean, look: I can buy that Samantha McCall (Allison Miller: 17 Again), a newlywed young woman still in school who doesn’t even want to be pregnant yet and had taken responsible steps to prevent it, might have gotten knocked up by Old Scratch in some crazy evil candlelit rite in the basement of a nightclub in Santo Domingo. What I cannot figure out, for the life of me, is this: Who assembled this footage? It cannot be her husband, Zach (Zach Gilford: The Last Stand, Post Grad), the dude with the video-documenting fetish, because as the film opens, we’re seeing police-interview video of him covered in blood being asked to explain just what happened — which we know he won’t be able to do because what cop or lawyer or jury is gonna believe “it wasn’t me it was Satan”? (And we know it was Satan responsible for whatever we’re about to watch in flashback, because the title tells us so.) 

But even if we could concoct a scenario in which he is exonerated and goes on to do some editing, huge chunks of the film consist of footage from cameras Satan’s minions secrete in the McCall house and other material that he doesn’t have access to and, in other cases, is probably not even aware of. The only other possible explanation is that the minions of Satan did some editing (using Lucifer’s supernatural powers to find the other footage), but why? They’re doing all their demonic babymaking in secret: they’d hardly assemble in one handy place all the evidence against them that reveals their diabolical plan. 

And then we have Mountain Xpress harping on the same point:

We are supposed to believe that it was cobbled together (by whom, I have no clue) from home video footage and security cameras. Banana oil. It's just a jumble of shaky, wobbly images that couldn't possibly be what they're claimed to be. Granted, the whole found-footage premise is played out and pointless, but you could at least pretend this footage (including footage that's stolen by the satanists part-way through the proceedings) could be real. 

Need I remind you the film never "claims" to be an actual documentary?

Even the New York Times got in on the act:

Though apparently pieced together from a variety of sources — including supermarket and police interview tapes — the film never reveals who did the piecing.

Screenrant:

This film and so many others in the genre seem to have abandoned the idea that this footage must conceivably be found at some point. Switching perspective to cameras that no one is ever going to find is a cheat, pure and simple.)

A "cheat?" Really?

And CraveOnline:

That element of the found footage genre – y'know, that the footage was actually found – is now completely absent, as evidenced in a film like Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's and Tyler Gillet's Devil's Due. The shaky-cam, low-watt filmmaking is now less an indicator of the would-be snuff film aesthetic that was once a highlight of these movies, and has been reduced to mere affect, style, and an easily mocked formula. In Devil's Due, perspective switches rapidly from the camcorder-happy protagonist, occasional security camera footage, and even numerous shots from mysterious hidden cameras insides the protagonists home (hidden cameras placed by… who could it be??). In such a case, you, as a viewer, can only begin asking the most inappropriate questions about who found all this footage, and why they are assembling it for us. 

I mean....

Riddle me this, Batman. When is a plothole not a plothole? When it's completely invented by the reviewer.  Is it fair for a critic to build a box, then flunk the film for not fitting into it when the film itself explicitly avoids that box?  That's really dirty pool.

Look, I'm not saying everyone should have loved Devil's Due, but I'd have a lot more respect for a negative review that seems to hate it for fair reasons. The Wrap's review also had this gem of an unfair attack:

Suffice it to say casting one of the stars of “Friday Night Lights” in a main role and hiring hugely recognizable character actor Sam Anderson (“Lost,” “WKRP”) further undermines any sense that this is real, much less believable. 

We're 15 years from the time of The Blair Witch Project, which was probably the last time you could effectively dupe an audience into believing that a found-footage movie was an actual documentary.  Part-and-parcel of that showmanship tends to be that filmmakers cast unfamiliar faces to further the pretense this actually happened.

The problem with that is that a lot of found-footage films suffer for exactly the result you'd expect when you cast a lot of untested talent - weak performances.  A genre with the potential for the greatest level of intimacy is then hobbled by showcasing inadequate interpreters for the drama.  This (and the Paranormal Activity series) is a major studio release.  Is there any portion of the audience that would buy a ticket to this expecting it's any more real than Jack Ryan?  It's not like anyone flipped out because Captain Kirk wasn't Captain Kirk, but rather a CIA analyst.

I'd point out that it's not too uncommon for found footage actors to end up in studio films soon after.  Even if the whole film marketing is predicated on fooling the audience into thinking this is all "real," that shelf life is pretty short when a year later, the leads are staring on a CW series or popping up in rom-coms.  Two stars of 2012's Project X ended up in rather high profile projects within a year of that film's release.  Alexis Knapp turned up in Pitch Perfect and Miles Teller starred in The Spectacular Now.

