The need for truth in "based on a true story"

Let me give you a little background to this post.  A little over a week ago, my friends Geoff LaTulippe and Scott Beggs over at Broken Projector discussed the issue of fidelity to the truth in content that's labeled as "based on a true story." In particular, they were discussing the case of a twitter account whose author claimed to be dying of terminal cancer.  Those who followed the feed found it to be inspirational and quite moving, and they were saddened when a final tweet announced the author's passing.

It didn't take long for people to begin questioning the veracity of the account.  As the story became less and less plausible upon examination, the followers started to feel duped and hoodwinked.  Geoff and Scott batted this issue around, with Geoff essentially taking the position, "Who cares? Does it matter?"  Is there a responsibility to be 100% accurate when telling a story that's ostensibly based on actual events?  They invited their listeners to write in with their thoughts on that debate.

This happened to be an issue I've given a lot of thought over the years, so I dashed off a not-small email to the fine gents.  On their show this week, they gave the issue another airing and encouraged me to post the letter in full on my blog. Then to drive home the point, they got on Twitter and attempted to get their followers to bully me into posting it.

Message received.  What follows is the email I sent them, with a few revisions and additions for clarity:

The first time I can ever really remember thinking about this question was when I was in middle school and ran across a Roger Ebert piece on JFK. The whole piece is worth reading in full, but I'll reproduce a few key paragraphs below:

"Their criticisms all boiled down to a couple of key points: They felt Stone's movie was based on unsupportable speculation, and they believed his film's hero, former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, was an unscrupulous publicity seeker who drummed up his celebrated case against Clay Shaw out of thin air.

"These points are no doubt well-taken. I believe they are irrelevant to the film, which is not a documentary, not a historical study and not a courtroom presentation, but a movie that weaves a myth around the Kennedy assassination - a myth in which the slain leader was the victim of a monstrous conspiracy. The pollsters tell us that most Americans believe this anyway. Even Tom Wicker, down deep in his piece, says he does not believe the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Well, who does? And yet the image of Oswald as the lone killer has been the official establishment myth for 28 years. Is it such a terrible thing Stone has done, to weave a countermyth?

"Here on the movie beat, I always sort of quail when anybody makes a film that ventures out of pure Hollywood fantasy and into the real lives of the experts in the front section of the newspaper. I'm sure to be treated to many analytical studies of the factual accuracy of the film, in which the writers may be sound in their knowledge of history, but seem to have little idea why they or anyone else in the audience really goes to see a movie. People will not buy tickets to "JFK" because they think Oliver Stone knows who killed Kennedy. And when "Babe" comes out this summer, and inspires all sorts of disillusioned analysis on the sports page, that movie's factual accuracy will have nothing to do with the tickets it sells, either.

"People go to the movies to be told a story. If it is a good story, they will believe it for as long as the movie lasts. If it is a very good story, it may linger in their memory somewhat longer. In the case of "JFK," which I think is a terrific example of storytelling, what they will remember is not the countless facts and conjectures that the movie's hero spins in his lonely campaign to solve the assassination. What they will remember (or, if they are young enough, what they will learn) is how we all felt on Nov. 22, 1963, and why for all the years afterward a lie has seemed to lodge in the national throat - the lie that we know the truth about who murdered Kennedy."

A perspective like that is why I'm generally pretty forgiving about "inaccuracies" in movies like CAPTAIN PHILLIPS. When the distortions are in service to the story and as long as nothing truly batshit happens like aliens rescuing the ship, I can live with some fudging in terms of specific characters and attitudes. But then I can't help but remember that in another review of a movie based on a real-life incident, Ebert muses that "for an entire generation, this will be how they remember the truth." I can't remember the film or the real life incident, unfortunately. But I get where this is coming from - if APOLLO 13 implied that the malfunction was the work of Russian spies looking to cripple the NASA space program, that would be beyond the pale, no matter how much drama it made for.

So to some degree, I think that the need for fidelity in filmmaking varies with the scope of the incident and the significance of the incident to the larger world. It'd be easy to say a blanket "Who cares?" but I don't think it's that black-and-white. Now just to contradict myself, I'll revisit an issue that was batted around a few weeks ago.  The whole story with THE BRINGING really strikes me as distasteful. To take a real life incident where someone actually died and use their real names while wrapping it up in a supernatural context strikes me as really distasteful. Even though this real-life story is relatively unknown (I hadn't heard of it until the film), it bothers me that the script seems to capitalize on that tragedy when it would be so easy to change the names and merely allow the story to be vaguely inspired by the real incident, as most LAW & ORDER eps are.

And yet, I don't have a problem with the myriad of time-travel stories that deal with someone going back to the Kennedy Assassination, even when the story reveals that the traveler ends up being the assassin. I recognize there are a lot of contradictions in my stance.

