Alec Nevala-Lee

Earlier this week, my wife and I went with some friends to the Siskel Film Center to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a charming, immediately engaging documentary of surprising depth and power. Its subject is Jiro Ono, the chef at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the Tokyo sushi counter that has become one of the most honored restaurants in the world. It’s a tiny place, located on the ground floor of an office building near a train station, with only ten seats and no bathroom. A meal there costs 30,000 yen, or upwards of three hundred dollars, and may last no more than fifteen minutes. In terms of money spent per unit of time and food consumed, it’s arguably the most expensive restaurant in the world, but it seems to be emphatically worth it, if its three Michelin stars are any indication. (The movie contains a great deal of mouthwatering food photography—even the rice looks amazing.)

Jiro himself, who is now eighty-five years old, stands at the film’s center, but he remains something of an enigma. We aren’t told much about his early life, aside from the fact that, to put it mildly, he wasn’t close to his parents: he left home at the age of nine, and serenely recalls that his parents told him that “You no longer have a home here.” Rather than sleep at the temple or under a bridge, he says, he had to find a job. And while we aren’t told much about what followed, the implication is that he ultimately began the long, arduous apprenticeship to become a shokunin—a term that literally means an artisan or craftsman, but which more generally describes a sort of spiritual state, a daily commitment to craft that manifests itself in work of utter simplicity. To become a shokunin of sushi, the film tells us, takes at least ten years of apprenticeship, but while we learn a great deal about the apprentices at Sukiyabashi Jiro, Jiro’s own route to mastery remains mysterious.

All the same, it’s refreshing for a film like this not to reduce Jiro’s life to a set of easy answers, although it does drop a few tantalizing hints along the way. A shokunin, we’re told, is someone who wants nothing more than to repeat the same set of actions every day, for years or decades if necessary. Few movies have done a better job of conveying the painstaking acquisition of artistic skill, not as some kind of magical process, but as a slow apprenticeship built on the agonizing accumulation of countless small failures: one of Jiro’s apprentices describes making the same egg dish two hundred times, only to always have it rejected—and when it was finally accepted, he says, he was so happy that he felt like crying. Jiro is hard on his employees, but no less hard on himself. He seems to do little in life but make sushi, think about sushi—and, as the title implies, he even dreams of it. Yet we’re left with the impression, not of a dreamer, but of a man who simply did what he loved every day, to the exclusion of all else, until he became the best in the world.

Of course, there were sacrifices involved. Jiro freely grants that he wasn’t a very good father—on the few occasions that he came home while his children were awake, they thought a stranger was sleeping in the house—and even at the age of eighty-five, it’s clear that his work means more to him than anything else. He takes days off only for national holidays or family emergencies, and whenever he isn’t at the restaurant, he’s waiting impatiently for the chance to get back to work. He won’t retire, he says, until he’s too weak or “too hideous” to come to the restaurant, and indeed, his refusal to stop working seems to have left its mark on his eldest son, Yoshikazu, now in his fifties, who expected to take over the restaurant fifteen years ago. Yet Jiro’s advice for his son is merciless and wise, and it stands as both a warning and a challenge to all of us on the road to mastery: “Yoshikazu just needs to keep it up for the rest of his life. He should keep doing the same thing for the rest of his life.”

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.

—Stanley Kubrick

Over the weekend, along with everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere, my wife and I saw The Avengers. I’m not going to bother with a formal review, since there are plenty to go around, and in any case, if you haven’t already seen it, your mind is probably made up either way. I’ll just say that while I enjoyed it, this is a movie that comes across as a triumph more of assemblage and marketing than of storytelling: you want to cheer, not for the director or the heroes, but for the executives at Marvel who brought it all off. Joss Whedon does a nice, resourceful job of putting the pieces together, but we’re left with the sense of a director gamely doing his best with the hand he’s been dealt, which is an odd thing to say for a movie that someone paid $200 million to make. Whedon has been saddled with at least two heroes too many, as well as a rather dull villain—far better if they had gone with the Red Skull of Captain America—so that a lot of the film, probably too much, is spent slotting all the components into place.

Still, once everything clicks, it moves along efficiently, if not always coherently, and it’s a bright, shiny toy for the eyes, certainly compared to the dreary Thor. It doesn’t force us to rethink what this genre is capable of doing, as The Dark Knight did, but it’s a movie that delivers exactly what audiences want, and perhaps a touch more, which is more than enough to deliver the highest opening weekend in history. And this, more than anything else, puts its director in a peculiar position. Joss Whedon has made a career out of seeming to work against considerable obstacles, and never quite succeeding, except in the eyes of his devoted fans. Buffy switched networks; Firefly was canceled before its time; Dollhouse struggled on for two seasons in the face of considerable interference. All of his projects carry a wistful sense of what might have been, and throughout it all, Whedon has been his own best character, unfailingly insightful in interviews, gracious, funny and brave, the underdog whose side he has always so eloquently taken.

So what happens when the underdog becomes responsible for a record-shattering blockbuster? The Avengers isn’t all that interesting as a movie—far less so than The Cabin in the Woods—but it’s fascinating as a portent of things to come. Whedon has delivered the kind of big popular success that can usually be cashed in for the equivalent of one free movie with unlimited studio resources, as if all the holes in his frequent shopper’s card had finally been punched. For most of his career, at least since Buffy, Whedon has had everything—charm, talent, an incredibly avid fanbase—except the one thing that a creative type needs to survive in Hollywood: power. Now, abruptly, he has oodles of it, obtained in the only way possible, by making an ungodly amount of money for a major studio. Which means that he’s suddenly in a position, real or imaginary, to make every fanboy’s dreams come true.

