Broad villains in comedies

Derek asks:

Hi Zuul, 

First, thanks for all of the knowledge you've passed down via the site. I've picked up a lot of stuff from it and I appreciate your efforts.

I'm writing a comedy, and the antagonist is an aggressive, serious, overconfident man, kind of like Bradley Cooper's character in Wedding Crashers. A typical d-bag, if you will. I can't help wondering if the script would be funnier if the bad guy was more over-the-top, the way the bad guys Will Ferrell plays are (Zoolander's Mugato is a good example). Seems like it's more meaningful if the bad guy really is just a terrible human being, someone we hate, someone we want to see defeated by the good guy. At the same time, lots of comedies these days go with the over-the-top, likable bad guy to cash in on as many laughs as possible, often at the expense of meaningful conflict. What do you think?

It's funny you should bring this up because I was recently thinking about villains in 80s comedies and how often they were treated much more seriously than modern comedy villains.  In fact, if you made some of those comedies today, they might not even have their "serious" bad guys and instead focus more on the high concept premise.

Consider Three Men & A Baby.  In that film, three bachelor roommates are saddled with an infant fathered by one of the men.  The comedy comes from the men awkwardly embracing fatherhood, only to bond with the infant and then be faced with losing her when the mother comes back into the picture.

Oh, and there's also a subplot about a couple drug dealers trying to get their hands on a package of drugs that was sent to one of the main characters on the same day that the baby was left on the doorstep.

Wait, what?

And then there's Twins.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito are twin brothers engineered in an experiement who find each other in adulthood.  Not only are the two of different physiques, but also different temperments and lifestyles.  There's instant comedy conflict.

Oh, and in the middle of this film there's a subplot about the brothers having crossed a contract delivery man/killer who murders in cold blood anyone who sees his face.  (I'm vastly oversimplifying, but I don't want to get too much into that unnecessarily convoluted plot.)

I don't know exactly when the shift happened, but my point is that there was a time when even the most fluffy and escapist of premises seemed obligated to include bad guys willing to shoot our heroes dead if needed.  And then thing is, I wouldn't call the antagonists of either of those films "pretty well-developed."  It's not as if the gun-toting killers brought meaningful conflict.  The best I can figure is that those movies were a product of the times.

With regard to your specific question, I think that today, there's a stronger sense of matching the bad guy to the tone of the film.  You bring up Mugatu from Zoolander as an example of the over-the-top bad guy as contrasted with Bradley Cooper in Wedding Crashers.  First, I thought Cooper was pretty much one-dimensional in that film (but that might be because I've never, ever warmed to that actor).  But I think the more cogent point is, you couldn't put Mugatu into Wedding Crashers and have that movie work in the same way.  He doesn't fit in that reality at all.

Yet the other examples I cited would suggest that you can put a "serious" bad guy into an inherently light premise and not disrupt reality as much.  For your specific story, I think the answer probably lies in how elastic your reality is.  In a film like There's Something About Mary, there's enough latitude to go relatively broad with the antagonists without either making them cartoons or threatening the integrity of the film.

But this is probably a topic that could generate a lot of discussion, so what do you say, folks?

Friday Free-For-All: Villains Laughing Maniacally

Thursday Throwback: Lessons from Wes Craven & Kevin Williamson's Scream

This post originally ran on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.   

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When it comes to slasher films, I only have a few favorites. I've seem dozens of them and I don't boycott the genre by any means (I save that venom for torture porn and Saw ripoffs. If you like that shit, don't try to defend it. I don't want to hear it.), but there are many, many more bad slasher films than good ones. Among the best, is 1996's Scream, written by Kevin Williamson, and directed by horror legend Wes Craven - whose A Nightmare on Elm Street is also on my "favorite slasher movies" list.

Scream pretty much single-handedly revived the teen horror genres after years when it was well out of favor. For the first time in a long time, horror was smart, scary and funny again. If it wasn't for that resurgence, you have to wonder what sort of movies the teen stars of the WB and CW would have ended up making during their hiatuses. I've read a lot of bad horror scripts that were trying to be like Scream, but few of them seem to have really deconstructed the film and made note of what really made it work. Here's what Scream really gets right:

A killer opening sequence: Granted, Craven's directing has a lot to do with this, and having a director that skilled isn't something a writer can always count on. Putting that aside, there's a lot here that's on target. A lot of horror scripts start with a three or four page kill scene that doesn't do much beyond setting up a victim and killing them off immediately. It's usually treated as a disposable scene that's just there to grab the audience and then give the writer license to spend the following 25-30 pages slowly killing time until the killer jumps out of the shadows and guts the next lowest billed character (who nine times out of ten will be the female character whom the script introduces at least a full two lines after her breasts.)