With regard to the internet hoaxes discussed on the podcast, I think that it's ridiculous to get fired up over things like if Diane in 7A was real or not. If someone was using that viral lie to solicit money or otherwise profit from it, then I'd have an issue. In general, most harmless Twitter hoaxes don't bug me. This also includes THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I thought it was brilliant how they tried to add some verisimilitude to the whole thing by building that internet rabbit hole for people to fall down if they attempted to do an internet search on that story.

When it comes to someone like James Frey, though, fuck that guy. I mean, it turns out that lying to Oprah is the least of that guy's sins, but I think once you've gone on Oprah and tried to pass your hack writing off as a real memoir, you deserve what you get when people call it out. If the BLAIR WITCH filmmakers appeared on Oprah under the pretense they wanted to raise awareness about these missing kids and how Maryland was doing nothing to find them, then they'd be rightly drawn and quartered when the truth came out.

(And as indicated, my disgust with Frey is at an extreme because of the story in the link above. I think people who prey on naive writers are the lowest of the low.  Taking advantage of someone's naivete in order to get them to sign over basically all rights to their creative work with an insulting low pay scale is really offensive.  As far as I'm concerned it's indefensible.  For a fellow writer to do that to people who look up to him as a mentor is about the slimiest thing ever. So yeah, fuck that guy.)

So I don't know. I think it would help if there was agreement on what consisted a major inaccuracy in an adaptation. I'm tired of every Oscar season turning into hit piece after hit piece on these "based on a true story" films. Sometimes the changes are major, but when we get to stuff like nitpicking deliberate timeline inaccuracies or composite characters, it gets out of hand.

In the second podcast, Geoff touched in this and said that he had no issue with those kinds of articles if they approached it from a more academic standpoint.  In other words, if they come from the angle of "Look at what they changed and understand why some of that was necessary," it could be educational about the process of writing a script.  Too often, these pieces carry the subtext of "They changed a few facts so this movie doesn't deserve an Oscar."  I'm not sure that should be one of the main criteria when evaluation how effective a film is as a piece of drama.

So what are your feelings on adapting true stories?  I'm curious to see where some of you draw the line.

Why aren't you watching THE GOLDBERGS yet?

This TV season was an embarrassment of riches when it came to single camera comedy. Just last night on Fox, the excellent BROOKLYN NINE-NINE concluded its freshman year on the air, wrapping with the confidence of knowing they will definitely be returning in the fall. The police-comedy had been one of my most anticipated shows of the year, and usually when that happens I end up disappointed when the show sputters out of the gate or just plain dies. (THE BLACKLIST and THE FOLLOWING fall in varying places within that spectrum.)

Fortunately, it's hard to go wrong with Andre Braugher and casting him as the authority figure some 20 years after he first played Detective Frank Pembleton on HOMICIDE ended up paying off well. On a lesser show, I'd probably be saying, "Well, at least Braugher is good," but not content to coast on their lead's mastery of deadpan deliveries and slow burns, the creators of B99 have surrounded him with a strong ensemble. Andy Samberg's natural goofiness is exactly what this show's world needs in order to inhabit the cartoony-but-not-TOO-cartoony tone that many of the show's best gags rely on. When he goes really big, Braugher becomes the anchor that ensures everything still has weight and the distance between the two approaches is where you'll find most of the show's other characters.

The only show that comes close to even competing with BROOKLYN NINE-NINE in terms of hitting the ground running and refining its voice over the course of a season is THE GOLDBERGS. This checks all the boxes for me, almost as if creator Adam F. Goldberg and his staff are spending millions over the course of a season just to play precision target practice with my funny bone. Framed as Adam's recollections of growing up in the 80s, the series evokes similar nostalgia that THE WONDER YEARS mined so long ago. But it's more of an outright comedy than TWY is, and a key decision is to not adhere strictly to the real timeline of the 80s. One episode might make mention of a movie from 1982 being at the theatre concurrent with a reference that fixes the action in 1986. It's enough to make one speculate about an episode where young Adam listens to Billy Joel's 1989 hit "We Didn't Start the Fire" and realizes he must avert the yet-to-occur "Rock and Roller Cola Wars."

As much as THE GOLDBERGS is compared to THE WONDER YEARS, the difference in the way they explore their time frames draws a sharp contrast. In its strongest moments, TWY examined the universal moments in childhood: first crush, first license, the frustration of dealing with a teacher who keeps pushing you to do better, the discovery that your parents are people who had their own dreams and lives before you. In some ways it told stories that could have been set in any era. But it was also VERY much about the Vietnam War era. A major plot point in the pilot was the death of Winnie's brother in Vietnam and though that element often receded into the background, it only allowed that tragedy to gain further potency in the moments where it was judiciously invoked.

