You can learn from the bad ones, too.

While down with Covid this month I watched the first episode of The Gilded Age. I’m not recommending it! But it was a great example of an OPENING IMAGE that sets up an important THEME of the series.

Did you spot it?

One of the first things we see on screen in Episode 1 is a wagon full of furniture, central to which is a statue of a woman, enclosed in a cage-like crate. 

• What does that tell you the story is going to be about?

• If you had to sum your own book or script up in one image, what might that be?

The point being, you can learn from the bad ones, too.

I still recommend that you only put good movies, or movies you really love, on the Master List you make as a textbook, or road map, for writing your current book or script.

But let’s face it, we end up watching a lot of bad ones. Because the spouse wants to, because the kids want to, because we’re just looking to space out and not think about everything else we should be doing.

Realistically, any movie that actually made it through the labyrinth of the Hollywood development system and got released is going to have most of its story elements in place, ridiculous though they may be.

That means, once you learn the basic building blocks of film story structure, all the things that I’m always hammering—I mean, gently stressing—in these posts, books, and workshops, especially:

• The Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure

• Act and Sequence Climaxes and Setpieces

• Essential Story Elements of every genre, act by act

• Genre-specific elements

… then you will see them automatically, and every movie you watch becomes a textbook for studying your craft. You never have to feel like you’re wasting your time if you can shift into story analyst mode.

I was recently reminded that when the disaster movie 2012 came out I was using it as an example in some of my STFA workshops. Again, I wasn’t recommending the movie at all, but I couldn’t help it—I still had to admire how clear it was about a coherent, well-spelled out PLAN.

I spend a lot of time on this critical story element. A reader/audience really needs to know what the protagonist’s PLAN is, even if they only get it in a subconscious way. Otherwise they are left floundering, wondering where the hell the story is going.

In the first act of a story, the hero/ine is introduced, and that hero/ine either has or quickly develops a DESIRE. They might have a PROBLEM that needs to be solved, or someone or something they WANT, or a bad situation that they need to get out of, pronto.

Their reaction to that problem or situation is to come up with a PLAN, even if that plan is vague or even completely subconscious. But somewhere in there, there is a plan, and storytelling is usually easier if you have the hero/ine or someone else (maybe you, the author!) state that plan clearly, so the audience or reader knows exactly what the expectation is.

And the protagonist’s plan (and the corresponding plan of the antagonist) actually drives the entire action of the second act. Stating the plan tells us what the CENTRAL ACTION of the story will be. So it’s critical to set up the plan by the end of Act One, or at the very beginning of Act Two at the latest.

In 2012, even in that mind-numbing rollercoaster ride of special effects and sensations, there was a clear central PLAN for an audience to hook into, a roadmap that drove the story. Without that plan, 2012 really would have been nothing but a chaos of special effects.

If you’ve seen this movie (and I know some of you have… ), there is a point in the first act where a truly over-the-top Woody Harrelson, as an Art Bell-like conspiracy pirate radio commentator, rants to protagonist John Cusack about having a map that shows the location of “spaceships” that the government is stocking in order to abandon planet when the prophesied end of the world commences.

Although Cusack doesn’t believe it at the time, this is the PLANT (sort of camouflaged by the fact that Woody is a nutjob), that gives the audience the idea of what the PLAN OF ACTION will be: Cusack will have to go back for the map in the midst of all the cataclysm, then somehow get his family to these “spaceships” in order for all of them to survive the end of the world.

The PLAN is reiterated, in dialogue, when Cusack gets back to his family and tells his ex-wife basically exactly what I just said above: “We’re going to go back to the nutjob with the map so that we can get to those spaceships and get off the planet before it collapses.”

And lo and behold, that’s exactly what happens; it’s not only Cusack’s PLAN, but the CENTRAL ACTION of the story, that can be summed up as a CENTRAL QUESTION:

Will Cusack be able to get his family to the spaceships before the world ends?

Or put another way, the CENTRAL STORY ACTION is John Cusack getting his family to the spaceships before the world ends.

And all this happens around the end of Act I. We need to know what the PLAN is by the end of Act I. Anything later, you’re going to lose your reader or audience.

In 2012, even in the midst of all the buildings crumbling and crevasses opening and fires booming and planes crashing, we understand on some level what is going on:

• What does the protagonist want? (OUTER DESIRE) To save his family.

•  How is he going to do it? (PLAN) By getting the map from the nutjob and following he map to get his family to the secret spaceships (that aren’t really spaceships).

•  What’s standing in his way? (FORCES OF OPPOSITION) About a million natural disasters as the planet caves in; an evil politician who has put a billion dollar price tag on tickets for the spaceship; a Russian Mafioso who keeps being in the same place at the same time as Cusack, and sometimes ends up helping, and sometimes ends up hurting.

Besides training yourself to do this kind of basic observation and analysis, once in a while a movie, or book, comes along that makes you react so violently that you owe it to yourself and your work to do a deep dig.

SPOILER ALERT: If you plan on seeing Nightmare Alley or Red Rocket, you’ll want to skip the rest of this article for now!

I don’t think I have the words yet to fully express how much I disliked Nightmare Alley.

I’ll get this in up front: I’ve been a Del Toro fan since Chronos. Pan’s Labyrinth is a work of particular poignance and brilliance. I was mesmerized by the production design of Alley, the imagery that references so many film classics. The early hunt through the hellish funhouse was staggering. And the following is very much my personal opinion. Many, many people disagree!

But for me, the greatness was all in the first act. Once Toni Colette and David Strathairn were out of the main action I did not care about anyone, and even the live wire evil energy Willem DaFoe was bringing was gone.

Worse than that for me, any moral center evaporated. There was no question that Bradley Cooper as Stanton was ever going to do anything remotely like the right thing, so there was obviously no moral choice that was going to be made. Rooney Mara was so revoltingly weak I started hating the writers and her, too. I thought the doctor was just as badly written—I never thought I could ever wish that Cate Blanchett would just disappear from a movie.

The looming end was so clear I didn’t even stick around to watch it—I didn’t want to have it in my head.

It didn’t help that we watched this movie so soon after Red Rocket. Maybe it’s just that I’m way beyond any tolerance for watching a sociopathic predator as the focus of anyhing. I don’t want to be cinematically forced into that point of view—at least until the one still holding the U.S. hostage is eliminated. But Red Rocket had the virtue of a bunch of disenfranchised and flawed victims and neighbors banding together to overthrow the monster. In Nightmare Alley, clearly no one on screen was going to do it, so I shut him down myself by walking out.

I could go on and on, because there are LAYERS to my revulsion for this movie. And that’s actually the point of this rant.

Anything that I react so strongly to is bound to be a valuable lesson for me as a writer.  I owe it to my own work to figure out the intricacies of my reaction. It’s all a little raw for me, so it might not be right away, but I know I’ll be thinking about it in the weeks to come. At some point I will even watch the end.

So how about you?

-      Can you think of any valuable writing lessons you’ve picked up from a bad movie?

-      Have you ever had a violent reaction to a movie that you can actually use to deepen your own work?

-      Are there any bad movies you’d particularly like to see an analysis of?

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