Your E-Mail is Empty

Just a heads-up. Combo of the flu and flipping the same rewrite four times in nine days killed my correspondence for the week. If we have pressing e-mail issues, you'll be hearing from me this week upcoming. I am not blowing you off. Except for the guy sending me Ted Kord & Barbara Gordon vs. evil Harry Potter slashfic. I am blowing you off.

Eureka and Index-Fu

With all the new readers mucking about, two quick bits of pimpage.
First, they're running a preview of Andrew Cosby's new show Eureka that's hitting SciFi Channel this summer. Not a legacy, not a revamp, not an outer-space show -- something actually different and original. You will dig. See it here.

Second, a rough Index of the longer posts and articles here on the site. Index-Fu for the last year.

BB model sheets 2

BB Model sheets 1

Blue Beetle

I was wondering why the hell my Statcounter was jammed with Something Awful humans. And thank you, Waid. I never knew you said that. I owe you a big damn pint.

So here he is, off of Cully's Newsarama interview (which I assume was cleared with DC or there will be some screaming on the phones tomorrow ...)

For the Ted fans: I will remind everyone that I essentially got this job because Keith was amused at my idea that Ted's death was symptomatic of the DC editorial board suffering from serial child abuse. (and oddly, they have forgiven me. Nice folk) So ... I loved the Ted.
For the none-Ted fans: the book is indeed 99.99% Ted free. Something -- or rather nothing -- for everyone.

On the design: I have seen it in action during fight scenes, and it excels. Heh, Cully even designed a secondary silhouette that's quite spiffy, something that would ghost past most artists, but a.) he's frikkin' amazing and b.) that sort of detail is totally in the Silver Age/neo-Kirby vibe we're going for. One quick note is that as a writer, I was pretty insistent that the face be completely expressive. I bored Cully with ceaseless e-mails about how I wanted Spider-Man, not Iron Man. He complied wonderfully. This is just BB's "badass" face.

But to keep you abuzzin' and curious enough to buy the book, some hints and lies:

... what IS that on his back? And how come he looks different than BB I and BB II? Yet not completely different?

... some people are completely misunderstanding something the Giff said about Booster Gold.

... why, in the name of Ambush Bug's Sainted Ma, are we in El Paso?

Buy a couple issues and enjoy the fun.

Writing: Action Scenes

Recently, our morphine-grogged friend (get well soon) Josh Friedman penned another one of his mini-masterpieces on writing sex scenes. Specifically, how he find writing sex scenes interesting, but he's not all that sussed on writing action scenes. I cite the relevant passage mined from the good stuff about Angeline Jolie and Mickey Rourke's toilet:

The people who are fucking lazy are the writers. Honestly, what does an action scene do to move a story ahead? Nothing. What does it do for a characters' journey? Nothing. What does it do for the movie itself? Take up a chunk of time that now doesn't need to be filled with character and story.

And you know why? Because character and story are hard things to write. And it's easy to write an action scene. I know. I've written hundreds of them. They bore the crap out of me. But at least I know they're gonna take up some pages in my screenplay without me having to figure out the hard stuff. Action sequences are the junk food in any writer's kitchen. That's not to say there aren't good action sequences--ones that literally take your breath away--but those are few and far between. For me, when the tripod in WOTW comes out of the ground and starts blowing shit up with no mercy--my jaw dropped open and my heart actually raced. And I bring that up exactly BECAUSE I was involved in the movie. I knew it was coming and yet it still got me excited.

And shouldn't the point of action sequences be excitement? No one wants to admit that--but violence in film is supposed to be EXCITING. It rarely is. But that doesn't stop people from jamming a movie full of it for no reason other than lazy writing.

And thus boring the shit out of us.

Now, what's interesting here is that in looking back on my entire career, I realized that I have never written a sex scene, while I find writing spiffy action sequences just buckets of goddam fun. We are two sides of the same coin, Josh and I -- soon we will meet in mortal combat, pitting our avataric powers against each other in the skies above Alamagordo, settling once and for all the eternal struggle between light and dark ...

Ahem. No, this is probably because, personally, I find the situation of two people who want to sleep together but don't or can't far more interesting a story dynamic than consumation. This is an odd admission, but for me almost all film sex scenes are boring as dirt. The conflict is (at least for this scene) closed, so we're going to muck around in soft-focus denoument for five minutes? If the the entire thrust of storytelling is conflict, and both characters want the same thing (to have ze sex) ... you get my point. The only interest in a film sex scene is when chemistry trumps structure.

