Prequels Not Advised

I've always been biased against prequels. I think they come with too much baggage.

You've got a story about a teenaged orphan who's living with his aunt and uncle. He does on a quest where he meets a sage mentor who knew his father and said his father was killed by the story's antagonist who in turn murders his aunt and uncle. He goes on to rescue the damsel in distress and achieve his quest. Cool.

Two sequels go on to show the quest encounter various reversals before it unfolds into a larger crusade to defeat the focus of evil in the world. One major complication in the story is that the boy's father turns out to be the antagonist who'd been turned evil. Yes, Darth Vader is Luke's father who's gone bad and ultimately repents of evil and receives a modicum of redemption.

It's not a bad story arc over the course of the three installments.

But, you may wonder, how did Darth Vader become evil in the first place? The answer is held in not one, but three prequels. But while consuming millions of dollars worth of CGI animations and all manner of explosions, sword fights, and derring-do, we all know that Anakin is going to break bad.

Seems sort of pointless, doesn't it? You like the girl? She's gonna die. You like the annoying kid, and the petulant teen? He's gonna be wearing the black helmet. Why bother investing in the story along the way when you know where it's going?

Play him off Keyboard Cat.

When I watched the second Indiana Jones movie, I thought it was a SEQUEL to the first. Thus I was on board with the fight scene where the two guys with swords go after him, and he reaches for his gun and it's not there. It was cute, because if this fight scene happens after the first fight scene with one guy with a sword that Indiana Jones dispatches with a gunshot, then his reaction and my reaction makes sense.

However, I recently learned that Temple of Doom was a PREQUEL to Raiders. How is it that Indiana Jones could react as he did when the two sword fighters dressed identically to the one sword fighter confront him? Had I known this was a prequel, it would have utterly taken me out of the story. In fact, this is such a violation of continuity, that I'll never be able to watch these stories again. The whole franchise is dead to me. There's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that's good and reasonable, but there are limits.

So, you've finished a well-received work and you're considering another writing project that's set in the same world. You have thought through the back-story of all your characters and you're proud of how well all that scaffolding holds together. You may have even written a few scenes with the detective's dead partner that were key in developing his character.

You don't publish scaffolding.

Instead of turning that scaffolding into a prequel, turn it into a sequel. Maybe Spade and Archer did something special before they had a case involving a black bird from Malta. Then carry it forward a generation after Sam sends Bridgid up the river. Then put together some young punk with those old clues from a generation before and solve the case in a context where the reader doesn't know for sure who's coming out of the story alive and who isn't. 

You know that Saul Goodman is an amoral lawyer with a dark sense of humor when you meet him in the second season of Breaking Bad. And you know he has a rolodex of guys who know guys who an make any unlawful thing happen. If you start telling his story when he's in law school, you know he's going to end up passing the bar. If he starts with a girlfriend who he thinks is "the one" you know they'll part company. If he has any shred of morality and idealism, you know it'll be gone by the time he meets Walter White. These things are foregone conclusions.

Instead, I'd like to know what becomes of him after he's managing a Cinnabon in Omaha. Or when one of Jesse's burnout buddies gets a job in that Cinnabon. What's past is past. Tell me what happens next.

Ripple Effects

The old Soviet Union was famous for manipulating images. If you made Stalin mad, he'd airbrush you out of the photos from the good old days when you and he were yucking it up. When that happened you'd better have your long underwear packed because you'd be on your way to Siberia or worse.

My favorite fakes show a crowd of faithful smiling and clapping at Dear Leader's speech while overhead a huge squadron of the most awesome bombers fly overhead.

But nobody looks up at them.

People can be very highly regimented true believers in Dear Leader's agenda, but at least one or two will look up at the huge squadron of awesome bombers.

That's one easy way to spot fakes. If you see big-foot or anything extraordinary in the picture, look at what's going on in the bigger picture. The bombers would have an effect on the crowd. If you don't see the effect, there's a problem. It looks contrived.

Going beyond the commies, consider movies these days where actors stand in front of a green screen and behind them some computer wizardry is showing a futuristic cityscape or a surreal historical battlefield. The events in that background have to be carefully crafted to be interesting to the audience, but not so interesting as make the characters in the foreground notice.

Or not. That's what I liked about Mad Magazine's little cartoons in the margins, and what I liked about the Zucker movies like Airplane, Top Secret or Police Squad. Folks in the background would be doing something ridiculous while the actors in the foreground would Not Notice. But the viewer noticed and would find it funny.

But if this isn't intentional, the joke is on you.

Let's suppose your story starts out with a bang. Suppose Godzilla eats Cleveland or something. Your story cannot have your characters sitting in a diner in Toledo or lining up for a ride at Cedar Point as if nothing happened. Big events have ripple effects.

You remember where you were on 9/11 and what you did. I'll bet you didn't get a lot of work done that day. Or if you tried to, you were pretty distracted.

Let's suppose you're an Asian living happily and comfortably in California, you get along fine with your neighbors and your shop has a happy clientele. And then it's 8 December 1941. You may be Korean or Chinese, but you look enough like the guys who bombed Pearl Harbor that your neighbors aren't as friendly anymore. Big events have ripple effects.

I was on the campus of MSU when Jimmy Carter goofed up Iran. A lot of people were unhappy with the hostage situation. Overnight, a lot of foreign students started wearing western attire whereas they had worn traditional clothes the week before.

All it takes is a scowl on the face of a stranger to make a person feel paranoid.

No, you didn't do anything bad to anybody, but your keffiyeh reminds me of something that makes me angry. I'm not mad at you, and I wouldn't dream of taking my anger out on you, but you don't know all that from the look on my face.

That's what made District 9 cool. Aliens show up and though they've got awesome tech, they're poor and disadvantaged. With this huge space ship hovering overhead, society adapts and establishes new institutions to accommodate this new reality. (And guilty white South Afrikan filmmakers get to tell a morality play about apartheid.) Big events have ripple effects.

I hope you realize that good stories need not have the same scope as an alien invasion, monster attack, or a World War. The big event might be a father dying and the ripple effects propagate through his immediate family. And that father might be the fella who pulled a gun on the clerk in 7/11 who shot in self-defense. He can't sleep at night, because big events have ripple effects.

You may have one thing in mind for your story. Boy meets girl in the context of an alien invasion. But every bullet fired defines an expanding cone of ripple effects. And these ripple effects may not be what you had in mind for your story. You needn't throw a lot of prose at these ripple effects, but you can't ignore them.

Otherwise, your story may come off as fake as a photoshopped Soviet May Day parade.

What's Up With Star Trek?

There have been quite a few Star Trek movies. The last two constitute a "reboot" of the franchise.

I haven't thought through what should and should not be done in a franchise "reboot," but I have some specific observations about the two movies of its reboot.

When you consider a fictional universe with as much that's been developed for Star Trek, there's a huge amount of backstory that's known. And where trekkers are fiends for trivia. So, the Star Trek reboot started out by demolishing all of it to build on a fresh foundation. Vulcan got trashed and the story got started before the start-point of the original show. This cleared the decks for the movies to tell all new stories in the reboot movies.

I hated it for many reasons, but trashing a Corvette Stingray in the opening scene was unforgivable.

When the second movie came around, all I knew was that Benedict Cumberbatch was the villain. And that was a huge source of interest to me. He's the actor who plays Sherlock Holmes on the BBC adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Any actor who can play Sherlock would do sociopath well.

At this point, I shall begin to disclose spoilers from the Star Trek movie "Into Darkness."

Tune out if...

...you...

...do...

...not...

...want...

...see...

...spoilers.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays a villain who is delightfully evil. He is marvelously competent at villainy as he starts blowing stuff up and killing Star Fleet personnel wholesale.

One of my hobby-horses is how the writer finds suitable motivation for the villain.

If you watched Star Trek the original show, and the second Star Trek movie, the motivation of Khan Noonien Singh changed with time. In the backstory of "Space Seed," there was this thing called the Eugenics Wars wherein Khan conquered a significant portion of Central Asia, and before he was defeated, he skipped out on a space-ship called the Botany Bay.

In this chapter of his life, Khan's motive was mere power. He was in the warlord business and he was motivated to gain power and rule. This is a very easy motivation to understand and to depict.

Khan's motivation is unchanged in "Space Seed" as he goes about taking over the Enterprise. All he wants is power. That's cool. And when he's dropped off at a nearby planet he's cool with reigning in hell rather than serving in heaven.

When "The Wrath of Khan" comes around, we discover the nice planet he was dropped off at has become hellish, his wife is dead, and he blames Kirk for these unhappy events. Now, Khan is angry with Kirk and he is consumed with wrath. Grumpy villains intent upon revenge is also a good motivation for villainy.

With this in mind, let's consider "Into Darkness." Benedict Cumberbatch is doing all the mayhem but it is not clear to me why. In the movie, we learn that Peter Weller is worried about Klingons so he thaws out Khan and puts him to work dreaming up weapons to fight Klingons with.

However, it's not completely clear to me why Khan decides to start blowing stuff up. Sure, he could be mad at Peter Weller, but why?

After things start getting blowed up and Kirk's friend Captain Pike gets killed, the movie is clearly misnamed. It should have been "The Wrath of Kirk."

And that's what doesn't quite work in the movie. It's a neat concept. Take a movie that everyone knows, "The Wrath of Khan" and then swap all the roles: Instead of Khan being wrathful, it's Kirk. Instead of Spock sacrificing himself and getting a deadly dose of radiation, and dying while Kirk looks on, "Into Darkness" swaps Kirk and Spock. And instead of Spock getting resurrected by some plot device, Kirk gets resurrected.

It's a fun concept, but you can't get the joke unless you're a long-time fanboy.

This works today, but I don't think it'll hold up with time. I've said before that Han Solo shooting first worked because the viewers in the 1970s were familiar with Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" wherein Angel Eyes showed he was a bad man. It quit working when George Lucas became a bigger filmmaker than Sergio Leone and nobody except film buffs and old guys understood how Han shot first because Lee Van Cleef shot first. By that same logic, everyone today interprets "Into Darkness" in the context of "Wrath of Khan," but they won't thirty years hence.

Does Benedict Cumberbatch work as Khan? Oh yeah. Anyone who plays Sherlock must speak arrogant as his native tongue. The best line in the movie is when Khan tells Kirk he's "better." Kirk asks, "at what?" And Khan says, "Everything." He carries off Khan's superhuman competence and aggressiveness marvelously. I really believed this was a genetically-engineered superman.

His only weakness from a story-telling perspective was his motivation. The writers needed to show a link between Khan's murderous campaign at the outset of the movie and some specific betrayal by Peter Weller or injury at his hand.

It would be trivial to do. The Botany Bay set off with 84 souls aboard, only 72 survived--including Khan (in "Space Seed's" time-line). In "Into Darkness's" time-line at least 73 survive--72 inside photon torpedoes plus Khan.

Perhaps Peter Weller got to the Botany Bay with all 84 cryogenic chambers intact, but he killed nine of Khan's crew by experimenting on them before he thawed out Khan. And when Khan finds out, he gets the motivation to launch his campaign of terror.

More likely, Khan's plan was to manipulate Star Fleet into launching the photon torpedoes at Kronos and somehow they don't blow up and somehow he thaws out his buddies and somehow he takes over the Klingon Empire? Yeah, that's what Khan had in mind.

The unclear motivation is what prevents me from saying Khan is the best villain ever.

A Few Bad Men

I've griped about how I think Dr. Who and BBC Sherlock failed when it came time to depict their protagonists' nemesis. In the case of Dr. Who, it is another Time Lord called "The Master," and in Sherlock Holmes's case it is Professor Moriarty. Every Batman needs his Joker and every Superman needs his Lex Luthor.

Thinking through your antagonist is as important as your protagonist and his/her love interest.

My complaint with BBC Sherlock is that Professor Moriarty seemed exactly like The Master who seemed like a nasty schoolboy. True, nasty schoolboys personify evil, but they needn't be taken that seriously. (Unless putting one over your knee and spanking him is not an option.) I guess that's my complaint: If the villain is just like someone you've spanked, s/he falls short of being taken seriously.

Likewise, fellas with monocles and long-haired cats don't work for me. But instead of enumerating what's wrong with other villains, I'd like to say what I think is right with one. I seek a Specification for Antagonist Design.

In one sense, anything that's to your hero's advantage should have a corresponding advantage in your villain. The Doctor is special because he's a Time Lord. Then the Master is a Time Lord, too. Sherlock has mad deductive skillz. So does Moriarty. But they needn't be the same sorts of advantages. They can be formidable, but different. Maybe your villain cannot shoot webs from his wrists, but he has robotic arms coming out of his back instead.

