Hey all,

Jar asked me to stop by and discuss Hollywood screenwriting and mythology. I'm a professional screenwriter here in lala land plus I have a degree in anthropology.

Hopefully, I'll be able to answer any questions you have.

The first thing to remember of screenwriting is that the film industry is a business and a collaborative one at that. Movies may be writer by one or two people, but notes come in from a hundred different sources changing and shaping the story in different ways.

This is why people often complain about "the same old sh!t over and over". You'll notice that in virtually every romantic comedy the guy is either an architect (if he's a good guy) or an ad exec (if he's not) and the girl is usually a reporter for a magazine or works at an art gallery (and usually has some dreams of fashion design).

Additionally, more and more, Hollywood is trying to sell to a global market. Films that require little to no understanding of English or American culture succeed well in various markets (car racing, monsters, explosions, etc) while biting commentary on inner city Baltimore youth culture doesn't really play in Tokyo.

Having said all that, there is still art involved. And there's definitely still storytelling.

You would be hard pressed to find a successful screenwriter who doesn't have Aristotle's "poetics" or Campbell's "Hero of a thousand faces" on their shelf. Usually both, plus an encyclopedia of greek mythology, Ovid's metamorphosis, a Bible and a book of ghost stories.

It's always easier to reskin an existing myth than it is to conjure up a new one.

There's a list on the web somewhere comparing and contrasting Star Wars and Wizard of Oz. It's definitely worth a look if anyone thinks we're doing anything "new" EVER in this town.

I'll tell you right now, when it comes to "adventure" movies - stories with a clearly defined hero - you can bet that the writer or director or producer has literally drawn a "Hero's Cycle" on a sheet of paper or dry erase board and plugged in the components.

There are a lot of common elements.

Another great chart to look for is mythological elements in determining heroes. Check out how Oedipus scores compared to Jesus on the over all chart.

The fact is, no matter what the original real story may have been, characters (even if they HAD been real) quickly get ascribed with certain magical attributes to make them into the archetypes for which the story is designed.

How many characters "sacrifice themselves to save mankind"? How many have "special powers"? How many are "betrayed by someone close to them"?

It's the same stories over and over again. They are the stories that people WANT to hear.

If you've got questions, fire them up. I'll be back from time to time to check on the thread.

-Nuggin

I'm not really understanding the correlation to screenwriting and how history turns to legend. Can you expound?

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"Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito"

OK, I have a couple of questions for you to chew on.

1) In your opinion after observing the synthesis, would you say that Life usually imitates Art or does Art imitate Life and the actual events that people experience?

2) Does our culture spend too much time imagining and not enough time creating a better world?

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"If I had simply asked what the people wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Henry Ford

Interesting post, thanks very much.

If you don't mind answering, are there any directors, writers, or even individual movies that, in particular, step outside that Mythos and create Mythos of their own?

(thanks jar for arranging a poster with such a special perspective)

Well, there's "history". What really happened.
There's "accounts". What people who were there think really happened.
Then there's the "story". What people making the movie tell you really happened.

The further you get from the event, the fewer people are around to tell you their accounts.

For example "JFK" was an interesting film. It suggests possible events, many of which probably didn't happen, a few of which absolutely could not have happened.

However, for viewers who have no other source of information about the assassination, the events depicted in the film are the closest they are going to come to the actual events.

If you were to have a conversation with someone who saw "JFK" about the assassination, they would be as likely to cite information gained from the film as they would to cite actual information.

There is a blurring between reality, subjective reality and full on fiction.

And that's a film about an event which happened during the lifetime of MANY people who are still alive today.

Take a look at a film about WWI or about Columbus, or at the Passion of the Christ.

Millions of Christians now hold the "Passion of the Christ" to be an accurate portrayal of events. When they discuss the topic, they aren't "seeing" Bible verses they read. They are "seeing" the brutal footage from the film.

Those images which did not exist 10 years ago are now, in their minds, valid evidence for an event which (theoretically) took place 2000 years ago.