Also, I don't really get my jollies unless the woman is dressed like a pirate. But I don't think that invalidates my point. Not completely, anyway.

Josh points out a great weakness in action scenes as written in American film -- they're pauses in the job of developing story and character. Where this came from, well, I'm not going to lay everything on the feet of directors, but ... suck it, camera boys. This is a distinctly American issue -- action sequence as end-point. Writers have fallen into this habit because that's just how action sequences have come to be defined in American films. I run smack-dab into this all the time:

Executive: But I don't get it. When did we find out about that subplot?
Me: It was the reveal at the center of the action sequence.
Executive: Oh, as soon as I see the action start, I just skip over that writing. Nothing ever happens in an action sequence, and I hate them anyway.
Me: Huh.
Executive: ... pardon me, but you seem to have driven your pen into my left temple.
Me: Sorry.

Don't do it, Spec-Monkeys. Don't treat your action sequences like dirty little obligations.

You don't do an action sequence for the sake of doing a damn action sequence -- you do an action sequence because it's a new or more effective way to advance your character or story.

Would you ever intentionally write a scene in which your protagonist was completely reactive, and the outcome of the scene was a foregone conclusion? Of course not. Screenwriting 101, and your drum-circle of a writing group would pillory you for it. But that is precisely how 99.999999999 % of action sequences are currently written.

If you are not a fan of action sequences -- and I am a fan, a junkie, I can parse them out in ninety different flavors -- then you may approach the basic dynamic of an action scene thusly:

Objective: Character wants to escape bad guys.
Dramatic Question: Will character escape bad guys?

The problem, here, of course is that the character objective is -- as stated -- completely reactive, and the dramatic question is answered "Well, duh, we're only halfway through the movie." All the sturm and drang and "hey that's the exact same car-bounces-just-over-our-head shot as in your previous movie and you know who you are, Sparky" business is just noise. Big, good-for-the-reel but shit-for-the-audience noise. You have to really notch up the visual tricks to overcome this, and to some degree I think we may have topped out. I hold, for example, that the car chase is now dead as a filmic device. Dead.

Tossing aside all the bigger philosophy, here's my attack: make sure every action sequence has a separate goal within the sequence which might legitimately suceed or fail with derailing the movie. Slap a little suspense beat down as your seed, then let your action sequence arrive from the a.) circumstances surrounding the goal or b.) choices of the character.

You can stop reading now, if you just take this away: Don't write action sequences. Write suspense sequences that require action to resolve.

Moving on, and this was beaten into me by the nice Hong Kong humans I've worked with: every action sequence has its own internal three act structure. Objective, complication, resolution. And not only that, but the complication needs to be something which forces a choice on the character, not just a complication in physical circumstances.

It is valid for the complication to be "the odds suddenly become impossible" if a.) the odds are indeed im-goddam-possible in the context of the movie so far and b.) the way the protagonist overcomes these odds is illustrative of the character.

If I may have the arrogance to discuss movies by some very amazing film-makers -- for me, this is one of the reasons The Matrix still holds up, and the sequels are two of the most boring movies I have ever, ever, ever seen.

In The Matrix, the Brothers Wachowski spend the entire movie setting the stakes: do not fight an Agent. When you see an Agent, run. The movie opens with Trinity doing one of the most AMAZINGLY BADASS things we've seen on film, and then she spends five minutes running in a blind panic from the Agents.

So, in the first big action sequence*: the Agents are coming. Oh shit. We need to outwit them, outrun them, but in no way, shape, or form do we stand a chance against them. When Morpheus has to stay and fight, there is no guarantee he's going to get out of this (suspense) and we're hooked because they've spent a lot of time making sure Morpheus is a sympathetic and emotionally involved character.

The second big action sequence: rescuing Morpheus. The choices Neo makes and abilites he shows actually evolve the story and his character. He's learning about the nature of the world. Learning to sacrifice. Going from a watcher to a participant. The action is simply the lens through which we see this growth -- the visually arresting, badass lens. This sequence is particularly noteworthy, as you can actually track its internal three-act progression of Neo quite clearly.

