Writing Movies For Fun And Profit! (20 page)

Tip 4. Make your characters feel real.

Even if they have superpowers. Or live in space. Or are being played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Even if they’re already dead. Read them
out loud: Does the dialogue sound real? Are all of their actions and reactions logical? Real?

TRY THIS EXPERIMENT

Go watch the
Superman
movies—all of them.
*
We’ll wait.

• • •

• • •

Now—which ones sucked, and which one didn’t? The first one,
Superman: The Movie
, was pretty good, right? (The original cut. Not the crappy director’s cut, where he added in all those terrible jokes.) The characters in it were written pretty real, right? Okay, Margot Kidder wasn’t so great, we’ll give you that … but you get the point.

Now, how about the other Superman movies?
Superman II, III, and IV
, and
Superman Returns
? They sucked, right? The characters are written for laughs, they’re cartoony, and they say and do stuff that flat-out doesn’t make sense. Real characters make the movie good, even in sci fiand comedy.

Tip 5: Forget that film school crap about “Create a cradle-to-grave biography of each of your characters.”

What did they eat for breakfast? How long did they suckle at their mother’s teat, and how do they feel about it? Who cares?

If that helps you: GREAT. Do it.
If that’s not how you write—don’t worry about it.
We know a lot of people, and we know them well, and we have no idea what they eat for breakfast or how long they suckled at their mamma’s teat.

Rick from
Casablanca
is one of the best hero characters ever created for the silver screen.
The writers who created Rick had NO IDEA what his entire history was
.

They didn’t even know that he “ran guns to Ethiopia in 1935 and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.” That stuff was written later by two PUNCH-UP GUYS. (See
Chapter 28
, “Rewrites: You Want It When? And I’m Getting Paid What?”)

If creating all that backstory helps you, great. Do it. We usually flush out only the elements of a character’s backstory that relate to our movie. It’s worked for us.

Tip 6: Make sure that the big horrible life-changing and insurmountable problem your characters face is also kinda fun.

If Luke Skywalker had battled, say, a debilitating cancer. Or world poverty … the
Star Wars
movies would have probably been accepted into some very prestigious film festivals. They WOULD NOT have made more than $100 billion at the box office.
Guess which one of those two things 20th Century Fox cares more about?
Sure, Luke’s aunt and uncle got killed—
but he didn’t like them anyway
. Then he got to go rescue a smoking hot princess and destroy the Death Star.

Sure, being trapped in a museum overnight with a
Tyrannosaurus rex
would be scary—but every kid in the WORLD would LOVE to be trapped overnight in a museum with a
T. rex.
Remember: no one asks movies to be complicated or challenging or enlightening—

They just want movies to be entertaining. That’s why they paid their 11 bucks.

Tip 7: Watch
Die Hard.
Many times.

Its characters are incredibly clear, they’re introduced with shockingly efficient exposition, and they’re a perfect combination of archetypal characters:

• The hero, John McClane, has one flaw:
he takes being a cop so seriously it’s gotten in the way of his marriage.
(Pretty damn good flaw for your action movie’s hero.)

• He has a slightly goofy good buddy to talk to—two of ’em, actually—who, in the end, are the smartest guys around.

• The villain is JUST AS SMART AND LIKABLE as the hero.

• The villain has a “sidekick” who’s much more evil and hateable than he is.

• The hero and the villain each have tons of likable cohorts and supporting characters. And you understand all of the characters and their motives in about five seconds: The plucky limo driver, the Twinkie-chugging cop who once shot a kid, the prick tabloid news guy who you just want to see get punched in the face … etc., etc.

Again—you’re not writing a novel
. It’s a movie. Be succinct, and make it as good as
Die Hard.

Okay. A Recap:

Laurie Anderson (performance artist/smarty-pants) has a great quote:

“Paradise is exactly like where you are right now … only much, much better.”

That’s what movies are like: Your hero should be as real as your nextdoor neighbor—but as cool as Han Solo. Your heroine should be as real as your first crush—only she’s carrying the plans to destroy the Death Star and she looks great in a bikini. And the problem your heros overcome should feel as real as a stopped-up septic tank. Only the septic tank should be guarded by robotic centaurs, and only a one-in-a-million shot with a proton torpedo can unclog it.

Free Movie idea

Yours Free with the Purchase of This Book

“MANNIES”

Approximate Budget: $45 million

Estimated Gross: $137 million worldwide

Shoots in: Vancouver, British Columbia, for the tax rebate Rating: PG-13

Awards Potential: .5% (Kids’ Choice at best)

Danny McBride stars as RICKY, a party animal/free spirit who’s never moved out of his parents’ basement. He’s a romantic, a philosopher, and a bongo player, and dreams one day of opening a store that sells only ROMANTIC MIX TAPES: yes, cassette
tapes
with awesome MIXES on them. He’s made a special one for the GIRL AT THE STARBUCKS near his house but can’t work up the nerve to talk to her.

