John Truby's Blog

Truby rates the Oscar Hopefuls – 2020

1. Parasite – Bong Joon Ho and Jin Wan Han (original)

A transcendent crime story that balances the books on the inherently corrupt capitalist/class system. With elements that go back as far as Crime and Punishment and High and Low, this film uses a structural sequence similar to the old proverb, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost…” What is unique here is not the crime or the punishment, but how weird the karmic trip is to get to the punishment. The real crime will be if the Parasite script loses Best Screenplay to Marriage Story, 1917, or Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, which aren’t in the same league as this original work.

2. Jojo Rabbit – Taika Waititi (adapted)

A black comedy/satire about a ten-year-old Nazi youth whose imaginary friend is Hitler. It’s Moonrise Kingdom in Nazi Germany, and that’s what makes it work so well. Some will feel that you can’t make light of the Nazis and especially not of Hitler. But by showing the phenomenon through the eyes of a young believer, Waititi has given us an emotional understanding of how ideology corrupts a mind and how encountering the Other in the flesh can defeat it.

3. Brittany Runs A Marathon – Paul Downs Calaizzo (original)

Don’t be fooled. This isn’t an addiction story. The surprising character work makes all characters both likeable and unlikeable, with witty dialogue and a big emotional payoff. That alone makes the plot more interesting than better known bloated epics that hit the same beat for 3 ½ hours. The sleeper picture of the year.

4. Bombshell – Charles Randolph (original, based on a true story)

This hard-hitting and surprisingly funny exposé tracks Roger Ailes’s sexual harassment of three women at Fox News. If you didn’t already know that Ailes was one of the most despicable and destructive human beings in the history of the United States – which suggests you must have been a captive of Planet Fox News – this gives detailed proof. It also shows the depth of moral corruption of Ailes’s minions, including a number of female enablers like his executive secretary and his wife. The worst part of the film is that it makes Megyn Kelly too heroic, with only a brief attack on her for her years of silence while this bastard continued abusing women. The best part of the film is that it shows that sexual harassment isn’t just something women have to get over, or it only happens to attractive women, though all three of these actresses are. It cripples and destroys women’s lives, and I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t experienced it. Men like Roger Ailes are cowards, liars, bullies, and killers of souls and they should all go to jail for a long, long time.

5. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood – Tom Junod, Noah Harpster, Micah Fitzerman-Blue (adapted)

A film with one of the more bizarre and creative story structures I’ve seen in years packs great cumulative emotional power. It’s really a traveling angel story with Mr. Rogers as the angel. And he’s a lot more complex than you might think.

7. Knives Out – Rian Johnson (original)

Television is built on the detective genre and does it extremely well. So Knives Out had to meet a high standard. It does, flipping the form in a number of ways, some brilliantly, others not. But it’s enough to make this one of the few true detective stories to get to the big screen since LA Confidential. If you love the form, you should see this. If not, it will come across as a lot of convoluted sound and fury, signifying nothing.

7. Little Women – Greta Gerwig (adapted)

An actor’s version of the classic that puts a premium on grand gestures. This film is structured around a series of buzzing household moments and girls hugging. It begins with a confusing framing device and meanders on two separate time lines. About halfway through, it funnels to the love story and catches fire. The ending is quite moving. I could have done without the meta moment, but this is a real achievement for Greta Gerwig as a writer. As an aside, I find it fascinating how much Louisa May Alcott was influenced by Jane Austen. Aren’t we all.

8. The Irishman – Steve Zaillian (adapted)

The Irishman hits the same beats, ad infinitum, as Scorcese’s past gangster stuff, but it doesn’t compare to Goodfellas in depicting the process of people being sucked into crime and slavery. Why? For one thing, Goodfellas is a screenwriting masterpiece. This is not. The moral investigation in The Irishman is not compelling because from the beginning this guy has no moral problem with murder. Therefore, his self-questioning at the end has little emotional resonance. If you kill people for a living, eventually you are going to feel bad when you have to kill someone you care about. The daughter’s moral attack has almost no effect because she is rarely seen throughout the story. Had the writer (and director, since he gets all the credit anyway) spent less time hitting the same beat of Jimmy Hoffa vs. the mob and more on the costs to the hero and his family, the moral accounting could have paid off big time.

