7 Things That Make Me Stop Reading A Book

Today at lunchtime I got a Wi-Fi hotspot working so I can now use my I-Pad at work—YAY!

I proceeded to do some net-surfing and ended up on Chuck Wendig’s site Terribleminds. (Seriously, if you’re a writer and have never been there, take yourself over right this minute—well, after you read this—it’s a great site and Chuck is a riot.) He had a post where he asked people to reveal what would make them stop reading a book.

Because the keypad for the I-Pad is still a bit awkward to use, I found my response took the form of a very spare bullet list—and I thought, hmmm, this looks like the beginnings of a blog post of my own. So I’m adding to the list I posted on Terrible Minds with a few expanded thoughts.

These are also reasons why I’ll stop watching a TV show or movie—story is story for me, regardless of format.

1. Front-loading the story with too much exposition. This is why, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get into The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The first chapter is two guys going over not only events that pertain to the story, but almost the whole friggin’ economic history of Europe for the past 30 years. I was practically pulling my hair out in frustration, wondering when people were going to stop talking ABOUT things and start DOING things. It didn’t happen by Chapter 2, so I stopped reading. I found out later than the first book in the trilogy is almost entirely exposition.

Clearly, for many people, this was not a problem, but I can’t stand it.

2. Characters the writer makes so precious/adorable/perfect s/he dares you not to love them. The writer needs to let me fall in love with the characters organically, not push them at me practically screaming, “AREN’T THESE PEOPLE WONDERFUL? DON’T YOU LOOOOOVE THEM?!”

I don’t actually need to like characters—much more important, in my view, is that they be interesting. You don’t have to make me adore them, you just have to make me interested in them.

3. Self-consciously clever dialog. I love good dialog, but when a book (or movie or TV show) has characters speaking in an overly-clever way no human being on earth would ever speak, it’s a turn-off for me. This is kind of connected to #2, as it’s usually another attempt by the author to get me to LOOOOVE their characters. It’s especially grating when the characters are children or teens.

4. Preaching of any kind, even if I agree with the point of view. This is not to say that I don’t want stories to have a point of view—I do, and hope writers are passionate about what they are writing and what they have to say.

What I don’t like is when a writer stacks the deck, or trivializes or ridicules the other side of the equation. A story doesn’t have to bend over backwards to be even-handed.But in most instances absolutes turn me off. It’s just as annoying—maybe moreso—when the views put forth are similar to my own.

5. Dull or poorly conceived concept. (I usually catch that before I pick up the book, but blurbs can be misleading.)  If the basic concept of a story is weak, there’s not much a writer can do to recover from this. There are probably writers who can spin an interesting yarn from a lousy premise (I can’t think of one at the moment) but in most instances, a bad concept is going to result in a bad story.

6. Figuring out exactly where the story is going very early on. Predictability kills a story for me. I love stories that go in directions I never expect. If I’m reading and realize that the story is pretty much a straight line from “Point A” to “Point B” it’s over as far as I’m concerned.

7. Characters with no complexity. Worse if the characters of one gender are complex and the characters of the other gender are not. I can’t stand one-dimensional characters! While it’s unfortunately not that rare for female characters to be one-dimensional (and shame, shame on female writers who create them—yes, they exist) I see it with male characters, too. Especially in certain made-for-TV movies on a certain channel aimed at female viewers.

What kills a book for you? Add your thoughts in our comments section (and add them to the ever-growing comments section on Chuck’s site, too).

8 Things You Need To Know About Character Arcs

1. Character arcs are not 100% necessary. I’m going to get this out of the way first thing.

This argument is made all the time, and there’s some truth to it. There are some very successful characters that never have a character arc. James Bond is the one most mentioned. While he was retooled somewhat when Daniel Craig took over the role in the movies, the character has never undergone a significant arc. Miss Marple never has an arc, or Hercule Poirot, or Stephanie Plum.

See a pattern here? They’re all characters in a long-running series of stand-alone books. While there are series characters that have arcs (I would argue Indiana Jones is an example) most don’t have them. Mainly because having the characters change would disrupt the series too much.

2. However, not giving your character one can simply be laziness on your part. Just because there are characters that have no arcs doesn’t mean yours shouldn’t. While in certain kinds of stories readers like knowing the main character will not change, in most stories, readers enjoy characters that undergo a significant arc.

3. When someone claims a character has no arc, take a closer look.  I once heard someone make the argument that Sarah Connor in The Terminator movie has no arc. He claimed she doesn’t do much in the movie besides avoiding being killed by the Terminator.

I would argue she has a very significant arc. She starts out as a seemingly ordinary person whose life is actually critically important to the survival of the human race as the future mother of the man who leads a revolution against cyborgs. Accepting and stepping into that role is a big part of her arc.

That’s on just one level. On another, she changes as she acquires mastery of survival skills from Reese, the man who travels from the future to save her from the Terminator.

She evolves from a waitress to, well, a kind of goddess, the mother of a savior. Beyond just giving birth to him, she also evolves into a mentor for her own son, who can pass on what she has learned about fighting against the cyborgs.