The question is what he intends to do with it. Unlike Christopher Nolan, he isn’t a director who seems to gain personal satisfaction from deepening and heightening someone else’s material, so The Avengers 2 doesn’t seem like the best use of his talents. Personally, I hope he pulls a Gary Ross, takes the money, and runs. He could probably make another Firefly movie, although that doesn’t seem likely at this point. He could make Goners. He could pick up an ailing franchise with fewer moving parts and do wonderful things with it—I hear that Green Lantern is available. Or, perhaps, he’ll surprise us. The Avengers isn’t a bad film, but it gives us only occasional glimpses of the full Whedon, peeking out from between those glossy toys, and those hints make you hunger for a big movie that he could control from beginning to end. For most of his career, fans have been wondering what he’d do with the full resources and freedom he’d long been denied—even as he seemed to thrive on the struggle. And if he’s as smart and brave as he’s always seemed, he won’t wait long to show us.

In The Name Above the Title, his wonderful, if somewhat unreliable, autobiography, the director Frank Capra describes seeing a silent comedian go onto a set, pick up the props that are lying around—a chair, a lamp, a basket of fruit—and immediately start improvising gags based on the materials at hand. I love this image, just as I love the idea of television shows wringing every possible variation out of a handful of standing sets, or low-budget exploitation films, like those of Roger Corman, that make inventive use of whatever happens to be available. (The original Little Shop of Horrors was shot in two days on sets that were left over from another movie.) While the results can sometimes be mixed, I can’t help seeing this as an example of artistic ingenuity in its purest form, and especially as a useful model for writers, who can often be paralyzed by the range of possible options.

Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, follows the scientist Stuart Kauffman in calling this concept “the adjacent possible”—the act of creating something new out of what happens to be lying around. His favorite example comes from the movie Apollo 13, in which a team of NASA engineers is confronted with the problem of converting the carbon scrubbers on the damaged spacecraft into ones that will work on the lunar module, using only materials that the astronauts have on board. As they dump a bunch of boxes full of equipment—space suits, tubing, the inevitable duct tape—onto a conference table, the lead technician announces, holding up a pair of carbon scrubbers: “We gotta find a way to make this fit into a hole for this using nothing but that.” The engineers get to work, sorting the mess into piles, as we hear a voice in the background saying: “Better get some coffee going, too.”

It’s a great scene, and I know for a fact that one of my best friends became an engineer because of that very moment—he wanted to be one of those guys standing around the table. And it isn’t hard to see why the idea is so appealing. It’s the kind of MacGyver-type problem we all like to think we’d be able to solve under pressure, given enough coffee, and while we may never have to save a spacecraft, we’re often confronted with analogous situations. This is especially true in the intermediate stages of any creative project, like a novel or screenplay. When we begin, we can do whatever we like, but each decision we make seems to narrow our options, until, by the end, we’re left with what feels like a table full of spare parts that we need to fit together. But it’s at moments like this that the most creative solutions tend to present themselves.

In my experience, when you’re looking to solve a problem in any story, the odds are that the answer is right there in front of you, in the collection of pieces you’ve already assembled. I’m always turning up useful spare parts in my own work. When I’m trying to solve a plot problem, I’ve found that it’s often best to go back and check what’s there, in the standing sets I’ve built, because the answer may lie in a throwaway line or a detail that can be put to some other use. (Like the Plains Indians, we try to use every part of the animal.) And when I’m writing a blog post and find myself searching for a snappy closing sentence, chances are, it already exists: it’s just a matter of looking over what I’ve written and relocating the best sentence so it sits at the end. See?

The release of the final trailer for The Dark Knight Rises gives me as good an excuse as any to talk once more about the work of Christopher Nolan, who, as I’ve said before, is the contemporary director who fills me with the most awe. Nolan has spent the past ten years pushing narrative complexity on the screenplay level as far as it will go while also mastering every aspect of large-scale blockbuster filmmaking, and along the way, he’s made some of the most commercially successful films of the decade while retaining a sensibility that remains uniquely his own. In particular, he returns repeatedly to issues of storytelling, and especially to the theme of how artists, for all their intelligence and preparation, can find themselves lost in their own labyrinths. Many works of art are ultimately about the process of their own creation, of course, but to a greater extent than usual, Nolan has subtly given us a portrait of the director himself—meticulous, resourceful, but also strangely ambivalent toward the use of his own considerable talents.

Yesterday, I referred to my notes toward a novel as urgent communications between my past and future selves, “a la Memento,” but it was only after typing that sentence that I realized how accurate it really is. Leonard Shelby, the amnesiac played by Guy Pearce, is really a surrogate for the screenwriter: he’s thrust into the middle of a story, without any context, and has to piece together not just what comes next, but what happened before. His notes, his visual aids, and especially the magnificent chart he hangs on his motel room wall are variations of the tools that a writer uses to keep himself oriented in during a complex project—including, notably, Memento itself. It isn’t hard to imagine Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who wrote the original story on which the screenplay is based, using similar charts to keep track of their insanely intricate narrative, with a protagonist who finally turns his own body into a sort of corkboard, only to end up stranded in his own delusions.

