When a Middle Fails a Beginning and End

Maleficent, a new film starring Angelina Jolie, has a wonderful opening and a wonderful close, but the middle seriously sags. Why that happens speaks to a problem with story structure.

The film opens with Jolie as a mythical creature and a young girl who watches over and protects the Moor, where other creatures like pixies roam. Humans occupy a nearby kingdom. Each mostly keep to their realm until a young man enters the Moor to steal a jewel and is caught by Jolie. They become friends, grow up together, and she falls in love with him.

When the nearby king fails in an attack on the Moor, the young man uses Jolie's love for him to take her wings and get himself appointed king. This sets up a central question, will she get revenge? She curses the new king's daughter so that when she reaches 16, she will fall into a deep sleep that can only be woken from a kiss of true love.

In this middle section, Maleficent watches over the girl, whom she clearly and deeply loves. As the girl gets to know Maleficent, she comes to love her like a mother. But this section of the movie mostly keeps the king scheming to destroy Maleficent off-stage, and there's no real drama around seeing Maleficent care for the girl. Beautifully acted by Jolie, yes; the narrative tension necessary to sustain the movie, no.

Narrative tension is generated when a character has a clear goal accessible to a story's audience, and is blocked from achieving that goal. When an audience has internalized a character achieving that, the narrative tension is transferred to the audience. This is what makes a story compelling.

Maleficent has no narrative tension in its middle section, so the drama of the story sags.

Jolie's wonderful performance can't make up for that.

Jolie as an actress had the same problem in the movie Changeling. Great performance, no narrative tension.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Love in the Movies

When you watch a film like Sleepless in Seattle, you know Ryan and Hanks will find and love each other. Just as easily, in six months they could go through the world's ugliest divorce. There's nothing in the film that really conveys they have intimate feelings for each other. Other Hollywood films might get the main characters into bed but they end up in the same place, two actors pretending to be in love because that's what they are being paid to do.

Then along comes Only Lovers Left Alive, a new film by Jim Jarmusch. To get this out of the way, I love his films, and the way they ask me to think and experience what I see on the screen. What Lovers also conveys through its two main characters is what an intimate relationship between two loving, sexual adults looks like. Watching the film I believed these two characters love each other.

I don't often see this in films, partly I suspect because there aren't many actresses of the caliber of Tilda Swinton. The last time I recall seeing kind of intimacy was in the Jason Bourne films with Matt Damon and Franka Potente. As the two characters became close and fell in love, I could see why he would go through hell to avenge her death.

It does take time to create this kind of relationship, and good acting, and Jarmusch takes the time with two wonderful actors.

As a story, Only Lovers Left Alive is about managing the mundane in an immortal life.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Why Transcendence Fails to Transcend

Big budget Hollywood films that fail to find an audience often offer lessons in storytelling. Transcendence is an example.

In most successful films, a main character embodies a story's promise (what the story is about) and that character experiences narrative tension around the course and outcome of the story. Transcendence violates this by starting with the aftermath of what's happened in the film with a major, but secondary character. This sets up a plot question, what happened to create the world we see in the opening scene? We then meet Johnny Depp in the present. He's a scientist working to create a singularity, an artificial, highly intelligent computer system that has the potential to evolve rapidly. But Depp is soon shot and dies, and his consciousness is uploaded into a computer. This takes 25 minutes. The action is slow and the settings mostly dark.

Main character #3 is kidnapped to force him to help shut down the new version of Depp, and he experiences narrative tension about this, but he's not the main character. These scenes run about twenty five minutes.

Eventually he's reunited with Depp's wife, who builds a massive underground compound at Depp's direction and guidance, using new technologies he's creating. A scientist friend gets into the facility and suggests to her the possibility that the A.I. is using Depp's personality to mislead her, and its real plan is to wipe out humanity and take over the world under the guise of using nano-technology to heal the crippled and end pollution. Now she experiences narrative tension. But she's not quite the main character in the film, either.

This builds to a major confrontation and some significant action (the trailer suggests this is an action film; that's not true at all). With the action, there's more tension generated about the plot about how the battle to shut down this facility/Depp will play out. To save his human wife, a newly minted Depp in a physical body allows himself to be infected with a virus she carries.