4. Arcs can go either way. A character can start at a low point and end up at a high point, in other words, in some way evolve. Or they can start at a high point and end up at a low point—devolve.

MacBeth is a good example of a character that devolves. The story starts with him gaining favor for an extraordinary act of bravery. This is the kind of act that usual results in the evolution of a character—he’s a hero to the other characters. Instead of taking on that mantel of heroism, he uses that position to ruthlessly gain power for himself. In the end, it destroys him.

5. Or, the character’s evolution may not be shaped like an arc at all.  For instance, a character can start at a high point, devolve, then climb back up to a high point again.

Scarlet O’Hara is one example: she starts as a girl with everything, loses it all in the war, gains back what she lost and more—and at the end devolves again, losing things she didn’t realize were important to her.

6. The important part of all this is change, mostly internal. Although change may also manifest itself in an external way, i.e. how they behave, how they speak, a physical change of some kind.

Don’t think of it as merely change, however. Making your character a jerk and then suddenly nice won’t cut it. I keep using the words evolve and devolve for a reason—certain things that were already there, perhaps deep down, come out as the result of what the character experiences in the story.

7. If you have a main character that doesn’t require an arc—give arcs to one or more secondary characters. One of the best examples I can think of is the movie Braveheart.

William Wallace, the main character of Braveheart, doesn’t really change much over the course of the story. In a prologue sequence, his family is killed and his uncle takes him away to the Crusades. When he comes back, he’s already an evolved hero. Yes, he suffers a terrible tragedy, but he’s already evolved to a point where he can step automatically into the role of hero and leader.

The movie would have been just fine like that—it’s an exciting story with or without a character arc—but screenwriter Randall Wallace gives arcs to two of the secondary characters: Isabelle, the French princess who arrives to marry the English king’s son, and Robert the Bruce, a Scottish nobleman who can’t quite decide which side to be on.

Wallace serves as a mentor character to both of these characters. Because of his example of bravery, both change significantly by the end of the story.

8. Two sure-fire ways to help give your character an arc:

·       Give them exactly what they think they want.

      or

      Take away something (or some things) deeply important to them.

I’m going to give two examples from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Series (Game of Thrones to those familiar with only the TV show):

Robb Stark is proclaimed King of the North after his father’s death.

Robb’s enemy Jamie Lannister is captured by the Starks and suffers humiliation after humiliation.

Both have to face situations they never faced before, and that changes them. In Robb’s case, he gets something a lot of other characters in the story want (a kingdom, at least in theory). In Jaime’s case, he loses everything that mattered to him—his status, his power, his family, and, um, something else I won’t mention because it’s such a huge spoiler.

Robb starts out as a young and untried man who gains his crown in the aftermath of his father’s death, and then goes on to have extraordinary success in the battlefield. The success doesn’t go to his head, exactly, but it does goad him to make some errors in judgment—and one is a doozy.

Jaime starts out at the beginning of the story as a flat-out villain (he pushes Robb’s younger brother Bran out of a tower window, crippling him permanently, when the boy catches him having sex with the Queen—who also happens to be Jaime’s sister). He is called the Kingslayer because he murdered the previous king, breaking his vow to protect his monarch. As he faces a continual worsening of his situation, some of his arrogance and lack of concern about other people begins to fade away.

The result is that readers/viewers who liked Robb at the beginning of his story begin to become frustrated with him, and those who despised Jaime begin to like him.

Readers love to have their perceptions of characters change. Creating an arc is one of the best ways to engage your reader.

Ray Harryhausen Brought The Creatures Of Our Imaginations To Life

How you react to the news of animator Ray Harryhausen’s death today may depend on your age. If you’re under the age of 40 there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of him. If you’re over the age of 40, especially if you’re a fan of fantasy and sci-fi movies, you probably grew up loving his animation and special effects. You may not know him by name, but if someone said “skeleton sword fight” it’s likely you’d know exactly what they’re talking about.

When it comes to animation and special effects, we’re a spoiled lot these days. What has become possible with computer animation is pretty much . . . everything. Almost anything imaginable can be put on screen and look seamless and organic to a scene. We’ve become so blasé about it, that it’s not unusual for people to rag on special effects on TV looking “cheap” (because, erm, compared to a movie with a $200 million budget, an episode of television IS cheap).

So it’s quite possible to look at Harryhausen’s work from a present-day perspective and see them as kind of precious and quaint.

But to me—and many who grew up watching his films—they are still AWESOME.

I think the reason Harryhausen’s work resonated—and still resonates—is because he started out as a boy fascinated by dinosaurs and creatures, which speaks to all of us who were children fascinated by dinosaurs and creatures.

When his parents took him when he was a boy to see the original version of King Kong, he was determined to figure out how to make a creature like Kong. He started out with string puppets and eventually began studying how to do animation. He even started a studio in his parents’ garage.