9. Once Upon A Time in Hollywood – Quentin Tarantino (original)

A movie combining a fake western and a real western, a fake hero and a real hero. Which sounds intriguing, except that it’s not played out dramatically. With so much time spent driving around town, watching movies, hanging out in backstage Hollywood, the episodic first half is a snore. It gets interesting when Brad goes to the ranch, funneling to the final obligatory Tarantino gore in the showdown. But even the good stuff is not that good. What’s the point? Though I could say the same thing about most Tarantino movies, especially the last few. I guess it’s just fun being back in 1969.

10. Joker – Todd Phillips and Scott Silver (adapted)

An anti-superhero movie that ties in nicely with the Batman origin story. It tracks the creation of a serial killer and makes it emotionally believable. But it’s one scene after another establishing the character’s weakness-need. I get it. The guy is screwed and screwed up. A bit more plot with the character work, please.

11. Two Popes – Anthony McCarten (adapted)

My Dinner with Andre in the Vatican, but without the dinner and without the wit. It’s a long but surprisingly engaging conversation between a conservative pope and the liberal cardinal who may replace him. Two Popes is more watchable than you might think, partly because the conservative realizes the liberal is right. Yes, it’s a fantasy film.

12. Booksmart – Emily Halpern & Sarah Haskins and Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman – (original)

Amusing, but not the treat it’s supposed to be. The set up is absurd: after finding out their deadbeat friends have also gotten into Ivy League schools (apparently it’s surprisingly easy), two nerdy girls decide to make up for their straight arrow existence in one night of fun. Yeah, that should do it. A string of hilarious hijinks ensues. Except that they aren’t hilarious and they’re all the same beat. This was pitched as a fresh take on the high school experience, but with so many elements from Romy and Michelle and Fast Times, I didn’t see it. These girls are trying really hard to be quirky, but their buddy shtick goes on so long they just come across as annoying. It really lost me when the teacher joins the party.

13. Judy – Tom Edge and Peter Quilter (adapted)

Judy Garland at the bottom of her life, taking her last shot. This film is deeply depressing as you watch one of the great talents of the 20th century fall from the accumulation of assaults she suffered since she was a child. Yes, she makes more than her share of mistakes. But she comes across as a hero fighting the unwinnable fight. Judy is hard to get through, but if you hold on you will see the most powerful emotional scene of the year. If you don’t cry in that scene, have them put you out of your misery. Because you’re already dead. I don’t see how anyone beats Renée Zellweger for Best Actress.

14. 1917 – Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns (original)

Spare me from cinematic experiments like this one where we walk though the trenches and across no man’s land in real time in what appears to be a single take (it’s not). There’s a reason the cut is the key technique in film. It gets rid of the boring parts. This is Saving Private Ryan goes to WW I (which was Seven Samurai goes to WW II), but without the plot. Did anyone not know what was going to happen from the original setup? A life and death obstacle course/video game with more than a few unbelievable moments. I know this is supposed to be an immersive experience. But beware of the fallacy of creating a boring experience to show the boredom and stupidity of war. This is the most overrated screenplay of the year.

15. The Rise of Skywalker – J.J. Abrams & Chris Terrio, Derek Connolly & Colin Treverrow (completely unoriginal)

The Rise of Skywalker was never going to be an Oscar contender, but this bloated mess marks the sad end (we hope) of what was once a great series. It’s not as bad as Rian Johnson’s embarrassing The Last Jedi. But that’s only because J.J. Abrams et al. throw everything at you so fast you don’t have time to realize how stupid it is. The worst part about the film isn’t the massive plot holes or the repetition of the same beats we’ve seen a thousand times before. It’s that the character beats and the attempts at real emotion come across as totally phony and unbelievable. No, I take that back. The worst part is that there are more resurrections than a Holy Rollers convention and Luke looks like a bobblehead doll.

