Save the Cat! (19 page)

Double Mumbo Jumbo is also in another big hit, one that doesn't get let off the hook because it's from a comic book. In M. Night Shyamalan's
Signs,
we are asked to believe that aliens from outer space have invaded Earth. Apart from the really embarrassing finale in which a super intelligent alien is dispatched with a baseball bat ("Swing away, Merrill!" is now my favorite bad line), the movie is
about
Mel Gibson's crisis of faith in God.

Huh?!

I'd say proof of an alien intelligence outside our solar system sorta trumps all discussion about faith in God, don't you think? But M. asks us to juggle both. And it's a mess.

My guess is M. started his script with his one piece of magic — aliens, crop circles — and realized we'd seen that. In an effort to make his alien movie different, he tried to make it meaningful. Okay. But in doing so, he also made it muddy. The minute aliens arrive, the problem of Mel Gibson's crisis of faith is, well, ridiculous. You want to see a miracle? Look out the window — ALIENS HAVE LANDED, MEL!!!! Because what M. is asking us to balance in our minds is a debate about whether or not God AND Little Green Men exist.

Well, God and aliens don't mix. Why? Because it's two sets of different kinds of magic. It's Double Mumbo Jumbo. And if you don't believe me, try substituting the word "Allah" for the word "God" and see if your brain doesn't melt.

So unless you too have a hit movie in your back pocket, or a comic book you must translate to screen, don't try it.

Only one piece of magic per movie, please.

It's The Law.

LAYING PIPE

Minority Report
starring Tom Cruise did it. So did
Along Came Polly
featuring Ben Stiller and Jennifer Anniston. Each of these movies did something that risked failure. And once I point out their flaw, you will see that perhaps they did more than risk it. In my opinion, both these movies came up short because the filmmakers went long. They forgot one of the immutable laws of movie physics we screenwriters live by:

Audiences can only stand so much "pipe. "

What is pipe? And what is the risk of laying too much of it?

Well, let's take a look at
Minority Report,
the big-budget movie based on yet another work by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. In death, Dick has become the "go-to guy" for source material that has resulted in such hits as
Blade Runner
and
Total Recall.
In
Minority Report
the hook is typically Dickian, but in this case, setting up the premise almost kills the story.
Minority Report
is about future crime. And we see exactly how this works in the opening scene of the film. A homicide is about to take place, and since Tom Cruise is in charge of the task force that monitors these future crimes, we see him spring into action and stop the murder. In the next scene, we jump to the politics involved in how this operation works. Tom, we learn, is under investigation by Colin Farrell. We even meet the three "pre-cognitives" who lie in a tub of water and predict the future. We also see that in his personal life, Tom lost his child and has some kind of drug problem. We also meet Tom's mentor (Max Von Sydow) whom we don't totally trust. Okay. All well and good. But by the time the writers lay out the pipe required to set up this story, I am personally exhausted! It's interesting, but what's the point? Where is this going?

The story finally gets under way when Tom receives the latest future news and lo! the criminal pegged is himself. Knowing that the pre-cogs are never wrong, Tom must find out how and why this mistake has been made — and stop the murder that he supposedly will commit. The clock is running; and so are we. There's only one small problem: By the time this plot point happens, we are 40 MINUTES INTO THE MOVIE! It took
40 minutes
to set up this story and explain to the audience what it's about. It took 40
minutes
to get to the hook, which is: A detective discovers he is the criminal.

Say it with me now, fellow students:
That's a lot of pipe!!

In
Along Came Polly,
we find the same problem. In order to get to risk-averse divorcee Ben Stiller falling in love with crazy girl Jennifer Anniston, the writer also has a lot of pipe to lay. We have to see Ben marry his first wife, follow them on their honeymoon, and watch as Ben catches her in the arms of their scuba instructor. Sure it's funny. And we'll put up with a lot when it comes to any movie that Ben is in. We love Mr. S! But the screenwriter and director (same guy — the funny and talented John Hamburg) risks our attention by laying a ton of story points to get to the reason we came to see this movie: Ben Stiller dating Jennifer Anniston.

In both
Along Came Polly
and
Minority Report,
the laying of all that pipe — a necessary thing to set up the story — risks our attention and, I believe, contributes to a lesser movie-going experience. By needing so much backstory to set up the movie, the whole story has been torqued out of shape.

To be honest, laying pipe is something about which I am hyper-aware, and in many cases I have stopped writing stories due to the pipe required to set them up.
Blank Check
has a little bit more pipe up front that I am comfortable with. There is way too much "splainin' to do to get us to the point where our hero, Preston, walks into the bank with his blank check for a million bucks. A lot of back and forth. A lot of pipe. It's not quite fatal, but almost. There's about a half a beat more movie in Act One than I like. And it risks the audience's patience.
Get to it!!
I hear them screaming. And as screenwriters, we need to be aware of risking the attention spans of our audience. The point is if you find yourself with a set-up that takes more than 25 pages to introduce, you've got problems. We call it "laying pipe"; the audience calls it "I want my money back!"