But for that matter, found footage has long been making use of known actors.  Let's look back six years to Cloverfield.  Lizzy Caplan was four years removed from a very visible part in Mean Girls, to say nothing of numerous TV roles in that time.  Odette Yustman and T.J. Miller had also each done a TV series and Mike Vogel and Jessica Lucas had even more extensive TV resumes.   The aforementioned Chronicle also made use of familiar talent.

So the idea that found footage must star complete unknowns hasn't existed for a long time.  Why is this still considered a valid attack on any film in this genre?

Also, it takes a special kind of balls to call out a film for being derivative while using a review gimmick explicitly stolen from another reviewer.

I miss Roger Ebert. He always judged a film by weighing what it accomplished against what it set out to achieve.  It was this approach that lead to an infamous argument with Gene Siskel over the fact Ebert gave Benji The Hunted a "thumbs up" on the same show where he gave Full Metal Jacket a "thumbs down."

Modern film criticism is in sad shape, and to some extent, I trace a lot of this back to Red Letter Media's original 70-minute video deconstruction of The Phantom Menace.  I think there's one very astute and absolutely brilliant insight in there.  At one point, the reviewer challenges Star Wars fans to describe franchise characters without referencing their occupation or their clothing.  As you might expect, those questioned are able to give very in-depth answers when describing Han Solo or C-3PO.  When the topic turns to prequel characters, they start grasping at straws.  It's a brilliant indictment of how thin the prequel characters often are, done in a very clever way.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the lesson too many took from Red Letter Media (and I include RLM himself in this indictment) is that what made the review awesome was that it had enough material to fill 70 minutes.  Thus it beget an even longer autopsy of Attack of the Clones in which the "flaws" felt more like fanboy whining and failed to be dissected in a manner half as amusing as in the original video.

But the agenda seemed to have shifted from giving interesting lessons about drama to providing a comprehensive checklist of every perceived "sin" of the prequels, no matter how small. This is the theory behind those incredibly annoying "Everything Wrong With..." videos that frequently take potshots at major films.  There they list everything they think is a sin, no matter how pedantic.  Sometimes they identify valid plotting and character issues - but those fair points are often listed alongside minor continuity errors and gaffes.

Quality of criticism appears to be less valued than quantity of criticism.  After all, the more things you find "wrong" with a film, and the more words you can generate in tearing it down, the more objectively worse it must be, right?  Give me a succinct Roger Ebert deconstruction any day over a review that takes longer to read or watch than a full episode of Siskel & Ebert.

(I fully realize the irony of taking such a stand in what has to be one of my longer posts of late.  Hopefully you find the multiple quotes from the Devil's Due reviews relevant.  I felt it was important to illustrate just how frequently the critics employed what I considered to be an irrelevant attack.)

When I was growing up, Roger Ebert's reviews encouraged me to look below the surface and explore my own feelings about a film.  He knew how to give his opinions in a way that provoked discussion and introspection, not as a bludgeon to convince his audience that his opinion was an absolute truth.  More than that, he was fair when he deconstructed a film and itemized its shortcomings.  Was he always perfect? No.  When he really hated a film, you could sometimes sense his passion get away from him.  But he tried - and more often than not, he succeeded.

When I read the work of most current critics, I think of Roger Ebert and am reminded of a quote from Hamlet: "I shall not look upon his like again."

A peek inside the writers' room of The Vampire Diaries

If you're a fan of The Vampire Diaries or are just interested in TV writing in general, you should check out this fairly comprehensive article from Entertainment Weekly that deals with the seven biggest debates from the show's writers' room and the two smallest.  It's a fascinating peek behind-the-scenes of a show known for its often shocking plot twists.

I think I've brought this up before, but there were a couple seasons there where The Vampire Diaries was one of the best shows on TV.  I had expected little more than a Twilight ripoff when I started watching the show, (And truth be told, I only watched the pilot initially because I knew someone who worked on it) but the writers soon got a handle on the characters and by season two, they were layering twist upon twist in a way that was both exciting and organic.  For a while there, it was a standing rule in our household that neither my wife nor I could watch a new episode if the other one was not there.