16. Marriage Story – Noah Bumbach (original)

Cinema as dental drilling. This is lawyer story, not marriage story. She comes across as the heavy from the beginning when she decides to use a lawyer after they agreed not to. She also seems like a dummy for falling for the bullshit from her smarmy lawyer. A talking heads movie that hits the same beat forever and makes The Irishman seem like a short film. It also leaves the false impression that women end up better off from divorce when the reality is they usually end up totally screwed.

17. Hustlers – Lorene Scafaria, Jessica Pressler (adapted)

A group of strippers drug Wall Street guys and steal their money. That describes the whole movie and the only plot beat in the movie. This film achieves the impossible of making you feel bad for Wall Street guys.

18. Dolemite Is My Name – Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski (original)

Until I saw Uncut Gems, this was the worst movie I saw this year. There’s no story. The hero faces zero obstacles in gaining success. It’s not funny. Yet some reviewers say it’s one of the best movies of the year. Incomprehensible.

19. Uncut Gems – Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie (original)

A self-professed fuck-up makes a colossally stupid move to start the film and then somehow gets dumber. What a waste of two hours of my life.

Success!I’ve just sent you an e-mail with the links to th...

Success!I’ve just sent you an e-mail with the links to the handouts on them.

 

 

You can download the Story Rescue handout below.

 

If you can’t find it (and it’s also not in your spam/junk folder), please e-mail me at trubystudio@truby.com

 

To writing smart,John Truby

 

Story Rescue

Success! You can download the Anatomy of Story handouts ...

Success!

 

 

You can download the Anatomy of Story handouts below.

 

To writing smart,John Truby

 

Anatomy of Story Handouts

Truby rates the Oscar Hopefuls – 2019

1. Green Book: a predictable racism-in-America story gains strength until the two payoff scenes at the end bring tears to your eyes. Proves the truth of the old cliché that it’s the “emotion picture business.” The trick is that this is a modern day “Pride and Prejudice” between a white man and a black man. As in the original book, what kicks the story up to a higher level is that both characters are guilty of pride and prejudice, and both figure it out. While I thoroughly enjoyed this love story, it is not a great movie. When “Green Book” is the best film I saw this year, it is further confirmation, if we needed it, that the art of film lags far behind the writer-controlled art of television. Bring on “Game of Thrones.”

To learn how to write a great script, check out the ANATOMY OF STORY CLASS.

2. Vice: in the same way his “The Big Short” gave us a black comedy look at the destructive absurdity of American capitalism, Adam McKay’s “Vice” gives us an absurdist look at the devastation of American politics. Dick Cheney as mass murderer on a worldwide scale.

3. Roma: an initially boring, neo-realist recounting of a maid and the family she works for becomes a powerful depiction of the strength of a woman and the massive socio-political forces arrayed against her. “No matter what they tell you, women, we always are alone.” Subtle weaving of top and bottom story and tracking and panning shots that will blow you away. Hard to watch but a huge payoff.

4. The Favourite: in the mode of “Dangerous Liaisons”, this film of the political and sexual games of two women vying to control a queen shows us the personal version of mutually assured destruction.

5. Widows: some good plot flips overcome an absurd premise and kick this up to the level of an anti-heist film.

6. If Beale Street Could Talk: a deeply depressing drama about the overwhelming injustice suffered by a black man in America. The beats are familiar because the reality doesn’t change. I can’t even imagine how depressing it would be to live this reality.

7. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: a fun black comedy set in the Old West takes some classic Western elements, like the gunfight, the wagon train, and the stagecoach, and turns them upside down in a series of short stories.

8. Black Panther: a black superhero origin story that flips many of the tiresome Marvel beats, especially an opponent who is more compelling than the hero. Not in the same league as “The Dark Knight”, but revolutionary in its own way.