Eventually, he met Willis O’Brien, who animated King Kong and The Lost World. On Obrien’s advice, he began to study art and anatomy. He went to work for producer George Pal, working as an animator on a series of shorts called Puppetoons. When he entered the Army during World War II, he joined the Special Services Division under directors Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak. There he worked on propaganda films, including some that used stop-motion animation.

A few years after the war, he was hired for his first major motion picture: Mighty Joe Young. The film won the Academy Award for special effects.

For the next 30 years or so, Harryhausen made many films using his stop-motion animation technique (dubbed “Dynamation” by producer Charles Scheer, who worked with him on twelve feature films). Some of his most famous are It Came From Beneath The Sea, 20 Million Miles To Earth, The Valley Of Gwangi, The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, Jason & The Argonauts, One Million Years B.C. and Clash Of The Titans.

Jason & The Argonauts featured that army of skeletons I mentioned before, as well as a gigantic statue (based on the Colossus of Rhodes) that comes to life, a seven-headed hydra and an animated discus-throwing scene. Though the movie was not a box-office success at the time, it’s often been cited since as a classic of the genre.

Harryhausen’s feature film career ended with Clash Of The Titans because by 1981, the year of its release, special effects were already starting to evolve into what we are familiar with today.
Yet it’s difficult to imagine what we have today without Harryhausen’s pioneering work. Filmmakers such as Steven Speilberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, as well as many contemporary animators, cite Harryhausen as an influence. To film-lovers, his movies may not be great works in the sense of having complex characters, ingenious plots, or deep themes and ideas.

But, oh, they are SO much fun, SO imaginative, SO visceral.

Even Ross on Friends, who had a doctorate in paleontology, didn’t look down on a movie like The Valley Of Gwangi. In the episode The One Where Joey Speaks French, he looks like he’s enjoying the hell out of it, grinning like a kid. It’s not hard to imagine that Ross Geller was inspired to become a paleontologist because of a Harryhausen movie.

It’s not hard to imagine that Harryhausen inspired many people to a great variety of careers.

RIP, Ray. Thanks for all the fun and fanciful afternoons watching the creatures of our imaginations come to life on screen.

Related articles

• R.I.P. Special Effects Legend Ray Harryhausen (geek-news.mtv.com)
• Visual Effects Master Ray Harryhausen Has Died at 92 (slashfilm.com)
• Ray Harryhausen (1920 – 2013) (boingboing.net)
• Ray Harryhausen: 1920-2013 (badassdigest.com)

9 Reasons Why More People Should Read Anthony Trollope

English: Anthony Trollope (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. If you like Jane Austen, you will love Anthony Trollope. Even though they were of different eras (some Victorian writers, including Charlotte Bronte, loathed Austen’s novels) Trollope has several things in common with Austen: a deadly wit he uses to expose human folly, an understanding of how money (or lack of it) can impact romantic relationships, and a talent for writing about both loving and contentious familial relationships.

2. If you don’t like Austen, you will love Trollope. Unlike Austen’s, the world his characters inhabit is far more varied.
Austen’s was more limited because in her day women had very limited lives. (She even has her character Anne Elliot comment on the limited sphere of women’s lives in her last novel Persuasion.)

Like Austen’s, many of Trollope’s books are about several country families interacting, but he expands his stories to other areas like religious institutions, politics and the work place. (Trollope worked for the General Postal Office for many years and eventually ran for the House of Commons). While many of his romantic pairings have happy outcomes, not all of them do, so there’s an element of mystery as to whether they’ll get together at the end.

3. Unlike many Victorian novelists, he’s funny. While I admire many Victorian writers, I find them overall a fairly gloomy bunch. (One of my favorites, ironically, is Thomas Hardy, the
gloomiest of them all.) While there can be humorous moments and characters in other Victorian novels (especially Dickens) I’ve found none of them to have moments as laugh-out-loud funny. He uses an omniscient narrator who is ironic and at times almost snarky, something
he was criticized for in his time, but which helps make his work seem fresh today.

That’s not to say he doesn’t tackle serious issues—he does, and his stories have tragic elements. But this is tempered with much-needed humor.

4. He has a way of making you like characters you shouldn’t like at all. Characters who come off as stiff-necked can still elicit sympathy. Even most of his villains get a fair shake.

5. He has a way of making you see the flaws of his most admirable and loveable characters. It is not unusual for his “bad” characters and “good” characters to have the same exact flaws. There are several characters on both ends of the spectrum who stupidly get suckered into deep debt, as well as “bad” guys and “good” guys who string along women they have no intention of marrying. Corruption can even touch his most kind and virtuous characters.

6. His female characters are complex and can be just as powerful in their own way as male characters. And unlike in a Thomas Hardy book, they aren’t punished for this with tragic outcomes.

7. Many of his stories have elements that are remarkably relevant to a modern audience. The Way We Live Now is the most glaring example, with a villain who has more than a passing resemblance to Bernie Madoff and a storyline that mirrors much that happened before and during the latest economic crash. His work place and political storylines show that a century and a half later, nothing much has changed in the work place or politics.