What story tellers SAY happened suddenly becomes what actually happened. And, in the field of film, because the images are seen, that's doubly reinforced in people's minds. They've SEEN the 2nd shooter. They've SEEN Columbus huddled over his maps. They've SEEN the hooks tear Jesus' flesh.

But, these things certainly did not happen the EXACT way they were depicted. These are mythological/fictional representations of things people believe happened.

Well, it's both.

Life does imitate art: The N Hollywood bank robbers ABSOLUTELY imitated the bank robbery in "Heat".
Art does imitate life: There are dozens of "based on a true story" movies every year.

Frequently there are events which, if I told them to you as a purely fictional account, you would never believe them. Like the woman who drowned her kids in her car. Or the kid that was kidnapped for eight years only 10 miles from his house.

At the same time, there are ideas which screenwriters present which are predictive of what will come. Go to any Star Trek technology website and see all the things which have subsequently been built to match the sci-fi ideas present on that show.


As for culture spending it's time -
People are going to waste time. If they aren't wasting it imagining about spaceships and dragons, they are going to waste it watching a team from one city try and score more points than a team from another city, or they are going to waste it in a haze of alcohol.

At least with movies, there is the ability (often not used) to introduce new ideas/moralities to the audience. This generally does not happen in sports.

I assume you mean establishing new genres.

This does happen from time to time, though EXTREMELY rarely.

Often it is attributed to films which don't deserve it.

"The Matrix" introduced nothing new to the either sci-fi or the cyberpunk subset of sci-fi.

Generally, ground breaking work of this kind can only be found in novels where exposition doesn't derail the story and where the author need not answer to executives.

The problem with trying to do something "too new" in Hollywood is that the marketing department (those people who are LARGELY responsible for how well your movie does) wants to know EXACTLY what they are trying to sell.

If you tell them it's a "vampire movie with a twist" - they can market that.
If you tell them it's a whole new paradigm in speculative dramatics - they can't.

More often than not, the "really different" areas of movies are not in the story but in the film making techniques. "300" and "Sin City" use a graphic novel looking cinematography which is extremely distinctive and "new" even though the stories involved are anything but.

It seems to me that technology has played a great and important part in shaping the format of stories down through the ages.

Today, writers need to shape their product for the medium, create a three or eight act script that has a set format within each section, introduce some new conflict or twist, build audience anticipation, reach a climax but leave a question hanging so that the audience comes back after the break for commercial.

Earlier storytellers had similar issues. They needed to break the story down so that a single segment lasted no longer than the audiences ass could endure but that left some crisis in the air that would make the audience keep the storyteller around for another days lodging and meals.

Those constraints seem to hold true whether the story is the Biblical Exodus saga or some ABC family special. When we read Exodus it is startling to see how it is actually a string of independent cliff hanger tales that could just as easily have been the one reel Episodic western shown at the theater.

With the advent of lower cost printing and the availability of books, a new format appeared which was the longer novel. While there were still chapters that held to the requirements of introduction, conflict, resolution, teaser, the format was not so ridged as either the oral/aural tradition or the modern cinematic (and radio) formats.

In particular, do the restraints of writing for TV move the product closer to the ancient story tellers and away from the novelist traditions?

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How pierceful grows the hazy yon! How myrtle petaled thou! For spring hath sprung the cyclotron - How high browse thou, brown cow? -- Churchy LaFemme, 1950

Ah... Gotcha. Thank you for clarifying. Yes, you make an interesting and valid point. Hollywood tends to add a special flair for the dramatic when making movies about events that really happened. It is probably why when in the opening credits it says something to the effect of, "Based on a true story."

It may, at its base, be true. However, that doesn't mean that the director's image is accurately portrayed. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was loosely based around real events. A psychopath really did where people's faces. That doesn't mean, however, that the directors and producers rendition was accurate.

"Millions of Christians now hold the "Passion of the Christ" to be an accurate portrayal of events. When they discuss the topic, they aren't "seeing" Bible verses they read. They are "seeing" the brutal footage from the film."