But by the end of the third season, I was perceiving a problem with the series.  It was, in a word: Klaus.  As I discussed in a column for KsiteTV:

"Klaus was virtually unkillable and incredibly powerful.  That can make for a great short-term villain, but when you've got a bad guy who needs to sustain an entire season, it can be problematic.  It can make for great drama to see the good guys try to kill the bad guy and fail once or twice, but after that tedium sets in.  

"Plus, if your bad guy is seriously unstoppable and ruthless, not only should he win every encounter but in order to keep his cred alive, he shouldn't allow the good guys to walk away unscathed.  If our heroes survive too many encounters with this invulnerable force of evil, it doesn't make Klaus very effective either, does it?

"And as if making him immortal, strong and invulnerable wasn't enough, Klaus also had very powerful mind control powers.  If he can make any of the characters do anything he says, it again tips the scales so far in his favor that it's hard to buy our characters lasting too long against him.  The show did its best to find compelling reasons why Klaus couldn't just tear through these guys, but by the last stretch of the season" it felt like every episode contained a scene of Klaus threatening our heroes to do as he commanded, or flat-out using his mind control powers to make that happen.

At the time I felt like the story demanded that Klaus die at the climax of season three.  Everything seemed to be building to that outcome and I recall feeling like the show massively copped out when it dangled that possibility, only to have Klaus survive. Dramatically, he NEEDED to die for the show to maintain its credibility.

Well guess what?  According to co-creator and showrunner Julie Plec, that was the original plan:

“And Klaus, we were going to kill at the end of season 3 because he was the villain, and if your heroes can’t vanquish your villain then what the hell good are your heroes for? When we started pitching that, the studio and the network had a heart attack. They looked at us and they said look guys, from a strictly studio network point of view, it is so rare that you get a character and an actor like this that connects with the audience, that breaks out, that the actor is so talented and works so well on this show. If you kill him, you are making a major mistake. And we said, ‘But he’s our villain. Our entire season will have been for naught because our heroes will have just blown it.’ But we managed to make it work."

I think the network was wrong.  That's probably a bold statement to make in light of the fact that Klaus now anchors his own successful spinoff, The Originals.  (Which I admit, I didn't expect to like and have been very pleasantly surprised by.)  I think dragging out a character like Klaus ends up diminishing the impact they have.  The textbook example of this is probably Sylar on Heroes, who was a really compelling threat for the first season, but then became less interesting the longer the show had to contrive reasons to keep him around.

Powerful threats can be interesting when they challenge our heroes, but prolonged usage tends to undercut the threat they represent.  If a villain sticks around for too long, the stalemate not only makes their power less awe-inspiring (as it means the heroes CAN keep him at bay), but it runs the risk of making the heroes appear too ineffective to stop this continuing threat, often making their continued survival seem like the result of lucky breaks or outside interventions.

One reason I think Buffy's villains worked more often than not is that they typically only stuck around for a season and then were pretty definitively dealt with.  Sure, some might pop up in cameos or as apparitions, but by and large once the bad guys had served their purpose, their stories were brought to a definitive end.

I get where the CW was coming from in wanting to prolong Klaus, but most of the time I'd rather trust the creators to know when something had run its course.  I don't think anything done with Klaus the following year was powerful enough that it merited compromising the earlier story.  The Originals has shown that there's merit to the character when used in a new context.  In terms of The Vampire Diaries, I feel like the character's a bit of an albatross.  Better for both that they move in different directions.

The other interesting point in this article also deals with the need to follow through on consequences.

"Should we bring Jeremy back? After losing her brother in season 4, Elena went downhill fast. She turned off her humanity and nearly killed both of her best friends before turning all of her hate on Katherine. So why did the writers decide that bringing Jeremy back would be the right decision, even after Elena had grieved her loss? 

“Bringing Jeremy back was a massive debate. Massive,” Plec said. “We knew that his death needed to happen in order to make Elena turn to the dark side and to get us that story. When all is said and done, I can defend it with all honestly. Sometimes when you don’t look at your show critically but you look at your audience, and I as a fan have watched shows like Alias and like Buffy where really really terrible things keep happening to the heroes and it gets to the point where they get so depressed and everything’s so sad that it actually becomes kind of depressing to watch. So I thought about it from the point of view of an audience member saying you know what yes, to be a good writer, your deaths should feel permanent, but our audience that has been watching our show faithfully and sobbing along with us every time somebody dies, there is something beautiful about getting to revisit them every now and then and in Jeremy’s case, it was actually about bringing him back into Elena’s world so that she could find herself again.”