Ricky spends his evenings cruising around in a van with the Tron logo on the side of it with his friends: DENIS, the “weird one” (Zach Galifianakis) and their cool black friend who actually gets the ladies, RAYBAN (Craig Robinson). The trio make what little money they have by recovering, cleaning, and reselling golf balls that they find in the bushes of the local golf course. Although they
seem high
a lot of the time, there
are no specific mentions of drugs
, so it’s family-friendly.

When RICKY’S stuck-up, holier-than-thou sister, RACHEL (Elizabeth Banks), and her fruity/asshole husband, RON (Thomas Lennon), get injured on a heliskiing trip in France, Rachel calls on Ricky to babysit for their precocious eight-year-old son, RUDY.

Ricky then realizes that he can make DOUBLE what he was making selling used golf balls by working as a babysitter.

Ricky, Denis, and Rayban open a full-service nanny business called MANNIES, for “Man Nannies.”

RAYBAN cruises for business with hot mommies at the local grocery store.

Ricky, Denis, and Rayban take three girls to the AMERICAN GIRL CAFÉ—Denis asks the waiter: “What kind of draft beer you got?” Waiter: “We don’t have
any draft beer, sir
, this is the American Girl Café.” Denis: “Then a
bottle
of Bud and shot of Jaegie.”

Ricky tells a few kids a scary BEDTIME STORY, with a flashlight under his chin: “And then Mr. Moon went into a terrible drunken rage. He crashed his brand-new sports car into the pool of the hotel. And Pete Townshend was very mad.”
Yes, he’s telling them GOODNIGHT KEITH MOON
!

Eventually, Ricky starts babysitting the son of the Girl at Starbucks, and a nerdy/sweet relationship starts to blossom. At one point, Rudy teaches Ricky a SIMPLE LESSON THAT HELPS HIM UNDERSTAND WOMEN IN A WAY HE NEVER DID, which allows him to overcome his fear. He gives the girl at Starbucks the mix tape he’s made her. They kiss. End Credits.

AFTER THE CREDITS, we see that one of Ricky’s MIX TAPES has fallen into the hands of Apple’s STEVE JOBS. Jobs calls Ricky on the phone and hires him to work at iTunes!!!

Note: The sequel to this film,
Mannies 2,
will go straight to DVD and will feature
none
of the original cast members—except for Thomas Lennon as Ron.

Note: The TRAILER FOR THIS FILM features the song “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

Enough bulls#!t. Now you’re actually going to sit down and write a screenplay. Great! (Go put on those fruity carpal tunnel syndrome gloves if you know what’s good for you!) Here’s the big secret no one tells you: writing screenplays is easy and fun! And why is writing screenplays so easy and fun?

BECAUSE WRITING OUTLINES IS HARD AND TIME-CONSUMING!

Repeat this mantra to yourself in a Yoda voice: There is no “writing screenplays,” there is only “writing
outlines
.” If you write a good outline, the screenplay will write itself.

If you sit down with a blank Final Draft file open on your computer, cursor blinking at you, taunting you to write a 105-page screenplay with no map at all,
you will fail
. The process will soon become frustrating, and you’ll end up giving up on what was once a great idea and squander the rest of the day watching funny cat videos on the internet.

Star of funny cat video on internet. Jumps on ceiling fan. It’s adorable.

You simply
have to
write an outline to write a screenplay. There is no other way. Maybe you can write an ART-HOUSE FILM with no outline; for example, most of the Andy Warhol films don’t seem to have outlines. Let’s take Andy’s 1964 film
Empire,
which consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building.
(LOOK, MA, NO OUTLINE!)

Now let’s compare Andy’s outlineless movie to other skyscraper movies—
ones that DID have outlines
:

Die Hard,
1988 (outline)

Box office: $140,767,956

Empire,
1964 (no outline)

Box office: $0.00

The Towering Inferno,
1974 (outline)

Box office: $116,000,000

Eraserhead,
1976 (no outline)

Box office: $7,000,000

As you can see, the movies with no outline made MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS LESS than the ones WITH outlines.

Yes, writing outlines sucks, and it’s not fun or sexy. Nobody sits at his Mac at Starbucks all day telling people he’s working on an “outline.” It doesn’t sound cool.

But, along with STRUCTURE (see
Chapter 23
, “If Your Screenplay Doesn’t Have This Structure …”), the secret to writing screenplays is
the outline
! And once you’ve worked out all of the problems in an outline, writing screenplays really is fun and easy. If you’ve written an outline and examined your story from every angle, all the writing you’re doing is creating dialogue, action, and gags. That’s the fun part.