Save the Cat! (18 page)

I love these Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics so much I wanted to make this whole book about nothing else — but

common sense intervened. To get to the good part, I had to explain the screenwriting process, from idea to execution, in order for anyone to understand what I was talking about.

And aren't you glad I did?

But even though this is the dessert part for me, the fun, the
raison d'etre
of the whole operation, there are some of you out there who will still want to pee on my Pop Tarts. Yes, there will be a few among you who will doubt my rules!

You are the type of person who bucks the system, who wants to make your own rules, thank you very much. When told that you
can't
do something, you want to do it all the more.

You
know...
a screenwriter!

To those of you who doubt me, bravo! But at least let me show off a little bit here, let me run amok — ego-wise — and tell you how smart I am to have uncovered these things before you go and stomp them dead. And try to remember the value of knowing these is so that you
can
override them. Before Picasso could dabble in Cubism, he had to become a master of basic drawing. It gave him credibility and authority. So for you budding Picassos, a few of my screenwriting basics:

SAVE THE CAT

I've found that Save the Cat, the title of this book and the screenwriting law it denotes, is amazingly controversial! Though many screenwriters I've shown this manuscript to are impressed with its premise, a few are horrified with this one idea and find it my least best thought. Many think my example of Save the Cat found in
Sea of Love
(as detailed in the Introduction of this

book) is old-fashioned and the worst piece of advice in an otherwise helpful primer. Not only that, they find the idea of making the hero "likeable" to be cloying and dull, an exercise in kissing up to the audience.

To review, Save the Cat is the screenwriting rule that says: "The hero has to
do
something when we meet him so that we like him and want him to win." Does this mean that every movie we see has to have some scene in it where the hero gives a buck to a blind man in order to get us onboard? Well no, because that's only part of the definition. So on behalf of my hypercritical critics, allow me a mid-course addition:

The adjunct to Save the Cat says: "A screenwriter must be mindful of getting the audience 'in sync' with the plight of the hero from the very start." To explain what I mean, let's take a look at a movie that definitely does not try to kiss up to the audience: Pulp
Fiction.
Scene One of
Pulp Fiction,
basically, is where we meet John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. These are the "heroes." They are also drug-addicted hitmen (with really bad haircuts). Quentin Tarantino does a very smart thing when we meet these two potentially unlikable guys — he makes them funny. And naive. Their discussion about the names of McDonald's hamburgers in France is hilarious. And sort of childlike. We like these guys from the jump — even though they're about to go kill someone — we are "with" them. In a sense, Tarantino absolutely follows the STC rule. He knows he has a problem: These two guys are about to do something despicable. And in the case of Travolta, he will become one of the main characters of the film, a guy the audience
must
like in order to root for him. Well, after meeting these two crazy knuckleheads, we
do
like them. They're funny. Instead of risking the audience's good will by making them existential hard asses without a soul, screenwriter Tarantino, in his own way, makes them sorta huggable.

Save the Cat!

The problem of making anti-heroes likeable, or heroes of a comeuppance tale likeable enough to root for, can also be finessed with STC. The Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics tell us that when you have a semi-bad guy as your hero — just make his antagonist worse!! Alittle further on in the introductory scene of
Pulp Fiction,
Tarantino does just that. Before he and Samuel Jackson reach the door of their victims, Travolta raises the specter of their Boss, and tells a story of how an underling, like himself, was thrown out of a window for giving the Boss's wife a foot massage. This is just another example of a great STC trick: When your hero is slightly damaged goods, or even potentially unlikable, make his enemy even more horrible. If you think Travolta is bad, well, look at the Boss. Travolta is a doll compared to
that
guy. And BINGO! The scales of whom we like versus whom we hate are adjusted to perfect balance. Let the rooting begin!

The problem of unlikable heroes even occurs in nice family films. My favorite Save the Cat example, and one that I repeat way too often, comes from the Disney movie,
Aladdin.
When developing this hit film, Disney found they had a real problem with the likeability of the main character. Go back and read the source material. Aladdin, as described in the original stories, is kind of a jerk. Spoiled. Lazy. And, to make matters worse, a thief! Thank God, Disney had Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott on their team. Rossio and Elliott are to me the two best screenwriters working in Hollywood today. (And so unsung! Where is their publicist?!?!)

What these two crafty writers did was give Aladdin an introduction that solved the problem and was a classic example of Save the Cat. In that $100+ million hit, the first thing we see Aladdin
do
is impishly steal food because, well, he's hungry. Chased by Palace

Guards with scimitars all over the market square (a great way to introduce
where
we are too, btw), Aladdin finally eludes them. Safe in an alley, he is about to chow down on his stolen pita, when he spots two starving kids. And, what a guy! Aladdin gives his falafel snack to
them.
Well now we're "with" Aladdin. And even though he's not quite the original thieving, layabout character, we're rooting for him. Because Rossio and Elliott took time to get us in sync with the plight of this unlikely hero, we want to see him win.

The point of all this is: Care! Though you don't have to have a scene in every movie where the hero literally saves a cat, helps an old lady across the street, or gets splashed by water at the street corner to make us love him, you must take the audience by the hand every time out and get them in sync with your main character and your story. You must take time to frame the hero's situation in a way that makes us root for him, no matter who he is or what he does. If you don't, if you go the
Lara Croft
route and
assume
we'll like your main character —just cuz — you're not doing your job. And even though some movies do this and get away with it, it doesn't make it okay. Or good and careful storytelling.