A conventional drama might have felt compelled to explore Winnie's grief in depth. However, as we were bound to Kevin's perspective, the toll it took on the girl next door was only apparent when the signs were too aggressive for Kevin to ignore. This comes to a head in "The Accident," where Kevin fears Winnie has fallen in with the wrong crowd and isn't acting like herself. He recognizes her acting out as the cry for help that it surely is, but all his efforts to reach out to her are rebuffed until after she's injured in a car accident and is left to deal with the consequences of her recent behavior. It was the last time the show would really examine the scars left on Winnie from losing her brother, aside from mention made of it in an episode when Kevin and Winnie work on the McGovern campaign.

It's hard to imagine THE GOLDBERGS getting either that serious or that political. We're not going to see an episode dealing with Iran-Contra or Gary Hart anytime soon. The vast sum of its nostalgia is drawn from 80s pop culture rather any of the world events at the time. It's as much a love letter to childhood and family as TWY was, but in a way that allows it to have more fun. THE GOLDBERGS is one of the rare shows where I can't think of a single dud episode thus far. As much as Adam's world has been fleshed out, there's the sense that the elements introduced later have always been there on the fringes, just waiting for their turn in the spotlight. Nothing feels like it's invented week-to-week. A good example of this is the GOONIES episode, where all of Adam's friends were made up of characters introduced individually in earlier episodes.

But the show's at its best when dealing with the characters who have been there from the start. Jeff Garlin fits the role of Murray like a glove, perfectly hitting the right tone of paternal pride in his children even as their drama annoys him to all hell. (In a recent episode, he remarked having more children was his worst nightmare, then turned to his daughter without missing a beat and said, "You'll understand when you have kids.")

He and Wendi McLendon-Covey inhabit their roles of Murray and Beverly like they've been playing them for years. It's rare to have that chemistry between a TV married couple who can bicker and snipe without making you wonder how these two still stand each other. There's a familiarity between the two and stories like last week's episode (where the two engage in a passive aggressive war of "improving each other") really take advantage of that. The writers really understand these characters and the characters understand each other. Hopefully five years from now we won't be complaining that their most prominent traits have been exaggerated over time and made them unbearable.

I also like how older brother Barry has alternately been a dork, a jock, a bully and a sappy romantic. TWY's older brother Wayne was often just a straight-up ass, but Barry is allowed to be the heavy as often as he's the goat. Objectively, he's probably more dork than anything else ("Big Tasty" casts a long embarrassing shadow.) However, because to Adam, Barry still wields a lot of power, the writers have license to play with the character in fairly versatile ways. Another great touch is that Barry is 100% confidant in his abilities, even when his his lack of game is cringe-inducing. (It helps that Troy Gentile is clearly having a ball with whatever the script throws at him that week.) There are a lot of directions the writers could take Barry as he matures and it'll be interesting to compare the Barry from five years from now with the one we've been presented with this season.

And then there's Erica, who probably took the longest to be fully-fleshed out this season. My favorite moments have involved her at odds with her mother, in part because that dynamic feels so real. I don't have a sister, but I DO have a younger brother and a mother who are more alike than either would like to admit, and so many of the Beverly/Erica fights rang true. (I assure that right now, both my mother and brother are calling bullshit on that last sentence and the comparison in general.)

Erica's an interesting one to examine because she's the only character without a real-world analog in Adam Goldberg's family.  Throughout the season you could feel the writing staff trying out different roles for her (alternately a conspirator and adversary to her brothers, manipulative with her grandfather, aggressive against her mother) with the result being that Haley Orrantia got to play a lot of different angles.  This paid dividends because in the "rebellious sister" category, Erica feels a lot more complex than Kevin Arnold's older sister Karen.

George Segal's Pops is another wonderful depiction of a familiar archtype brought to life in an interesting way.  Maybe it's because you really can imagine Segal as a former Lothario, but the requisite "randy old man" jokes don't play as the cheap laughs they often are on other series.  Or maybe it's just that the writers are smart enough to realize that "old guy wants to get some" is the set-up to a joke, not just the punchline.

The wonderful thing about Pops is that just below the humor is a very human story about a guy in his declining years.  He already had his driving privileges taken away and a recent episode dealt with him needing to stick to a budget and raised the issue of his memory lapses.  Segal and the writers make balancing those tones look a lot easier than it actually is.

And of course, I can't leave out the show's own storyteller, Adam. Sean Giambrone is a real find - a TV kid who actually looks like a kid. Adam is supposed to be about 14 and Sean looks damn near that age.  This might sound like a no-brainer, but the last show to cast a 14 year-old regular with someone who's actually that age probably was THE WONDER YEARS.  Consider that most of the characters on CW dramas and Glee started their series runs at age 15 and were played by actors in their early-to-mid twenties.  It pushed those shows into more adult territory early on.