BLACK VET A.K.A. TOO MUCH MARZIPAN

When dealing with conceptual creativity, an offshoot of the Double Mumbo Jumbo rule is a rule I call Black Vet.

You often fall in love with certain elements of a movie idea and cling to them. You can't let go. You're Lenny in
Of Mice and Men
and you're going to squeeze that little rodent to death. And usually when you find yourself in this situation, you must stop. This is when the Black Vet rule allows you to step back from the concept.

What is Black Vet?

Better to tell you where it came from. In the 1970s. comedian and now actor/writer/director, Albert Brooks, made several film parodies for
Saturda
y
Night Live.
In one of his best, a piece that tweaked the nose of NBC and the silliness of network programming, Brooks did a hilarious fake promo for several upcoming shows that would be seen that fall on NBC.

One of these was called
Black Vet.
In unctuous "NBC — Be There! " style, it showed a black actor who played a veterinarian cavorting with animals at his clinic. But this guy
also
has a past in the military. The punchline came when the narrator announced the name of the show and its fake promo line:
"Black Vet: He's a veteran
and
a veterinarian!"
Hilarious! But it is also so close to a real show on real TV, so much about the desperation of Hollywood types trying to squeeze 10 pounds of shit into a five-pound bag, that I found it to be brilliant. And I personally never forgot it. "Black Vet" is a joke, and yet you'd be surprised how often we creative folks get caught piling on our great concepts. Like eating too much marzipan, a little goes a long way where ideas are concerned. And more does not always mean better.

In my career, my favorite example of this came when I was working with my first writing partner, the quick-witted and entrepreneurial Howard Burkons. We were young and energetic writers with a lot of great ideas — and a lot of bad ones. But Howard and I achieved early success and even earned our WGA cards while

working together, a huge step forward for us both. Because we were working in TV, we had a TV series idea, and a good one I thought. Set in the 1950s, it followed the adventures of a blacklisted private eye. We called the show
Lefty.
Get it? Lefty referred to his political affiliation, but sounded tough and very '5°
^s
- Okay. But Howard and I killed the idea when Howard insisted we also make our hero left-handed. And maybe, Howard suggested, he could also be an ex-boxer, a left-handed ex-boxer! So he's a Communist
and
an ex-boxer
and
he's left-handed? I kept asking. And Howard thought that was great. Well... to my mind it was "pick one." To Howard it was a matter of milking the idea for all it was worth. And while I usually trusted Howard's instinct on this stuff— Howard is brilliant when it comes to conceptualizing and a much smarter marketer than I — I just didn't get it.

It was Too Much Marzipan.

It was Black Vet.

What we had succumbed to was getting stuck on a good idea. And it's easy to do. You like that? Well, hell you'll like it even more if I just add a couple of more scoops of the same thing on top, right? Well, no. To this day, whenever I talk with my pal Howard, he insists he was right about
Lefty.
Me? It's a whistle I don't hear. Still! But it makes a great rule of screenwriting and creativity: Simple is better. One concept at a time, please. You cannot digest too much information or pile on more to make it better. If you do, you get confused. If you do... stop.

WATCH OUT FOR THAT GLACIER!

Very often when bad guys are involved, they will be way off screen somewhere, far away from our hero, and "closing in." Sometimes they close in so slowly, the noose tightens so lackadaisically, you want to yell at the screen:

Watch Out for That Glacier!
Well, I do anyway.

That's how the "danger" is coming toward your hero: s-l-o-w-l-y! One inch per year. That's how unthreatening your supposedly threatening horror is. And if you think this doesn't happen to the big boys as well as you and me, you're wrong. Slow danger happens to good movies all the time.

Just check out Pierce Brosnan in
Dante's Peak,
one of two volcano movies that came out in 1997, presumably to cash in on all that Mt. St. Helen's buzz. And here's what
Dante's Peak
is about: See that volcano? It's gonna blow any minute!! That's it! And that's all it is. A volcano is about to erupt and no one believes the handsome scientist (Pierce Brosnan), so we sit there and wait for him to be right (we saw the trailer). Well, while we're waiting at least we can look at Brosnan and think: Yeah, Sean Connery
was
better.

And check out Dustin Hoffman in
Outbreak.
Now there's a dull movie! Basically, it's about a super Ebola virus that comes to the U.S. and Hoffman's attempt to find the cure. But while we're waiting, that virus is slowly, slowly,
really
slowly headed our way. It's a Monster in the House movie basically, but in
Outbreak,
they have to create the "house" by quarantining a small town and introducing us, in thumbnail sketches, to the people who live there so we'll care if they die. Of course, we don't meet them until like page 75!! But so what?! We gotta do
something
while we're waiting for this Butterball to baste and for Dustin to catch an infected monkey, which, if I remember correctly, is the D or E plot of
Outbreak
and... Man! How did these guys get talked into this?

It even happens in Westerns. In
Open Range,
Kevin Costner's and Robert Duvall's cowboy buddy gets killed by the bad guys on about page