9. Bohemian Rhapsody: all the clichés of the rise and fall of the rock star until the final redemption at Live Aid and the movie soars.

10. BlacKkKlansman: in spite of being heavy handed, or possibly because of it, this is ultimately a hard-hitting exposé of how the lynch mobs of yesterday are the America First crowd of today.

11. First Man: a bit slow but puts you in the experience of taking that first mind-blowing step on the moon.

12. On the Basis of Sex: agitprop story preaches to the choir. But it’s our choir so it’s ok.

13. A Star Is Born: the fourth version hammering the predictable beats of the rise and fall of a star. The rise has some nice moments between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper but the fall just gets progressively worse. It will be a sad day if this three-time remake gets Best Picture. But after all, this is Hollywood.

14. Mary, Queen of Scots: a confusing mess about a woman who is by turns brilliant and stupid.

15. Can You Ever Forgive Me: a writer forges letters instead of writing a witty book of fake letters. Why was this film made?

16. Crazy Rich Asians: this movie proves that Asians can execute the romantic comedy clichés and be obscenely rich, too. What progress.

17. Destroyer: the imitation of a crime film with one phony scene after another. If you like Nicole Kidman’s acting, do not watch this film.

18. Private Life: a long series of awkward moments, each more unpleasant than the one before. Public embarrassment as art form.

Truby Rates the Oscar Hopefuls – 2018

1. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: master of the transcendent crime story (In Bruges), writer-director Martin McDonough creates another masterpiece, with a brutal and sometimes funny story of a justice battle that can’t be won, played out in one irony bomb after another, with character and plot flips throughout. Frances McDormand is Marge gone vengeful, Sam Rockwell is a nasty Barney Fife, and Woody Harrelson is a police chief who just breaks your heart. This is writing at the very top. Should win best picture but will probably lose to a much inferior Shape of Water.

2. Get Out: a rare and brilliant combination of horror and satire makes the powerful case that no matter how far we think we’ve come, racism is in America’s DNA and we all have the disease.

3. The Big Sick: a romantic comedy-drama that transcends the form, equally adept at comic and serious, with writing that’s strong in both story and scene.

4. The Post: a deeply moving social melodrama overcomes preaching to the choir by focusing on an older woman coming of age through her realization of the value and duty of the free press.

5. Lady Bird: the comedy drama of a teenager wanting to leave her hick town is overly familiar, but sharp, fresh micro scenes (as in Boyhood and The Tree of Life), witty dialogue, and a brutal relationship between mother and daughter make this film emotionally satisfying.

6. Their Finest: this story of a secretary who becomes a screenwriter for propaganda films in World War II Britain is a little gem with a kick. Best of the three Britain-on-the-brink films this year.

7. I, Tonya: a scathing and funny satire about a gifted American athlete destroyed by a horrible mother, a violent husband, and a win-at-all-cost culture.

8. Okja: a simple girl-and-her-beast story becomes a surprisingly moving social fantasy about the brutality of modern capitalism.

9. Darkest Hour: this true story recounting of Churchill during Britain’s near devastation at Dunkirk turns on a hokey, absurd scene, and yet the film packs real emotional power.

10. The Shape of Water: a horror story combined with fairy tale and love that hits the same basic story beats as ET and Splash. The love seems rushed and forced, but the plea to see the humanity in and love for the Other, the Alien, or what some in this country call the “wetback,” gives the ending a powerful punch.

11. Dunkirk: strangely uninvolving with a three-part crosscut structure in time that sucks the life from the sum of its parts.

12. Call Me by Your Name: a touching love story without the predictable Hollywood beats, but so sloooow and loooong. The scene with the dad makes it worth the wait.

13. The Lost City of Z: a boring, episodic story about one of those guys obsessed with the jungle, which for me is like mountain climbers: a definition of insanity.