This theme is explored repeatedly in Nolan’s subsequent films—notably The Prestige, in which the script’s endless talk about magic and sleight of hand is really a way of preparing us for the trick the movie is trying to play on the audience—but it reaches its fullest form in Inception. If Memento is a portrait of the independent screenwriter, lonely, paranoid, and surrounded by fragments of his own stories, Inception is an allegory for blockbuster moviemaking, with a central figure clearly based on the director himself. Many viewers have noted the rather startling visual similarity between Nolan and his hero, and it’s easy to assign roles to each of the major characters: Cobb is the director, Saito the producer, Ariadne the art director, all working toward the same goal as that of the movie itself—to transport the viewer into a reality where the strangest things seem inevitable. While Nolan has claimed that such an allegory wasn’t intentional, Inception couldn’t have been conceived, at least not in its current form, by a man who hadn’t made several huge movies. And at the end, we’re given the sense that the artist himself has been caught in a web of his own design.

In this light, Nolan’s Batman movies start to seem like his least personal work, which is probably true, but his sensibility comes through here as well. Batman Begins has an art director’s fascination with how things are really made—like Batman’s cowl, assembled from parts from China and Singapore—and The Dark Knight takes the figure of the director as antihero to its limit. The more we watch it, the more Nolan seems to uneasily identify, not with Batman, but with the Joker, the organized, methodical, nearly omniscient toymaker who can only express himself through violence. If the wintry, elegiac tone of our early glimpses of The Dark Knight Rises is any indication, Nolan seems ready to move beyond this, much as Francis Coppola—also fond of directorial metaphors in his work—came to both to identify with Michael Corleone and to dislike the vision of the world he had expressed in The Godfather. And if Nolan evolves in similar ways, it implies that the most interesting phase of his career is yet to come.

I suppose my formula might be: dream, diversify and never miss an angle.

—Walt Disney

For most of this week, anyone passing by my house would have seen a bright rectangular glow in the living room window, as the new Blu-ray of Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol played in a nonstop loop. While it doesn’t have the same visceral power as it did in IMAX, this is still a fun, expertly assembled action movie, the perfect sort of thing to have playing in the background while I’m working on other projects. Even after seeing it three or four times, however, I still have to drop everything and watch whenever the big scene in the Burj Khalifa comes up. I may not get as dizzy as I did when I first saw it, but even on the small screen, it’s still wonderfully exciting—and all the more terrifying when you know how it was actually filmed. (Incidentally, as much as I hate this sort of corporate extortion, it’s worth shelling out the extra money for the Best Buy exclusive edition, which contains some great bonus features that aren’t included in the version available on Amazon.)

In fact, I’d say that the Burj Khalifa climb in Ghost Protocol is my favorite action sequence of the past five years, on a short list that includes the Guggenheim shootout in The International and the opening chase scene in Drive. At first glance, these three scenes might not seem to have much in common—one is a death-defying ballet staged one hundred and thirty stories above the ground; one is lunatic, extended gunplay; and the last is the car chase as chess game—but they’re all executed with something of the same spirit, and it’s worth drilling down to figure out why they affect us so deeply. There’s something hugely pleasurable about these scenes that goes beyond their immediate impact, and which sets them apart, in my mind, even from such landmark sequences as the hallway fight in Inception, which I love, but find somewhat less interesting from a writer’s point of view. Because what the three scenes I’ve mentioned have in common is that they were all written first.

Here’s what I mean. Many action scenes, particularly car chases, come off as assemblages of second unit footage that have been pieced together in the editing room, and as a result, there’s something monotonous about the relentless similarity of action—just see any Michael Bay movie for an example. The action sequences in these three films, by contrast, were conceived on the printed page. They have a clear beginning, middle, and end. They make memorable use of their locations. They have small setups, payoffs, and surprises along the way, as when Ethan Hunt throws away his malfunctioning glove and finds it adhering to the side of the building a few stories later. Each is centered on the personality of the characters involved—indeed, each scene unfolds as a sequence of logical choices, which is something you’ll never hear said of Transformers. And these are all things that can only be planned at the screenplay stage.

And while this may seem obvious, it’s worth remembering in light of a movie like The Hunger Games, which has its good points, but to my eyes, despite the strength of its material, doesn’t know how to plan and carry out action. Instead, it relies on editing and camerawork to create the illusion of momentum, when all of this should have been laid out in the script. (Note that none of the three films I’ve mentioned ever use anything resembling a shakycam.) Full credit, then, to writers Eric Singer, Hossein Amini, and the platoon that worked on Ghost Protocol for giving us action scenes we’ll remember, which is something that ought to be celebrated. Because it appeals so shamelessly to our reptile brain, the ability to write a great action scene may never get the respect it deserves, but like any other narrative skill, it benefits from intelligence, ingenuity, and clarity of thought—and all of the editing tricks in the world won’t make up for their absence.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about American movie audiences over the past decade or so, it’s that they don’t like being surprised. They may say that they do, and they certainly respond positively to twist endings, properly delivered, within the conventions of the genre they were hoping to see. What they don’t like is going to a movie expecting one thing and being given something else. And while this is sometimes a justifiable response to misleading ads and trailers, it can also be a form of resentment at having one’s expectations upended. Audiences, it seems, would rather see a bad movie that meets their expectations than a great one that subverts them. And whenever there’s a sharp discrepancy between critical acclaim and audience reaction, as measured by CinemaScore, it’s often for a challenging film—think Drive or The American—that has been cut together in its commercials to look like safe, brainless genre fare, or one like Vanilla Sky or Solaris that, whatever its flaws, is trying valiantly to break out of the box. (Or The Box.)

I found myself mulling over this yesterday after seeing The Cabin in the Woods, an uneven but often terrific movie, in both senses of the word, that seems designed to frustrate the kinds of audience members that CinemaScore so diligently tracks. All the danger signs were there: this is ostensibly a horror movie, after all, a genre that tends to get positive responses from audience members only if it gives them precisely what they want. It’s also comedy-horror, a notoriously tricky genre. And most of all, writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard take a seemingly conventional story—five familiar slasher-movie types menaced in, well, a cabin in the woods—and deconstruct it so savagely that no one, not even the filmmakers or the audience, can escape. Despite all this, The Cabin in the Woods escaped with a C rating on CinemaScore, which is more than I would have expected, but still implies that a lot of people aren’t happy—anything less than a B+ or so is seen as a sign of trouble ahead. As a commenter on the A.V. Club says of the early reaction: “There was quite a lot of love and stunnedness, sure, but there was also a healthy amount of ‘waste of money’ and ‘dumbest movie ever.’”

And in a sense, The Cabin in the Woods is a stupid movie, if you define stupidity as an obstinate refusal to meet your expectations. Clearly, it’s more than capable of delivering the kind of horror that the audience wants: it cheerfully provides plenty of jump scares, shadowy basements, and bucketfuls of gore. The fact that it then turns into something much different can strike a lot of people as simple incompetence. The logic goes something like this: if they could give us a straightforward horror film, but didn’t, they must have no clue as to what we really want. The idea that a movie may know what we want and refuse to provide it, in the classic Joss Whedon style, doesn’t entirely compute—and rightly so, since most of the movies we see have trouble just delivering on their most basic promises. The Cabin in the Woods has it both ways as much as a movie possibly can—it never stops being scary, funny, and entertaining even as it changes the rules of its own game—but it still seems to have left a lot of people feeling cheated. Box Office Mojo sums up the situation nicely:

By delivering something much different, the movie delighted a small group of audience members while generally frustrating those whose expectations were subverted. Moviegoers like to know what they are in for when they go to see a movie, and when it turns out to be something different the movie tends to get punished in exit polling.

So what’s a director, or a movie studio, to do? The easiest response, obviously, is either to give away every twist in the trailer, as the director Robert Zemeckis has famously advocated, or to only make movies that deliver blandly on an audience’s expectations while flattering them otherwise. In the latter case, this results in movies and marketing campaigns like those for Super 8 and Cloverfield (also written, interestingly, by Drew Goddard), which are essentially elaborate simulations of movies with a twist or secret premise, when in fact the film itself is utterly conventional. The Cabin in the Woods, by contrast, has a real secret, not a winking simulacrum of one: the trailer hints at it, but the movie goes much further than most moviegoers would expect. Not surprisingly, it’s getting punished for it. Because unlike movies that appeal squarely to the art house or the solid mainstream, Cabin occupies that risky space where the expectations of a mass audience collide with something rich and strange. And that’s the scariest place for any movie to be.

Is it possible to watch Titanic again with fresh eyes? Was it ever possible? When I saw Titanic 3D this weekend in Schaumburg, Illinois, I hadn’t seen it in almost fifteen years, the week after it was first released. At the time, I liked it a great deal, although I wouldn’t have called it the best movie of a year that gave us L.A. Confidential, and since then, I’d caught it in bits and pieces on television, but had never gone back and watched the whole thing. All the same, my memories of it remained positive, if somewhat muted, so I was curious to see what my reaction would be now. And what I found is that this is a really good, sometimes even great movie that looks even better with time. Once we set aside our preconceived notions, we’re left with a spectacularly well-made film that takes a lot of risks and seems motivated by a genuine, if somewhat adolescent, fascination with the past, an unlikely labor of love from a prodigiously talented director who willed himself into a genre that no one would have expected him to understand—the romantic epic—and emerged with both his own best work and a model of large-scale popular storytelling.

So why is this so hard for us to admit? The trouble, I think, is that the elements that worked so strongly in the film’s favor—its cinematography, special effects, and art direction; its beautifully choreographed action; its incredible scale—are radically diminished on television, which is the only way we’ve seen it for well over a decade. On the small screen, we lose all sense of scope, leaving us mostly with elements—dialogue, human drama—that James Cameron has never quite been able to master. Seeing it on in theaters again reminds us of why we liked this movie in the first place. It’s also easier to appreciate that Titanic was made at precisely the right moment in movie history, allowing it to take full advantage of digital technology while deriving much of its power from stunts, full-scale sets, and practical effects. If Titanic were made again today, even by Cameron himself, it’s likely that much of this spectacle would be rendered with CGI, which would be a major loss. A huge amount of the film’s appeal lies in its physicality, in those real crowds and flooded stages, all of which can only be appreciated in theaters. Titanic is still big; it’s the screens that got small.

It’s also time to retire the notion that James Cameron is a terrible screenwriter. It’s true that he doesn’t have any ear for dialogue, and that he tends to freeze up when it comes to showing two people simply talking—I’m morbidly curious to see what he’d do with a conventional drama, but I’m not sure I want to see the result. Yet when it comes to structuring exciting stories on the largest possible scale, and to setting up and delivering climactic set pieces and payoffs, he has few, if any, equals. I’m an enormous fan of Christopher Nolan, for instance—I think he’s the most interesting mainstream filmmaker alive—but his films can seem fussy and needlessly intricate compared to the clean, powerful narrative lines that Cameron sets up here. (The decision, for instance, to show us a simulation of the Titanic’s sinking before the disaster itself is a masterstroke: it keeps us oriented throughout an hour of complex action that otherwise would be hard to understand.) Once the movie gets going, it never lets up, and it moves toward its conclusion with an efficiency, confidence, and clarity that Peter Jackson, or even Spielberg, would have reason to envy.

Despite James Cameron’s reputation as a terror on the set, I met him once, and he was very nice to me. In 1998, as an overachieving high school senior, I was a delegate at the American Academy of Achievement’s annual Banquet of the Golden Plate in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, an extraordinarily surreal event that I hope to discuss in more detail one of these days. The high point of the weekend was the banquet itself, a black-tie affair in a lavish indoor auditorium with the night’s honorees—a range of luminaries from science, politics, and the arts—seated in alphabetical order at the periphery of the room. One of them was James Cameron, who had swept the Oscars just a few months earlier. At one point in the evening, leaving my own seat, I went up to his table to say hello, only to find him surrounded by a flock of teenage girls anxious to know what it was like to work with Leonardo DiCaprio. Seeing that there was no way of approaching him yet, I chatted for a bit with a man seated nearby, who had not attracted much, if any, attention. We made small talk for a minute or two, but when I saw an opening with Cameron, I quickly said goodbye, leaving the other guest on his own. It was Dick Cheney.

Editing is the transformation of chance into destiny.

—Jean-Luc Godard

When you’re watching a film [as an editor], somebody has to deal with the film in complete ignorance of how it actually got made, because that is the way it is going to be seen. I try to keep myself as removed as possible, because I’m the ombudsman of the audience, looking out for their best interests. If you are the director and it took you an incredible amount of time and anguish to get a particular shot, you might invest that shot with more importance than it really has. It has to carry the burden of the effort that it took to get it. On the other hand, if I as the editor am not aware of that burden, I might look at the shot and think there’s nothing special about it. And occasionally I might be right. On the other hand, a shot that was grabbed just before lunch when everyone was having an argument: the director might dismiss it. Whereas I would say, “Ooh, in the right context, this shot could be magical.”

—Walter Murch, to David Thomson in The Believer

The massive opening weekend of The Hunger Games, while impressive in itself, is also the clearest sign yet of a seismic shift in our popular culture, the effects of which will be felt in ways we can only begin to guess. Let’s start with the numbers. Like many movie nerds, I’ve been an avid consumer of box office data for most of my life, and a glance at the top opening weekends of all time—which is usually the least interesting of all movie lists, since it’s more about marketing excitement than true staying power—reveals some fascinating patterns. The first, obviously, is the dominance of sequels and established franchises, which doesn’t come as a surprise: if you throw out The Passion of the Christ as a marginal case, the largest opening weekend for a movie with an original story belongs to Avatar, all the way down at number 39. And although The Hunger Games is based on an existing property, the fact that a series of books that most readers hadn’t even heard of two years ago has generated such excitement is nothing less than remarkable.

Yet this list reveals another, more important trend: the gradual but inexorable replacement of science fiction and comic book properties with those based on young adult novels. A few years ago, the list of top opening weekends—which, again, is less a measure of staying power than a sort of index for cultural excitement over particular franchises—would have been dominated by Spider-Man, Batman, and the Star Wars movies. Today, it’s Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, which will undoubtedly fill three more slots on the list before long. And while this may seem like a case of Tweedle-Dum giving way to Tweedle-Dee, it’s actually a generational shift that has implications not just for the movies, but for all forms of popular storytelling. A list like this is the closest thing we have to a snapshot of the narrative forces shaping the inner lives of children and teenagers, and by extension the rest of the world. And the transition from comics to young adult novels is arguably the most significant cultural change of the last twenty years.

It’s no surprise that Hollywood has always looked to young people to construct their tentpole franchises. Not only are kids more likely to see a movie on opening weekend, but their tastes, in general, tend toward the monolithic: as we grow older, we break off into Mad Men-watching splinter factions, but until high school, kids usually like more or less the same stuff. (The difference in magnitude can be roughly understood as the disparity between the opening weekends of The Hunger Games and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.) From a marketing perspective, this is very helpful: it allows expensive films to be pitched to the widest possible audience. Around the time of Tim Burton’s Batman, the studios realized that comic books were the most valuable properties for exciting the youngest quadrants, although it took the massive success of Spider-Man and the latest revolution in computer-generated effects for this trend to reach its culmination. In the end, Marvel went from being a niche provider of superhero fantasies to a central part of mass culture, to the point where the comics themselves became incidental to the multimedia studio to which they provided raw material.

And yet that moment appears to be passing. The explosion of young adult fiction in the past decade has allowed kids to get their pop culture satisfactions in other ways. As a result, comic book sales have been suffering for a long time, as existing companies struggle to interest younger readers in characters who were around before their parents were born. (To the extent that kids today care about these characters, it’s because of their movie incarnations, not the comics that inspired them.) And new heroes aren’t being created to take their place. Hence the efforts to repeatedly renew the few viable properties (The Amazing Spider-Man) or to launch franchises that palpably lack the fan enthusiasm to justify a movie (Green Lantern). It may not be long before a movie based on a big comic franchise will feel like John Carter: an attempt to drum up excitement for a hero who looks like a relic, while The Hunger Games is fresh and new. Which also means that a publisher like Scholastic, which can generate new properties in a way that Marvel cannot, will soon find itself in a similar position: a formerly tiny company that can move our entire culture. Farfetched? Maybe. But it’s happening before our eyes.

I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time—keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long. I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience.

—Clint Eastwood, quoted in Clint: The Life and the Legend

As I see it, two lessons can be drawn from the Mike Daisey fiasco: 1. If a story seems too good to be true, it probably is. 2. A “journalist” who makes himself the star of his own story is automatically suspect. This last point is especially worth considering. I’ve spoken before about the importance of detachment toward one’s own work, primarily as a practical matter: the more objective you are, the more likely you are to produce something that will be of interest to others. But there’s an ethical component here as well. Every writer, by definition, has a tendency toward self-centeredness: if we didn’t believe that our own thoughts and feelings, or at least our modes of expression, were exceptionally meaningful, we wouldn’t feel compelled to share them. When properly managed, this need to impose our personalities on the world is what results in most works of art. Left unchecked, it can lead to arrogance, solipsism, and a troubling tendency to insert ourselves into the spotlight. This isn’t just an artistic shortcoming, but a moral one. John Gardner called it frigidity: an inability to see what really counts. And frigidity paired with egotism is a dangerous combination.

Simply put, whenever an author, especially of a supposed work of nonfiction, makes himself the star of a story where he obviously doesn’t belong, it’s a red flag. This isn’t just because it reveals a lack of perspective—a refusal to subordinate oneself to the real source of interest, which is almost never the author himself—but because it implies that other compromises have been made. Mike Daisey is far from the worst such offender. Consider the case of Greg Mortenson, who put himself at the center of Three Cups of Tea in the most sentimental and self-flattering way imaginable, and was later revealed not only to have fabricated substantial elements of his story, but to have misused the funds his charity raised as a result. At first glance, the two transgressions might not seem to have much in common, but the root cause is the same: a tendency to place the author’s self and personality above all other considerations. On one level, it led to self-aggrandizing falsehood in a supposed memoir; on another, to a charity that spent much of its money, instead of building schools, on Mortenson’s speaking tours and advertisements for his books.

As a result, I’ve become automatically suspicious whenever I see an artist inserting himself gratuitously into his own work of nonfiction. This is especially obvious in documentary filmmaking, when, in general, the less you see of the director’s face or voice, the better. It’s true that some documentaries benefit from the director’s presence: I wouldn’t want to take Werner Herzog out of Grizzly Man or Claude Lanzmann out of Shoah. But for the most part, documentaries that place the filmmaker at the center of the action should raise our doubts at once. Sometimes this leads to a blurring of the message, as when Michael Moore’s ego overwhelms the valid points he makes. Occasionally, it results in a travesty like Catfish, in which the blatant willingness of the filmmakers to subordinate everything to their own self-interest poisons the entire movie. And it’s especially problematic in films that try to tackle complex social issues. (It took me a long time to see past the director’s presence in The Cove, for instance, to accept it as the very good movie it really is. But it would have been even better without the director’s face onscreen.)

One could argue, of course, that all forms of journalism, no matter how objective, are implicitly written in the first person, and that every documentary is shaped by an invisible process of selection and arrangement. Which is true enough. But a real artist expresses himself in his choice of details in the editing room, not by inserting himself distractingly into the frame. We rarely, if ever, see Errol Morris in his own movies, while David Simon—who manifestly does not suffer from a lack of ego—appears in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets only in the last couple of pages. These are men with real personalities and sensibilities who express themselves unforgettably in the depiction of other strong personalities in their movies and books. In the end, we care about Morris and Simon because they’ve made us care about other people. They’ve earned the right to interest us in their opinions through the painstaking application of craft, not, like Mortenson or Daisey, with self-promoting fabrication. There will always be exceptions, but in most cases, an artist’s best approach lies in invisibility and detachment. Because in the end, you’re only as interesting as the facts you present.

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts about the strange case of Q.R. Markham, the suspense novelist who was later revealed to have constructed his debut thriller, Assassin of Secrets, out of a crazy patchwork quilt of plagiarized passages from other novels. Since then, the unfortunate author—under his true name of Quentin Rowan—has been featured in his own New Yorker profile by Lizzie Widdicombe, which quotes an unnamed fan as claiming that Rowan’s book is actually a secret masterpiece: “What might have been just another disposable piece of banal commercial trash has now been lifted to the level of art.” Others thought that it might have been a deliberate prank, a work of stealth literary criticism, or simply an impressive act of construction in its own right. And these are, in fact, all things that it is possible for a novel to be—just not this particular novel, which was clearly a case of plagiarism born of insecurity and fear. And to Rowan’s credit, he has never tried to claim otherwise.

Yet the idea of a novel constructed out of other novels, like a longer version of Jonathan Lethem’s famous essay in Harper’s, is an interesting one. I might even buy and read it. But the issue is one of truth in labeling. If Rowan had been honest about his method, he’d deserve the ironic accolades that he has subsequently received, but the fact remains that until his exposure, he never claimed to be anything but a suspense writer in the vein of Ian Fleming, which makes his book a work of plagiarism. Similarly, there’s always a place for works of art that mix fact with narrative imagination in pursuit of a larger artistic goal, as long as it’s properly labeled. Norman Mailer beautifully mingles journalism with artistic reconstruction in The Executioner’s Song, and much of the appeal of Frederick Forsyth’s spy novels comes from his use of real historical figures and events. But both works are clearly shelved in the fiction section. It’s when a story with invented elements is shelved with nonfiction—even metaphorically, as in the case of Mike Daisey—that we start to get into trouble.

Labels matter. By stating that a work of art is fiction or nonfiction, novel or memoir, the author is entering into a contract with the reader, one that can be violated only in very rare cases. Now, it’s true that a work of art occasionally benefits from ambiguity over whether what it depicts is real or not. I wouldn’t give up a movie like Exit Through the Gift Shop, for instance, which gains much of its fascination, at least on subsequent viewings, from the question of how much the director has manipulated events behind the scenes. But such cases are extraordinarily uncommon. In film, the result is more often a movie like the loathsome Catfish, in which the inherent interest of the story itself is suffocated by the filmmakers’ palpable vanity and dishonesty. Meanwhile, in print, even as some authors claim to be constructing a more challenging synthesis of artifice and reality, in practice, it’s often a case of a writer combining the easiest, most obvious elements of fiction and nonfiction to get cheap dramatic effects or a marketing hook without the trouble of well-constructed storytelling or real journalism. See: Three Cups of Tea, A Million Little Pieces, and now Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.

The fact is, journalism is hard. Writing novels is also hard, in different sort of way. And it’s accomplishment enough for a lifetime to become good at either one. Before a writer decides to operate in some kind of hybrid mode, he needs to ask himself whether he’s tried to master the infinite complexities inherent in the practice of straight fiction or nonfiction, which, when honestly pursued, are capable of almost anything. For those who claim that it’s necessary to depart from the facts to tell an artistic and moving story, I’d ask them to first check out our many works of truly great nonfiction, ranging from David McClintick’s Indecent Exposure to David Simon’s Homicide, all fully reported and documented, and see if there’s any way they could possibly have been improved. And for those who believe that the conventional novel, unadulterated by plagiarisms, appropriations, or winking narrative shortcuts, is exhausted, well, I can only quote what Borges said, through his editor, to the translator who claimed that it was impossible to render one of his poems properly: “Borges thinks you should try a little harder.”

In recent years, the fawning New Yorker profile has become the Hollywood equivalent of the Sports Illustrated cover—a harbinger of bad times to come. It isn’t hard to figure out why: both are awarded to subjects who have just reached the top of their game, which often foreshadows a humbling crash. Tony Gilroy was awarded a profile after the success of Michael Clayton, only to follow it up with the underwhelming Duplicity. For Steve Carrell, it was Dinner with Schmucks. For Anna Faris, it was What’s Your Number? And for John Lasseter, revealingly, it was Cars 2. The latest casualty is Andrew Stanton, whose profile, which I discussed in detail last year, now seems laden with irony, as well as an optimism that reads in retrospect as whistling in the dark. “Among all the top talent here,” a Pixar executive is quoted as saying, “Andrew is the one who has a genius for story structure.” And whatever redeeming qualities John Carter may have, story structure isn’t one of them. (The fact that Stanton claims to have closely studied the truly awful screenplay for Ryan’s Daughter now feels like an early warning sign.)

If nothing else, the making of John Carter will provide ample material for a great case study, hopefully along the lines of Julie Salamon’s classic The Devil’s Candy. There are really two failures here, one of marketing, another of storytelling, and even the story behind the film’s teaser trailer is fascinating. According to Vulture’s Claude Brodesser-Akner, a series of lost battles and miscommunications led to the release of a few enigmatic images devoid of action and scored, in the manner of an Internet fan video, with Peter Gabriel’s dark cover of “My Body is a Cage.” And while there’s more to the story than this—I actually found the trailer quite evocative, and negative responses to early marketing materials certainly didn’t hurt Avatar—it’s clear that this was one of the most poorly marketed tentpole movies in a long time. It began with the inexplicable decision to change the title from John Carter of Mars, on the assumption that women are turned off by science fiction, while making no attempt to lure in female viewers with the movie’s love story or central heroine, or even to explain who John Carter is. This is what happens when a four-quadrant marketing campaign goes wrong: when you try to please everybody, you please no one.

And the same holds true of the movie itself. While the story itself is fairly clear, and Stanton and his writers keep us reasonably grounded in the planet’s complex mythology, we’re never given any reason to care. Attempts to engage us with the central characters fall curiously flat: to convey that Princess Dejah is smart and resourceful, for example, the film shows her inventing the Barsoomian equivalent of nuclear power, evidently in her spare time. John Carter himself is a cipher. And while some of these problems might have been solved by miraculous casting, the blame lands squarely on Stanton’s shoulders. Stanton clearly loves John Carter, but forgets to persuade us to love him as well. What John Carter needed, more than anything else, was a dose of the rather stark detachment that I saw in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, as directed by Stanton’s former Pixar colleague Brad Bird. Bird clearly had no personal investment in the franchise, except to make the best movie he possibly could. John Carter, by contrast, falls apart on its director’s passion and good intentions, as well as a creative philosophy that evidently works in animation, but not live action. As Stanton says of Pixar:

We’re in this weird, hermetically sealed freakazoid place where everybody’s trying their best to do their best—and the films still suck for three out of the four years it takes to make them.