Am I off the hook on this now, fellow screenwriters?

THE POPE IN THE POOL

The Pope in the Pool is more of a trick than a rule, but it's a fun one that I love to talk about and one that I see done onscreen all the time. It is also one of the first insights passed on to me by Mike Cheda, script master.

Your problem is: How to bury the exposition?
Exposition
is backstory or details of the plot that
must
be told to the audience in order for them to understand what happens next. But who wants to waste time on this? It's boring. It's a scene killer. It's the worst part of any complicated plot.

So what's a good and caring screenwriter to do?

Mike Cheda told me about a script he once read called
The Plot to Kill the Pope
, by George Englund, which did a very smart thing. It's basically a thriller. And the scene where we learn the details of the vital backstory goes like this: Representatives visit the Pope at the Vatican. And guess where the meeting takes place? The Vatican pool. There, the Pope, in his bathing suit, swims laps back and forth while the exposition unfolds. We, the audience, aren't even listening, I'm guessing. We're thinking: "I didn't know the Vatican had a
pool?\
And look, the Pope's not wearing his Pope clothes, he's... he's... in his bathing suit!" And before you can say "Where's my miter?" the scene's over.

The Pope in the Pool.

The Pope in the Pool comes up all the time, but I've written one scene using this trick that I'm really proud of. It was in a script called
Drips
that Colby Carr and I wrote and sold to Disney. A comedy (duh!),
Drips
is about two dumb plumbers who are tricked into an oil-stealing plot that is to unfold beneath the streets of Beverly Hills. Suckered into the heist by a Beautiful Girl, Plumb and Plumber are invited to the Girl's Boss's house where the Bad Guy will explain the heist and essentially lay out the plot of the movie. He will describe how our two plumbers will be required to tap into an old oil well beneath the house, and connect the runoff to the sewers beneath the city which inevitably lead to the sea and the Bad Guy's waiting oil tanker. (Trust me, it's possible.) And yet we risked the audience's attention as we forced them to sit through this potentially joy-killing exposition.

Our solution? The Pope in the Pool.

In the scene, before the meeting starts, we show our two doofus heroes having an iced-tea drinking contest to show off for the Beautiful Girl — whom they both like. By the time the meeting begins, they both need to pee. Really badly. The humor of the scene comes from them sitting there, legs crossed, trying to concentrate on the Bad Guy's powerpoint demonstration while all manner of pee-inducing images are seen around them. Out the window, lawn sprinklers go on and the neighbor's dog takes a big, relieving wiz on a bush. And in the room, the Girl pours a nice, tall glass of iced tea for herself from a crystal pitcher. Seeing these things, our two heroes are going slowly cross-eyed with discomfort, all while the Bad Guy drones on with the vital heist information.

We got the information across... and it's hilarious.

In the
Austin Powers
films, Mike Meyers has done us one better by naming a character Basil Exposition (Michael York), whose sole purpose is to tell the boring backstory to the British super spy... and us. Every time Basil appears we know we're going to get a dose of elucidation, but revel in the fact that
the
y know
we
know it's boring and have made light of that fact.

There are dozens of examples of the Pope in the Pool and now that you are aware of it (if you weren't already), you can come up with new ways to bury the backstory. Whether it's the two funny guards scene in
Pirates of the Caribbean,
where we get the lowdown on Jack Sparrow, or the batting cage scene in a thriller like
A Clear and Present Danger,
the Pope in the Pool gives us something to look at that takes the sting out of telling us what we need to know.

And does so in a lively and entertaining way.

Good trick. Thanks, Mike Cheda.

DOUBLE MUMBO JUMBO

Double Mumbo Jumbo is a favorite. It is also a rule you and I can't break, even though we see it broken all the time!

I propose to you that, for some reason, audiences will only accept
one piece of magic per movie.
It's The Law. You cannot see aliens from outer space land in a UFO and then be bitten by a Vampire and now be both aliens
and
undead.

That, my friends, is Double Mumbo Jumbo.

Yet despite the fact that it throws a big ol'
sabot
into the machinery of the audience's brain, even though Double Mumbo Jumbo is logically wrong, it's done all the time.

My favorite example is
Spider-Man.
Why is it that you went willingly to see this movie, it became a big hit, and yet when it comes on cable you don't want to see it again?

Can't be the actors; we love Tobey and Kirsten and Willem. Can't be the special effects; swinging through the city on a spider web is cool! I propose that our interest vanishes around the middle of the movie when the Green Goblin first appears. That's where I always lose interest anyway.

Why? Double Mumbo Jumbo.

The makers of
Spider-Man
ask us to believe two pieces of magic in one movie. Over here on this side of town, a kid is bitten by a radioactive spider and endowed with superhero powers that combine nuclear fusion and arachnia. Okay. I'll buy that. But then over on the other side of town, Willem DaFoe is getting a whole other set of magic powers from an entirely different source when a lab accident transmutes him into The Green Goblin. So... you're saying that we have a radioactive spider bite AND a chemical

accident?! And both give one super powers? I'm confused! They're straining my suspension of disbelief. They're breaking the reality of the world they asked me to believe in once already. How dare they! Like Save the Cat, when I see the DMJ rule violated I get mad. It's sloppy. It's a product of moronic creativity. Yet in the world of comic books, you're sort of excused.