The Storytelling Thread

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This is a thread to talk about a storytelling

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The most difficult challenge in selling a story is getting people hooked into it. In live performances, there is plenty of opportunity to hone a story or even change certain things on the spot based on the audience reaction at the time. However, with books, movies and television shows, it has to hook them with what’s been already recorded and packaged. There have been plenty of movies, shows, comics and so on where I could appreciate how well they were produced, but I had no interest in the content of the story.

Obviously, when creating the material, the writer will need to get feedback on its various early stages. Some approaches are to get it out there as wide as possible and others only rely on a few selected sources for early feedback. With internet forums, there is a lot of opportunity to get feedback on portions or all of a story, but the audience has to be targeted. If you’re writing a hypermasculine sword and sorcery story, then taking it to fans of Harry Potter or Twilight – even though it’s “fantasy” – probably won’t be productive.

Like with superheroes. People think superheroes and comic book characters are all the rage, BUT really that isn’t the case. A specific set of Marvel and DC heroes are all the rage in superhero fiction. There isn’t a big market outside of those even in comics – and that is even more true today than it was a few years ago when we had the original Image and later all the spinoff companies from that. So, if you’re focused on superhero stories, then your audience is going to be limited unless you are looking to eventually work for Marvel or DC. There are plenty of good alternative superhero comics being published, but they’re only getting seen by very few readers. As far as alternative superheroes in movies, there are hardly any of them that are new characters or written recently and originally for film. Movies like Hit Girl and Hancock or shows like The Umbrella Academy are unusual, and the circumstances behind their path to screen are also unique.

However, a lot of writers interested in these narrow genres are of course surrounded by fellow enthusiasts, so most of that material gets written for that audience even if it has a lot more potential beyond it. I’ve read plenty of superhero stories that could have gotten a much broader audience if they had taken out or changed the capes, masks, superpowers and gadgets. Like the movie SAW or SEVEN could have been stories for a BATMAN comic book. Take out BATMAN, and they go massive world-wide.

Milking a storyline…

Rocky was a good story about the triumph of an underdog boxer and look at it now.

Star Trek

Same with Star Wars which is initially about overthrowing an empire, themes of good and evil, Force magic, etc. but it should have ended not milked dry.

Game of Thrones is now getting prequels.

Whatever happened to a captivating story being left at that with the audience hanging on for more?

Comics have also fell into traps with these retcons extending themes and storylines. Xavier was supposed to have had a telepathic battle with another mutant and should have been left at that. Then it was changed to the Shadow King and so on. I could go on with more stories of everyone coming from the future, resurrections, and bad revivals of characters that were better off left behind. But they are milked.

Some of that had to do with policies of the companies. When Claremont & Byrne and Wolfman & Perez (and many others of that period) revamped the X-men and Teen Titans and started introducing a lot of great new characters, there really was no consideration of the intellectual property rights until these new characters suddenly started generating million (and now billions) of dollars in ventures outside comics. Also, the emergence of Image and independent comics markets started to change the way new characters were handled by Marvel and DC as well as the willingness of writers and artists to participate in the creation of characters, worlds and new story directions that are essentially work-for-hire when they could do that with something they own. Like Venom which had what seems like ten different writers and artists involved in his development. We’re unlikely to see something new as popular as Venom or Deathstroke at DC or Marvel very often as neither the publishers nor the creators have a lot of incentive to risk the copyright questions involved. Which is unfortunately not good for the comics in general since DC and Marvel are really the driving force behind the industry. The better they do, the better comics on the whole will do.

The problem with “milking it” often boils down to “missing the point.” It’s not necessarily always the case, but with Star Trek, it doesn’t work as well when it gets away from using the science fiction as a platform for exploring social questions. Even some of their poorest episodes have become classics because they have one good moment that explodes into social consciousness. Like “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” about the two aliens who are half black and half white but locked in mortal combat because their sides don’t correspond. As an episode, it’s pretty repetitive and doesn’t go anywhere, but it has the great moment where Kirk says “Why are you fighting? You are exactly the same.” And Frank Gorshin responds, “Are you blind? I’m black on the right side and he’s black on the left!”

However, when DC comics constantly revives some ancient Kryptonian or decides to explore what Alfred Pennyworth or Thomas Wayne did when they were young men — or comes up with ideas like the speed force to explain The Flash and his kind of speedster and then use that to do something like FlashPoint OR we end up with a dozen different versions of characters from alternate universes running around left over from five different reboots of the continuity, it often alienates the story and the reader from what got people and gets people into the stories in the first place.

Yet, a lot of that is driven by readers as well who aren’t really that interested in letting the stories move on.

Exploiting popular characters to make more cash didn’t originate with Marvel or DC. Dickens was very good at it.

[DavidM]

It’s been done forever. Even the Old Testament had a sequel, which seriously misjudged its core audience, and in going for the popular audience share removed everything that made the original such a cult favourite.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by DavidM.

The first recorded story is Gilgamesh and it’s not a “one and done” tale.
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Someone told a story, then added to it, then more people added to it and the version that survives to modern times is described as “epic” for a reason.
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It’s at least 4,500 years old.
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“Sequel” may not have been in the Sumerian dictionary, but they knew a hit when they heard one, and they wanted to hear more of the same character.

Ha ha…

Sequels

Some sequels are just retreads of the original. Eddie Murphy did great with 48 hours and tried to recreate that in the sequel Another 48 hours but it looked like a carbon copy and fell flat. Same with the Beverly Hills Cop sequel, but I digress…

Imho, a sequel should break new ground and advance the story, like Empire Strikes Back, not be a light version like The Force Awakens.

Perhaps the best was Godfather 2 which had a sequel and snuck in a prequel at the same time.

As for the future, I don’t know what to make of the Matrix sequel and the Terminator stuff, have to see…

I guess I am set in my ways as I am a fan of the Claremont/Byrne run on the X-men but I have to embrace new storytelling like Hickman at present.

As I said before storytelling has to be progressive and even experimental or else it will be stale retread stories.

Using analogues for Satirical and parody storytelling

Well, I finally saw the Boys and believe me when I tell you
this posting is NOT a review of it as everyone has an opinion
and it had its own thread…

There have been many writers who have used analogues of the
main DC and Marvel characters/archetypes to tell a story or
give a social commentary that they can’t do with the actual
characters because the powers that be in the big two won’t
allow it. Watchmen, Supreme, the original Squadron Supreme
come to mind. Imho, it is a good idea to use the analogues
as the writer has more leeway and can do more things outside
the box as it were.

Thing is as I was watching the Boys, I felt as if I seen it
before it’s cynicism and satire.

I leave more material here and invite more posting on satirical
storytelling and parody. If done right it makes its point.
Next will be Jupiter’s Legacy sometime next year.

OK for now, that’s all carry on.

Scorcese and Copolla’s comments about the Marvel movies are their opinions and underscore the different types of genre.
There was an actor whose name escapes me at present who said of the Nolan Batman movies that playing Batman would be nice to
him but he added that most actors go to drama and acting schools to portray real people in everyday life. I see his point.

Basically it is fantasy storytelling and a more realistic storytelling. Both have their place.
Perhaps one side is jealous of the attention the other is getting and feels crowded out…

You don’t need to go to drama school to learn how to portray real people in everyday life. I’m portraying one right now, without any acting training at all.
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I think it’s worth admiring an actor who can portray an outlandish person in a fantasy situation and still convince his audience that it is real.

