Wednesday 24 July 2013

On Black List 3.0 evaluations

I've been at screenwriting a long time, but always feared stepping into the arena, exposing myself to criticism, afraid I have no talent for writing despite some rewarding but all-too scarce evidence to the contrary.

But fortune increasingly favours the bold (which is ironic given that so many writers are anything but).  As I've got older, I've come to realise that this is what I care about beyond all the imagined trappings.  This is my geekery, in the same way others' is crochet, libraries, IT. This is what I do. This is who I am

And I couldn't hold off anymore.  The fear of not knowing begins to outweigh the fear of being shot down. I need to know if I have what Americans call "game".  If the dream is a pipe one or if maybe, just maybe, I have a chance to do what I love and make some kind of living from it. 

"All I offer is the truth. Nothing more."

The Black List 3.0 doesn't claim to make writers; it simply offers them exposure.  That's all well and good, but saying we go in with no hopes or expectations would be disingenuous.  There are three distinct layers of hope:
  • An industry pro likes your work.  They won't rep you, but tell you to keep at it.  This would have been enough for me.  I wouldn't have booked my plane ticket, but it's progress. Minimal validation, to be sure, but as all writers know, we'll take what we can get.
  • Someone likes your work and offers to rep you.  It's still not plane ticket time, but it's a step up. A toe-hold on the battlements.
  • Someone likes your work, wants to rep you and thinks they can sell the script. I'd argue it's Sky-Scanner time, even if only from idle curiosity about how much a flight to LA actually costs.
Everything beyond that is the preserve of Variety, THR and our own fever-dreams.  I'd be lying if I said I hadn't though about it, and so would you. 

But there are safeguards; the reader.  Like Agents of The Matrix, they are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys.  They are the system.  If your script is downloadable it will still be available to the right people, but these are busy folk; they live on recommendations.  If readers don't like the work and rate it accordingly, your chances plummet.

Last week I uploaded my screenplay for feedback on the Black List 3.0.  This morning, I got that feedback.

The results were not what I expected, or hoped for.  Now I have to deal with that.

I think ten years ago I would have thrown a hissy-fit. There would have been anger.  Bitterness.  A resort to the kind of tactical self-denial seen on screenwriting message boards across the world. It's better than X, and that got made. It's a conspiracy. It's not what you know, it's who.

I have no anger. Only determination.

The reader did his/her job.  There's no malice in their words.  I'm upset, I'm gutted and I've only just stopped shaking, but the classic screenwriter's retort that "they don't understand my work" is self-serving and of no practical use.  Our job is to make them understand our work.  If we can't do that, we've fallen at the first hurdle.

I lie beneath that hurdle with bloody knees and hurdle-grade plastic wedged into my balls.

There are positives to be taken.  The words "throwback" and "fun" were used.  The feedback also makes some decent points that I can address in the rewrite, not the least of which is that this reads like an R-rated movie, and would likely make less money as a result.  That's not going to encourage any studio to say yes. We tend to forget this when writing for ourselves, but it's important to understand the realities of the marketplace, the milieu into which scripts are being plunged.  The fact is that right now, studios want PG-13 content, and despite a multitude of 2+ hour blockbusters, 117 pages is now considered a hair too long.

The evaluation also raises some points I believe are misguided.  I won't go into them because no matter how eloquent one thinks one is, a point by point rebuttal of that nature can only ever come across as bitter and angry.

Perhaps it all comes down to sensibility.  I believe I know what I've written and why I've written it.  The reader fundamentally disagrees. I think the rating is harsh in the context of the fairly mild criticism levelled at it.  (There was nothing like "you can't write, please stop giving us your money", but perhaps they're just humouring me.)  Like any artist, I'll defend some of my choices to the hilt, but the fact remains; we have to make them understand, and bawling isn't the way to do it.

Above all this illustrates how switched on we have to be to break in.  I brought what I thought was my A game, and it wasn't enough.

What we as amateurs have to be careful of is swinging with the wind, simply changing everything somebody doesn't like; if reader A loves your characters and reader B hates them, which way do you swing?

You swing your way.

When you've reached a point where multiple readers address the same concerns, when the general consensus is that you are wrong, or where the studio has notes (this can be the same thing as scenarios one and two)... fine.  It may never be easy but it's common sense.  Compromise is inevitable in even the least collaborative of artistic media, and film is probably the most.