But because Adam looks so young, he's allowed to be a kid.  So many stories about the early teen years now feel like fresh territory.  Several episodes this year reflected this, as we had stories about Adam giving up his beloved childhood toys, Adam's geeky love of THE GOONIES leading him to send his friends on a treasure hunt, and Adam wondering if he had a crush on his platonic friend.

Adam is an "every-kid," must like Kevin Arnold was.  He's not a future Tiger Beat cover boy, he's not written like some sort of teenage fantasy wish-fulfillment.  He's simply one of us, neither an Alpha nor an Omega.  He's developed just enough for the audience to project their own childhood feelings onto.  There's an innocence that Giambrone brings to the role and it'll be interesting to see how long the show's able to maintain that.  I have to imagine the writing staff is praying daily that their young lead doesn't return from hiatus having hit a growth spurt.

As of yet, THE GOLDBERGS has yet to be renewed for a second season.  It feels like it should be a lock, but I'm sure an upswing in the ratings can't hurt.  When the show returns next week, please consider sampling it.  It was one of the best, if not the best new comedy of the season.  (Aside from BROOKLYN NINE-NINE, only ENLISTED made a fan out of me as quickly as THE GOLDBERGS.)  I'd love to see it run for many years - or at least long enough so that young Adam Goldberg can become a fan of THE WONDER YEARS.

Reader questions: Are you bringing something original to the table?

Joe writes:

I adapted a screenplay based on a RomZomCom novel about a married couple on the verge of divorce that repairs their relationship after/due to a zombie outbreak. I thought that since it was a RomZomCom that focuses on a bickering married couple (I'm aware that it sounds like a similar premise to Shaun of the Dead, but thought it would fall into the "same, but different" category) and not a dreary zombie flick about a group of survivors holed up somewhere would give it enough commercial appeal to at least be a direct to DVD film. 

I hosted my script on the Black List, paid for two reviews, and much to my dismay each came back as 5 overall with no individual scores higher than a 6, and each review had a 4--one review gave me a 4 for characters, and one gave me a 4 for plot. 

The weaknesses discussed in each review focused on a lack of character development, particularly the couple's relationship--which I agree with and have ideas for fixing--but the "Prospects" section of each review stated that my screenplay wasn't unique enough to stand out from other zombie movies. 

Obviously, since no category was higher than a 6, there are also issues with dialogue and plot (which may be linked to character development) that need to be fixed, but in your opinion, would it even be worth the time to re-write the script focusing on developing the relationship of the couple? Or, given the fact that there are already so many zombie movies, is my premise not even unique enough to have any commercial appeal? How do you know when it's time to just give up on a script completely?  

First, as far as knowing when to give up on a script, check out this video post.

But to further that discussion, I think it's important to consider the larger context here.  I think that no matter how good the script is, you're going to be fighting against that knee-jerk reaction of, "Not ANOTHER zombie movie!"  Zombies, like vampires before them, have hit total saturation point.  If you think there are a lot of produced films about either of those entities, you need to remember that for each one of those, there are hundreds of specs all trying to cash in on that genre's success.

To stand out from the crowd, you're going to need an incredibly inventive take.  The first spec that springs to mind is MAGGIE, which was on the Black List a few years ago.  This was a zombie script with a twist - it treated zombie-ism as a slow-progressing disease and focuses on a 16 year-old girl who's gradually turning into a zombie over six weeks.  I've read MAGGIE and it really plays less like a horror movie and more like a terminal illness movie that uses the supernatural trappings to dress it up a bit.

I'll confess I wasn't a huge fan of the script. I admired its cleverness in how it set up its concept, but it wasn't a script that left me with a burning need to see brought to the screen.  But I can't dispute that it found an approach to zombies that no one else was doing and it did it on a budget.

With your script, you need to be brutally honest in deciding for yourself if you're bringing anything new to the table.  With a genre like that, it's going to take more than just another set of characters working through their issues amid a zombie attack.  What's unique beyond those characters?  ZOMBIELAND didn't work just because it was four colorful characters - it was because the story started at a point where zombies had almost completely taken over the country and it treated that situation with a bit more irreverence than we'd seen.  We're given the doomsday scenario, but it's made darkly funny rather than brutal.

Is your script doing something that no one else's is?  Or is it merely a well-executed example of elements that feel familiar at this point?

Alessandro asks:

Is there any room for a character arc in a short movie script? (15 mins max)

Absolutely.  Just to pull from two examples I've featured on the blog, check out "Violet" and "Man Crush."  Both of them are under five minutes and were produced by students participating in Campus MovieFest.

Daren asks:

I've always liked the format for THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER script - with the absence of traditional sluglines. Using instead things like "IN JACK'S OFFICE" as the heading. Dan Gilroy's NIGHTCRAWLER script used the same style. I also really liked the bold. Both scripts were lean/fast reads. 