8. If you’re a writer, he’s a great role model. When he started his career he held a full-time position and still managed to crank out a lot of books. He’s the poster boy for the “butt in the chair” writing career philosophy.

9. Which means he was incredibly prolific, so there are lots and lots of books to help you fill up your e-reader. Best part: you can get some really good editions for very little money or even for free.

Finally, if you’re a bit hesitant about picking up one of his books, there have been several TV adaptations of his books. The Barchester Chronicles, The Pallisers and The Way We Live Now are all outstanding series.

If you’re a fan of Alan Rickman, one of his earliest roles was as the “odious” Mr. Slope in The Barchester Chronicles.

That alone is reason enough to dip your toe into Trollope’s world.

Related articles

• Today’s Birthday: ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815) an English novelist (euzicasa.wordpress.com)

The Difference Between Hero And Protagonist

SPOILER WARNING FOR JAWS, HARRY POTTER, THE HUNGER GAMES.

The terms “hero” and “protagonist” have become nearly interchangeable. Writers and readers will nearly always refer to major characters in a story as the hero or the heroine.

While every lead character who is a hero or heroine is a protagonist, not every protagonist is a hero or heroine.

I think the events of the past week illustrated the difference in a startling way. When the bombs went off at the finish line at the Boston Marathon, almost the first thing people noticed when the footage ran on TV and the internet was how first responders and a few other individuals immediately ran TOWARDS the site of the explosions.

Almost everyone else—who was still mobile—ran away or walked around in a daze.

If anything makes someone a hero, it’s running towards the danger rather than away from it.

That doesn’t make those who ran away bad people. It just makes them normal. Human beings have a strong survival instinct, and at a moment of danger, we usually do all we can to get ourselves away from it as fast as we can. There were many random acts of kindness in the aftermath of the bombings, to be sure—but most did not involve running towards the danger.

There’s a popular belief in the concept of the Everyman Hero. Again, like the word hero alone, I think this has become a misused term. Many people think it means that everyone in the right circumstances will behave heroically. What it actually means is that heroes can come from any circumstance—they can be educated or illiterate, upper class or lower class, they can be someone who did bad things who may redeem themselves through heroic acts.

Heroism can come from anywhere, but not everywhere.

I can already hear the cries of elitism and arguments such it’s the job of first responders to run towards danger.

But they choose the job of running towards danger. Most of us don’t.

Of course, heroes don’t JUST run towards danger—people who thrill-seek, for instance, aren’t necessarily being heroic—they do it to help others, either to save them from the danger or for the advancement of some greater good.

That doesn’t mean they don’t experience fear. They do. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to live as much as anyone else. They do. It means that there’s something inside them that compels them to overcome that survival instinct and risk themselves to help others.

I’ve heard some fictional characters described as “everyman” or “everywoman” in the sense that they’re supposedly just ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Here’s one of my favorites—Harry Potter. Um, Harry Potter was anything BUT ordinary. He was The Boy Who Lived, marked with the lightning-shaped scar. He was the boy who agreed to die because it was the only way Voldemort could die.

How many “ordinary” people would have agreed to do that, regardless of the circumstances? I’m guessing most would have told Dumbledore to shove it and let Voldemort take over.

Harry in a lot of ways SEEMS ordinary—Snape was not wrong when he called him a mediocre wizard, and you know he and Ron would never have been able to find their own behinds without Hermione. Yet he had the extraordinary ability to put the greater good above his own survival.

Here’s another character I’ve heard described as ordinary—Katniss, from The Hunger Games. That’s so wrong it’s almost funny. What’s one of the FIRST things she does in the beginning of the book and movie? Cross the fence that surrounds her district so she can hunt and feed her family—an act punishable by death in her society. The same day, she volunteers to take her sister’s place as a tribute in the Hunger Games—an almost certain death sentence. (She herself remarks how rare it is for people to volunteer to take the place of others reaped for the games—even when the tribute is very young.)

Like Harry, she has her faults (she’s one of the most reluctant heroes you’ll ever come across) but she still runs towards danger to protect those she loves—and later, to free her society.

One of my favorite “ordinary” heroes is Chief Brody from the movie Jaws. Even though he’s a cop, I’ve heard people describe him as a bumbler. Brody is a man who is adjusting to a completely foreign environment (from New York City cop to Chief of Police of a small seaside community). Brody is more than just foreign to the environment—he’s deathly afraid of it, because he has a terrible fear of water.

When a rouge shark begins attacking humans off the shore of his community, he is easily intimidated by the town officials into keeping the beaches open. Because of this, more attacks happen, including one that results the death of a young boy. His own son narrowly escapes an attack.

The community finally seeks a solution and hires a couple of experts—a fisherman named Quint and a marine biologist named Hooper. At this point, no one—not even the mother of the dead boy who slapped him for keeping the beaches open—would have blamed Brody for stepping aside and letting the experts take over.