14. Downsizing: a high concept social fantasy about downsizing humans to save the planet that just fizzles and dies.

15. Hostiles: the Western as funeral dirge in slow motion.

16. The Disaster Artist: this movie isn’t a disaster, but watching an entire film about a mentally-challenged man who thinks he’s a great artist is a painful slog.

17. Blade Runner 2049: glacially slow and almost incomprehensible, this visually stunning science fiction detective-thriller makes a lot of noise to uncover a big pile of “That’s it?”

18. Wonderstruck: two parallel journeys by children where nothing happens.

19. Phantom Thread: creepy, boring, phony, pretentious nonsense. Locks down Paul Thomas Anderson’s position as the most overrated writer-director in America.

20. The Florida Project: episodic story that follows one of the most obnoxious little kids in the history of film and her repulsive mom in a Florida motel. As unpleasant as it sounds.

21. Mother!: this trip into a woman’s madness is mind-numbingly dull and pointless. The worst film I saw this year.

Truby Rates the Oscar Hopefuls – 2017

Oscar night is fast approaching. Here are my thumbnail breakdowns, in order of preference, of this year’s contenders.

1. Arrival: A female myth in which a woman’s ability to see holistically instead of divisively is matched by the story’s structure, and results in a personal and global revolution. This shows the power of story structure in film, and what creating your own unique structure can do for your story.

2. Fences: As talky and uncinematic as you can imagine. But this drama about the moral accounting of a man and his family, a man who has lived his entire life with two strikes against him, has more emotional punch than any movie this year.

3. La La Land: A lovely reinvention of the old musical love stories. But a lack of believable love story beats between the two leads and a hollow, unearned structural twist make the emotional bubbly go flat at the end.

4. Hell or High Water: Using a vortex structure, this crime story, set in the north Texas desert, just keeps getting better. Not great, but it stands out in a weak field.

5. Zootopia: The female bunny in this delightful combination of buddy comedy, detective and myth navigates her way through one of the most richly detailed story worlds in some time, and shows us how living with differences can be, if not a utopia, pretty darn close.

6. Moonlight: An intense drama in which a boy struggles against negative cycles to become a man, and more importantly, become who he really is. Because of the almost hopeless situation and a complete lack of narrative drive, this film is often tough to watch. But hang in there. It’s more than worth it.

7. Hacksaw Ridge: The last third is a gore fest in slow motion. But the heroics of a real medic in World War II are inspiring beyond words.

8. Manchester by the Sea: A family drama whose dominant ghost beat, episodic structure and complete lack of plot make it feel painfully slow. But I loved the anti-Hollywood honesty in the payoff.

9. Sully: A personal myth in which the everyman hero is portrayed as a flying genius and a humble saint. A lot of padding, but they really stick the landing.

10. Hidden Figures: Another personal myth that tracks the contributions three black women made to the space program in the early 1960s. Fun and inspiring if you can overlook gushing sentimentality, social drama clichés and Kevin Costner playing God.

11. 20th Century Women: A family comedy-drama that is one long group therapy session. Apparently, the writer has not heard of plot.

12. Captain Fantastic: A hippie Peter Pan and his family of Lost Boys and Girls try to deal with the modern world by escaping back to a wilderness re-education camp. You have to suffer through a lot of leftist platitudes, preachy dialogue and stupid decisions for them to find out disengagement doesn’t work either.

13. Jackie: An attempt at a personal myth, this one about Jackie Kennedy and the Camelot myth. Unfortunately zero narrative drive means the film is a jumbled talkfest with Jackie angry, sad or just plain looney.

14. Nocturnal Animals: One long self-revelation by a disillusioned artist intercut with a brutal murder in the west Texas desert. As dull, pretentious and unpleasant as it sounds. The most over-rated script in a year with lots of them.

Holiday Inn and White Christmas

To see the story beats in Christmas story, let’s first look the story patterns found in both Holiday Inn and White Christmas.

Both films are about a successful performer in show business who sees that community in a country setting is the better way of life.