Anyway, question - is it okay to use similar formatting as long as you're consistent? I'm not talking about using a non courier font or messing with margins/dialogue and character spacing, but would the use of non traditional sluglines or bolding your script really turn off a reader/producer that much (assuming the story is great and script well written of course)? 

I don't see this thing too often so I can't speak to what the exact reaction would be.  I'd presume that once the script got to the point of being budgeted, the non-traditional slugs are going to drive your line producer crazy.

Speaking as someone who reads a lot of scripts, I always get thrown by this because it makes it harder to scan and identify specific scenes easy.  The extra line break before that scene heading and the "INT."  is really easy too look for when one has to scan back for a particular sequence.

I'm one of those who tends to feel that any time you stray outside the normal format, you're making it harder on the people reading your script.  The last thing anyone should want to do is force the reader to make extra effort.  I never want to have to rely on the benefit of the doubt.  There's a reason that every formatting program defaults to the standard sluglines.  They're universally recognized.

I don't think straying from the format will hurt a brilliantly written script, but if your writing already has the reader assessing it on the borderline AND they're having to work harder to keep track of things, you're probably dead.

Nepotism and network cronyism

Ah, nepotism.  It's often invoked by people far outside the business as the reason that movies and TV "suck."  You know the type of people I'm talking about - the bottom feeders who comment on Deadline articles presenting themselves as an authority who understands show business better than the people who work in it day in and day out.  To hear them tell it, everyone who ever got a movie made got there only because they were fraternity brothers with the studio head.

Sometimes these accusations get a little ridiculous.  Google "Lena Dunham nepotism" for an example of what I'm talking about. Yes, her parents are artists - it played no part in her getting an HBO show.  Plenty of people who actually ARE artists have trouble getting their own shows.  Nepotism doesn't quite work like that.

However, as we head into staffing season in the coming months, I'm reminded that nepotism does exist in a number of forms in the industry.  In some cases, this is expected and maybe even reasonable. Most industry jobs are highly coveted, with hundreds if not more than a thousand people applying for each job.  Those UTA job postings that you find on the net? Virtually worthless.  By the time the UTA List has gone wide, several thousand people are flooding the inboxes of people seeking employees.  If you're looking to apply to a job that's been publicly posted, the best way to get called in for an interview is to have someone who knows that person pass your resume along.

As some of you might remember, every year around this time I pound the pavement looking for a writers' assistant job.  I've put posts up on the site saying as much and I typically work all my contacts.  I know a lot of people working in TV, both as writers and in jobs with access to writers.  In general, it's not hard for me to get my resume into the right hands on a number of shows.  Even as I do that, I realize that there are at least a hundred other resumes coming in via similar means.  People in the business are going to recommend people they know who are qualified, experienced and easy to work with.  That's honestly a reality of any industry, so don't think I'm railing against that.

Here's what DOES burn me, though - when all of those resumes are discarded because the network or studio in question tells the showrunner "These are the four PAs you will hire."  Who are these PAs and assistants whose employment becomes network mandates?  23 year-old entitled brats just out of college.  They're kids who've never had to punch a clock, whose car is probably newer and more expensive than most of the staff writers on their show.  Hell, there's a good chance their condo (because Daddy wouldn't DARE let them throw their money away renting) is better than several staff writers.

Yeah, fuck those guys.  And fuck the studio execs who give the showrunners zero say in who their low-level employees are.  If you guys want to say, "I want you to interview these guys" be my guest.  But throw them in the thunderdome with the rest of us who've actually put in the time and earned the respect of the showrunners.

On more than one occasion, I've had a direct "in" for a writer's assistant job because I or someone close to me was very tight with the showrunner of a newly-ordered series.  In some cases, this has even involved me proving my worth to the writer by taking the time to read their work and give them very considered and detailed reactions.  So I'm not just coming in from a place of "Hey, I know this writer socially."  It's often a case where I've shown my value to the process and demonstrated a willingness to put in the hours and check my ego at the door for the good of the show.

What I'm getting at is that in pretty much all of these cases, I probably would have been at least a strong runner-up for any position if it was in the hands of the show-runner.  I can take being beaten fair and square by someone with more experience than me.  But to get trumped by some twit who proceeds to spend the next ten months whining about being called upon to do basic tasks that are part of their fucking job?  Yeah, screw those guys.  They're the ones born on third base and are pissed that they can't have someone wave them into home.  Why do they have to wait until someone else hits the ball?

Frankly, I'm tired of losing to these guys.  And I don't blame the showrunners at all. I know they've done what they can.  The fact that I've seen this play out for many years across several shows tells me that this isn't their fault at all.