DavidM wrote:

You don’t need to go to drama school to learn how to portray real people in everyday life. I’m portraying one right now, without any acting training at all.

I didn’t want to mention this, but your accent’s a little off.

Dave wrote:

DavidM wrote:

You don’t need to go to drama school to learn how to portray real people in everyday life. I’m portraying one right now, without any acting training at all.

I didn’t want to mention this, but your accent’s a little off.

And his eyes are the wrong color.

DavidM wrote:

You don’t need to go to drama school to learn how to portray real people in everyday life. I’m portraying one right now, without any acting training at all.

Try doing it on stage or in a movie in a compelling way.

I think it’s worth admiring an actor who can portray an outlandish person in a fantasy situation and still convince his audience that it is real.

Both require great skill, and are to be admired. But I do have to admit that the best performances I have seen, in my opinion, were in the context of what you might call mundane settings.

Ok haha on posting about playing real people. How about storytelling on nonfantasy, or storytelling with a satirical take or a parody?

If you write non-fantasy fiction, you’re still writing about invented people, people who don’t actually exist. You might say you’re writing about the “real world”, but clearly it’s not our real world, because our world doesn’t have these people in it. So you must be writing about a parallel world. So, basically still science fiction

So you’re saying that ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER is fiction?!

Al-x wrote:

Ok haha on posting about playing real people. How about storytelling on nonfantasy, or storytelling with a satirical take or a parody?

I think something similar applies. I mean, there is great craft and even art in telling a fantasy or science fiction story, but I admire the kind of writing even more that digs into the mundane lives of people and manages to surgically extract an essence that speaks to us. I couldn’t tell you whether I think Death of a Salesman or Lord of the Rings is the better work, they are such different animals. And both are needed, and have their place in literature, art and movies.

Almost everything you read or watch – even documentaries or “non-fiction” – has to be unreal in many ways.
There are two major narrative points of view that most entertainment takes and it is either third person or first person. Third person dominates and usually is considered an “omniscient” perspective. There is nothing hidden. On top of this, most novels – irrespective of perspective – are written past tense as if recounting events that have already taken place. Screenplays are usually present tense, but they don’t have much wider readership – and you could say that the action most films take place in present tense, but that is not always entirely true – the film Rashomon spends a lot of its time on the accounts of characters about a crime that has taken place in the past, so are the scenes of those accounts in the present or in the past? It’s especially hard in that case as the accounts may be false so the present question of “what happened?” is always a presence while we watch the “past” events. Also, since you are watching something that has been “recorded,” does every viewer have the innate sense that this “is” happening or that it is something that has already happened? You know the narrative is set even though you don’t know what happened next.

However, the basic unreal nature of entertainment – even realistic entertainment – is always present. First, naturally, you are watching events usually from a detached point of view. Often, it is the psychological distance of the viewer or reader from the action that determines if a scene or moment is comic or tragic or light or dark. HOGAN’S HEROES versus M.A.S.H versus PLATOON. NETWORK versus NEWSRADIO versus SPOTLIGHT. Anything can be comic when you’re set (by the narrator) far from it, and the same thing can be tragic if you’re placed right in the middle of it. Even in first person, except in maybe video games, the entertainment experience is not comparable to real experience. There are very few first person films, but even in movies where the focus is entirely on following around a single protagonist – the closest equivalent to the first person novel or short story – you retain a point of view that gives you more information than the characters have in the action. Also, naturally, in a movie like CHINATOWN, for example, when Jake Gittes follows a suspect or visits a client, you aren’t with him while he’s in traffic on the way to Evelyn Mulray’s house or renting the boat in Echo Park to follow her husband and his “mistress.” You’re only there for the significant parts of the story.

And that is what is truly unreal about storytelling whether it’s in 1930’s Los Angeles or Middle-Earth in the Middle Ages. The central idea that there is something important going on. That some moments have meaning and matter. It’s not that a story is somehow a real event and the narrator has selected the scenes from this event to deliver it. Even when telling stories about real events, the scenes are crafted to keep focus on what’s important to the story. Revealing the murderer, finding and keeping “The Ark” (or whatever), destroying the Death Star.

Often, today, whatever is important to the story is also important to the entire world of the story. That bends reality even further as it means that the hero must now suddenly become the “Most Important Person In The World” not just the “most important person in the story.”

Related to this is the more relevant appeal of narrative itself. Sit down and I’m going to tell you a story. The sense of being catered to is enjoyable, and crucial to the health of storytelling itself. Today, there is something of an expectation more on the side of artists and especially many art education programs, that the point is to express something “important” either about the world, society or even the artist’s personal experience. However, except possibly in the most simplified propaganda pieces, there is no way to determine how people will take to your work. HIGH NOON is a terrific example. It was written in the heyday of the congressional committee hearings on the infiltration of communists and soviet collaborators into the entertainment industry (a very interesting real life story in itself that is far more complicated than the simplified mostly pro-leftist narratives you’d see in movies like TRUMBO or THE FRONT). One of the blacklisted writers, Carl Foreman, wrote HIGH NOON with the intent to be an allegory for the threat of blacklisting (like Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE). Nevertheless, it was a hit mostly with the conservative Americans who supported McCarthy and were scared of all the allegations (with considerable evidence, though, at the time) of Soviet influence on not only film, but the US government itself.

The context of the movie certainly leads to either interpretation. A lone man being abandoned by his community as dangerous thugs come to kill him – could mean the (mostly former) communist writers and actors facing forced testimony at the hearings. But that lone man is a Sheriff, an elected official, so could it mean someone like Joe McCarthy who faced an onslaught of communist propaganda alone while everyone turned their backs on him too afraid of having their own lives attacked in the media. The director Fred Zinneman, a Jewish Austrian, took the approach that it was really more about the failure of Western Nations to take action against Fascism before it was too late. Today, none of that context remains.

So, it really doesn’t matter what message you might want to convey – and often, it seems like much of the political stance of entertainment is trying to simply not offend extremely vocal partisan groups ( most of whom probably won’t even see their movies or read their books or play their games) than they are trying to appeal to them. Added to this is the obvious fact that most people in the entertainment industry don’t really have anything significant to say on any topics. Even if they can act well on screen, tell a good story, write a novel or direct a film, it doesn’t mean they have any more (or less) deep knowledge of topics like racism, feminism, conservative values or the value of free speech. If you knew a really good chef, he could probably tell you a lot about how to prepare chicken. A really great mechanic could explain how a car engine works and how to keep it in good order. However, chances are they aren’t going to have opinions any more valid than yours on America’s military actions in the Middle East or the consequences of the EU’s trade policies. So, why should some writer or actor be taken seriously on whatever they have to say about politics? They aren’t journalists (though, it seems like journalism is full of people who are really entertainers) and they aren’t held to the same standards of journalism in their jobs.

Anonymous wrote:

HIGH NOON is a terrific example. It was written in the heyday of the congressional committee hearings on the infiltration of communists and soviet collaborators into the entertainment industry (a very interesting real life story in itself that is far more complicated than the simplified mostly pro-leftist narratives you’d see in movies like TRUMBO or THE FRONT). One of the blacklisted writers, Carl Foreman, wrote HIGH NOON with the intent to be an allegory for the threat of blacklisting (like Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE). Nevertheless, it was a hit mostly with the conservative Americans who supported McCarthy and were scared of all the allegations (with considerable evidence, though, at the time) of Soviet influence on not only film, but the US government itself.

John Wayne turned down High Noon, supposedly because he recognised the allegorical nature of the script. He later said he considered it an “un-American” film because of the way the marshal acted (and possibly because he had to be saved by a woman at the end, which is obviously the worst thing that can happen to an American man).
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But an interesting point is:
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Anonymous wrote:

Today, none of that context remains.

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Which is entirely true, but how much does that matter? Certainly at the time I first saw High Noon I knew nothing of that period of American history (I mean the McCarthy era, not the old west ;) ) so even if somebody had explained the allegory there’s no way it could have resonated with me. I took the film entirely at face value. Does this mean I had a poorer, or less valid, viewing experience?
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Watching High Noon again years later, after knowing the history and knowing it was (probably) written as an allegory, I don’t think it changed the way I viewed the film. I still took it at face value, as a purely literal human story. I don’t think it needs to be more than that.

DavidM wrote:

Which is entirely true, but how much does that matter? Certainly at the time I first saw High Noon I knew nothing of that period of American history (I mean the McCarthy era, not the old west ;) ) so even if somebody had explained the allegory there’s no way it could have resonated with me. I took the film entirely at face value. Does this mean I had a poorer, or less valid, viewing experience?

Not at all. The point is that whatever “message” the writer or director intends does not matter. Nor do criticisms of films or books where critics see political messages they don’t agree with. The story will be entertaining or boring irrespective of its message, and most often that intended message is never delivered. Audiences will read into a film they like from their own position.

DavidM wrote:

I took the film entirely at face value. Does this mean I had a poorer, or less valid, viewing experience?

I wouldn’t say poorer or less valid, but maybe less rich.

I am a firm believer that stories with these deeper levels of meaning and allegorical qualities should also work on the basic surface level as a story, without all that extra depth.

But if you’re only enjoying it on that level and you aren’t aware of the deeper layers of meaning, then you’re not having as rich an experience as someone who is seeing that extra depth.

Having said that, sometimes those extra layers can detract from a story if not done well, so you could be having a better experience if you’re only seeing the ‘pure’ story.

Dave wrote:

Having said that, sometimes those extra layers can detract from a story if not done well, so you could be having a better experience if you’re only seeing the ‘pure’ story.

It’s not new either. Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells and a whole swath of Russian writers were inspired to write stories based on what concerned them, but since we don’t live in those times and places, those messages aren’t what keeps us reading. Another interesting example is Edgar Allen Poe. He was not seen as a macabre author in his day as death was much more omnipresent at that time. He was simply writing about what everyone felt and experienced. However, today, after many of the common causes of death have been addressed successfully by medicine, better nutrition, sanitation and safety codes, from our perspective, he was obsessed with death.

However, there has always been a genre of “message pictures” in the 50’s and 60’s that were all about pushing some political or social interest at the time. Few of them actually did very well outside the groups that were already on board with the messages, and hardly any of them are seen or remembered today outside film studies courses.

Conversely, the whole “blaxsploitation” movement in film that gave a lot of African American actors, directors, writers and musicians a rich outlet for their work outside Hollywood faced great resistance from civil rights organizations that felt its depiction of the black community was harmful. A position, obviously, that the black community in general did not share nor was it the intent of the people behind the film to present it that way.

The thing is that great movies can come out of a specific message that someone wants to depict. HIGH NOON, for example. Even the classic THE WOLF MAN emerged from the writer’s experience as a Jew in increasingly fascist and anti-Semitic Europe. However, who really gets that from the movie? THE WATCHMEN is definitely a political story and Moore said that he wrote it (like V FOR VENDETTA) to criticize the policies of leaders like REAGAN and THATCHER, but he changed the world so that Nixon was still president – no one thought he was a good guy – and the US had won the Vietnam War so that no one would be necessarily insulted by it.

Nevertheless, the one character who is openly extreme, right wing and xenophobic, Rorschach, is also the only one who will not willingly cover-up the murder of a million people and he and the right-wing bastard, the Comedian, are the only two Watchmen who die in the course of the story uncovering the leftist leaning Veidt’s “altruistic” plan to save the world. It’s a toss-up on who is the most popular character to come out of the story – Rorschach or Dr. Manhattan.

I think stories that emerge from or have certain messages the author wishes to express seem to work when they are authentic. When the message is connected to the real experience in the writer’s or director’s life. But, it’s the drama of the experience, not the message, that reaches people who are there for the story.

[Christian]

Anonymous wrote:

Not at all. The point is that whatever “message” the writer or director intends does not matter.

Death of the author again. Fuck yeah!

Also, on a minor technical point:

Anonymous wrote:

Third person dominates and usually is considered an “omniscient” perspective. There is nothing hidden.

The dominant third-person perspective in novels isn’t the omniscient, or unlimited, one, but rather the limited (or personal) perspective, in which the narrator channels through a character’s point of view. That he can choose and switch those characters allows for a kind of omniscience, of course, but then first-person narrators can also have functional omniscience because they’ve lived the story and know everything that happens. They use the past version of themselves to channel the PoV in the same way that a third-person narrator uses one (or more) of the characters.

Another interesting example is Edgar Allen Poe. He was not seen as a macabre author in his day as death was much more omnipresent at that time.

That’s also not quite right. Poe’s first published collection was called “Tales of the Grotesque and Arababesque”, and horror was at the time already a popular genre, mainly within the Romantic movement as a form of Dark Romanticism (which differed from what Poe was doing), and Poe was very aware of that (his first story was a parody of gothic horror stories of the time called “Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation of the German”).

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Christian.

Christian wrote:

The dominant third-person perspective in novels isn’t the omniscient, or unlimited, one, but rather the limited (or personal) perspective, in which the narrator channels through a character’s point of view. That he can choose and switch those characters allows for a kind of omniscience,

A point that used to bug me when I hung out on (amateur) writers’ forums was that they were all convinced that “head hopping”, switching the point of view character in a third-person narrative, was a cardinal sin.
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I could never understand why it was universally reviled, when I could point to dozens of critically acclaimed writers who do it. I have a feeling some big name writing coach banned it once, or more likely said something that was misconstrued as a universal ban, and it then became received wisdom that got repeated on the Internet ad nauseam.

DavidM wrote:

I could never understand why it was universally reviled, when I could point to dozens of critically acclaimed writers who do it. I have a feeling some big name writing coach banned it once, or more likely said something that was misconstrued as a universal ban, and it then became received wisdom that got repeated on the Internet ad nauseam.

Yeah, that goes for a lot of how-to-write advice. It’s good to know the “rules”, but you can and should break any of them at will.

Normative poetics, the idea that there is a proper and right way to write and that there are ruled, died back in the 17th century really. Because the idea of writing (and painting etc.) as just a craft was superseded by the idea of the genius artist who has to strain against the rules and break them (one of the core ideas of romanticism). At which point poetics sidled into becoming merely descriptive, cataloguing what was being done but not pretending there was a “right” way to do things. But writing (and especially screenplay writing) advice books have brought those old ideas back to some extent.

Christian wrote:

The dominant third-person perspective in novels isn’t the omniscient, or unlimited, one, but rather the limited (or personal) perspective, in which the narrator channels through a character’s point of view.

That’s true. However, I think when all entertainment is viewed, from non fiction to films to plays to television, the point of view is the more omniscient one where everything in the scene is laid out for the audience.

Christian wrote:

That’s also not quite right. Poe’s first published collection was called “Tales of the Grotesque and Arababesque”, and horror was at the time already a popular genre

My point though is that today the perspective of the times is absent and it’s led many to erringly portray Poe as somehow more morose, tragic and obsessed with death and the macabre than others at the time. This was the era when the death rate was six to ten times higher than it is now. Cemeteries became popular park like sites in growing cities. Spiritualism and seances were popular. The macabre was not a particular part of Poe’s personality as people view him today; it was a part of the time he was writing.

Of course, this extended to the “mystery” of his death when, in truth, there was little that was any more mysterious about it than the others lying in their tombs or any others who had died in those times. It’s a projection of present meaning on a very different past.

Anonymous wrote:

That’s true. However, I think when all entertainment is viewed, from non fiction to films to plays to television, the point of view is the more omniscient one where everything in the scene is laid out for the audience.

That is probably true where non-fiction is concerned, but of course non-fiction has entirely different goals than fiction, and narrative perspective in non-fiction isn’t actually something that is often discussed (because there is no fictional narrator, mainly, but rather what is supposed to be the actual author’s voice (whose non-fictionality can, however, be discussed)). Where the other forms are concerned: It is usually considered that there are three forms of writing – poetry, prose and drama. Prose is the only form for which narrative perspective and point of view is essential. Drama usually doesn’t have a narrator (there are examples of course, but it’s not normally the case); the play is presented neutrally to the audience. The same goes for movies – though arguably the camera itself functions similarly to a narrator, but if you look at that more closely, I think we may find that omniscience is actually not the norm, as the camera tends to follow a specific character and give us their perspective.

Anonymous wrote:

My point though is that today the perspective of the times is absent and it’s led many to erringly portray Poe as somehow more morose, tragic and obsessed with death and the macabre than others at the time. This was the era when the death rate was six to ten times higher than it is now. Cemeteries became popular park like sites in growing cities. Spiritualism and seances were popular. The macabre was not a particular part of Poe’s personality as people view him today; it was a part of the time he was writing.

Yeah, that’s fair. Although I am not sure how much of that we can actually attribute to mortality; I mean, the macabre and horror and all that are still massively popular. Just look at Halloween coming up. There is actually a pretty straight line you can draw from the baroque age and its obsession with death (memento mori and all that) through the gothic horror of the Romantics (and the creation of Dracula and Frankenstein by them) to Anne Rice and Twilight and horror movies today.

Good points.

I was going to point out in sci fi exploration shows that they are mostly based on the military. Babylon 5, Star Trek, Stargate, and on and on.
They aren’t just collecting planetary rock samples and astronomical studying nebula, but adventure.

It’s because even though we like to think we are an enlightened civilization, we still like wars more than we like science.

Also, they are usually based on non sci fi genres in the same medium. Star Trek is Wagon Train in space. Or Horatio Hornblower in space. Star Wars is a WW2 movie in space. It’s not just science fiction that has a military bias – it’s the adventure genre in general.

Soldiers are trained to be capable, physical people and then deliberately put in harm’s way.
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Star Wars is a lot of things, but Lucas’s experience teaching Navy students how to make films may well have contributed to his choice to make his space fantasy movie a war film?

Al-x wrote:

I was going to point out in sci fi exploration shows that they are mostly based on the military. Babylon 5, Star Trek, Stargate, and on and on.

Yeah, Trek is an interesting example of a military structure that is kind of merged with a scientific exploratory crew. It can all come across as a bit fascist really, which I think they played upon with the Maquis? Babylon 5, on the other hand, wasn’t an exploratory show really; it was about a space station that was a diplomatic nexus. So the military angle was more obvious.
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But yeah, it’s a good point. It’d actually be cool to see a space exploratory show driven not by a government/military structure, but by private corporate structures. Lots of potential for drama, too. I’d actually really like to see a show like that.

That would mean that the corporate structure survived and took over in the future.

The shows we have now imply the military survived and practically saved us all.

Why not have the universities and academia get into the space race and exploration? I know it sounds wild but I am thinking about a neutral structure behind it all.

Christian wrote:

It’d actually be cool to see a space exploratory show driven not by a government/military structure, but by private corporate structures.

I said before about storytelling in movies being dependent on an actor’s performance carrying the movie and even making up for the slow scenes, like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Then movies with two actors depend on their chemistry like in the movie Passengers and the original Swept Away. Finally a huge cast of differing characterizations like the original Star Wars of a farm boy, a wizard, a pirate, a princess, etc. like in comics a team of diverse characters the energy guy, the flying man, the babe, the acrobat etc.

Each story has their own approach and writer have to know how to write for each situation. There is a difference between writing a single character title like Batman, DD, and a team like the JLA, X-Men…Just saying

Al-x wrote:

Why not have the universities and academia get into the space race and exploration? I know it sounds wild but I am thinking about a neutral structure behind it all.

Yeah, that’d also be cool. I think the corporate idea would give you a lot of material to explore (some of this would be in Alien universe territory, of course, but you’d have to show more aspects of this and not just corporations-are-evil stuff), but academics in space also has a lot of potential. It’d actually pretty awesome, potentially.

Or, going the next step, a post-scarcity economics, post-hierarchy society where you have a starshship of individual explorers that are just out there because it’s what they decided to do, with very individual motivations.

Christian wrote:

Al-x wrote:

Why not have the universities and academia get into the space race and exploration? I know it sounds wild but I am thinking about a neutral structure behind it all.

Yeah, that’d also be cool. I think the corporate idea would give you a lot of material to explore (some of this would be in Alien universe territory, of course, but you’d have to show more aspects of this and not just corporations-are-evil stuff), but academics in space also has a lot of potential. It’d actually pretty awesome, potentially.

Or, going the next step, a post-scarcity economics, post-hierarchy society where you have a starshship of individual explorers that are just out there because it’s what they decided to do, with very individual motivations.

In the old series Space: 1999, they were pretty much all scientists, doctors and technicians. They were not a military organization.

Two things:

Limited premise

There are stories with a limited premise that can’t really be open ended. Voyager comes to mind of the ship being far away and time after time the crew would come so close to finding a wormhole or tech solution to getting home but something always goes wrong. Thing is the setting was based on them not getting back so easily or else the show would be over. Similarly, Gilligan’s Island had the premise of getting rescued but Gilligan would always do something stupid and avert it. Thing is these two shows would be over if the smart thing happened so the viewer can’t get his hopes so high on a rescue.
The Fugitive was based on some detective always getting his man, but if he was so good, how come he hasn’t captured him yet after all those seasons? Wiseguy almost fell into that trap but they made it into a closed arc. Banshee was based on this crook impersonating a sheriff and they ended it before it became ridiculous or else how long can a crook keep up the ruse?

Stealing the Show…

Game of Thrones was originally done well in that it set up the fantasy world with intrigue and drama before the sensational stuff like the magic, the giant, and especially the full-grown dragons would steal the show. I hope that Watchmen build up slow before they give the Dr. Manhattan introduction and you know he would be the sensational element from then on as he was in the comics. However it is not just the supernatural that steals the show but also the antihero character who doesn’t play by the rules and stands out from the others. Happy Days had Fonzie, Star Wars had Han Solo, comics have Batman, Wolverine, Midnighter and so on. Even villains take over everyone’s attention like Darth Vader, the Joker, and JR Ewing. I know I am all over the place with my examples but just saying…

Al-x wrote:

Similarly, Gilligan’s Island had the premise of getting rescued but Gilligan would always do something stupid and avert it.

When I was young I met Lloyd and Sherman Schwartz to work on a never-realized live musical version of Gilligan’s Island. It was interesting that the original idea was that these people were stranded after a nuclear war destroyed the world while they were on a leisure cruise out in the ocean. It was conceived at the height of Cold War fears.

At heart, Gilligan was the easy scapegoat. Often, if you look back at it, the other castaways depended on Gilligan to screw up so that they did not have to go back to “civilization.” Despite its physical hardships, the isolation of their island was much preferable to the alienation of the world they left behind. Slavoj Zizek often quotes a line from one of his peers that goes something like, “it is much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In other words, the “rat race” of the status struggle is so entwined with our worldview, that the end of that worldview entirely is more conceivable than any change to that central part of it.

Everything is framed against it – essentially against some kind of competition or opposition. It’s not a binary either-or proposition, but one of ranking. What is the “best” sort of car, spouse, occupation, food, culture, sport’s achievement and how much does it cost? Essentially, everything has a price tag, but spending just a single dollar for anything means you’ve committed your whole existence to that worldview.

Which is why so many criminals in movies are actually the heroes.

Todd wrote:

In the old series Space: 1999, they were pretty much all scientists, doctors and technicians. They were not a military organization.

Oh yeah, that’s right! I only ever got to see a few episodes of that show, but I loved it. Great design for the spaceship (/station?).

Al-x wrote:

There are stories with a limited premise that can’t really be open ended. Voyager comes to mind of the ship being far away and time after time the crew would come so close to finding a wormhole or tech solution to getting home but something always goes wrong. Thing is the setting was based on them not getting back so easily or else the show would be over. Similarly, Gilligan’s Island had the premise of getting rescued but Gilligan would always do something stupid and avert it. Thing is these two shows would be over if the smart thing happened so the viewer can’t get his hopes so high on a rescue.

I think this is a problem that many shows these days counter by having an open-ended premise for the overall show, but a limited premise for major storylines. For example, you could theoretically have done Killjoys as a bounty-hunter show forever; the major story revolving around the central character was one that had to be wrapped up at some point, but they could’ve replaced it with another story if they had kept going.

Christian wrote:

but they could’ve replaced it with another story if they had kept going and were not owned by SyFy.

FTFY

Apart from the obvious fantasy worlds in comics, Tolkien and RR Martin where you have to suspend belief a lot, some of the better stories are from suspending a little.

Big was a good movie and Hanks first serious role and it was all based on a wish made at a carnival game.
The original Back to the Future used time travel effectively. Some of the Twilight Zone episodes had great acting and settings around just one supernatural event. Watchmen world is derived from the Dr. Manhattan accident and that broke the whole thing open. I can even bring up Peggy Sue Got Married and a many others where a little belief is suspended to great effect.

Two things:

I went to my LCS and overheard a few saying that the Watchmen show is slow. I guess in this age where we have a remote and developed short attention spans the TV and storytelling has to grab your attention or else… I heard it will start to take off in episode 5 but the show has its own thread. My point basically is something like what Henning said about getting the viewer/reader hooked, but a slow buildup asks the reader/viewer for patience and there is the challenge. GoT was a slow build IIRC, then came the action, dragons, etc… but I digress… I mean, how long can a mystery be stretched out when everyone wants to see the payoff?

As for the climax and epic final battle, (almost like the boss fight in video games), I say that we have been inundated with huge spectacle and effects, like Infinity Endgame, the huge light show battle in WW, the Xmen movies of all this debris summoned into the air, and even some of the space battles in Star Wars and Trek. It can be ho -hum after a while and even overdone like in Man of Steel. I say that some movies could use a little twist like when Superman tricked the Three into losing their powers in Superman 2. Has to be a balance….

Al-x wrote:

I mean, how long can a mystery be stretched out when everyone wants to see the payoff?

As Dan Obannon once pointed out, conflict is central to drama, and the mystery generally is, like a murder mystery, a question that compels the protagonist to seek a clear answer. Who did it and why? You can – and often must – stretch out a mystery for a long time as long as it is clear what the characters want and why it matters, how those intentions conflict and what’s stopping them from getting what they want.

Most importantly, though, you have to be sure the audience members know what they know and what they don’t know. This is a problem with trailers. Sometimes they will show an actor is in a movie, but then, in the movie, that actor’s playing a character whose appearance is supposed to be a surprise in the story. I’ve noticed more cases these days where the reveals seem anticlimactic since the writers or directors actually revealed it several scenes or episodes earlier and seemed to have forgotten that.

The Batman title was going and going to the point where they brought in someone new. Issues and issues where the plot made no progress but I digress…

Watchmen show is taking its time with things not directly related to the comic title. The show runner said he wants to do it all his way and so on.

Storytelling like this calls for patience but for how long with other choices?

Al-x wrote:

The Batman title was going and going to the point where they brought in someone new. Issues and issues where the plot made no progress but I digress…

Watchmen show is taking its time with things not directly related to the comic title. The show runner said he wants to do it all his way and so on.

Storytelling like this calls for patience but for how long with other choices?

If the story and characters are compelling, it’s easy to be patient. The storyteller does have to have some payoffs along the way to maintain the continued interest.

Todd wrote:

If the story and characters are compelling, it’s easy to be patient.

This.

When I tell people I gave up on GoT after one episode, I got comments like, “It gets better, haven’t you got the patience to wait through a slow build-up?”

Well, yes, I’ve got oodles of patience, I was bought up on books and movies that were paced far more sedately than anything being made today.

The thing that turned me off GoT after one episode is that (in my opinion, obviously) the generic fantasy story wasn’t interesting and the characters were all repellent. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to make me want to watch the next part.

The first part can be as slow as you like, but there still has to be an interesting hook there somewhere.

That was my reaction to Lost too. I had no reason to pursue it past the first episode.

Any difference you see between American authors/ storytelling and those from other countries?

The cultural differences should show through, not just in comics and movies.

Alan Moore in Watchmen and other works is different from say, Frank Miller’s work in pacing, payoff etc.

I can remember a sociologist from Europe watching American television and noting the differences in culture and so on. Some of the reactions the British had to prime time American shows… Interesting.

Just saying

Al-x wrote:

Alan Moore in Watchmen and other works is different from say, Frank Miller’s work in pacing, payoff etc.

They’re such different creators. I don’t think their nationality is particularly relevant to the differences between them.

This is true about being two different creators. Perhaps I should rephrase … I meant cultural differences being a factor – Does it show in storytelling?

I’ve long believed that the primary difference between American comic book writers and their British counterparts in the mid-80s was that the Murricans grew up reading Marvel and DC comics on a regular basis, and thus came into the field with new ideas that were tied to the pre-established continuity of those universes; whereas the Brits grew up on DC Thomson and 2000AD comics, which exposed them to a greater variety of genres besides superheroes, and came into American comics without the established preconceptions that weighed down their Yankee counterparts.  So you get Swamp Thing as a plant rather than a human, and a complete re-creation of Sandman, and so on.

Honestly, for the likes of Moore and Gaiman (and maybe to a lesser extent Morrison) I think the big influences came from outside of comics altogether. Both Moore and Gaiman have definitely talked about being voracious readers as youngsters and how a lot of the ideas important to them were from other literature just as much as comics.

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that that’s a major point of difference with US writers of that era – I’m sure lots of them were well-read too – but I do think it informs their style a lot.

Morrison made some comments in the past about American writers and their approach to the characters like Superman.

Did he say something like, “No writer has ever approached Superman with as much creativity and originality as Siegel, Binder, and Dorfman”?

 

 

No, that was Alan Moore.

I’m pretty sure Grant thought of it first though.

Alan Moore did talk about how Mort Weisinger used his psychotherapy sessions as fodder for his SUPERMAN stories and ended up creating most of the mythos associated with the character.

I think that may be an interesting way to go with these characters today as well. There was a really entertaining movie recently about the life of Wonder Woman’s creator and how he put his ideas about human psychology and social power into his essentially bdsm-lite female Superman. Rather than going “dark and gritty,” “post-modern deconstruction” or “genre crossing” in the treatment of superheroes, basically go “Alice in Wonderland” for the stories.

Superman, for example, is essentially absurd. All superheroes are especially if someone tries to examine them in any way realistically. Bringing in things like Red Kryptonite and Mr. Mxylplykt seem much more freeing to the concept than trying to take the character absolutely seriously. Grant Morrison of course, did this quite well with his All-Star Superman, but a Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman who are more like characters in a children’s fantasy story might make them much more accessible and interesting.

 

The storytelling derives from unique places. Tolkien said once that his LOTR battle content was from his experiences in WWI and some other things were from the Norse mythology stories IIRC. Even the Daleks in Dr. Who were said to be derived from the Nazis of WWII. I don’t know where Dr. Who came from or the Tardis concept but it was great.

Regarding Dr. Who, it doesn’t have the action fight scenes and adventure seen in American TV. Not to say that it is good or bad, but it is just different. It is a children’s format I know… I still maintain that cultural differences influence the storytelling.

What’s possibly more interesting about Tolkein is that he states that he had a specific intent in his fiction. He felt that Britain – as he conceived of that (a very conservative or traditional point of view from the late imperial British period) – did not have a true mythology or mythic period. King Arthur was more French or European than truly British and many of the fairy tales in the British Isles were more Gaelic than Anglo-Saxon in nature and origin.

Tolkien was far from the first English writer to invent his own mythology, but he was by far the most qualified. However, it is interesting that he created what essentially are meant to be centuries or millennia old stories – like fairy tales, heroic epics and classic myths – that are designed to support his contemporary point-of-view. Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock did something of the same thing, but compared to Tolkein’s professorial and academically dense approach, it’s easy to see how he really did become the grandfather of modern fantasy fiction. His was the template for pretty much all fictional approaches that followed and many of them were reactions to what he did.

Al-x wrote:

Regarding Dr. Who, it doesn’t have the action fight scenes and adventure seen in American TV.

It has veered into that from time to time but it is a notable difference in Doctor Who that the character solves ideas with intelligence rather than force.

If you remember the original incarnation had quite an old man in the role (funnily enough Hartnell was younger when cast than Tom Cruise is now but people clearly didn’t age as well in the 1960s). The intention was always partly to educate as well as entertain so he took a head-teacher role that is still there even though they tend to cast younger nowadays.

I don’t know whether it’s a transatlantic difference more than something rather unique to Doctor Who. If you think around the same time British TV had the Avengers and Danger Man which were far more action based.

 

Anonymous wrote:

King Arthur was more French or European than truly British and many of the fairy tales in the British Isles were more Gaelic than Anglo-Saxon in nature and origin.

I think the bigger element was that British mythology was quite ‘bitty’. There are thing like Beowulf or Arthur (which is British, most of the elements are in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s telling even though the French retelling spread further) or the Mabinogi but no grand epic on the scale of the Greek or Norse legends.

LOTR  was primarily an attempt to create that big wide mythology rather than what existed which was essentially a lot of short stories and morality tales. It retains a heavy Celtic influence in the language and druidic traditions all the way through.

 

Anonymous wrote:

I think that may be an interesting way to go with these characters today as well. There was a really entertaining movie recently about the life of Wonder Woman’s creator and how he put his ideas about human psychology and social power into his essentially bdsm-lite female Superman. Rather than going “dark and gritty,” “post-modern deconstruction” or “genre crossing” in the treatment of superheroes, basically go “Alice in Wonderland” for the stories.

Wasn’t that pretty much Moore’s “Supreme?”

 

 

Al-x wrote:

Any difference you see between American authors/ storytelling and those from other countries? The cultural differences should show through, not just in comics and movies.

I do think that Asian movies and anime work differently from western movies and serials. I’m probably not the most qualified to try and put those differences down.

To me, the big difference in Asian movies is in the pacing of the story rather than the nature of the stories. Even when the west tries to make an Asian style movie, it’s paced like a western movie. Films like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon move at a pace that no western “action” movie would ever do.

Christian wrote:

Wasn’t that pretty much Moore’s “Supreme?”

I was thinking the same thing, too. Moore did much the same with his Captain Britain way back at the beginning of his career. Just great stuff with a lot of the weirdness that made comics unique at the time. If Marvel really wanted to make a distinct movie, Captain Britain from that era would be a surprising sort of film (but completely at odds with the rather pedestrian basic storyline of the Marvel Universe).

If some adventurous creative team just decided to go whole hog and say that every Superman story “happened” in their take on the character, it would be a crazy but extremely exciting take on the character.

Anonymous wrote:

If some adventurous creative team just decided to go whole hog and say that every Superman story “happened” in their take on the character, it would be a crazy but extremely exciting take on the character.

It’s exactly what Grant Morrison did with Batman. It made for an interesting approach.

Dave wrote:

It’s exactly what Grant Morrison did with Batman. It made for an interesting approach.

Yeah, that’s another good example. It was also one of the longest runs on the character since the 80’s, I believe. Also, when Dick Grayson and Damien Wayne took over as Batman and Robin, that was one of my favorite series.

I won’t go into last night’s Watchmen as it has its own thread but there was a plot twist and big reveal…. How do feel about big reveals you don’t see coming in stories?

Also in most westerns the villain outlaw is always outnumbered by a whole town and yet the town never gets together to throw out the outlaw. They are always cowards.

Al-x wrote:

Also in most westerns the villain outlaw is always outnumbered by a whole town and yet the town never gets together to throw out the outlaw. They are always cowards.

This is basically the entire plot of High Noon (one of my top two favourite Westerns).

There are two kinds of reveals: The ones that explain everything and make sense, like in The Sixth Sense or Fight Club.

Then there is the kind that makes you say “What the fuck?” because they make no sense at all, like the one in Watchmen today.

Tobias Radesäter wrote:

There are two kinds of reveals: The ones that explain everything and make sense, like in The Sixth Sense or Fight Club.

Then there is the kind that makes you say “What the fuck?” because they make no sense at all, like the one in Watchmen today.

Exactly. Good, well-constructed twists and reveals technically shouldn’t be a surprise. Sufficient hints and clues should have been presented that if you had been focusing on the details, you would have seen it coming. You should be able to go back and see the clues. Some are done better than others. Some will throw a twist in merely for shock value. In many cases, those types actually undermine the story.

George R.R. Martin talked about this often during the Game of Thrones series. Before the internet, 1 in 1,000 readers would be sharp enough to catch a reveal before it was revealed in the book, but the other 999 readers would be delightfully surprised. However, now, when one person picks it up, social media spreads it so that 60% of the audience will know it.