"I may not be the One, but I'm going to help my guy."
"You moved like they do."
"Holy shit, he is the One."

This leads into the third sequence: Neo fights Agent Smith. Now, we're pretty close to the end of the movie here, so we may well assume that "duh, of course Neo's going to win." But the Wachowski's have done something masterful. First, even in the previous sequence, the heroes only beat an Agent when they cheat. Two on one, and they still need Neo to pull a trick he's never exhibited before, changing the rules in mid-fight. This Smith fight is the first mano-a-mano fight. The threat and obstacle are escalated way, WAY over what they've been before. Second, it's a payoff -- Smith is one of the best screen antagonists of the last ten years. We wannnnnt to see the throwdown we've been waiting for, the one the film's been quite consciously avoiding all the way up to this point. Third -- the exterior complication of the squids arriving. Fourth -- this fight is a character moment. This fight is Neo saying: "No. I'm not going to run anymore. I stand and fight and die here." This is the moment in the film where Neo-we leave our cubicles and beat up our bosses, or stand up and fight all the bastards in suits who shove us around and make us feel unimportant. This is "Take this job and shove it" with gun-fu, and that's a powerful gut-check moment. All those factors combined are necessary to overcome the "well, of course he'll survive" instinct.

If you've seen the sequels, all I have to say is "Burly Brawl", and you get my point.

*********************************

Leaving aside the flame wars that analysis will spark in the Comments, I'll pull something possibly illustrative out of something I worked on: Lee Childs' Killing Floor. The rights are tied up in a rights kerfuffle over at Paramount now, so I feel free to discuss it.

There's a moment in the book where the protagonist, ex-military cop Jack Reacher, goes up against two Bad Men sent to kill him. Jack doesn't go mano-a-mano with them. He uses a particularly nice bit of strategy and makes a particularly brutal choice, which illustrate both his training and his personal morality. We learn Jack Reacher is someone With Whom You Do Not Fuck, and look forward to seeing him unleash unpleasantness on the main bad guys.

But still ... it's in the Second Act, and in our heart of hearts we know Jack's going to get out of it. It's a nice action sequence, and it serves to illustrate Jack in a way that the pleasant conversations he's had with people up to this point do not -- cannot -- but still it can only break two ways: Jack lives or Jack dies. And we kind of know Jack's going to live.

So I tried to find a story beat that could break either way. In the book, a Young Woman arrives who is a source of Information. She's killed before our people can talk to her. She's also intimately, emotionally tied to Jack.

So I blended the two together. The Young Woman arrives, she brings the Information, but is snatched by the Bad Men. Jack now has to go up against the Bad Men. But now, on top of the nice bit of action choreography and the character moment, we get suspense stakes. The bit can break multiple ways: Jack can survive, but fail to rescue the Young Woman and the Information. Jack can save the Young Woman and the Information. The Young Woman dies, but Jack gets the Information. Jack survives but the Young Woman and/or the Information are somehow removed from his grasp. None of these results will break the movie, so we as viewers can't dismiss them as possible scene endings.

Which leads us to our last trick: Pipe. So boring. So horrible. But if you make pipe the objective of an action sequence, or a by-product, it all goes down much more smoothly.

All this to reinforce what I mentioned earlier (Christ I am chatty):

Don't write action scenes. Write suspense scenes that require action to resolve.

Good luck, and take from it what you will.

Obama-rama

Although I loves me some General, one cannot argue that Barack Obama isn't a dedicated public servant and a helluva speaker to boot. (The "Don't You Dare Kill Obama" t-shirts are being designed as we speak. And no, I'm not kidding)

I'm in the " '08 is too early for Obama" camp, but there is an interesting essay (via MyDD) arguing otherwise, in particular making the same point I discussed last year -- extended periods of time in the Senate are deadly for a potential presidential candidate. And, of course, as one is always inclined to agree with arguments that somehow validate one's own opinions, I recommend the essay.

Hey, my arrogance and self-awareness are on two different frequencies, and so can co-exist peacefully in my skull.

"She's a Bleak .... Hooooouse. She's mighty mighty ..."

The new BBC production of Bleak House -- at least for me, and take of it what you will -- is excellent. It's worth noting that they're using a filthily addictive half-hour drama format. Is it a series? Is it a mini-series? They don't care -- it's just the best way to tell this particular story. Meanwhile, that discussion would consume three hours of the pitch meeting in an American room and eventually kill the thing.