The Passion's theme was centered around the gospel narrative, as well as Old Testament prophecy reputed to have been fulfilled by Jesus. However, what we read in the caption has quite a lot of dialogue that has no scriptural basis. Actually, most of the dialogue is Mel's vision, which may or may not be even mildly accurate. As for the brutality, there is a scriptural and historical basis for it. Most Christians for thousands of years have understood that Jesus was scourged beyond recognition. This much, I don't think, was a concoction of Mel, but rather a concoction of centuries of tradition.

"What story tellers SAY happened suddenly becomes what actually happened."

True... But if you think about it, all historians are story tellers too. But we don't generally question the validity or historicity of Josephus or Pliny the Younger. People tend to take at face value if they can see no reason why the author would embellish. In fact, what we know about history (or think we know, in some cases) often come from these sources. Will we ever know if they are absolutely accurate? No, we can't know that empirically. But such is the nature of such things since we weren't there to view it. We sometimes have to trust the interpretation of the source, especially if they appear to correspond with some physical evidence.

But that doesn't undercut your premise about Hollywood and how they spice it up for the sake of melodrama.

_________________
"Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito"

Well, if the ancient story teller was employed by the King and had a specific message they had to get out as well as a collection of things they weren't allowed to talk about, then sure.

Unfortunately, TV writing is slave to the advertisers, the producers, the network execs and the parent companies that own them.

If you are writing a show for NBC, you have to answer to a dozen or so execs at the network all of whom are worried about what they will hear from the advertisers and from the execs at GE.

There's not much room for thinking outside the box.

Well the ancient storyteller sometimes worked for the King and often had a particular message they had to get out. They almost always had a collection of things that they could not talk about and had to slant the tale for a given audience. And they had to be sure to NEVER offend the village elder or local warlord.

There is yet another similarity though. Many of the stories found in the Bible are not one single tale but several versions mixed together. Sometimes the stories are kept separate like Joshuah and Judges that both seem to tell the story of a people coming to Canaan but often they are are mixed together as in the Flood tales. What we see is not even what the story teller wrote but what the director changed to fit the producers needs and as interpreted by several different actors and set designers.

So how much difference is there between what the writer writes and the final product?

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How pierceful grows the hazy yon! How myrtle petaled thou! For spring hath sprung the cyclotron - How high browse thou, brown cow? -- Churchy LaFemme, 1950

How about Kevin Smith's Dogma?

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Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
---J.F. Kennedy

I feel it is bad enough that all those cooks have to stick their dirty fingers into the soup that is the modern Hollywood 'blockbuster' such as the Flintstones movie, From Justin to Kelley, anything starring Paris Hilton, or the next appearance of the modern Richard Burbage - Pauly Shore. What is equally as irritating is that purported educational channels such as the History Channel or Discovery franchises.

Instead of documentaries of ghosts, UFOs, and poltergeists punctuated by the equally fanciful Enzyte commercials, can't these guys document something other than Hitler's last dinner place setting?

A few modest proposals:

Galerius / Claudius II / Aurelian - The empire going from the ruler who left his dad as a Persian footstool and 19 pretenders to hard-fought reunification.

Archimedes - so what's all this noise about him 'almost' discovering calculus?

Ashoka - already a great movie, what no one can even crib a documentary?

Or for that matter anything in India's history besides Ghandi and the Taj Mahal.
Or China's besides the guy who started the wall, a bunch of terra cotta statues and ate arsenic in a quest for eternal life? Who was Kangxi?, chopped liver?
Or Latin America after Columbus and Cortez? (overly repeated accounts of the Alamo don't count). Any war that reduced the male population from 250k to 15 k would be today's news, why can't it also be the subject of a documentary?
Or Africa? (other than Nelson Mandela) Hey, I have a 7th that essentially says throughout African history they never learned how to put one brick on top of another. What of Axum? Ghana? Songhai? What was going on down south in Zimbabwe with all those cities? Why preserve the ignorance?
Or Thailand?
Or Korea?
Or Persia?
Or Vietnam?
Or Polynesia?
Or ...............................................................

Or

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The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza