Plotting

I’m not fond of “how-to-write” books which use movies as a teaching device. I understand that it’s an easy shortcut, and that more people are familiar with a popular movie as an example. It’s not just that they use the same movies (“Silence of the Lambs” is frequently used), it’s that it’s so limiting. It encourages small plots and small stories.

That’s because a 90-minute movie is actually the equivalent of a short story or a novella, not a novel. It’s one thing to learn how to write a screenplay starting with an epic novel like “Gone With the Wind,” but learning to plot a story going the other way around can be limiting.

Movies are good at compression, a form of visual and aural shorthand that conveys the meaning of a scene. I saw this recently in the “National Treasure” sequel, “The Book of Secrets.” The movie opens with an ancestor of our hero, Thomas Gates, being accused of participating in Lincoln’s assassination. In the next scene, we’re in the home of Gates’ father, and he’s searching through his crowded office muttering, “Maps to president’s houses … keys to locks that don’t exist … what’s the point? … what am I looking for … proof … proof … proof … what proof.”

The scene lasts only a few seconds, but we can intuitively tell several things:

a) He is upset at the revelation in the previous scene;
b) He’s searching his papers for any evidence to disprove it;
c) He can’t and he’s upset about that.

All this from a few seconds of a man roaming his office and moaning.

That’s compression. Wonderful for movies, terrible if you got to fill 300 pages.

But last night, while watching another movie, I realized that you can practice plotting using movies, but starting with a movie that showed promise, but didn’t quite get there.

The Great Buck Howard

We were watching “The Great Buck Howard,” a movie from 2009 starring John Malkovich portraying a character based in part on “The Amazing Kreskin,” a mentalist who was popular during my childhood. (I even owned “The Amazing Kreskin” boardgame that was not so much a game as a box for creating mentalist tricks such as card predicting and pendulum swings.

The movie was inspired by the writer/director’s experiences as Kreskin’s road manager. Since this movie was meant to tell a story, a plot had to be found to accompany it.

At the center of the story, there’s Troy Gable, a young man who gives up his father’s dream of law school so he can act as Howard’s assistant. Along the way, he runs into a young woman who will act as the love interest.

Assisting Buck, however, is not an easy job (we see him at the beginning of the movie driving off his assistant before Troy could settle into the job). Buck’s been in show business for 40 years and has fallen from being a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” to playing small venues in the Midwest. He has two dreams: to play Vegas and to appear on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

The movie only runs 90 minutes, but it seems to move much faster. Troy settles into his job, encounters his father who wonders what happened to him, and meets and charms the girl. The majority of the screen time belongs to Buck, who blows his shot to get on the “Tonight Show” and – after a new stunt gets the media’s attention (after he collapses afterwards) – he appears in Vegas, where he fails to perform his signature trick successfully. At the end, Troy finds his way, makes up with his father, and he sees Buck – a little wiser and happier – doing the same little shows where he is appreciated.

After the movie, my wife and I talked about the film. It was all right, but it seemed like there was something missing. We chewed over the scenes and tried to identify what was missing.

And then it occurred to us: Troy’s story and Buck’s story did not meet.

On one side, we had Troy. He tells us he wants to be a writer, but we never see him write anything. He needs to defy his law-school-demanding father, and he does … by saying he doesn’t want to go back to law school.

There’s one problem: There’s nothing in the story that shows him the way to do that, to give him the backbone to stand up to his father. He just does it.

That’s fine for real life. Children can be pretty good at defying their parents; just ask my daughter. For movies, we need to see the lever that forces Troy into action.

In other words, we want to see him struggle.

In fact, we don’t see Troy struggle with anything. He’s competent in his job, and when something happens that’s outside of his control, he takes a tongue-lashing from Buck, and he moves on. In one city, instead of the limo Troy ordered, Buck is picked up in an SUV. The horror!

Buck turns on Troy, and … he takes it.

Again, just like real life. But this is a movie.