Scream's opening is a bit longer than that, and it doesn't just give us a victim and a killer. It has them interact via phone and we see the killer's MO established with clever dialogue. He asks his victims to name their favorite scary movie, setting an important tone for the killer and the movie in general - this is a movie about people who have actually seen scary movies and know all the conventions and cliches. It's a way of announcing to the audience "This isn't a film that's going to just cynically recycle the cliches - it's gonna subvert them!" (Now, whether this sort of meta humor is always a good thing is probably a topic for another column.)

As many, many reviews have been written about Scream's self-aware tone, I won't waste much more time on it. My point is that the opening sequence isn't a throwaway kill. It's crucial to the fabric of the movie beyond being a scene that shows a killer is out there.

Sharp dialogue - Here's where you probably either love Williamson or hate him. I'm firmly in the former category. The characters - especially Jamie Kennedy's Randy - are constantly referencing movies, both in terms of the horror setting and in other scenes. (In one example, a character laments that his relationship with his girlfriend is like a horror movie "edited for television" - all the good parts have come out. Every character has a distinct voice. A Randy line doesn't sound like a Billy line. Nor does a Sydney line sound like a Tatum line. I've suffered through many a horror script where Jack's lines seemed interchangeable with Ryan's, or even Jennifer's. I've also read a lot of scripts that try to imitate the Williamson (or Joss Whedon) penchant for pop culture references and you know what? Every character talks exactly the same. It's not enough to make your characters witty - they need to be distinctively witty.

(Now, sometimes the actors will make this harder for you. I remember loving Scream's dialogue, but feeling that some of Williamson's dialogue in early Dawson's Creek sounded rather clunky. Revisiting Scream post-Dawson's actually left me feeling that there wasn't THAT much difference in the dialogue, stylistically. If you listen to some of the lines in Scream, you can clearly pick up on cadences and rhythms that turn up on the TV series. So why does Dawson's sound more forced? To be blunt, the actors seem a lot less comfortable with it - especially early on. Neve Campbell and company took Williamson's words and were able to deliver them organically. In contrast, James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes appeared to have memorized their dialogue phonetically at times.)

Great use of red herrings - Scream is a solid example of using the audiences expectations against them. From the moment it's clear that this is a whodunit, the audience is naturally going to try to outguess the film. Thus, Williamson is smart enough to not just thrown in red herrings, but use those as red herrings for further red herrings.

For example, boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich) is virtually the only suspect the film points a finger at early on. Thus Mr. Smarter-Than-Everyone-Else Moviegoer is going to say, "They want me to think he's the killer, but since it's still the first half-hour of the movie, he's clearly not going to turn out to be the killer. It would be too obvious... unless that's what they want me to think. So, when Billy is arrested and then seemingly cleared, it can't be taken at face value... unless they want us to think that he's still the most likely suspect so that we won't notice it's someone else...."

That was basically my internal monologue during the entire film the first time I saw it, "It's so obvious that it can't be true, unless they're counting on me NOT to suspect the most obvious suspect!"

And don't even get me started on the debate about which glass had the iocane powder....

Anyway, I kept vacillating about the killer's identity - still casting a suspicious eye towards Billy right up until the point he got gutted in the bedroom. At that point, the audience's reaction is probably something along the lines of "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!" as they try to outguess the movie again. Even later, when Billy turned up still alive, I remember not suspecting him. After all, we saw him and the killer at the same time, right? Which leads to...

Using the audience's knowledge of the genre against them - I'm sure there are obscure counterexamples, but I can't recall a slasher film with two killers working together. Williamson knew that the audience would assume that there's only one killer to be unmasked, and because the script doesn't tip it's hand on this until the very end, certain characters seem to be accounted for at the same time the killer is shown. We're used to getting one psycho with one convoluted motivation - so most viewers were likely totally blindsided when the ending hinged on two killers working in concert with each other.

