The likability fallacy

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m at a point in my life—it’s called “fatherhood”—in which I can see maybe three or four films in theaters every year. My wife and I saw The Hobbit the week before our daughter was born, and since then, our moviegoing has been restricted to a handful of big event movies: Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel, Gravity. In general, my criteria for whether a movie is worth catching on the big screen are fairly simple. It needs to be something that would be considerably reduced on television, which applies particularly to a film like Gravity: I loved it, and I plan to watch it again and again, but its impact won’t be nearly the same at home. Reviews count, as well as my own intangible excitement over a franchise, and beyond that, I tend to go with directors whose work has impressed in the past, which is why I know that the one movie I’ll definitely be seeing next year is Chris Nolan’s Interstellar. In other words, after a lifetime of seeking out strange and challenging movies in theaters, I’ve turned into something like a studio’s idea of the mainstream moviegoer, who tends to prefer known quantities to interesting gambles, and is happy to catch the rest on video. You can complain all you like about Hollywood’s reliance on sequels, remakes, and established properties, but when I look at my own choices as a movie lover with a limited amount of time, I can’t say it’s entirely wrong.

But if there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that it allows me to treat myself as a kind of guinea pig: I can take a hard look at my newfound conservatism as a moviegoer with what remains of my old analytical eye. So much of how Hollywood operates is based on a few basic premises about what audiences want, and as I’ve become less adventurous as a viewer, I’ve gotten a better sense of how accurate those assumptions—presumably based on endless focus group testing and box office analysis—really are. And I’ve come to some surprising conclusions. I’ve found, for instance, that star power alone isn’t enough to get me out of the house: I’m an unabashed Tom Cruise fan, but I still waited for Oblivion to arrive at Redbox. I don’t need a happy ending to feel that I’ve gotten my money’s worth, as long as a darker conclusion is honestly earned. And the one that I can’t repeat often enough is this: I’m not worried about whether I’m going to “like” the characters. Studios are famously concerned about how likable their characters are, and they get nervous about any project in which the lead comes off as unsympathetic. Industry observers tend to think in the same way. As a writer for Time Out recently said of the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street: “Why should we give a damn about these self-absorbed, money-grubbing Armani-clad cretins and spend our money and time learning about their lives?”

Well, to put it mildly, I can think of a few reasons why, and they’re strong enough that The Wolf of Wall Street is the next, and probably last, movie this year that I expect will get me into theaters. Spending three hours in the company of an Armani-clad cretin seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese strikes me as a great use of my money and time, and while I can’t speak for the rest of the world, the movie we’ve glimpsed so far looks sensational. Part of this, of course, is because Scorsese has proven himself so capable of engaging us in the lives of unlikable characters. I don’t think there’s a sympathetic face to be seen throughout all of Casino, one of the most compulsively watchable movies of all time, and Scorsese has always seemed more comfortable in the heads of the flawed and unredeemable: it’s the difference between Goodfellas and Kundun, or Raging Bull and Hugo, and even a sleek machine like Cape Fear comes off as an experiment in how thoroughly he can grip us without a likable figure in sight. But there’s a larger principle at work here, too. Scorsese, by consensus, operates at a consistently higher level than any other filmmaker of his generation, and if he’s drawn to such flawed characters, this probably tells us less about him personally than about the fact that his craft is powerful enough to get away with it. Likability wouldn’t be a factor if all movies were this good.

In other words, any fears over the protagonist’s likability are really an admission that something else is going wrong, either in story or execution: the audience doesn’t care about the characters not because they aren’t sympathetic enough, but because it hasn’t been given a reason to be invested on a deeper level. Trying to imbue the hero in a meaningless story with more likable qualities is like changing the drapes while the house is on fire, but unfortunately, it’s often all the studio can understand. As Shane Black notes in the excellent interview collection Tales From the Script:

Movie stars are gonna give you your best ideas, because they’re the opposite of development people. Development people are always saying, “How can the character be more likable?” Meanwhile, the actor’s saying, “I don’t want to be likable.” You know, they give you crazy things like, “I wanna eat spaghetti with my hands.” Crazy’s great. Anything but this sort of likable guy that everyone at the studio insists they should play.

“Make him more likable,” like “raising the stakes,” is a development executive’s dream note: it doesn’t require any knowledge of the craft of storytelling, and you won’t get fired for suggesting it. But let’s not mistake it for anything more. I don’t want my characters to be likable; I want them to be interesting. And if the characters, or the story around them, are interesting enough, it might even get me out of the house.

Protecting the throughline

The life of a screenwriter might seem like an enviable one, but really, it’s a thankless job. You’re generously compensated for your time, with a career that countless other writers are dying to achieve, and in theory, you’re in a position of enormous creative power: without you, there’s no movie. In practice, though, you’re boxed in by constraints on all sides. Your only tools are dialogue and structure, and maybe, if you believe William Goldman, it’s really just structure alone. You’ll get notes from every producer and executive in sight, few of whom are writers themselves, and if you can’t make the requested changes, you’ll be fired, even if it’s your own story. Even after all that, you’ll never get the credit you think you deserve: there simply aren’t any famous screenwriters, at least not to the extent that we reward actors and directors. (As John August says: “Your mom probably doesn’t know any screenwriters other than you.”) And although this state of affairs often leaves screenwriters cynical and bitter, it also clarifies your thinking enormously, like any work done under pressure, about what battles really count and what you can afford to let slide.