He doesn’t do that. In this case, he doesn’t run towards danger—he sails towards it, even though he is terrified of the ocean, never mind the killer shark. While Brody does seem a bit of a “bumbler” in this environment, it’s important to note that he’s New York City cop (it’s very subtly implied during the famous “scar comparison” scene that he was injured, possibly shot, on the job) so has an area of competence.

The two “experts” who are comfortable in the environment fail to kill the shark. It’s the outsider who succeeds in defeating it, all the while combating his fear of the water. He doesn’t give up because he’s taken on the responsibility for the community he guards.

That’s extraordinary. That’s heroism.

Does that mean every protagonist has to be a hero? Absolutely not. There are, of course, anti-heroes and tragic heroes, but it is perfectly possible to compose a story about someone ordinary, though I would argue there is always SOMETHING about a successful protagonist that is special. They just don’t always have to be heroes.

The Western Is Not Dead–It’s Just Asleep

Over on one of my favorite web sites, io9, there was a recent article by Charlie Jane Anders about the failure of many sci-fi-fantasy/Western genre mash-ups to gain large audiences. She argued that the reason is the Western is a “moribund” genre—i.e., basically dead.

Well, them’s fightin’ words where I come from, pardner—er, I mean, I disagree with that.

First of all, there is no such thing as a dead genre—things go in cycles. Westerns were so popular for such a long time that it was inevitable that they would, well, kind of go to sleep for a while. The same has happened with the musical.

But genres do return to popularity, and sometimes in a big way. Pirate movies, for instance—no one would have imagined the insane popularity of The Pirates of the Caribbean movies a little over a decade ago. It wasn’t that long ago when writers were told the vampire genre was never going to sell again, ever, ever.

While Ms. Anders makes an accurate observation that most blatant Western genre mash-ups don’t attract a mass audience, we are now in a time where not everything needs to attract a large audience in order to become part of the cultural zeitgeist. She points to the failure of Firefly, but it’s very easy to imagine the series attaining success today on SyFy or AMC or one of the premium cable channels, that it couldn’t on a major network. (Also, she skips over the broadcast history of Firefly, which almost guaranteed it would fail, regardless of its genre(s).)

Because of the money needed to mount a sci-fi or fantasy movie, one that melds with the Western genre is undoubtedly a huge risk—as far as we know at this moment. There’s some very understandable doubt that the new version of The Lone Ranger will attract a large enough audience to turn a profit. It certainly could fail. Or it could be the next Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

There was another point Ms. Anders made that I disagree with—that the reason Westerns fail to attract audiences is because it highlights things in our history we don’t like to be reminded of. Well, you could make the same argument about period dramas of ANY era. Mad Men, for instance, reminds us of a time where prejudice and misogyny in the work place were accepted as normal. I could write an article about how mid-20^th century dramas almost always fail to attract a large audience, because every attempt by the major networks to cash in on the Mad Men success has failed so far.

She also ignores that Westerns going as far back as the 1950s have actually addressed Western stereotypes and less-than-stellar moments from our history. For instance, John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn tackled the issue of how Native Americans were treated head-on. I watched Little Big Man just last week for the first time in a very long time and was struck by how it managed to tweak the genre with humor while also very seriously depicting the worst parts of its history. More recently, the mini-series Into The West dealt with them in an even more unflinching manner.

It’s also interesting to note that Ms. Anders never mentions Avatar, which director James Cameron himself described as “Dances With Wolves In Space”—clearly inspired by the history of Native Americans after the arrival of the Eupopeans—a movie that was not only financially successful, it was only recently knocked down from its perch as the highest-grossing film of all time.

That most famous icon of the genre, John Wayne, played several characters that went against the stereotypical lone gunman, in movies as diverse as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers, True Grit, and The Shootist.

Westerns fascinate me for a reason never brought up by Ms. Anders, and it’s the same thing that attracts me to dystopians and other sci-fi and fantasy subgenres: tabula rasa–the clean slate. The Western is about both individuals AND society reinventing itself from the ground up. To me, that is always a fascinating subject for a story.

Several years ago, I made up a list of my favorite Westerns for a mail list I belonged to, breaking them down by category. (I hate 10 best or 100 best lists. Some things just can’t be compared to other things, and I don’t like arbitrary numerical limits.) I’ve updated it to add some great stuff that either came out in the past few years or that I’ve just recently discovered. Because I’m always watching Westerns and Western-inspired movies and TV shows.

There are a few things that may seem to be missing. (I haven’t seen Django Unchained yet, but have a feeling it could easily belong in either the Spaghetti Western or Revionist Western categories. I also have the first episode of Defiance waiting on my DVR.) If you have suggestions for additions, please let us know in the comments.