But before all of that, you have to write for you.  From you.  Or you are lost.

Be guided, be mindful of and serious about others' opinions, but first and foremost, write for you.  Just know that in one of creativity's most cruelly sadistic paradoxes, doing so may mean that you labour without reward, without recognition.  If you can reach even grudging acceptance of that, you're going to be a whole lot better off.

So where do I go from here?

I re-read the coverage and it's like looking at the last letter from an ex.  The one that finally confirms what you always feared; this is definitively over.  Your heart races every time you look, even though you know what it says so well you could read it in your sleep.  Still, you hope the words have changed. 

They haven't.

But this is not over. From here I go backwards.  And forwards.  Already rewriting. To truly know if these problems are not the result of a sensibility mismatch, I'm going to have to pay for another evaluation.  It's the only way to be... sure?  Maybe not.  But more sure.

This has been a "no".  But it only takes one "yes".

Friday 19 July 2013

Superman Unmade #3: Superman Reborn (Take 3B)


Here there be spoilers.

This is more an incremental post, dealing with relatively minor revisions in the second (known) draft of Gregory Poirier's Superman Reborn. I'll try not to repeat myself, analysis of the first draft is here.

Who wrote it?
Gregory Poirier - credited on (amongst others) The Lion King 2, A Sound of Thunder and National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

When was it written?
This draft is dated 20.12.95, eight days after the last.

How long is it?
119 pages (down from 122 for the first)

What's the broad structure?
Act 1 = 1-27
Act 2a = 28-57
Act 2b = 58-98
Act 3 = 99-119

What's the context?
This is the second of three drafts Poirier wrote for producer Jon Peters, and it's a little tighter. There's no indication of why it was so hot on the heels of the first draft.  Perhaps the studio wanted a polish before Hollywood shut down for Christmas.

What's changed (and works better)?
  • There's a better sense of Brainiac's physical deterioration.  Nobody is allowed to look at him, not even his alien slaves.
  • Clark's state of mind is explained a little better; his sense of feeling homesick but with no home to go back to.  It's just that this doesn't feel very much like the Superman we've known up to this point.  He grew up in Smallville; surely if anywhere is home, it's there?
  • Superman's Sisyphean task is outlined better. He spends most of his day fighting for others, but the more he does, the worse things seem to get.  I understand Kevin Smith's argument that Superman is about hope, but sometimes to get to the hope, one has to endure despair.
  • There's more subtext between Clark and Lois; when he asks her what she'd do if Superman decided to move on, he's actually telling us he's tired, that he's thinking about doing so.
  • The civil servants of Metropolis no longer conspire to steal Superman's body (a scene in the first draft has them attempt an autopsy and fail miserably).  Instead, Lois sneaks into the tomb behind Brainiac's minions only for them all to discover the body is gone.  This also draws Brainiac's attention to her for the first time.
  • Brainiac's recruitment of Silver Banshee and Parasite is made marginally more interesting; he's curious as to why not everyone is out searching for the body, and charges them with marshaling the dregs to do so.
  • One of the major issues around Brainiac is also addressed; he's a genocidal maniac, a genius, a telepath, a telekinetic, and practically a god.  Why doesn't he go search for the damned body himself?  It turns out he can't, as Earth's atmosphere speeds his decay.  Without Kryptonian DNA he's too vulnerable.  It doesn't exactly plug the plot hole as much as whack a plaster on it, but it's an effort.
  • Superman is careful not to fatally injure the cops under Silver Banshee's command, as they aren't responsible for their actions.  Which is mighty nice of him.
  • Parasite now comes after the infiltrators in the tunnels, which makes far more sense than sending Doomsday, who in the initial draft... gets stuck.
  • Lois tells Clark he was the one she really missed, not Superman.  In the first draft, she admits this to an empty room.  In the second, it's moved up and done face to face, giving Clark a much more powerful reason to consider quitting the cape once and for all after Brainiac is defeated.
  • No rod through the brain for Brainiac, which is a step down on the brutality scale.  He's still genetically dismembered though.