The lack of struggle also plays into his relationship with Valerie, the media assistant Buck hires to get publicity for his new stunt. Being the only boy and girl of roughly the same age in the entire movie, it’s clear they’re supposed to fall into each others arms, and they do. At least long enough for them to get drunk and fall into bed (this is Hollywood, of course).

Again, no struggle.

All Right, Smarty Pants, How Would You Do It?

The solution was clear: there needed to be more conflict. With conflict comes emotion. With conflict comes things to try and fail.

Buck’s character arc in the movie was perfect. There’s nothing that needs changing here. What needed to happen was an acceleration of Troy’s journey toward being a writer, and he needs Buck’s help to do that.

In other words, instead of two parallel stories running side by side – Buck’s ambition of Vegas/Leno and Troy’s ambition to be a writer – we need to tie them together.

How can Buck help? How can he not help! He’s a mentalist, a hypnotist, and he sings and plays the piano as part of his act. Let him play Troy’s mentor.

* He can teach him the secrets of hypnotism so he can try them on his father, and maybe with Valerie (for laughs, of course).

* He can help him with his writing. Not with the nuts and bolts, but with the connection Troy needs to forge with his readers. The same kind of connection Buck forges with the audience.

There’s even the perfect subplot already in the movie that can shape this arc. Early in the movie, Buck is followed by a writer for “Entertainment Weekly.” He’s writing a profile of Buck, and when it comes out later, we see that it’s a hatchet job. The writer portrays Buck as a washed-up, out-of-date hacky entertainer.

Buck feels horrible about this, of course, but by this time Troy (who has come to feel some fondness for Buck) could be livid about it. He could be angry about it on Buck’s behalf. Maybe he could threaten to punch out the writer, or call up the magazine.

And here’s where Buck could stop him and say, “No, don’t do that. You’re going to be a writer, you’re going to face criticism like this yourself. You need to walk it off, keep doing what you’re doing. This is what entertainers do.” (And he would have the authority to say that, too. He must have gotten some bad notices after 40 years in the business.)

In other words, Buck could in his own way have acted as Troy’s mentor. He could even reveal that writers have to be entertainers in their own way, too. They can put on an act just like any performer.

(And this inspired another idea, a different way for Troy to handle his father. He could still stand his ground, but do it in an exaggerated way, a form of false bravado. Would Hemingway have let his father tell him to go to law school? Would Hunter S. Thompson? Jerry Lewis wouldn’t have put up with that, and neither did Buck.)

See what I mean? The structure of a mentor-type story was built into the structure of “The Great Buck Howard,” but it wasn’t used. Once I started looking for it, not only did I see how Troy’s story could be built up, but how Buck could play a role that would be meaningful and effective (I’m sure with further thought there would be something for Valerie to do here as well, which would base their relationship on something firmer than a mutual liking for each other.)

Not every movie can be improved, but by practice plotting using movies, you might be surprised what happens if you give it a try.

I’ve been relearning the basics of writing fiction on my way to writing a series of stories and rewriting some older works. This means that I’ve been paying more attention lately to novels and movies, comparing what I’ve learned against what they’ve written.

For example, the Steve Alcorn courses I’ve been taking discuss writing a story as a series of scenes and sequels. Scenes consist of goal, conflict, and disaster, while sequels consist of emotion, thought, decision, followed by action.

Structurally, stories consist of these seven steps. Up to 200 of them in novels, less in short stories.

Is this true? Is this a rule? Do all stories follow this pattern?

No, no, and no. Some writers follow this unconsciously. Some don’t. Sometimes, they’re mixed together. Or, a scene can be followed by a flashback with its own scene and sequel, followed by a sequel of the first scene. A nested scene / sequel.

Another thing we learn is that every story has a protagonist and an antagonist. The protagonist has a character flaw which must be overcome or dealt with to defeat the antagonist to get the happy ending, or not to create the tragedy.