In World War II, the Japanese Zero was a superior aircraft in several key aspects. Nevertheless, the Americans learned how to avoid its strengths and exploit its weaknesses. Avoid a turning fight against a Zero, and if you can't, get outta Dodge. That's how conflicts work in real life and that's how your stories should work.

Stories without conflict suck. And where conflict is concerned, it takes two to Tango. Thus you want to think carefully about your protagonist's dance partner(s). The best villains have several admirable qualities about them. Sure, Gabbar Singh is evil, but he's got a sense of humor and irony and he loves to laugh--before he shoots them. Darth Vader was a sensitive soul easily disturbed by his co-workers' lack of faith--before he choked the life out of them. The Operative was motivated by his faith.

Most Westerners share a cultural heritage of the Greek/Persian conflicts of antiquity. We relate to the independent-minded Greek hoplites who are vastly outnumbered by a host of Persian slaves, but win because they are free men who can seize the initiative on the battlefield while their opponents await the commands of their masters. Thus your story will resonate better with Western audiences if you have a feisty band of Rebels outmaneuvering the giant Empire.

The circumstances needn't be martial. You can write the same conflict between Preston Tucker versus the Big Three automakers with the same asymmetry.

Because companies are generally larger than readers, it's common to make some Corporate Type the villain. Given the amorality of common corporate governance, this is not a stretch. But Big Labor and Big Government work just as well in the role of Persians waging a war of attrition. And since the only good politicians in Washington are Whigs (and long dead) you can show bipartisan villainy. If you want to make Big Religion the villain, choose one that is not in the habit of chopping people's heads off.

That's where I'm at right now. I'm putting together a villain who's motivation is money. He won't blow up the world, because that would destroy all the shops where he spends money. He won't kill everyone, because then there would be no one left to be minions. He doesn't feed his minions to sharks, because it reduces minion-morale. However, his minions are well paid, they have full health insurance with dental, and a generous 401k matching plan.

In other words, he's exactly like me, but with a few billion dollars.

Well, he's different from me in one regard: I'd waste time in the third act gloating about the details of how my nefarious plan works. This villain would just kill the hero and move on to the next item on his Things To Do Today list.

Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. This means you should show the stuff on the good side of the line in the villain's character. Once upon a time, that might have meant being a pious, church-going man, but the Hollywood stupid tax has made religion a telltale of villainy.  In choosing the good you put into a villain, you risk making him more sympathetic than your hero.

So, what good attributes do you think should inhere within the character of a villain?

Han Solo Did Not Shoot First

You may have heard about a certain controversy about the movie Star Wars. In this movie, there is a confrontation between Han Solo and a bounty-hunter named Greedo. The confrontation ends with gunplay and Greedo is shot.

In the original theatrical release one guy shot first, and in subsequent releases on VHS, DVD and Blue Ray the other guy did.

You may think that Han Solo shot first, but he didn't. The theatrical release of Star Wars was in 1977. 11 years before that Sergio Leone directed, "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly." The movie begins with three vignettes wherein Clint Eastwood--the good, Lee Van Cleef--the bad, and Eli Wallach--the ugly in turn introduce themselves to the audience.

Lee Van Cleef, playing the character Angel Eyes, makes an unwelcome visit to someone with information and he sits down at the man's table. While he interrogates the man, who is in fear of his life, he eats the man's supper. Eventually, the man goes for his gun, and Angel Eyes shoots through the table killing the man in cold blood. Moments later, he guns down the man's oldest son. The scene makes it clear that this character is one stone-cold murderer. He's Bad.

Fast forward 11 years and George Lucas is making his own film. He's introducing a character and he wants to demonstrate that this character is not a nice guy. Lucas grabs the shoot-through-the-table without warning gag that he and most of his audience has already seen. In moments, Han Solo is seen through the lens of Lee Van Cleef's portrayal of Angel Eyes.

That was then. The kids nowadays haven't seen any Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns before they see Star Wars. Unlike a generation ago, things are reversed, kids interpret Angel Eyes' gunplay through the lens of Han Solo and Greedo instead.

Lucas now wants a softer, kinder and gentler Han Solo who's more fitting with a lovable rogue, not a stone-cold killer.

And that's why I think Lucas felt he had to change a scene that worked better the first time.