This is not meant to demean every writers' assistant.  There are a number of those who do manage to get hired through conventional means.  (A good trick is to have the writer hire you before the pilot is officially picked up. A showrunner who doesn't want to get saddled with a dud shouldn't put themselves in a position where the network knows there's a vacancy.)  But if you work in TV and you find yourself dealing with a writers' assistant who acts like getting coffee and taking notes is beneath him, you probably wonder "How did this idiot get hired?"

He knew the right people. And the "right people" didn't give the people who had to work with that twit any say in the matter.  I wish I had advice about what to do about this, but I don't. This is a venting post.

I'm not saying I'm owed a job just because I've proven my worth to those people in the past.  I do feel like I and every other person in that resume stack at least deserves a chance to present ourselves as a more grateful alternative to these spoiled dilettantes who often leave the business within five years anyway.

Joshua Caldwell's superhero short film "Resignation."

Friend of the blog Joshua Caldwell just recently presented his new short film Resignation and I'd say it's well worth the time required to watch it.  I think the film carries more impact if you watch it without knowing anything about the premise, as I did.  For that reason, I've put the promotional blurb below the next paragraph, so you can avoid being spoiled.


If you have difficultly viewing the embedded video, it's probably best to view the video via the film's dedicated site.  When you go there, you will be prompted to select "Film Only" or "Immersive Experience."  I highly suggest going with "Film Only" for your first viewing.  The Immersive Experience is a little too busy for my tastes and I feel like it distances you from the drama.

Resignation is described thusly, "The gritty, action-fantasy, immersive film that turns the superhero myth on its head: as an alcoholic combat photographer with a curious, heroic past struggles with his job as a “professional witness,” he must confront the fact that his dilemma may run deeper than he’d like to face."

Caldwell directed from a script credited to himself, Thomas G. Lemmer and Alex LeMay.

I like a lot of what Josh has done here.  There's a nice mood to the piece, aided tremendously by a score that evokes both the Hans Zimmer and John Williams Superman themes at different times without violating copyright. One thing I think Josh does really well is picking a big theme but finding a way to explore it via a relatively small scale or location. It doesn't feel rushed and despite the fact it's over eight minutes long, it doesn't feel drawn out early.  There's a nice sense of pace to the whole thing.

I asked Josh to talk a little bit about his vision for the film:

"With Resignation I sought to explore the character of a superhero in a way that I hadn’t seen before -- at least in the movies. I believe that superheroes can serve to reflect back on our society -- and they are ever changing because of it. So, rather than simply creating a kickass fight scene and having the hero save the day -- I wanted to play with something much more complex and multi-layered. To put that hero in a place where's he's grown tired of having the responsibility of being a savior, of playing God, and see what happens when he's directly confronted by that choice once again. 

"Where and how this fits into the existing canon wasn't of concern to me. Nor was whether this was in line with our current understanding of this character. I just didn't think it needed to be. Had I been making a $150 million studio movie, yes, there would have been that responsibility. But I was much more excited about exploring a version of this character whom we had never seen before (and probably never will) and challenging the audience with the choices he makes."

Please check it out when you get a chance.

What was the first script you wrote?

On Go Into The Story yesterday, Scott Myers asked the question, "What was the first script you wrote?"  Though I answered over there, it felt like this was something worth covering on this site as well. I actually re-read that final draft of my first script a couple weeks ago and live-tweeted the experience. It wasn't as wretched as I feared, but it's still not anything I'd want out there as a sample of my writing.

(For the purposes of this post, I'm discussing my first feature script - not any of my shorts or scripts for the TV show I created in college.)

The story was about a disgraced cop who was in exile on a small-town police force after being the Mark Fuhrman-like fallguy for the failure of a high profile case. He's thrown a nuisance case that arrives in the form of a student film showing a murder, with a note saying that this actress has really been killed.

The cop investigates the local film school (I developed the story in college and wrote it my senior year. I was writing what I knew, sue me) and quickly matches the film to its director, who has a lot of holes in his story AND who had been dating the actress. Surprise, surprise, they were having problems. But a couple other twists emerge and red herrings start popping up left and right.

I first came up with the idea during my freshman year and at that point, I was intending it to be a 20-minute short I would make as my final project senior year. Overtime, the story evolved and expanded to the point where I realized my treatment couldn't possibly fit into 20 minutes of screentime.

During my senior year I took a screenwriting class and two of the assignments involved writing a treatment for a feature-length story and then writing the first act (delivered to the class in 15 page increments as we went round-robin rotation.) We had just learned the three-act structure before being given the treatment assignment. I went back to my dorm, looked at my printed treatment and drew three lines between various paragraphs: END OF ACT ONE, MIDPOINT, END OF ACT TWO.

