Could It Be a Movie

by Christina Hamlett

  It is difficult to take a true story that encompasses several months and tell it concisely and dramatically within the confines of a two-hour Hollywood movie. If you have more than eight or 10 prominently recurring characters, you will confuse and lose your audience. So I had to pare down the number of people important to my story by, in some cases, combining two and three of them into one person. I had no choice. And I had no choice but to reorder some of the events; what happened over the course of time and several combat patrols is sometimes condensed into one day. If I had been writing a book or a documentary (or if Hollywood were to allow us 300 pages!), I wouldn't have had to do that either. Another problem is that real life doesn't have the tidy character arcs and resolutions required for the screen.

  There were cases where I took some literary license and colored in motivations or exaggerated conflicts. And the character representing me (I changed nearly everyone's name) was given a denouement that I didn't especially earn. In the end I was faithful enough to the story that fellow members of Echo Company would recognize that it was a story about them. I was as historically accurate as this art form permits.

  Story telling is required by human beings; it's part of our gene makeup. We use stories to sort out our values and to encourage ourselves to prevail in trial and hardship. And to even assuage ourselves to our own ultimate demise. So it's not surprising that many of the best stories are about war. We can all agree that war is bad, but it gives us some of our greatest examples of honor, courage and sacrifice -- and even redemption. I've never met people who better exemplified these attributes than this group of Marines, and so in honor of them I wrote Semper Fi.

  Film Title: Tiananmen

  Screenwriter: Bill Flannigan

  Circa: 1989

  Premise: A cynical photojournalist working in Asia reluctantly agrees to help an old girlfriend search for her missing Chinese lover, reportedly killed during the brutal government crackdown on demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. Along the way, the two former lovers must come to terms with their conflicting feelings for each other, and the truth about themselves and the people they’ve chosen to love.

  My initial inspiration for this screenplay was a documentary that I saw. Also, I was a Chinese Studies major in school, and was living in Asia during the events leading up to the Tiananmen massacre. Since I speak Chinese and have many Chinese friends, the topic was very close to me and really needed to be told.

  Finding a way to bring Westerners into the story in an organic way was the biggest obstacle. I knew that trying to tell the story with just Chinese characters would be a difficult sell, so I had to have at least one — and it turns out two — of my lead roles be either American or European. Using them as vehicles helped to tell the story to readers who might not be as familiar with the events surrounding Tiananmen. Also, I didn't want to preach politics and history, so I needed to come up with a love story — a love triangle actually — that would carry the narrative, while not getting bogged down in the details of the story.

  The 15-year anniversary of this event will be Spring of 2004. I think the thing that will resonate with modern audiences is the realization that liberty and freedom are still rare things in the world today, and that people quietly do heroic things every day, unnoticed and away from the spotlight. I wanted to show through my protagonist, Henri, that a single person can make a difference but only by getting personally committed and involved. The first line of the script spells this out when a character tells Henri that someday he'll have to put down his camera and get dirty. I think audiences will respond to this notion that change only occurs when we stop observing and start getting involved.

  IDEA-STARTERS

  Identify what you consider to be the 10 most significant events or people in history.

  Why do you consider each of these to be important?

  What specific issues regarding these past events or famous people would resonate with contemporary movie-goers?

  How many of these events or biographies have been made into commercially successful films?

  How closely did the screenwriter follow the historical facts in presenting the story in this medium? If liberties were taken, was it to accommodate the resources of the production or the sensibilities/values of the audience who would be seeing it?

  What elements do you think made each of these films a success? (i.e., was it the theme, the cast, the special effects.)

  Did the era in which these films were made have any bearing on their popularity upon release?

  If these films were remade today, how would the increased sensitivity to political correctness impact the script content?

  For those films which were not successful, what accounted for the failure of them to attract and sustain a box-office following?

  Has any of the events or biographies on your list not been made into a film?

  Based on what you have learned from this chapter, identify the reasons why such films have not been made.

  If it were your assignment to develop one of these events or personages into a feature length motion picture, how would you decide which elements of the event or lifetime were the most important for inclusion?

  SECTION II:

  WRITING IT DOWN

  CHAPTER 6: TIMING IS EVERYTHING

  The good news is that the editor loved the plot. The bad news is that the story was set in Hawaii.

  “What’s wrong with Hawaii?” you may ask.