That half-hour choice really conveys the pacing and joyful pulp feel of Dickens well done. The directing's crisp, the polar opposite of strained costume-period habits. All this on top of an Andrew Davies adaptation script. Davies did House of Cards. The box set for that trilogy is kicking about; the third one drags, but the first one -- oh my. Thank you, Davies, for several of the pleasantly queasiest moments I've ever seen scripted.

And look at those faces, by the way. Can you imagine promoting a show in the US while burdened with, horrors, nothing more than just ... good actors? Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce is really the stand-out. Bonus: Lawson's geek cred is ... beyond impeccable. Just go take a look.

Dead Things on Sticks

I have been remiss -- Denis McGrath's excellent Canada-based screenwriting blog should have been on the sideboard ages ago. When Blogger stops coughing like poor Joe in Bleak House, I'll add him.

Bonus points for Denis writing the best line about Canadian TV in the last, oh, ten years:

The other thing -- and I will not out the person who said it -- but at one point someone got up and described their show as "TV for people who don't watch TV."

Poor CBC. You would think that they'd be focused on their current problem: making TV for people who do watch TV but don't have anything to watch on CBC.

4GM: Perception Wars

Ooohhhh, Waid .... gaze upon this and despair.

This spiffy device currently on sale converts everything ... everything you have that flies, swims or crawls like entertainment into MPEG-4's, then either lets you dump those files onto the media of your choice or plays the goodies back itself like a VCR. (as usual, via BoingBoing)

Its top resolution is 640x480, which won't fly on your HD but will muddle through okay on your analog tube, and certainly look spiffy on your laptop or other portable.

Why do I like this stuff? Well, it's part of my 4th Generation Media Theory -- the profitability of future shows will not only depend on mob-dissemination of the products; there will be a direct relationship between the availability of good-but-not-great copies of those shows -- which can therefore be traded more much easily -- and the said profits. The faster we mainstream port-ability, we mainstream in the perception of trade-ability.

Now, this part of the theory will evolve as the nature of "where I download stuff" and "where I watch stuff" converges. The tactics used in that next phase are beginning to reveal themselves -- hmm, let's actually pick this apart for a moment.

There are two pieces of news which show some promise for the evolution of 4GM. First, the FCC has come out in favor of a la carte cable services. This won't change the mechanics of TV distribution all that much, but again moves audience perception along a very important curve for 4GM -- it changes the perception of TV/entertainment from something shoved down a pipline to them into something they choose. And as soon as they begin choosing the material , if only in the broad "what channels do I choose" sense, the nature of their relationship with the media changes. To be blunt, I think that most people won't bother to parse through the basic cable package channel list, but it's another chink in the wall.

The other bit of news is more a rumor(leading us into the tactics discussion mentioned above): the buzz is Apple will make some heavy-duty announcements about moving into the home entertainment business and expanding its downloadable media deals to include other companies than Disney/Touchstone. CBS and NBC are possibilities. Now CBS and NBC already have deals in place with Comcast and DirectTV, respectively, so why the dabbling with Apple? I've written previously that I believe the delivery-systems will be the ultimate winners in the downloadable entertainment wars, but as I mentioned in the same post, Apple basically used (think total pwnage, please) the ABC deal to bootstrap itself into first place in the Perception Wars. If they wield that early advantage ruthlessly ... It'll be a race now, between Apple locking down the "source of all your media" spot in the consumer's mind, and cable's "we are the source, the box is meaningless" destiny.

The wild card here, of course, is the ubiquitousness of gaming platforms among the 18-25 year-olds. For many young men in particular, the XBox is their media hub. I haven't had a chance to play with the media options on the XBox 360 yet (any Penny Arcade-style geniuses, feel free to enlighten us in the comments) but if it's anything like the Windows Media Center software ... ugh. As we all know, Microsoft loses money on every XBox 360 sold. Most industry folk see this as a calculated risk to recoup money on the insanely profitable game software side. However, in the conversations I've had with some evil Microsoft zerglings, the idea that they're trying to get an entire generation to back into Microsoft as their set-top box has been floated as a fairly convincing rationale. We'll see if Microsoft manages to conquer its love of DRM thoroughly enough to become a useful player in the Perception Wars.