You can see that in “The Sun Also Rises,” a book I have a particular fondness for. Hemingway’s Jake Barnes is in love with Lady Brett Ashley. She loves him, but there are obstacles. Due to a war injury, he can’t have intercourse with her. She also has a flaw in that she’s a party girl, flitting from scene to scene and man to man. By the end of the book, he realizes that he’ll never be able to keep her. He’ll always be a friend, a man she can rely on, but never a lover or a couple. It’s a tragedy in that respect.

Which brings me to “Local Hero,” about which I have to spoil the ending.

Local Hero (SPOILERS)

In the 1983 movie. Peter Riegert plays “Mac” Macintyre, a representative from an American oil company, sent to Scotland to buy a coastal fishing village to build a refinery. It’s a charming, very low-key movie that plays against expectations in several ways. We’re shown that building the refinery requires tearing down the entire village, but instead of objecting, the villagers are happy to sell out. They prefer being millionaires to living a hard life on the Scottish coast.

In fact, the only people who grow to appreciate the beauty and life in the village are the oil company people: Macintyre, Danny (played by a boyishly young Peter Capaldi), and Felix Happer, the billionaire owner of Knox Oil played by Burt Lancaster, an unhappy mogul whose wants to discover a comet and have it named for him. There’s a happy ending, but a complicated one. An old beachcomber whose land has been in the family for 400 years refuses to sell out. Happer flies out to negotiate with him, ends up becoming friends with the beachcomber. Seeing the stars overhead, he decides to relocate the refinery offshore and build an astronomical observatory by the village instead. But Happer changed his mind because he cared about the stars and his ego than the people living there. In fact, the owner of the local hotel grumbles something like “the rich always keep the best bits for themselves.” Worse, he sends Macintyre back to Houston and blames him for the “scheme” of buying up the village.

Capaldi’s character Danny is a big winner by not only suggesting the observatory idea to the mogul, but wins the affection of the nautical scientist who might or might be a mermaid (one of several magic realism elements in the movie).

As for the villagers, they didn’t get their million-pound payday, but they still have the village, and more work will come in from Happer’s project. In fact, the only person who loses is Macintyre, a lonely man who says a couple times he prefers to negotiate by telex, and who early in the movie is seen talking to co-workers in the same large room by phone. He even tries (and fails) to ask a secretary for a date, despite his boyish good looks and high salary ($80,000 a year, in 1983 dollars!).

At the end of the movie, Macintyre is back in his Houston apartment. He pins on the bulletin board a few photos from his trip, steps onto the balcony, and looks over the grey evening skyline of Houston.

“Local Hero” is a great movie. I define great and so-terrible-they’re-great movies by their ability to stay in the mind long afterwards. They give you something to think and talk about. There are many, many small, sometimes funny touches in “Local Hero,” such as the rabbit subplot, the abusive shrink, the droll innkeeper and his randy wife, the Russian captain. There’s a lot going on, but it’s also a slowly paced movie that wants you to look at the scenery and the characters and think about them.

Now, with regards to the structure, it was when I was apply Alcorn’s lessons that I realized who were the movie’s protagonist and antagonist.

The antagonist was “Mac” Macintyre, the lonely negotiator who has a hard time connecting with people. He wasn’t a villain, but he was directed to perform what pure-souled environmentalists would see as a villainous act.

The protagonist was the village, which stood to gain the world’s wealth but lose its imaginary soul by selling out. After all, atheists tells us there is no soul, so you can’t lose what you don’t have, right?

And this is what surprised me the most. The community was the hero. The Local Hero of the title turned out NOT to be Macintyre, the outsider who becomes an insider and lectures the villagers about what to value most. That’s a trope worthy of TVTropes. The true local hero was Knox, the lifetime resident who valued the beach, his continuity, and his self-worth too much to sell it all for mere money.

Still, you feel for Macintyre. He’s a good man, but an incomplete man. He couldn’t change, and he knows it, and at the end of the film, seeing the village’s phone booth at night, the phone ringing, and you know it’s Mac trying to reconnect the only way he knows how, and your heart breaks a little.

You want him to have his happy ever after, if not in the village, at least somewhere. That he can’t, and never will, makes you ache for him. That’s how you make a story worth telling.