Depp and the wife he loves die together; her love has pulled on what was left of Depp to do the right thing. He dies, and since everything about his nano technology has already infected the world, everything in the world (anything connected to the internet or run from the internet) shuts down.

The film ends with main character #3 in a garden created by the human Depp that shields some of the nano technology that could rebuild the world. Will he allow the technology to rebuild the world?

The film develops a number of ideas about technology, but none are ever developed. It's also a muddle about who the main character is in the film. Depp and his A.I. version? The wife? The other scientist? It's not clear. They all have prominent roles in the story.

A film can be developed with multiple main characters. L.A. Confidential is a great example, but it's also a great example of story mechanics. Several main characters, but one story (about illusion, reality, and identity) and one plot (who's going to replace Mickey C, and what happened at the Night Owl Cafe?)

You don't find that kind of clarity in Transcendence. Big budget Hollywood films that fail to find and satisfy an audience often have flawed story mechanics, and not having a clearly defined central character is deadly. A film can be told with an ensemble that acts out the promise, it's just hard to do well and easy to do badly.

Helping an audience to transcend mundane reality is a basic goal of a good film. Having a main character the audience relates to or invests in and begins to share that character's narrative tension is a major part of how a good film helps its audience become absorbed in and share the story's journey to the fulflllment of its promise.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Tips on Writing a Screenplay

by Bill Johnson

I teach an introduction to screenwriting class through Portland Community College. The course covers how to format and structure a screenplay, marketing, contests and outlets of the finished script, including writing a query to an agent, manager, or producer. Students work on the opening scenes of a screenplay and learn how to write a movie script.


One of the most common problems for someone writing a first script is what I call 'watch the movie, write down the details.' By this I mean mentally watching the scenes of a film script and writing down the details of what you see. This leads to a first script that is a collection of details, what characters are doing. 'Mary, blonde and athletic, walked across the room. John, stocky, male, 45, picked up the book.' These kind of flat, descriptive details are tedious to read and fail to convey the dramatic purpose of a scene.

Students will be helped in this class to replace that kind of language with a visual language appropriate for a movie script. A good resource for studying screenplays is Drews Script-o-rama.com, where scripts can be downloaded and read.

Another place that students become blocked is coming up with a sequence of scenes. In this class, I teach a 3/5 card system for organizing ideas. Each student is asked to carry some 3/5 cards around, and each time they have an idea for a scene, or dialogue, or some understanding of a character, they write it on a card, one idea to a card. This frees student from needing to understand what comes next, with just a focus on coming up with ideas. It can be very liberating. I suggest students do this until they have 40-50 cards, then start looking at how those cards can be put into some kind of order as scenes.

One of the five sessions of the class will be spent breaking down a movie like Sleepless in Seattle, which has a very transparent story structure. Many new writers to screenwriting are what I call blind imitators. They think they are doing what successful screenwriters are doing, but in reality they aren't. Conveying that Tom Hanks character in Seattle is overwhelmed by grief is different than writing that his character has brown hair and an average build.

Whether or to obtain copyright for a script is another issue students wrestle with. Technically, anything someone writes, they hold the copyright for. If you are just writing a first script and have little expectation that anything will happen with it, you don't absolulely need to pay for copyright. That said, I've been asked several times to show that I held copyright to a script, and it was a great help to have a signed copyright form when a co-writer claimed sole credit for a script we'd written together. To me, it's just part of the cost of doing business.

If a student wants to show a script to anyone in Hollywood, they do need to register their script with the WGAw (Writers Guild of America West) or WGAe, for Writers Guild of America East. Studios will not read a script that has not been registered with the WGA or submitted by a WGA certified agent.

If, by some stroke of great good fortune a studio agreed to read a student script, the other option is to have an entertainment attorney submit the script.

Final Draft is a program I recommend to students. It's a full-featured program used by production companies and producers in Hollywood.


CeltX is a free program that can be used to format a movie script. Using a formatting program saves a tremendhous amount of time.

The goal of this class is that students be able to leave the class with an ability to break down and understand the movies they are watching outside of class, as a technique to teach themselves how to write a movie script.

Good luck.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, visit my website or check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon Kindle. Or, find me on Google+ and tell me what you think.