In Holiday Inn, the hero is retiring from performing. In White Christmas he’s an extremely successful professional performer and producer who helps out a man in need.

Both films have the moral woman who insists on ethical behavior above professional success. Each woman ends up getting success in career and love, because she is ethical.

The primary story world in these films, the Inn and the Lodge (actually the same set), express a colonial New England image of America. And each place looks especially good in snow at Christmas.

Both films add a strong nationalistic flavor to the Christmas love story. Holiday Inn brings in Americana and patriotism by sequencing the story with national holidays, done over a full year, including a big July 4th song and dance.

In White Christmas, the patriotic part comes from a plot based on WWII GIs helping out their former commanding general.

Now let’s look at how each film works individually:

Holiday Inn

The hero, played by Bing Crosby, originally wants to leave the insanity of show business and city life and go to the opposite extreme and be a farmer. But that’s an abysmal failure as he realizes that being a farmer is not country leisure but brutally hard work.

Then he hits on an idea that will let him live his dream of country relaxation by combining the old and the new. He will go back to being a performer, but not with the non-stop grind of his former life. He’ll perform only at the Inn and only on holidays.

It’s win-win as they say; have your cake and eat it too. And only Bing Crosby, Mr. Relaxation with one of the best voices of the 20th century, could pull it off.

Bing’s former partner, played by Fred Astaire, is a dancer intent on professional success. He’s the main opponent and he drives the story.

Fred begins the pattern of the plot in the opening when he steals Bing’s professional partner and love interest, Lila. The main plot then kicks in when Fred must find the partner he danced with on opening night at Bing’s Inn, because he was too drunk at the time to remember who she is. Of course she’s Bing’s new partner in his holiday shows, Linda, and she’s the woman with whom he’s fallen in love.

In response to Fred’s chase, Bing resorts to a scam to hide Linda from Fred and Fred’s agent.

These plot techniques also have an emotional effect in the love story. “Tricks and scams” for winning a woman’s affections are set in opposition to honest, heartfelt expressions of real love.

The sleazy professional vs. ethical love opposition is also structured into the character opposition of the two women. Lila, the performer who originally dumped Bing, is “Miss Hit and Run” vs. while Bing’s new woman, Linda, is a good and moral person also loyal in love.

12 nights a year Linda “becomes Cinderella of Holiday Inn.” And that is just what this movie is: a modern Christmas fairy tale set in a quaint, wintry New England town.

I love the farce bits where Bing and Linda just escape the bad guys by taking the other stairs.

In a musical, the songs and the song sequence should tell the entire story. This happens in both of these Christmas movies.

For example, in Holiday Inn, the musical number where Fred dances with Bing’s girl on the Valentine’s Day set while clueless Bing is wooing her with his singing is the whole movie in one scene.

Holiday Inn features both “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade”. Each is the height of crooner music and an expression of Irving Berlin’s songwriting genius.

Near the end of the story, Linda, the moral woman, leaves Bing because he resorts to underhanded behavior that deprives her of a chance at professional success. He rationalizes that he did it out of love for her. She rightly points out that he lied to her and deliberately tried to take her decision from her. Loving someone is not an excuse for imprisoning them.

Bing uses a scam at the end to beat Fred and get Linda back, in the same way Fred scammed to get Linda when she was almost engaged to Bing.

The final scene on the movie set of the Inn, in what was already a New England Americana postcard, highlights how artificial this story, and this story form, is. Where earlier in the film we were warmly ensconced in what seemed like a real Connecticut Inn, we now see that we’ve been had by good storytelling and Hollywood “magic.” The director heightens the cynicism and the “bah humbug, it’s all about the money” reality when he tells Linda to just sell the old Hollywood hokum.

Then Linda does the scene, and we can see that being back in the Inn, even though it’s a set, has brought back real feelings of love and loss for her true love, Bing. And we’re thrust right back into the emotion, even though we know she’s playing a part and it’s being filmed. It doesn’t hurt that she’s singing one of the great secular Christmas songs. So we buy right back into the Americana Christmas love story, and who cares if we’re being scammed.