I have to admit, I felt Jeremy's "death" lacked some punch because there wasn't a single person I knew who thought it would be permanent.  His resurrection was expected, but stopped short of being a total cop-out.  I hadn't thought about it the way Plec articulates it here, and I guess she is onto something there.  There is something to be said for letting your heroes win now and then.  It helps that TVD had stuck to its guns on a number of character deaths prior to this, so one resurrection under extraordinary circumstances isn't too damaging.

That said, I think that if character deaths are undone too often, it compromises emotional investment in the work.  It's a real problem in comics, where it's rare that a death leaves any impact because there's little chance a major death WON'T be undone.  Drama thrives on consequences.  Puncture that too often and your story pays the price.

This is why while I might see Plec's side of the Jeremy resurrection, I think it was important that the show let its next major deaths stick, just to reestablish that sense of permanence.  Alas, TVD killed off Bonnie as Jeremy was resurrected, then brought Bonnie back to life fewer than a dozen episodes later.  That's a possible jump-the-shark moment, depending on how the rest of the season deals with the fallout.  What is clear to me is that the next several deaths HAVE to stick in order for the show to reestablish the threats to its characters.

But it is interesting to know that none of these decisions were made lightly in the writers' room.  They clearly debated each one at least as much as the fans eventually did.

Webshow: Flashbacks

So how true is the "rule" that writers should "never" use flashbacks.  In this week's video, we'll explore that question.

Unfilmables

Scott Myers continues his postings about "screenwriting rules" today with a look at unfilmables.  In going through some archives, I found I covered this topic once before, in a comment on Scott's own site.

There are a couple of different kinds of unfilmables. One kind is what might be called the “tonal unfilmable.” Something inexplicable might happen to the character, and the description might read “What the fuck!?!” That’s something that generally works, and I’d think wouldn’t raise a red flag for most readers. In fact, so long as you don’t overdo it, it might even remain invisible or subliminal.

Note that key phrase, “so long as you don’t overdo it.” Slush pile hacks are frequently guilty of thinking that if this trick works great on one page, then two or three times in that same scene would be even better, right? And then why not do this for every scene?

There’s a saturation point for tricks like this. Was it THE EXORCIST that only used music in a select scene or two, which made its eventual usage standout and be more powerful? CASTAWAY definitely did this sort of thing, as there’s no musical score until Hanks gets off the island. In both cases, the absence of an element made its eventual usage more powerful. Any film composer will tell you the same thing – that scoring a movie is as much about knowing when not to add music as it is knowing when to use it.

Same thing with tonal unfilmables. Some of you might be rolling your eyes at the fact I even have to say this, believing it to be self-evident. I can assure you from my readings that it is not.

There’s another kind of unfilmable that absolutely MUST be avoided at all costs – the expositional unfilmable: “Frank drives his 1987 Buick Skylark, which he bought three years ago from his grandmother. It’s a good car, even if the upholstery smells like broccoli. He turns down Exposition Blvd, thinking to himself about his first solo drive down this very street, where he swerved to avoid hitting as squirrel, and instead drove his father’s car into a tree. “That tree is gone, by the way, with no evidence it was ever there.”

Slush Pile Hack LOVES to tell his readers what his characters are thinking, remembering, smelling and usually the entire story of their lives. He’s also big on describing the history of locations and settings, doing it in a way that draws attention to itself and isn’t useful at all. (How is your audience supposed to know that the blue dress Jenny is wearing is actually something she borrowed from a friend and never returned? Why is that in the description?)

I’d venture that at least 80% of the unfilmables I see come from the latter category – from writers who really should be writing novels. And THAT’s really where the “no unfilmables” rule is coming from. I don’t think anyone’s gonna rap you across the hands for most of the examples Scott gives in this post – but if you’re putting exposition – vital, plot-changing exposition – into your action lines, you’ll give yourself away as not knowing what you’re doing.

The final word on "we see."

Scott has been running a great series on Go Into The Story where he attempts to put the lie to the notion of "Screenwriting Rules."  I definitely encourage you guys to check it out. He's going continue the series over the next two weeks and I'll be coordinating some of my content here with the topics he's discussing.

Per Scott's schedule, today we're taking on the advice to "never use 'we see.'"  As you may have seen on twitter, this debate never fails to get pros in a frothing frenzy.  I have seen pros more vehemently attack someone who gives this advice than they have attacked actual scammers charging money for their services.  This isn't all on the pros - newbies really get their panties in a twist over the "we see" rule.

