The Rough Draft

Hi guys, it’s been a while. Why it’s been a while I’ll fill you all in on in another post in the, “Waiting to Sell out thread.” This current post comes out of the MWS nesgroup on Usenet. Credit where credit is due. Niel, the guy who wrote this is a produced writer, currently up for a directing gig at Paramount. So here we go.

NMS Writes:

I am in agreement with the proposition that you should know what the movie is about within the first ten minutes.

Now – the question is – what do I mean when I use the phrase – “what the movie is about.”

I do not mean, necessarily, “the inciting incident.”

I mean, “the central problem.”

The thing that the protagonist, whether he realizes it or not, has to solve, (or have the opportunity to solve and ultimately fail to solve) in order for the movie to be over.

For Dorothy, that’s nor getting back from Oz – that’s just a

metaphor. Her central problem is expressed in “Over the Rainbow” – that she feels as if she doesn’t fit in at home. Nobody listens to her. Nobody pays any attention to her problems. So she runs away. The adventures of the story resolve *that* problem, which is established long before any twisters come along.

Very often stories consist of external problems and internal problems – the external problems acting as external representations of internal problems that the protagonist has to solve.

In “Die Hard” Bruce Willis has this big external problem – all that stuff with the terrorists, but he also has this internal problem, this business with his unresolved manhood and his wife. And he has come out to L.A. not to solve anything to do with terrorists – but to address this problem with his wife – namely that her success has, in some way, undermined his sense of being in charge of the family and he wasn’t able to handle that – and that sort of broke up the family –

and the whole opening of the movie really sort of focused on that. So it’s quite late when the terrorists ultimately come on the scene. But that’s okay. Because, weird as it may seem, structurally – all that stuff with the terrorists is really there to enable Bruce Willis to work out that problem with his wife. And in case you missed it – it all comes together metaphorically, at the end. They gave that wife of his a Rolex – big expensive watch that symbolizes her business success. Somewhere along the line, Bruce Willis tells the sympathetic

black cop how he really should have supported her when she was doing well at business and feels terrible about it. Okay. Now we know that he’s had a change of heart. Fine. But when the final moment comes, and the chief terrorist is hanging from the wife’s wrist at the top of the building – Bruce Willis pops the strap on the Rolex. Good bye Rolex. Goodbye terrorist. But, symbolically – goodbye wife’s career, welcome

back Bruce Willis’s manhood. Wife saved. Terrorist dead. Problem solved.

So when you look at stories that seem to be slow out of the gate, very often they are not, in fact, slow out of the gate. They are actually, very properly, doing their story work – by telling you, right up front, what the story is about – by telling you what the story is

*actually* about – first, the *internal* problem – the thing that the protagonist has to fix on the inside – and then moving on to the external problem, the large external problem, like an asteroid hitting the earth, which is going to come to represent, metaphorically, that internal problem, which the story has just set up. The fact that the asteroid may come at minute twelve or fourteen is beside the point –

so long as the *real* problem is being addressed at minute two, or four, or eight.

If, on the other hand, nothing is being addressed during those first ten minutes, neither internal nor external problem – you bet I think that there’s something seriously wrong going on.

I, of course, cannot speak for others, but some time reasonably close to the opening credits, I want to know why I am watching the movie. That means that I want to know what the movie is going to be about. And if I haven’t been given enough to able to at least form a pretty damned solid thesis, I, for one, am going to be pretty damned bored – no matter what’s going on on screen.

NMS

Thanks for a great post Neil, we wish you all the best.