White Christmas

White Christmas pushes the moral element in the Christmas love story even further than Holiday Inn. Again, the plot is based on an opposition of values: using others to get ahead in show business vs. family and strict moral integrity.

Bing is a successful singer and producer who is working too hard to get married and have kids. His partner (Danny Kaye), primarily a dancer, once scammed Bing to get his own shot at show business success. But now he wants Bing, if not to retire, at least to slow down enough to have a family.

The two guys are paired up with performing sisters, one a singer and the other primarily a dancer. Repeating the earlier pattern, the dancing sister scams Bing to give their careers a boost, and the singing sister disapproves of this unethical behavior and apologizes.

The love story turns on the fact that the moral sister suspects Bing of being sleazy to get ahead professionally, but he’s actually being highly moral and generous.

Once she learns what a decent and generous man he is, it’s full speed ahead to the altar and the movie ends with a double “marriage,” with kids, in front of a giant Christmas tree and falling snow.

 

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

I get that Richard Linklater is not interested in writing classic narrative films, loosely defined as a single main character chasing a single goal in spite of intense opposition. As a character in Everybody Wants Some!! says while stoned (and I’m paraphrasing), “You have the program (read story or melody) but it’s all about the tangents within the program.” To put it bluntly, nothing much happens in his movies, but the experience of talking about it supposedly makes up for the lack of surprising action. Not this time.

Linklater’s lack of interest in mainstream story structure and his heavy emphasis on dialogue doesn’t mean Everybody Wants Some!! is without structure. Quite the contrary, the movie is part of a strain of screenwriting commonly known as non-linear storytelling. I normally don’t use the term non-linear because it’s too broad. In my Masterpiece Class, I go through the beats of a number of story structures that fall under the non-linear category, and each gives you very different stories and very different effects.

Everybody Wants Some!! is an example of a “branching” story structure, the same structure used in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (and yes, I’m purposely giving the film’s author credit to the screenwriter, not the director) and George Lucas’s American Graffiti. There are many kinds of branching story structures, but generally these stories crosscut among multiple main characters and small groups within a limited period of time, often one night.

The branching structure has a lot of major effects on the story. First, it changes the focus from the single individual to the mini-society. Second, it shortens the story length and expands its breadth. Third, it changes the theme from the long-term development of an individual to an eternal utopian present. Ironically by telescoping the story down to 12-18 hours, you stop time and experience the moment. All the characters feel a sense of intense community, and then it’s gone. But for one brief shining moment…

The biggest cost to this structure – and all story structures have costs – is that you lose plot. When you track multiple characters within a maximum 120 minutes of a Hollywood feature film, you limit the choreography of attack and counter-attack between each main character and his or her opposition. That in turn limits the number and depth of reveals, or surprises.

In Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater loses even more plot by having so many scenes where many of his main characters are talking in a group. This removes any chance of plot coming from the crosscut between storylines, and crosscut is the key story tool in the branching form.

Implied in Linklater’s disdain for traditional plot is that he is making fun of the Hollywood conventional wisdom that says film is a “visual medium,” and that writers must always use “visual storytelling.” I couldn’t be happier about that. Yes, sometimes “visual storytelling” is a good idea, especially if you are writing in the action or myth genres. But dialogue is extremely valuable in any story, in any medium, in any genre. By removing almost all plot from his films, Linklater isn’t just saying that “visual storytelling” gives you a narrow band of what is possible and what could be great in film. He’s saying it’s all about the dialogue.

If you can write great dialogue, you might be able to pull that off. In his highly-rated “Before” movies (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight), I would argue there are quite a few moments of great dialogue. And those movies are a unique and major achievement in American film.

But great dialogue in film comes with at least two requirements. First, you need characters who we believe could actually come up with this stream of dense, thoughtful talk, right on the spot. Second, you have to have actors who can believably deliver that talk. In the “Before” films, he’s got two highly intelligent characters and two very fine actors who can make this articulate talk seem real.