In what surprised me at the time, the story beats that in a perfect world would have matched those turning points, landed EXACTLY where they would have if I had done it on purpose. Basically, I had internalized the pacing and structure of your typical thriller to such a degree that I innately followed the beat sheet without trying.

Before I pat myself on the back too much, I'll note that for all my plotting and structure strengths, the show comes up light on character. I was - and still am - a huge fan of LAW & ORDER and its influence was very apparent in the script's style. There were a lot of short dialogue-driven scenes. Almost everything in the plot is advanced through dialogue. No real set-pieces, just a lot of talking, interviewing, debating and interrogating.

As I said, we wrote the first act as part of the final project for that semester. We then had an option to continue into Advanced Screenwriting, where we would spend the full semester finishing our scripts.  As before, we worked in a rotation. There were nine of us in the class, broken into groups of three.  When our group's turn came up, we were to deliver pages (anywhere from 10-20 pages each) to the rest of the class for reactions and in-class critiques at our next meeting.

However the schedule worked out, by the time it was coming up on my final turn in the rotation, I was just at the start of Act Three.  I knew I was doing something right when a couple students realized that my next turn might not necessarily finish off the story if I stuck to just 15 pages. (During finals week, we were to rewrite and complete our scripts before submitting them to the professor, so the assumption was that those who didn't have a complete draft before then would complete it at that time.)  More than one classmate implored me to finish the story for the next class.  They had to know how the mystery was resolved.

For all the nitpicking and issues they had had with the script up to that point, that was when I knew that in some sense it was working.  It was one of the few scripts in that class that left the audience with a need for the closure.  That desire was far less evident in reactions to scripts where the writers were clearly making it up fifteen pages at a time.

This was the script I brought with me out to LA. My first internship was at a boutique management company. It passed muster with one of the assistants, who compared it favorably to a script they had just sold for $1M. He had a few suggestions before he passed it up, most of which just involved adding another red herring. I made the changes and one of the managers read it. It came out as a gentle pass and some very correct advice that this was a hard sell. I believe his exact words were, "I'm not sure the best possible version of this script could be a spec."

[Note: a really weird quirk of this office was that they would use "spec" only to talk about hot scripts that sold for a lot. Technically, the script already was a "spec" since I didn't write it for a buyer, but in the terminology of the office, he was basically saying he didn't see people paying a lot of money for it.]

I moved on to another internship - a production company responsible for a lot of hit films in the 90s. Coincidentally, their latest film was that $1M dollar spec. It also was their LAST film. Take from that what you will.

Anyway, the director of development agreed to read my script one day. Not long after I delivered it to her, I saw her walking through the office, nose buried in a script, reading WHILE WALKING TO THE BATHROOM.

Yes, whatever she was reading, she didn't even want to put it down to pee! About an hour later, she calls me into her office and says, "This is great writing, Bitter! Do you have an agent?"

Don't get too excited for me. She passed it on to an agent and nothing came of it. Later I gave it to a development exec at the first company I actually worked. His takeaway: He could see I had a lot of talent, the story moved well, but he just didn't think it had much of an audience as a feature. I asked him if he thought it would work for me as a writing sample and he bluntly said, "Agents are looking for something they can sell."

So I moved on and wrote another script. I'd learned enough from that first script that the next one was a little better. And then the one after it was stronger still, as was the one that followed that.  In fact, out of six solo feature specs and two feature specs written with partners, I'd really only want the three, perhaps four, most recent features to stand as any kind of representation of my writing.

(My TV samples have a higher hit ratio, but that owes to the fact that I only wrote one early TV spec before focusing on features for several years.  By the time I returned to TV writing, I'd gotten a LOT better at it.)

I read some of those early scripts now and they feel like the work of a different person.  I might not be making all of the rookie mistakes, but I still see a hundred things I would do differently now.  Being a good writer is about more than just not making the most grievous errors - it's about knowing how to tell a story in a compelling way.  The best version of my first script works on the page in some ways, but it would never make a good film.

So if you finish that first script, bask in the accomplishment.  Be proud of what it represents.  Then site down and start writing your next one.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mind control sex scene and rape culture

Oy. I know I'm wading into a topic here that's likely to provoke some strong reactions, but I think this is a conversation that needs to happen.

I've been watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and if I'm being totally honest, I've stuck with it mostly out of potential for what the show could be rather than any significant enjoyment of the stories and characters. As I'd rather not derail this into a "what S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to improve post, I'll merely note that this week's episode largely represented an upswing from the usual quality. It's probably not a coincidence that it's one of the few episodes to make a significant effort to tie into the wider Marvel Universe.