Even if you don’t need to worry about studio notes, you can still learn a lot from how screenwriters prioritize what to protect. What matters most is the throughline, which we can temporarily define, for the sake of convenience, as the core of the screenplay that a writer is ready to guard with his life. In the useful interview collection Tales From the Script, the screenwriter Joe Forte says:

People want to change scenes or dialogue. You work with that. But the thing that I try to influence is theme, that emotional throughline. That’s what the movie’s about…It orients everything. It’s the registration mark that goes through your movie. And if you can bring people back to that, that’s why you try to stay involved as much as you can—or are allowed to be.

Elsewhere, while discussing the production of the movie Maverick in his wonderful book Which Lie Did I Tell?, William Goldman calls it the spine:

I must explain that I am willing and happy to do any changes here because I am not threatened by anything that’s happening—nothing is altering the spine of the movie…I get very crazy if you mess with the spine. Otherwise I am totally supportive.

So what is the throughline, really? You can think of it, if you like, as the theme or emotional heart of the story, but that’s a little vague, and if nothing else, the throughline needs to be clear, if only so you have a vivid sense of what you’re trying to preserve. To paraphrase David Mamet in On Directing Film—which, as I’ve said many times before, is the best book on storytelling I’ve ever read—the throughline is the essential problem, with a definite end, that occupies the protagonist through the climax of the movie. The castle needs to be taken; the princess has to be rescued; the hero is desperate to get money or respect or physical safety. He or she pursues this objective through a series of logical steps, and when the objective has been achieved, or our protagonist has failed spectacularly, the story is over. That’s really it. Theme, emotion, character, and suspense are all precipitates of that clean, well-defined progression, and without it, the story will just sort of lie there, no matter how good the writing is. And that’s why the throughline needs to be protected above all else.

This is as much true for novelists, who tend to work in solitude, as for screenwriters operating under the scrutiny of a bevy of producers. Novelists may not be getting notes from a dozen different studio executives, but as the rewrites and discarded drafts pile up, it can be just as easy to lose sight of the central thread of the narrative. By the time you hit the fifth or sixth draft, or the fiftieth, you run the risk of focusing on side issues while forgetting what the story is really about. You don’t need to share this information with anyone else, particularly with your readers, and if asked, you might want to maintain a discreet silence. But it’s essential that you at least be able to explain the throughline to yourself, because it’s the only thing that will carry you through the ups and downs, both internal and external, that any writing project has to survive. Because in the end, as Mamet points out so beautifully, the throughline is nothing less than a metaphor for the act of writing itself:

It’s not up to you to say whether the movie is going to be “good” or “bad”; it’s only up to you to do your job as well as you can, and when you’re done, then you can go home. This is exactly the same principle as the throughline. Do your specific task, work until it’s done, and then stop.

A word of caution from Paul Schrader

Occasionally people ask me about whether they should get involved in screenwriting or filmmaking. I usually say, “If you can find any happiness or satisfaction in another field of endeavor, you should do so, because the real reason to get involved in the arts is because you have no choice—you have issues that you need to address through fantasy and fiction.” That said, there is also a very commercial incentive for being in the arts, but I’ve never really given that too much thought, because that was never my intent. I got involved as a form of self-therapy, and I stay in it that way.

—Paul Schrader, in Tales From the Script

“I wish my job was being a bricklayer”

Everyone’s like, “Oh, you have a cushy life—you just sit around and write.” I’m like, “No, it’s actually really hard.” As I like to say, I wish that my job was being a bricklayer—because I would lay the bricks, the wall would be built, and that would be it. Nobody could deny that it’s a fucking brick wall. Nobody’s gonna come along and say, “Mmm, I think that brick should be over here.”

—Guinevere Turner, in Tales From the Script

Frank Darabont tells it like it is

If your colleagues have respect for you and recognize your value, then you’re gonna be treated great. And if they don’t, you’re gonna be treated like shit. I’ve been treated both ways. We all have. I am somewhat of the Zen opinion that you endure the one and appreciate the other. The potential for the crap that a screenwriter has to endure never goes away. No matter what your level is, no matter what your reputation is, no matter what your credibility is, no matter what the work is that you’ve done, the potential for being treated as an afterthought—if you’re a screenwriter—is always present.

—Frank Darabont, in Tales From the Script

Mark Rosenthal on breaking into screenwriting

I always get in trouble when I say this: I believe there is no great screenplay that hasn’t at least been optioned. I believe there is no great screenplay that doesn’t get the writer into the business. Most screenplays are mediocre or just okay. Really great writing always, always gets noticed in Hollywood. When I hear someone say, “It’s who you know,” or “I couldn’t get it to the right agent,” that is the consolation of failure. When it really works, it might not get made, because you need a Jupiter effect of a perfect director and a perfect actor—but if the writing is great, you always get into the game.

—Mark Rosenthal, in Tales From the Script