Which only makes us wonder what might have happened if John Carter had been granted a fourth year.

Stanton should take heart, however. If there’s one movie that John Carter calls to mind, it’s Dune, another financial and critical catastrophe that was doomed—as much as I love it—by fidelity to its source material. (In fact, if you take Roger Ebert’s original review of Dune, which came out in 1985, and replace the relevant proper names, you end up with something remarkably close to a review of John Carter: “Actors stand around in ridiculous costumes, mouthing dialogue with little or no context.”) Yet its director not only recovered, but followed it up with my favorite movie ever made in America. Failure, if it results in another chance, can be the opposite of the New Yorker curse. And while Stanton may not be David Lynch, he’s not without talent: the movie’s design is often impressive, especially its alien effects, and it displays occasional flashes of wit and humor that remind us of what Stanton can do. John Carter may go on record as the most expensive learning experience in history, and while this may be cold comfort to Disney shareholders, it’s not bad for the rest of us, as long as Stanton gets his second chance. Hopefully far away from the New Yorker.

Another rule I have found useful is: Every time you make a cut, you improve a scene. Somerset Maugham, a wise old man, said that there are two important rules of playwriting: “One, stick to the subject. Two, cut wherever you can.” Another wise man said: “If it occurs to you that something might be cut, it should be cut.”

Paul Osborn, an experienced and smart playwright and screenwriter, invited me to a screening of a movie made by the producer Sam Goldwyn. Sam asked Paul his opinion. “Needs cutting,” said Paul. This made Sam frantic because he thought the same but didn’t know what to do about it. “But where?” he asked. Paul answered, “Everywhere.”

—Elia Kazan, Kazan on Directing

An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.

—Billy Wilder

Art is merciless observation, sympathy, imagination, and a sense of detachment that is almost cruelty.

—Michael Powell

Last summer, after a certain post on this website led to an unexpected bump in traffic, I wrote a roundup of previous posts for readers who had just discovered the blog. Now that six months have passed and The Icon Thief is out in stores, it seems like a good time to do this again. My advice for new visitors remains the same as before: after you’ve made the obligatory stop at my author bio and novel page, you should check out the Quotes of the Day, which provide a convenient snapshot of many of the issues I care about. When I launched this site almost a year and a half ago, I didn’t expect that it would evolve so quickly into a blog focused on writing and the creative process, with frequent excursions into pop culture, but perhaps that was inevitable: as someone doing his best to write for a living, I find questions of creativity, productivity, and craft not merely interesting, but vitally important. As a result, it’s one topic that I can talk about at length without any fear of running out of material.

On the writing side, over the past six months alone, I’ve shared my own ten rules of writing, discussed the importance of artistic indifference and irrational optimism, and raged against the excessive use of backstory. I’ve talked about how writers need to be both intuitive and relentlessly resourceful, and explored such matters as finding the perfect title, practicing the art of getting by, and when not to revise. I’ve explained why some of my favorite works of art center on a deeply unfair universe, why true love joined by destiny has no place in most good fiction, and why I don’t like semicolons. I’ve examined the nuts and bolts of preparing the dreaded synopsis and writing the detailed outline. And I’ve gone into possibly excessive detail about the origins of my stories “The Boneless One” and “Ernesto,” both of which appeared last year in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and the former of which can be read for free here.

Because I also love books, I’ve talked a great deal about other authors, from some of the greatest, like Dante and Edgar Allan Poe, to the less fortunate, like Irving Wallace and the unhappy Q.R. Markham. I’ve uncovered the uncanny similarities between Catch-22 and The Phantom Tollbooth, and written about the unexpected lessons of the early years of The Family Circus. I’ve described my youthful obsession with the Great Books of the Western World and delved into the influence of the Whole Earth Catalog on both myself and Steve Jobs. I’ve spoken of my recent discovery of great novels ranging from Little, Big—with a surprise appearance from its author in the comments—to The Magic Mountain, and written about old favorites like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Frederick Forsyth, and Isaac Asimov. I’ve defended the importance of suspense and lamented the decline of the science-fictional mind. And I’ve shared my love of used bookstores, culminating in my recent triumphant purchase of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

My other great obsession, as regular readers will know, is pop culture, especially the movies. As a result, I’ve talked endlessly about my own favorite films, listing off my personal top ten, of course, but also going more deeply into the legacy of other classic movies, including Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Blue Velvet. I’ve discussed the power of two shots from Psycho, glanced at the future of Pixar directors in live action, and used Unknown to examine the problem of fridge logic. I’ve written about my own short stint as a professional movie reviewer and discussed what makes a great critic. I’ve composed posts in praise of such disparate cultural figures as Walter Murch and Lady Gaga. Inevitably, I’ve ticked off my own list of the best movies of the year, and looked for lessons in such recent films as The Artist, In Time, Drive, and Haywire, as well as television shows like Community. And there’s a lot more, if you’re inclined to dig for it—and probably a lot more to come. If you’re just joining us now, I hope you’ll stick around.