THE ESSENTIALS:

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

STAGECOACH
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
FORT APACHE
SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON
THE VIRGINIAN
THE OX-BOW INCIDENT
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
THE SEARCHERS
HIGH NOON
WINCHESTER ’73
SHANE

3:10 TO YUMA (the original)

3:10 TO YUMA (the remake)
RED RIVER
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID
UNFORGIVEN

THE EPICS:

CIMARRON (the original)
HOW THE WEST WAS WON
THE BIG COUNTRY
LITTLE BIG MAN

THE NATIVE AMERICANS:

CHEYENNE AUTUMN
APACHE
GERONIMO: AN AMERICAN LEGEND
I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER (TV movie)

THE WOMEN:

WESTWARD, THE WOMEN
THE FURIES
THE GREAT MAN’S LADY
THE BALLAD OF LITTLE JO

THE REVISIONIST WESTERNS:

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
THE PROFESSIONALS
THE WILD BUNCH
WILL PENNY
NEVADA SMITH
JEREMIAH JOHNSON
MCCABE & MRS. MILLER
THE COWBOYS
TRUE GRIT (the original)
TRUE GRIT (the remake)
THE SHOOTIST
THE GREY FOX
SILVERADO
TOMBSTONE

THE SPAGHETTI WESTERNS:

THE MAN WITH NO NAME TRILOGY: A FISTFULL OF DOLLARS, FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

THE COMEDIES:

BLAZING SADDLES
THE PALEFACE
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL GUNFIGHTER
CAT BALLOU
THE CHEYENNE SOCIAL CLUB

THE WEIRD STUFF:

JOHNNY GUITAR
DUEL IN THE SUN
FORTY GUNS
RANCHO NOTORIOUS
HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER
THE HIRED HAND

RANDOM STUFF I JUST HAPPEN TO LIKE:

THE LAST WAGON
THE OUTRIDERS
THE NAKED SPUR
THE COMANCHEROS
THE UNDEFEATED
THE RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE (TV movie)

THE TV MINI-SERIES:

LONESOME DOVE

INTO THE WEST
CENTENNIAL
THE AWAKENING LAND

HEAVEN AND HELL
TRUE WOMEN

 

THE CLASSIC TV SERIES:

 

GUNSMOKE

THE RIFLEMAN

HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL

THE BIG VALLEY

THE VIRGINIAN

BONANZA

 

THE REVISIONIST TV SERIES:

 

DEADWOOD

LONESOME DOVE: THE OUTLAW YEARS

ALIAS SMITH & JONES

THE YOUNG RIDERS

HELL ON WHEELS

THE TV GENRE MASHUPS:

 

FIREFLY

WILD, WILD WEST

THE ADVENTURES OF BRISCO COUNTY, JR.

KUNG FU

JUSTIFIED

Roger Ebert: Film Lover, Never A Film Snob

Roger Ebert, american film critic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There have been so many beautiful tributes to film critic Roger Ebert, who died a few days ago, that I was almost hesitant to add my own thoughts. What more needs to be said? Many famous people, such as President Obama, Werner Herzog, Harvey Weinstein, Leonard Maltin and Richard Roeper, as well as many not-so-famous people, have written and spoken very eloquently about Ebert’s life and cultural impact.

But as someone who became a serious student of film just as Ebert became a household name, I feel the need to add what he meant to me.

When I say I “became a serious student of film” I could swap that out for “became a serious film snob.” Not only because I was pursuing a degree in film studies, but also because my mother was working for New Yorker Films, a company that distributed foreign and independent films. This was during the late 70s and early 80s, just as there was an explosion in the art house scene. Growing up, I loved Hollywood classics (my grandparents thought I was mad for loving film noir, what they considered “B” movies) and now exposed to foreign films, both in school and through my mother’s connection to New Yorker Films, I thought those were the only kinds of movies worth liking.

Before college, I had loved popular fare like Star Wars, but there did come a point when I started to turn my nose up at those kinds of movies. I remember taking my father to see Raiders of The Lost Ark for his birthday and kind of smirking my way through it, while my parents were completely enthralled by it. (I love the movie now, by the way.) Someone who worked at New Yorker Films asked me if I’d seen The Terminator yet and I looked at him as if he had committed a sacrilege.

Yeah, I was kind of obnoxious on the subject for a while.

Happily, I got over it in a big way, and Roger Ebert is one of the reasons why. Watching him and Gene Siskel on At The Movies and the other incarnations of their review show, it eventually dawned on me that I was missing out on some great movies. What I came to love about them, and about Roger particularly, was that they simply loved movies, and it didn’t matter if they were Hollywood blockbusters or foreign films or small independent features. If they were good, they were good.

It’s a little hard to imagine now, because professional film critics seem to have little impact on the success or failure of movies, but Siskel and Ebert could help films succeed that might have been overlooked otherwise.

I worked for a while at New Yorker Films myself, answering the phones, during the time that a movie called My Dinner With Andre was having a hugely successful one year run at one of their theaters. The major reason the movie—which is about two men (Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn) talking over dinner—did such phenomenal business was Siskel and Ebert boosting it on their show. One of the amazing things I noticed while reading over the tributes to Ebert was how many of them mentioned that Siskel and Ebert persuaded them to go see My Dinner With Andre and/or had people in the comments section saying the same thing.