I'm not even sure if this counts as misdirection so much as it is knowing how the audience is going to interpret the unspoken clues. The best mysteries hide their solutions in plain sight. They rely not so much on deception as the audience putting themselves and their logic in a box. In this case, the "box" is "There is only one killer." We were never told this - the movie just gambled we'd assume it. Thus, Craven and Williamson haven't deceived us so much as WE have deceived ourselves. That's a lot more subtle than simply cheating by lying to the audience about what they were shown, and that's the sort of twist that keeps people talking. (See also The Sixth Sense.) A weak mystery plays out exactly how you'd expect, in the precise manner you'd expect.

So if you have never seen Scream, slip it into your movie marathons this weekend. You won't be disappointed. Yeah, I kinda blew the ending for you, but there's more than enough to keep you entertained even with that.

Plus after that, you can watch Scream 2 completely fresh. (Scream 3 isn't as strong a script, in part because Williamson is replaced by Ehren Kruger. I'd love to know what Williamson's original plan for the trilogy closer was.)

Screenwriter: "I Just Don't Want to Answer Phones at a Place I used to pitch."

The Wrap has an excellent article focusing on a screenwriter who's been so hard up for work, he's had to turn to temp assignments to pay the bills.  It's a sad tale of how the industry has changed to make it difficult for even B-list writers to cultivate their careers the way they used to.  This particular writer saw his first film gross $80 million dollars and he sold a second script.  Yet that money runs out quickly in today's world.

"I was doing fine for a while, and then it seemed like after the writers strike, studios and production companies used that as an excuse to cut in-house deals and use that as an excuse not to pay writers for anything."

He suddenly found himself competing with A-list writers for B-list jobs. 

"A lot of the jobs I used to go up for, A-list, like super A-list writers are going for those jobs right now," he said. "In the past, they wouldn't have. There was enough of every level to go around." 

Now, he said, with studios cutting back on the number of movies they make, it's a tougher world. "They used to make films in the 5-to-10 million dollar range," he said. "Now everybody wants to do either the super micro-budget stuff, they want to make remakes or sequels, or they want to make tentpoles. A lot of those middle-ground movies that filled the marketplace, those assignments are gone now."

He goes on to say that studios used to develop projects more - but now it's expected that you'll have the project ready to go - developed and packaged - before they'll pick it up.

And he said studios have used the economy as a justifaction for their own greed. "The studios aren't hurting," he said. "They're just trying to keep as much money as possible." In addition, he said, "Studios used to buy and develop projects a lot more. Now, you almost have to have the project developed and packaged to get it picked up."

Though he's turned to temp work, he says he won't take an assignment in an entertainment company.

"You don't want to answer phones in an office you've pitched to in the past," he said. "It's a little humiliating."

Agreed.  You can read the whole article here.

Tuesday Talkback: Greatest Horror Sequels

It's Halloween week, and usually I ask some variation of "What's your favorite scary movie?"  This year, I'll mix it up a bit.  If you were to program a horror movie marathon made up ONLY of horror sequels, what would you choose?

For the purposes of this discussion, assume "so bad they're good" movies are perfectly acceptable.

Unofficial Get Your Shit Done Week begins now

I had a choice today.  I could write a few blog posts for this week, or I could make serious headway in the Act I have to write for my latest pilot spec.  Since too often I've used the blog as an excuse to procrastinate, this time I decided that blogging would take a backseat until I got at least ten pages written.

This sparked an idea.  I'm trying to finish Act Two of a pilot, reconvene with my writing partner on Saturday and then finish Act Three with him over the weekend.  I want to use this week to motivate everyone to make some headway on their writing  Think of this as a support group.  Seven days, people.  The clock starts now.  In comments, put your writing goals for this week.  Then, come back next Monday and tell us how far you got.  Let's keep each other honest.

Friday Free-For-All: Yom Kippur at WME

Twitter is a funny thing.  Recently in one fell swoop I got to interact with childhood crush Danica McKellar AND make a frenemy-for-life of screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe ("Going the Distance").  This occured when I beat him to the correct answer of one of Danica's regular anagram tests, prompting him to say, "I can't wait to hit you in the mouth."

Bring it, Geoff.

Frankly, I'm not scared of him, but in the interests of detente, I'd like to feature his new short "Yom Kippur at WME," starring the incomparable J.B Smoove.