So, what do you do? Do you throw in something that no one can predict because there are no clues leading up to it – like aliens invading Westeros – or do you stick with the carefully laid out plan from the beginning?

KNIVES OUT is a good example of misleading without cheating. It’s still the essential format of introducing red herrings, but in a clever way that no one would see that it is a red herring “a hole inside the donut hole. A donut-hole hole, if you will.”

The Watchmen reveals are not the same sort of thing exactly. Like LOST, some completely insane revelation occurs that is almost impossible to see coming. Then, there is a flashback that introduces all the elements that fit the revelation into the story. Basically, it withholds all the real clues to the moment that would normally lead up to the revelation until the twist has already occurred.

It is “cheating” in a classical sense, but if the enjoyment of the story is really seeing the character’s actions and interactions rather than solving the mystery (or even knowing what the hell is going on), it’s legitimately entertaining.

The Coen Brothers are also very good bringing their mysteries together in things like Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There, etc. but there are usually very little mysteries in their stories. The audience usually knows more than the characters do.

DavidM wrote:

This is basically the entire plot of High Noon (one of my top two favourite Westerns).

And High Plains Drifter, as well.

Anonymous wrote:

This is basically the entire plot of High Noon (one of my top two favourite Westerns).

And High Plains Drifter, as well.

And let’s not forget Blazing Saddles, at least until the Johnsons decide to help Black Bart.

Some might see some political messages behind the prevalence of a weak community requiring salvation from some lone authority figure with a penchant for cold blooded violence.
High Plains Drifter turns it on its head with the town turning to the violent man who is far worse than the outlaws they fear.

In the real Wild West, towns actually did generally form up their numbers and put down criminal elements as well as any minorities they might not like. In cases like the OK Corral shooting, the outlaws were an organization of criminals who operated like a gang.

There have been stories of intrigue and reveals in comics:

Jason Wyngarde in Claremont’s Xmen run
Xorn in Grant Morrison’s Xmen run
Kevin Smith’s run in Daredevil
The Hush storyline in Batman
The traitor in Millar’s Ultimates run

It is a little reminiscent of the who done it stories of past novels. Thing is the past stories have given you some clues and you can guess and figure out before hand. The bad ones introduce something toward the end to the reveal in which there was no way to tell beforehand….

Just saying.

True, however something like Xorn is different from The Who Done It in that no one asked who done it. In a murder mystery there is the obvious dead body. Xorn was a reversal in the sense that the revelation makes you realize that you should have been asking the question the whole time. It suddenly turns the tables changing the real meaning of everything that came before like the Fight Club or The Usual Suspects reversal.

The question I have about revelations in Watchmen seem to be whether they are driven by the actions of the characters are more by the questions the audience has.

njerry wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

This is basically the entire plot of High Noon (one of my top two favourite Westerns).

And High Plains Drifter, as well.

And let’s not forget Blazing Saddles, at least until the Johnsons decide to help Black Bart.

Anonymous wrote:

True, however something like Xorn is different from The Who Done It in that no one asked who done it. In a murder mystery there is the obvious dead body. Xorn was a reversal in the sense that the revelation makes you realize that you should have been asking the question the whole time. It suddenly turns the tables changing the real meaning of everything that came before like the Fight Club or The Usual Suspects reversal.

Yes. With a Whodunit there’s the active expectation of a twist, so the writer has to stay two steps ahead of the audience and not only sell them on the story before the twist, but also anticipate the kind of twist they might be expecting and provide something different to that – so it becomes a kind of game of pretending you’re telling one story, hinting at another through red herrings, and then doing something else entirely. The TV series Inside No. 9 has become very good at this.

But with something like Xorn or Fight Club or The Usual Suspects they’re a bit more free to set everything up because the audience isn’t necessarily expecting a twist.

It’s why it can be so disappointing to hear that a new movie has a great twist ending, as it heavily colours the viewing experience to be thinking along those lines and trying to work out what the twist will be.

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It’s also important to note that every story has many reversals or “twists” during the course of the narrative. It’s not simply “Heracles goes to Lerna and kills the Hydra” or “Jesus goes to Jerusalem and becomes king of the Jews.” There are many moments in the narrative where the story is turned around and the characters’ positions rise or fall in relation to their objectives.

Essentially, it’s all slapstick. One character wants to perform one action and at the last second the thing is wants is yanked out of his grasp by fate or some opposing force. If there is an opponent in the act, then sometimes the opponent has the thing he wants yanked out his grasp by the star of the act. In the end, it will look like the opponent has what he wants only for the star to get the last laugh often due to the very character flaw or fickle fate that started all his problems in the first place.

 

Anonymous wrote:

It’s also important to note that every story has many reversals or “twists” during the course of the narrative. It’s not simply “Heracles goes to Lerna and kills the Hydra” or “Jesus goes to Jerusalem and becomes king of the Jews.”

I doubt if anyone saw “founds the biggest religion in human history that spends the next 2000 years persecuting Jews in his name” coming.

njerry wrote:

And let’s not forget Blazing Saddles, at least until the Johnsons decide to help Black Bart.

And Magnificent Seven is also about the village defeating the villains together.

Spectacles, gimmicks, and sensational plot devices…

Ok… Lately I have been watching Watchmen and I will leave most of it to it’s own thread. A major character came out of hiding whose presence is rather sensational and might overwhelm and take over the show. In a manner of speaking, it parallels Game of Thrones in that the sensational plot devices where the CGI dragons, the giant troll, and so on. After a while, it got called the dragon show by some.

How can a storyteller keep the story from being overwhelmed by the spectacle?

Put it in context or it will break the bank. Game of Thrones is a bad example as the writers kept changing the rules they established earlier. Snow zombies overwhelm their opponents rapidly and by a great mass unless that opponent is a character you know. Dragon fire can destroy hundreds at once or knock over towers except when used against a series star. The point of the dragons was the return of magic to the world, but they were just about the end of it. Magic seemed no more prevalent in the world when the dragons returned to Westeros than before. You’d expect that as the dragons rose some contrary force would rise against them, but it never really did.

A recent case I studied was the use of superpowers in Philip Wylie’s proto-Superman novel GLADIATOR. In it, the hero was essentially the same as the Golden Age Superman. However, his powers never really accomplished anything because civilization had no place for a superhuman. In the end, he realized that there was nothing he could do that many men with machines could not. In fact, many men working together could accomplish much more than he ever could alone. The only thing he could accomplish was destruction.

Like in The Magicians – an adult take on the Harry Potter idea – the central theme was that for all the miracles magic could perform, it could never really help the user to find a good way to live. That’s at the heart of the Harry Potter novels, too, of course. Harry and his friends never really solved any of their projects with magic alone. In fact, often magic was the source of more problems.

Setting the elements of the spectacle under the human needs of the characters is important for a story to take life. It doesn’t really matter what a hero can do or what spectacular things are happening if what they are trying to achieve is not really important. Saving the world is not important if you don’t have one thing in that world people care is saved.

In Watchmen, I’m not that invested in Angela Abar, so the course of the story doesn’t have a strong anchor of concern or care to hold me to it. However, I can see that it is operating as if her arc is central to the story, so it is honestly tying all the spectacular elements to a central human concern.

In writing Watchmen, Moore put the fantasy stuff of Dr. Manhattan in proper context. The reader was into the characters and intrigue to the end. Those who were more interested in the sensational elements of the story were still satisfied and also ended up reading the subsequent comics and TV show but I digress.