It’s true that they had most sway when it came to movies that were in the art house category, but the fact that they boosted art films while taking mainstream Hollywood fare completely seriously was probably why their show was successful while others who tried to copy its format were not.

When Gene Siskel died in 1999, it was impossible to replicate the chemistry the two men had, though Richard Roeper did a good job as Ebert’s new partner. When cancer literally took away Ebert’s voice in 2006 and ended his television career, it would have been perfectly understandable if he had faded away from the public consciousness.

But he didn’t go away. With the advent of social media, Ebert was able to stay connected to his audience and continue reviewing and boosting movies. Almost up to the last day of his life, he was still writing about his favorite subject. He even had plans to crowdfund a new version of At The Movies.

Roger Ebert taught me to love movies for themselves, not for what category of movie they belonged to. For that, I will always be grateful.

R.I.P., Roger. I hope you and Gene are together, having a great time watching (and probably arguing about) movies.

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Character And Plot

It kind of aggravates me when people—writers included—differentiate between plot-driven and character-driven stories.

Basically, because character and plot are not mutually exclusive entities.

When people say character-driven, they usually mean stories that feature characters sitting around and talking a lot. They think of these stories as basically plotless.

I’ve heard Kevin Smith’s film Clerks cited as plotless. Certainly, for a good portion of the film, characters do a lot of talking. They don’t go anywhere but the store where the main character is a clerk.

But . . . stuff actually does happen. And that’s all that plot means—what happens in a story.

For instance, main character Dante talks a lot about his ex-girlfriend Caitlin.

And then, Caitlin shows up.

That’s something happening. That’s plot.

An anti-smoking activist buys some coffee in the store and starts hectoring people who come in to buy cigarettes.

That’s something happening, that’s plot.

Dante talks to his current girlfriend, who blithely confesses to some of her sexual history—which shocks Dante and changes his relationship with her—and she totally doesn’t get why.

That’s plot AND character at work together.

So in the case of Clerks, while the plot is certainly episodic, it still has a plot.

Plot doesn’t necessarily have to mean car chases or aliens landing from outer space or characters planning and executing a daring robbery. Anything that happens in a story is plot.

Plot-driven usually means that characters react to what happens in a story and act only in ways that suit the plot. For instance, a bunch of characters who are wimpy suddenly and bravely face down a hoard of attackers, shooting them with guns—without ever having picked up a gun in their lives.

AND THEY’RE SUCCESSFUL.

Then later, if it suits a plot point, they become craven cowards again.

That’s obviously an exaggeration, but it illustrates the point. Characters only behave according to what the plot dictates at a certain point in plot-driven stories.

This kind of storytelling usually results in readers and audiences rolling their eyes and wishing they had saved their money for some other form of entertainment.

But some people who claim they write plot-driven stories just mean they enjoy writing stories with big, noisy events, instead of quieter, smaller events. They think character is not as important to that kind of story, but I would disagree with that. Some of the most memorable characters are in grand stories that have plots full of big events.

Instead of looking at story as plot-driven vs. character-driven, I suggest looking at plot and character as having a symbiotic relationship. One feeds the other. This would be regardless of whether a plot has a ton of big events, or less action and mostly quieter events, such as in Clerks (though it does have one big and shocking event).

Let’s take an example from history as an illustration of what I mean. King Henry VIII famously changed the course of European history because he insisted on dumping his first wife Katherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn, in the hopes of begetting a legitimate male heir. Because the Catholic Church refused to grant him a divorce, he broke with the Church.

I’ve often thought that if Henry had been a different sort of person, this would never have happened. Another king might have stood by his first wife, even though he had no male heir. Another king might have become tired after wrangling with the Church and given up after a while. Another might have never been susceptible to the charms of an ambitious woman like Anne Boleyn in the first place. Another might have married off his only daughter very young in the hopes of gaining a grandson as his heir. And so on.

So Henry’s character most certainly had a profound impact on shaping history.

But what would have happened if we could change one or more of the EVENTS he was reacting to when he changed history?

Such as, one or more of Katherine of Aragon’s sons had survived infancy. Henry’s motivation, he claimed, was that he desperately needed a male heir to prevent civil war. If he had had legitimate sons, that motivation disappears.

Or his brother Arthur hadn’t died and had become king instead of Henry.

Or the Church had refused to give Henry permission to marry Katherine, who had been his brother’s widow (something that played a huge role in Henry’s quest for a divorce).

Or Anne Boleyn had been content to be just his mistress.

Or the Pope had agreed to the divorce.

Or Katherine had agreed to the divorce and retired to a convent.

Now the story changes and the outcomes most likely would change. In the first three instances, would he still have fallen for Anne Boleyn? Maybe. But it’s far less likely that he would have changed the course of history because of her.

I must point out that the last three examples are of characters being made weaker to suit a weaker story. Characters easily giving the protagonist what they want will cut a story off at its knees. There is no question that one reason this chapter of history excites people’s imaginations to this day is because many of the characters involved were implacable, complex individuals.