  The editor was quick to explain that they had just bought another romance novel only two weeks prior that was set on Oahu and would it be possible to please change mine to somewhere else.

  Iowa, for instance.

  Ordinarily, I would have said yes. I am, after all, the same person who whimsically did a name/city/limb search-and-replace to copy a steamy chapter from one of my novels into another and to this day no one has even noticed. What was problematic in the Hawaii book, however, was the final confrontation scene. Lovely as Iowa may be in landscape, I was pretty certain it didn’t have anything comparable to the craggy cliffs of the Pali from which Kamehameha chased his adversaries to their deaths.

  I decided to hold out for a different publisher. The second one, however, felt that my heroine was too smart and could I please dumb her up a bit to make her more vulnerable.

  I didn’t think so.

  The third one liked her just the way she was. They also really liked Hawaii. What made them nervous, though, was the fact that in the first scene I killed off the heroine’s magician husband in a tank of water. “Moonlighting did an episode last week with a magician in a tank of water,” they said. “If you could just kill him off in some other way…”

  Such is The Author’s Curse: no matter how good the story is, sometimes the sale of it is all a matter of timing.

  YESTERDAY’S NEWS

  Just like fashion, movie trends are transitory. Whatever is in the theaters this month —whether it’s aliens, talking babies, or historical epics about sailors or samurais — is going to be passé by the time you script a line, much less get out and pitch it to a producer.

  Even if your screenplay is already written and on a bargaining table somewhere, all eyes will be on the box office if a similarly themed film beats you to the punch. This irony even extends to adaptations wherein the source material actually predates your competitor’s release.

  What can you do about it?

  Sadly, nothing much.

  While certain genres can accommodate structural and thematic tweaking, those that require the protagonist to work in a specific occupation, live in a specific era, and carry out a specific mission are not as easily reshaped. These are the scripts that get shelved in temporary deference to those whose market value holds more immediate promise for you. The operative word here is “temporary.” In keeping with the earlier analogy about fashion, if you hold on to anything long enough, it’s only a matter of time that it will come back and look interesting all over again.

  As if your fellow writers weren’
t enough to cause you angst about timing issues, of course, you’ve also got public opinion, the media, and world events at large to contend with. When Independence Day opened, for instance, I recall my nephew’s enthusiastic praise of what a “cool” special effect it was to see the White House blown to smithereens.

  In the aftermath of September 11th, however, scripts and images depicting hellacious acts of violence, destruction, and terrorism took on a sobering new meaning to filmmakers. Several movies, in fact, were put on hold or significantly edited so as not to upset, offend, or further traumatize a populace who had witnessed the horrors of the real thing.

  POPCORN POLITICS

  Gauging the mood of the public is never an easy thing, especially when it comes to trying to predict what kind of movies they are likely to flock to. Every four years, though, our national pulse is taken at the polls when we elect a President. As the media becomes more of an influence in our lives, the political process becomes more and more one of carefully crafted messaging, focus groups, and opinion surveys. Long gone are the days of the stump speech and of the impassioned speeches at county fairs that lasted well into the evening. Oratory has given way to sound bites, and these sound bites and well-crafted images can give you a keen insight into the mood of your potential audience as well.

  The Cold War that lasted through much of the post-World War II era is an example of how politics insinuates itself into the psyche of the movie going public. The decade of the fifties began with the dark The Third Man, a tale of intrigue set in post-war Vienna already embracing themes of paranoia and images of a dark, secretive world behind the Iron Curtain that would be retold countless times over the next two decades. Is it any wonder that this would be the decade that would see some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable movies such as Rear Window and North By Northwest?

  McCarthyism took its toll on the industry and upon writers during that decade, but with the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960, a new sense of optimism swept the country, even if the Cold War would grow to its most menacing stage during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The paranoia of the fifties gave way to a more robust war against Communism in the sixties, just as the old leaders of WWII gave way to a younger group of veterans as embodied by JFK. Dashing secret agents on both the screen and on television visited exotic locales throughout the world, complete with equally exotic toys and very exotic women.

  Is it coincidence that one of the classic Cold War movies, The Manchurian Candidate aired the same year (1962) as a young Scotsman, Sean Connery, first portrayed Ian Fleming’s unforgettable James Bond in Dr. No? Forty years later, the almost comic book setting of the most famous secret agent still reminds us all that a martini must be shaken, not stirred.