I've said my piece on this before, but Scott's goal is to have an archive where we can point people to for the definitive answers for these silly debates.  Basically, we're all tired of these fights and want a handy URL to point writers to so that they can read it and go back to worrying about important things.

I want to start from the understanding that anytime someone argues against a rule, they claim they are told "never" to do something.  That's not a helpful way to begin the debate because it becomes a strawman that's easily knocked down when one exception is found.  And boy do you aspiring writers love finding exceptions. 

Another thing some writers love to do: blame the reader. Do you know why that is? Because it's a lot easier to assume the person finding fault with your work is an idiot than it is to admit that you might, just might, not be as good a writer as you think you are.  And frankly, the people who rail the loudest about readers are generally the people who don't know shit about what they're talking about. 

But really, my overriding point here is that blaming the reader is an easy out.  You can't change the reader, but you CAN change your work.

Here's what readers care about: Is this a good concept? Is this a good script? Did it keep my interest throughout the read? Can I show this to my boss and not be embarrassed by it?

There's no such thing as a truly compelling script that gets a pass because the writer used "we see."  Or because the first act turning point came a little late.  However if your writing is shit and your pacing is garbage, yes you WILL get dinged for a late turning point, or for an over-reliance on "we see" that makes the act of reading a genuine chore.


Here's something that isn't useful to settling the debate - dragging out Black List scripts and counting the instances of "we see" in them.  If you do that and your take away is, "The concerns about 'we see' are full of shit and I should never listen to anyone again about it," you deserve to fail.  You might as well be saying, "Well these Black List scripts used italics and didn't get in trouble so I should make ALL of my description italicized!  And if someone tells me otherwise, they don't know what they're talking about!"

Instead you should ask, "Why is 'we see' such a debated issue?"

Contrary to popular belief, script readers do not go through a script with a scoresheet, marking rule violations and adding them up to some kind of score.  So asking "Why do the pros get away with X while I can't do that?" is overcomplicating a basic fact.  If the pros "got away" with something that you regularly get hit for, it probably means that they did it well.  You probably didn't.

If I'm reading a Craig Mazin script, stumbling onto a "we see" on p. 12 isn't going to convince me he's a shitty writer.  And the same goes for if I'm reading your script.

But if you are starting every paragraph with "we see," you're not a good writer. (And yes, I have seen writers do this.)

If you use "we see" excessively to the point that it clutters up your description and ruins any flow in the reading, you're not a good writer.

My stance on "we see" is generally "Don't overdo it. It's okay if you use it in moderation, preferably sparingly."


My feeling is that 90% of the time it's redundant. Your action descriptions are supposed to be all visual, so if you're writing it, the assumption is we're seeing it. After all, you don't write "We hear" before every line of dialogue, do we?

One notable exception is that "we see" is valuable when we're trying to limit what the audience sees and then replicate that limitation for the viewer. When this debate came up elsewhere, someone noted that in an Indiana Jones script, there's a "we see" that introduces a character wearing a fedora and leather jacket, though he's only shown from behind. Obviously, the "we see" is used to offer that description and give the impression that the character is Indiana Jones when that is not in fact the case.

So it's definitely useful when limiting the information the reader gets. I wouldn't dispute that at all.

However, as with capitalizing and underlining, this "rule" exists because there are always a healthy sampling of newbies who overindulge. Like I said, I once read a script that started nearly every paragraph with "we see" and after a while it just got to be annoying. It was a pretty clear PASS. However, I hasten to add that the Pass wasn't because of the "we sees," just that the "we sees" were merely symptoms of this writer's lack of skill.

If all the dialogue in a script sucks, the answer is not "Never write dialogue," it's, "learn to write better dialogue." And if all the uses of "we see" in a script reach such an epidemic proportion that it becomes cluttered and annoying to follow, the answer is "learn to use the tool properly."

If you write a script with non-linear chronology and the feedback you get is, "This makes no sense, you shouldn't write it this way," then it's not a reasonable response to say, "Tarantino did it in Pulp Fiction so I can ignore you! You don't know what you're talking about!"  No, the answer is, Tarantino did it well and you clearly didn't.  So rather than arguing about being judged unfairly, maybe your energy is better spent figuring out why Tarantino's execution was better than yours.

Most of all, let's knock it off with the strawman rules.  If you're arguing that it's wrong to "never" use something, you're completely missing the debate about why this particular thing might be an issue in some circumstances.