Moore did it right in not overexposing the sensational. Thing is in the TV format with ratings pressure and all, I don’t know if that can be done.

Of course there is a difference in writing across the formats. Comics is different from lit. is different from movies and tv…

Miller who wrote DKR also wrote Robocop 2 which didn’t come across in the cinema like the original movie but I digress…

Too much storytelling, stretching …

It was Patrick Stewart who used the term franchise fatigue about the last TNG movie… I know a studio may be eager to churn out movies but after a while it can be too much, like Star Wars films these days, or the Spiderman movies, or even all comic book movies for that matter.

A good storyteller knows when to say enough and end the story. Game of Thrones was good most of the time but now after all those seasons of really getting into it, who is buying the box set for themselves? It has come and gone. Stretching a concept actually undermines the story like the old Fugitive show where if he was such a great cop who always gets his man, why hasn’t he go the guy already? Just saying.

I think franchise fatigue doesn’t exist, it is just a film-maker’s excuse when they make a film that wasn’t as good as the previous ones.

I am not tired of Star Wars. I just think they are making poor Star Wars movies recently.

I am not tired of Star Trek, I just wish Voyager had been less boring.

I am not tired of the Legion of Super-Heroes. I just think Brian Bendis is a terrible writer.

Etc.

I agree to an extent. But I do also think that there’s an excitement people can get when a franchise has been let rest for a while that wouldn’t be there otherwise. It’s the only way to explain the success of the new Jurassic Park movies. And it certainly launched the new Star Wars movies into the stratosphere, in spite of them being mediocre. And it’s probably going to give that new Matrix movie a huge boost.

Crossover

With regards to the comic crossover of Watchmen characters in the DC universe that just finished, it just did not work imho…

Crossovers are usually about a character meeting his/her counterpart in the other universe and I just did not see Manhattan vs Superman.

Just saying. You can also comment on crossover storytelling with examples.

In pulp or superheroes, it depends. Team up Doc Savage with Tarzan or James Bond with Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, and it can work even though they are essentially the same character because their story types are very different. Even teaming up Batman with Superman generally works but it takes hard work to match their strengths and weaknesses. Superman has to be a little dumb to let Batman take the strategic lead and Batman needs to be a little less physically capable to give Superman the advantage.

However, comic book crossovers usually require an incredible level of disbelief. 90% of the Marvel superheroes find themselves operating around New York city, but in 90% of their adventures, even when the city or world is under threat, none of the heroes outside the title get involved.

 

That was always something I found odd… Like Dr. Octopus is terrorizing downtown and only Spidey shows up all the time. I could go on but…

Anyway, years ago it was Roger Ebert that commented on filmmaking that films used to be about making the great American movie with the message on historical and social commentary. (I guess Forrest Gump is the last of its kind…) Ebert then said that now it is about making the great American hit with all the action, adult situations, and pop culture soundbites and quotes.

Scorcese said something similar but he focused on Marvel movies crowding out his kind of movies from the box office. I see his point but Ebert said it a little better that the overall storytelling has changed. Although movies will come out for Oscar consideration at certain time of the year, storytelling overall has changed.

Should have more balance, but the money goes where the action is.

The focus is generally on the wrong point though in Ebert and Scorsese. The movie’s are about what people want to see. Often it is going to be different than what critics want to see and film school grads want to make. There has been a cinephile movement since WW2 that wanted film to fit in nicely with the plays, novels and performing arts of the time, but often it’s just the arts middle and upper class urbane audience members appreciate.

However, popular works in all media have been similar to popular movies in all periods as well. James Bond and Smokey and The Bandit movies were coming out and reaching more people the same time as Taxi Driver or The Last Detail we’re made.

Critics also often forget that people simply want to be entertained. While “messages” are often slipped in, TV and movies are really about escape. They are a way to relax and unwind for a few hours.

Todd wrote:

Critics also often forget that people simply want to be entertained. While “messages” are often slipped in, TV and movies are really about escape. They are a way to relax and unwind for a few hours.

Yes – I think what we’re seeing is a tendency away from the more literate viewpoint of narrative media. If you compare HARRY POTTER today to its equivalents in the 19th century, it would be hard to say that Harry Potter as a work of literature and art is anywhere near as accomplished as DAVID COPPERFIELD or ALICE IN WONDERLAND or LITTLE WOMEN or LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. Nor does it really have the relative impact as those works did either.

However, unlike Alan Moore, who has argued this before, I wouldn’t say that there has been a decadence or degrading of the quality of even popular fiction attendant to a lessening of the literate point of view. Even illiterate people in the time of Dickens, Carroll, Alcott or authors before them like the Brontes, Shelley, Byron, Austen and back to Shakespeare, everyone had a “literate” point of view. Much of this due to the effect of the printing press on society where ideas were transmitted in a new fashion so that even people who could not read were delivered entertainment that had been composed by a literate person to be spoken by a literate person. Marshall Macluhan wrote extensively on this in his book THE GUTENBERG GALAXY.

We’ve moved into something post-literate as electronic media facilitate the transmission of less composed works with more immediate and complex experience delivered to people who’ve developed much broader bandwidth. Many videogames have transcended narrative form entirely giving the audience – the players – as much involvement in a game as a director or editor has making decisions to put together a traditional film. A common criticism of today’s audience is that they have a narrower attention span, but that is probably coming from someone more invested in the traditional and now somewhat obsolete methods of making entertainment. Watch some teenager spend 30 hours playing Red Dead Redemption, Witcher 3 or Fallout games, and it’s hard to make the argument they don’t have an attention span. In some of these games, the player will be immersed in them spending several hours on what in a regular movie story would take less than 30 minutes of running time. The time is “decompressed” but more importantly, it is packed with detail and decisions that are important to the player.

Recently, I saw AD ASTRA which can be summed up as APOCALYPSE NOW meets 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. The thing is though that except for people really interested in cinema, Apocalypse Now and 2001 have both become less than gripping narrative experiences. Just as older classic movies like John Ford Westerns, The Wizard of Oz – hell, even the original Star Wars trilogy – have gradually lessened in appeal decade after decade. The movies still work – especially many old comedies – but they can hardly recapture the impact they had when they first released.

At the same time, though, I just saw LITTLE WOMEN and UNCUT GEMS this week. Before that the films FORD V FERRARI, JOKER and THE LIGHTHOUSE were fairly widely and well received. Even AD ASTRA and CATS show that – despite their failures – people are still willing to invest a fortune in movies that generally intend to be more traditionally artistic rather than are entirely chasing the money for popular hits. I don’t think this is significantly different today than it was when Scorsese started making films or when Tarantino started making them.

 

This dichotomy between popular entertainment and “art” (what the general public versus what the critics praise and give awards to) is not limited to TV and films. We see the same thing with live theater and music and books and, yes, comic books. The “Best of 2019” lists are filled with books from Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, yet the best-sellers are always from Marvel and DC and Image.

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njerry wrote:

This dichotomy between popular entertainment and “art” (what the general public versus what the critics praise and give awards to) is not limited to TV and films.

I think the idea that that is a dichotomy is a false one. Great art can also be fantastically entertaining. Work produced without any ambition to be artistic can still be boring as hell.

There are things that are meant to engage us in different ways; sometimes, it’s more about saying something of substance and sometimes it’s more about just making us laugh or entertain us, sometimes it’s both at the same time.

And in contrast to Todd, I wouldn’t say that any of those things are the main purpose of TV or movies. It’s all of it.