None of that is present in Everybody Wants Some!!. The story, if you can call it that, covers three days in the life of a team of college baseball players just before classes begin. The movie is essentially three days of frat boy jocks talking incessantly while trying to get laid.

Now this is as annoying as it sounds, and it’s all made worse by the fact that these characters strut around as if they are the wittiest guys since Noel Coward. If the dialogue sounded either real or deep I could probably find at least a modicum of interest. But it’s neither. Linklater was apparently a college baseball player, so you’d think the talk would at least sound authentic. I spent a good part of my high school and college career on sports teams, and this talk doesn’t even come close to sounding real. It’s the cliché of what people who are not athletes think male athletes say when there are no women around.

You may say that this is exaggerated talk intended to get laughs. Loosen up, it’s a comedy. The fact that comedic dialogue is supposed to exaggerate is true up to a point. But when the dialogue is so over-the-top phony it distances you from the situation, it’s not funny. You’re always aware that the writer is trying to get you to laugh.

Part of the phoniness comes from the fact that Linklater is constantly trying to choreograph four or five guys explaining something to the rookie. Somehow each knows when it’s his turn to speak, so it comes off as if they all got together ahead of time to agree on what each was going to say and when each was going to say it. Like a sign is flashing in a corner of the screen: CAUTION – ACTORS PERFORMING DIALOGUE.

The phoniness is made worse by the fact that Linklater also wants these guys to sound deep. I’m certainly not arguing for the dumb jock stereotype here. But having them all spout philosophically, especially while chasing, and getting, one woman after another just makes the whole thing ludicrous.

These actors give it their best shot. But Brando couldn’t have made this stuff seem real, and the fact that these guys are a long way from Brando just makes the whole thing painful.  

I’m fully aware that Richard Linklater is one of the most highly regarded writer-directors in American movies today, and this film is getting a lot of praise as well. If he wants to set his writing apart from others by jettisoning plot, and can still get his films funded, that’s fine with me. But I would argue that Everybody Wants Some!! is a powerful case study in how not to write dialogue, which is the one major writing skill where Linklater has staked his claim to greatness.

 

Novelists’ Corner

By Leslie Lehr

Benjamin writes historical fiction with the ear of a playwright. As a longtime Vogue, Vanity Fair & Esquire reader, I’ve heard of Babe Paley and her crew. As a writer I’ve read Truman Capote. But never have I known the full story of this unusual combination until now.

The tale begins with a large set piece – many characters in the elaborate story world of New York high society. As we settle in to this lofty time of yore, the women become familiar, partly due to her early admission of each character’s ghost. By choosing to humanize these wealthy women, Benjamin draws the reader into their world with the empathy needed to care about these women we might now call trophy wives. Here the trophies are husbands, and these women work very hard to earn them. The varying points of view allow Benjamin to use her incredible research to paint the shadows of this world with emotional nuance.

Once we are comfortable rooting for Babe, her relationship with Truman draws us forward like champagne in an old fashion goblet, but it’s a whirlpool circling faster and faster until it drains into the stem…which leaks and stains the tablecloth, the very fabric of society. Truman’s rise, fall and betrayal is a symbol of the larger loss that this privileged society feels from the forward marching of time.

Or, as Benjamin writes so elegantly about the end of the era of the swans, “the faint ripples in the wake of their water.”

Novelists’ Corner

Another big thumbs up for John Nelson’s detective novel, Joey’s Place. Nelson took the Anatomy of Story Masterclass so many years ago it was just called the
Story Structure Class. He really knows his stuff. The story takes place in Las Vegas, 1970, the turning point when the city’s casinos went from mob control to corporate control. This allows Nelson to make the rare and difficult combination of detective story and historical drama. We not only get a terrific plot, we see the machinations play out within the making of a modern American city.

Impressive stuff, and more proof that the well-written, self-published novel is the way of the future for most writers. (Get it here.)