But again, if we change outside events, the story becomes something quite different.

Now I’m going to skip to another historical event altogether—Hurricane Katrina. (Bet you never thought you’d come across a post that links the movie Clerks with Henry VIII and Hurricane Katrina!) Just before it hit New Orleans, I was discussing with some of my co-workers the preparations—or lack of them—even though the city had almost been hit with a catastrophic hurricane not that long before Katrina, and it had been pointed out then that their emergency plans were woefully inadequate. If they knew it could happen, why had they not made more preparations since then, I asked?

“Because people are reactive,” answered one of my co-workers.

I think she hit on something very true, and it’s true of characters in a story, too. They can be bouncing along just fine—or maybe not so fine— before the story opens, but then SOMETHING happens to shake up the status quo, something that forces them to react, then to act. In the best stories, the way they react and act are very specific to the characters.

Even if you’re a “panster” (make up plot as you go along) it’s still important to keep in mind how your characters are going to react and act in the face of events you throw their way. That’s the symbiotic relationship between character and plot.

Desperately Seeking The Perfect Title

Reblogged from MOON IN GEMINI:

After a lot of frustration trying to find good titles for my projects, I started thinking about titles of successful books and movies.  I realized they usually fall into categories.  Knowing these categories help me create a strategy for finding the perfect title.

1. Main Character – this is the obvious place to start.  I’m not a fan of using the name of the main character as the title of a book. 

Read more… 536 more words

Kind of busy this week, so I thought I'd repost an old column. Hope you enjoy!

My Favorite Celebrity Memoirs

I really enjoy reading memoirs written by actors. I find them a fascinating insight into the movie industry and the joys, frustrations and tragedies associated with what is seen as a glamorous profession. I also enjoy listening to the audio versions of these autobiographies, because many of them are voiced by the author. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. My Mother Was Nuts, by Penny Marshall – Marshall is almost painfully honest when talking about her upbringing in the Bronx and her acting and directing career. She bends over backwards (maybe a tad too much) to give her co-star Cindy Williams a fair shake when recounting her controversial exit from Laverne & Shirley. Most interesting to me were the sections about her career as a director, something she almost treats off-handedly, never making a big deal out of the fact that she was the first financially successful woman director since the silent era. She also takes the supposed end of her film directing career in stride (acknowledging that Hollywood no longer makes the kind of films she wants to direct) though she still occasionally directs television projects. Funny, touching and oh, that voice just makes the audio version!

2. My Extraordinary Ordinary Life, by Sissy Spacek – of all the books on this list, this one is less about an acting career and more a memoir about what it was like to grow up in Texas during the 50s and 60s. In that sense, it was slightly disappointing to me, because she has worked with some of the most interesting directors and actors around. She does go into great detail about filming her first leading role in director Terrence Mallick’s first  masterpiece, Badlands, which is utterly fascinating. I was surprised to find out that music was her first ambition, which made her perfect to play Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter, a role she resisted taking at first. While I enjoyed the tales of her family, childhood and adolescence (some quite haunting and sad), I would have liked details about more of her various film roles.

3. I Am Spartacus!, by Kirk Douglas – Douglas’ first memoir, The Ragman’s Son, should be on the reading list of anyone interested in actors autobiographies—it’s truly outstanding. In this book, he zeroes in on one particular event in his life: his efforts as a producer to get the film Spartacus made, at the height of the Hollywood black list. What is most remarkable about the book is how he refuses to cast himself as a hero for hiring blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbull. He is very honest about his reluctance and fear during that shameful period of history. Also compelling is his often contentious relationship with director Stanley Kubrick. The audio version of the book is further enhanced because it is narrated by Douglas’ son Michael (yes, that Michael Douglas, for young’ins who may not be in the know).

Cover of Lauren Bacall: By Myself

4. Lauren Bacall: By Myself, by Lauren Bacall – it’s so hard to believe that a woman who came across on screen as so confident and mature, even at the age of nineteen, was actually quite insecure and naïve. Born Betty Bacall and raised by a single mother, she pursued her career at a very young age and found herself a sudden star entangled in a romance with one of the greatest (plus much older and married at the time) Hollywood stars. Everything would seem to have been against a successful marriage, but Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had that for the most part. Bacall is very forthcoming about the lows and highs of the relationship, as well as the many mistakes she made with men after Bogart passed away. Her career has spanned from the Golden Age of Hollywood to the end of the studio system to the present day, which is one of the things that makes the book such an enjoyable read.

5. This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection, by Carol Burnett – this is more a collection of anecdotes than a conventional autobiography. Burnett skips back and forth over various periods of her life, from being brought up by her grandmother, to surviving in New York City as an actress, to her classic variety TV show, to the illness and death of her daughter Carrie. My favorite sections were her stories of how The Carol Burnett Show came together and her various triumphs and disasters while trying to break in as an actress. The audio version, narrated by Burnett herself, is extraordinarily touching when she talks about the tragic aspects of her life.