Writing Wednesdays
The Hero’s Journey as Screenplay
By Steven Pressfield
Published: May 23, 2012
Last week we were talking about the “hero’s journey” in myth. This week let’s talk about movies.
Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. The "amnesiac story" is a classic "hero's journey"
The neophyte writer, when he arrives in Tinseltown, very soon gets wised up to the lingo—“inciting incident,” “Act Two curtain,” “All Is Lost moment” and so forth. It’s not so much that there’s a “formula.” But there’s definitely a “vocabulary.”
The reason there’s a vocabulary is that certain structural concepts work in stories, and others don’t. How do moviemakers know this (forgetting for a moment William Goldman’s famous axiom, “Nobody knows anything”)? They know by the box office. The Monday morning ticket figures. Audiences line up for some movies and run away from others.
William Goldman said another very smart thing. He said “Screenplays are structure.” What he meant was that the building blocks of the story and how they are arranged are the most important elements in the success of a screen drama or comedy. What comes first, what comes second, what’s left in, what’s left out. If the architecture works emotionally, the movie will work, even if the casting is less than inspired and the dialogue fails to rise to Academy Award level.
What’s interesting to me is that these building blocks often parallel, beat by beat, Joseph Campbell’s throughline of the “hero’s journey.”
Herewith those beats in myth: the hero starts out unconscious, the hero receives a “call,” the hero ventures forth, meets outlandish characters, receives aid from unexpected sources (often divine or semi-divine), suffers, is lost, despairs, and finally returns home—often in a guise unrecognizable to others.
That’s a movie. That’s a screenplay.
In the prototypical screen story, the protagonist starts out in “normal” life. Think about Taken, The Hangover, Bridesmaids. But something is out-of-kilter or potentially out-of-kilter. Suddenly: a shock! The inciting incident propels the hero out of normal life and into movie life.
We have launched ourselves upon the “hero’s journey.”
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Big Night
By Shawn Coyne | Published: May 25, 2012
Once a year, I uncinch the family money belt, take a deep breath, and plan a trip to Yankee Stadium.
Our big night out is our annual splurge. My son marks off the days. Our weekend hours of playing catch, me hitting him grounders and pitching him batting practice revolve around the state of Derek Jeter’s batting average or whether or not C.C. Sabathia might pitch the night we’re scheduled for the Bronx.
This year, I promised to teach him how to keep score.
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Adios Zero Sum
By Shawn Coyne | Published: May 18, 2012
My five-year-old daughter felt bad.
One day at school, a frienemy teased her about having had a play date with another girl in their class. My daughter had not been included. Nah…Nah…Nah Nah Nah.
I discovered this while helping her put on her tights. It was the day she’d planned her revenge.
I’m pleased that my children were born in an age of abundance. I grew up in the era of scarcity. In my day, there were only so many jobs at the steel mill, there were only so many football scholarships available…there were only a few opportunities to “make it.”
If someone won, someone else lost. The sum of the positive and the negative equaled zero. That made a lot of sense back then when our worlds were provincial and closed.
But this competition for scarce resources (jobs, education, status) created a “give as good as you get” culture. If another person was kind and generous to you, you owed them something in return. If they attacked, you hit back with equal ferocity. Accepting a kindness as a gift or turning the other cheek upset the social balance.
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