  With the assassination of President Kennedy and the growing quagmire in Vietnam, the mood of the country became restless. The foundations of the past were cracking and the country as a whole began to shake lose its ties to the past. The civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and a whole lot of other movements involving sex, drugs, and rock and roll now fed the public’s psyche.

  As we moved to the seventies, movies became more expressive of this new sense in the country. The Green Berets made in 1968, is the only film of note to ever suggest that the Vietnam War was a noble cause. By 1970, M*A*S*H was more reflective of the nation’s view of war (even though that movie was set in Korea) and through the next several decades treatment of Vietnam remains more cathartic than historic.

  The anti-establishment sentiment of the early late 1960s and early 1970s manifested itself in far more different ways than the treatment of war. This period can be summed up well when considering that in 1967 John Wayne and Robert Mitchum stared in El Dorado, Robert Redford and Paul Newman starred in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, and one year later, Wayne again starred in Rio Lobo, a film that coincidentally had Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher in the cast as a young Confederate soldier returning home from war to face problems in Texas.

  Richard Nixon was President during most of this period, from 1968 until his resignation in 1974. Films became increasingly restless, as did the electorate, during this period of time. Easy Rider (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), and A Clockwork Orange (1971) pushed the envelope on a variety of themes. Traditional genres of war and police movies, when seen through the eyes of these Americans manifested themselves in such classics as Patton (1970) and Dirty Harry (1971). While Nixon was to enjoy a landslide victory in 1972, his days were numbered.

  By the time Jimmy Carter became President in 1976, the country was ready for a respite from the challenges of the past decade. The first of the cathartic movies about Vietnam, The Deer Hunter (1978), Coming Home (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were produced. For sheer escapism, Star Wars was the perfect elixir for an aging population of rebels with a new cause – making money. While Carter may have been the right person to write the final chapter on the Vietnam experience and the Watergate scandal, the American people did not feel he was the right man to stand up to a group of Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. They left that job to Ronald Reagan.

  When looking at the relationship between movies, moods, and politics, be careful to recognize that it is not the issues of the day that drive the creative force, it is the sentiment of the public as manifested by the response to these issues that you are trying to tap into. Great events in world history occurred during the eight years Ronald Reagan was President, but it was his effect on the American psyche that produced films such as Terms of Endearment (1983), Moonstruck (1987), and Rainman (1988).

  This general sense of satisfaction, certainly peppered by cautionary tails such as Wall Street (1987) was transformed into a general malaise by 1992 and once again, not unlike thirty-two years prior, the public wanted new blood in Washington. William Jefferson Clinton was the person the people chose for that role.

  Would movies such as Dave (1993) and The American President (1995) been made had George H.W. Bush won the 1992 Presidential election? No one knows, but both these films tapped into a sense of detachment from leaders, and disgust with politics as usual, that remains with us to this day.

  When Californians decided to elect another actor to run their state in 2003, it was not because of policy or vision, it was because the mood of the people compelled change. While writers today enjoy far more freedoms than did their counterparts 40 years ago, unless you have the resources to film and distribute your movie yourself, that freedom does not extend to making a film that the public is not ready or is unwilling to see.

  Put your finger on the pulse. Read letters to the editor in local newspapers, strike up a conversation with the grocery store clerk about something more than how you want your food bagged. Gauge the response of your friends and co-workers to stories that are uplifting, tragic, or uncomfortable. Watch the messaging in political campaigns closely, as Democrats and Republicans alike spend millions of dollars testing themes and ideas before they ever hit the airwaves.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  If you’re interested in studying additional correlations between what’s unfolding in real life and how that translates to what develops in “reel” life, take a look at Patrick Robertson’s “Film Facts” (Publisher: Billboard Books, 2001). It’s not only an entertaining compendium of anything and everything you have ever wanted to know about the movie industry, but includes a thematic timeline of how comedies, dramas, Westerns, and every other genre have been represented in terms of percentage between the years 1914 and the 1990s. If you’re a whiz with statistical analysis and forecasting, you just might be able to predict what the next top genre will be!

  CHAPTER 7: STORYTELLING STRUCTURE

  From as far back as grade school, it has been drilled into us that every story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This three-act structure carries over into the majority of screenwriting texts on today’s market where it is re-labeled as Conflict, Complication, and Resolution.