 In a nutshell, an Asgardian named Lorelei escapes to Earth following a jailbreak from Asgard (as shown in Thor: The Dark World.) As Lorelei has the ability to mind-control men, making them enamored with her and willing to do anything for her, Lady Sif (Jamie Alexander, reprising her role from the Thor movies) is sent to bring her back and crosses paths with Agent Coulson's team. You'd think that the men on Coulson's team would be made to sit this one out considering a touch from Lorelei is all that it would take to get them to betray their friends and their country. Oddly this doesn't happen, and predictably, Lorelei ensnares Agent Ward with her mind control.

On its face, it opens up an interesting conflict, as our heroes are faced with the possibility that they'll have to kill Ward in order to stop them. Lorelei is an especially nasty manipulator and it's pretty clear she'd get off on ordering Ward to his death against his comrades, especially for the angst it will cause them. It's pretty standard mind-control stuff. The problem is that during said enchantment, Ward and Lorelei head off to Vegas and spend a passionate night in a suite together.

What unsettled me was that this moment was played as a "hot" scene - not what it really was: a woman forcing sex on a man who is not in a mental state to give consent. Sure, in his mind, Ward has been convinced that this is what he wants, but that's only because he's been given a magic roofie. I don't think it's a stretch to call this a rape scene.

The problem is that the show seems blithely unaware of this subtext. If anything, there's a leering "Awesome, Ward had hot sex with a babe!" feeling floating over the moment in question and then beyond that, there's zero follow-up. He's not even the one who ends up taking down Lorelei.

Pretend for a moment that the genders were reversed. Let's say it was Skye or Simmons who got the mental whammie on her and suddenly she can't get enough of Loki. The two of them get to a suite and she can't tear her clothes off fast enough for some steamy action. (A) Do you think this scene would even make it to screen? (B) If it did make the final cut, how much do you want to bet Loki would be explicitly punished for this, with Skye or Simmons mortified or even traumatized by their own behavior and (C) If so, is there anyway that scene gets made without it being called out as rape?

(If such a scene with Skye or Simmons DID make it to air in a fashion as tone-deaf as the Ward scene, I have no doubt there'd already be a couple dozen blog posts and "think-pieces" about how abbhorant S.H.I.E.L.D. was to do that and how it plays into rape culture. And the writers of such scenes would be right to call it out for that.)

If a woman was the victim here, I have little doubt that the non-consensual sex would been treated as wrong. It probably would have been portrayed in a similar tone to another mind-control near-rape done on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called "Dead Things." In that episode, the Nerd Trio finally invents a mind control device to get the hot sex slave they always wanted. When the subject is first raised, it's through the lens of the juvenile teenage boy who thinks it would be pretty cool to have a hot chick at his whim. Unfortunately for them, their intended victim comes to her senses and calls it out for what it is - rape.

There's no similar lamp-shading of what was done to Ward. When I raised the issue on Twitter, Emily Blake correctly drew an analogy to how we as a society perceive cases of teacher-student sex. If a teenage girl has sex with her older male teacher, then he's a pervert and the worst kind of sex offender. She's a victim who was taken advantage of. When a teenage boy has sex with his hot teacher, he's lionized and practically given a high five. He's not a victim, he's a "lucky dog."

I think that does a great disservice to the young men who are victims of non-consensual sex. The message they're given in society is that they're supposed to want it, that they should feel excited whenever they get it, that if their victimizer is "hot" then there's no reason to get upset. And maybe I'm making too much of a few minutes of a TV show. Had they treated this moment maturely, it still probably wouldn't change anything in society. But it sure as hell reflects society and it's not doing anything to make someone question the wrongness of this message.

Think of how many 80s movies feel kinda "rapey" now, viewed through today's mores. I ran across an article that is an excellent examination of that culture, including a good take on 16 CANDLES:

16 Candles is not only rife with cheap racism, it’s cavalier about sexual assault. Worse, Jake Ryan - the beau hunk himself - is the one who orchestrates it. In exchange for information about Sam, he offers The Geek the opportunity to drive his girlfriend Caroline home and basically gives him permission to do whatever he likes as long as he doesn’t leave her abandoned in a parking lot somewhere. (This is after he tells The Geek that if he were interested in her anymore, he could go into his bedroom where she’s passed out cold and ‘violate her ten different ways’. ‘What are you waiting for?’ The Geek splutters.) But worst of all is when The Geek and Caroline wake up in the car the next morning. Despite neither of them really remembering the previous night’s ‘activities’, The Geek asks Caroline if she enjoyed herself. ‘You know,’ she replies, ‘I have this weird feeling I did!’ 

80s movies. Encouraging hilariously rapey ‘sexcapades’ enjoyed by beta males, and making it an extra triumph for them because the girl really enjoyed it. (See also: Revenge of the Nerds.) 


One day, the Ward/Lorelei hotel romp is going to be just as repugnant to more progressive eyes. Trust me.

Don't let that happen to your writing. Be aware of what you're putting into the culture and what your scene is really saying.