What's changed (and still doesn't work?)
  • Batman's dialogue is gone, but his cameo remains, and is still completely redundant.
  • Silver Banshee's super-cheesy introduction has vanished.  The male models and death-sex are gone.  Unfortunately almost everything else about her remains.  She just doesn't fit.
  • Poirier addresses a major plot hole; if Brainiac destroyed Krypton, he must have acquired Kryptonian DNA already.  So why does he need Superman's?  Unfortunately it's fudged with some nonsense about Brainiac not having perfected his DNA harvesting technique when he destroyed Krypton.
  • Silver Banshee frees the prison population to hunt for the body.  This would be a nice idea if she didn't advertise it as a chance to win their freedom... something she just gave them for nothing.
  • Phin-Yar is explained a bit more, just not necessarily any better.  Superman's powers will come back when he remembers why he belongs here.  But if this is the case, his powers would have begun to wane even before he died.  Setting this up earlier as the reason he loses to Doomsday would have been at least consistent.  Ultimately Phin-Yar still comes across as a lot of sub-Star Wars new age mumbo-jumbo.  And I like mumbo-jumbo.
  • In this draft it's the army (not a band of Daily Planet reporters) who are planning to attack Brainiac's ship through the sewers.  The General in charge owes Lois a favour, so she and Jimmy get to go along.  Unfortunately this idea is somehow even dumber than the first.  I'd buy vigilante reporters over a high-ranking officer allowing reporters to tag along on a secret military incursion into the heart of an alien star ship.
  • Brainiac is now destroying one building every hour until the body is delivered, but this doesn't heighten the tension any.  We know the whole city, if not the whole planet, is to be destroyed anyway, so it raises no tension at all.  Eradicating large portions of the city's populace is also counter-productive to the search.
  • Parasite's aversion to feeding off the sick is better explained, in order to set up his leeching from Superman in the final act.  The denouement still doesn't make much sense, though, because up until that point Parasite hasn't been particularly discerning.  He's harvested the energy of hundreds of people.  This sets up the psychological damage carrying all these voices is doing to him, (something which is never paid off) but it's never established that he's leeching ailments until near the end of Act 2.  Are we seriously supposed to believe nobody he'd absorbed before that point had something wrong with them?  Even if we assume so, there's a huge logical disconnect between a brain condition like epilepsy and alien radiation poisoning.  I just didn't buy it.

Conclusion
There's only so much anyone can do in eight days.  These are incremental changes which do slightly improve the story; less dumb stuff happens in slightly less dumb ways.  However, the storyline is still unwieldy, with far too many deep problems to address in a polish.  It would take Poirier another two months to address some of these when he turned in his third draft.

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(All sources have been linked to except the script: if you are the creator or originator of any material you feel has been misappropriated, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct the problem.) 

Tuesday 16 July 2013

Superman Unmade #3: Superman Reborn (Take 3A)


Here there be spoilers.

"If there are any movies we kept looking to over and over again in relationship to this, it's Star Wars and The Lion King." - Jonathan Lemkin on his draft of Superman Reborn.

First things first, I implore you to check out Film Crit Hulk's incredibly detailed story autopsy on Man of Steel.  He talks a lot of sense, and whether you agree with him or not, it's a worthwhile read for anyone interested in story mechanics, and specifically the story mechanics of Superman.  It's a long read, and the all-caps doesn't help, but hey, that's Hulk.

Who wrote it?
Gregory Poirier - credited on (amongst others) The Lion King 2, A Sound of Thunder and National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

When was it written?
This draft is dated 12.12.95

How long is it?
122 pages

What's the broad structure?
Act 1 = 1-27
Act 2a = 28-57
Act 2b = 58-98
Act 3 = 99-122

What's the context?
Having tossed aside Jonathan Lemkin's take (allegedly for its thematic similarities to Batman Forever) Warner kept faith with Jon Peters to oversee the project.  He hired his Rosewood screenwriter Gregory Poirier, a 1990 Nicholl Fellowship semi-finalist, to pen the new draft.  Poirier seems to have written at least three drafts which have surfaced.

Why didn't it happen?
One man brought Superman Reborn down.  Kevin Smith, writer/director of Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy, was at Warners for meetings with top brass over potential rewrite projects.  Asked to assess the Poirier script (which draft isn't clear), Smith told them he hated it, calling it "The Batman TV show version of a Superman movie."  (2:08 on the video).
Eventually sat down with Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, head of production at Warner, Smith was handed the keys and told to go off in a new direction.

The Script
It's really tough to know where to start with Poirier's Superman Reborn, the last script to bear that title before the long-gestating project became Superman Lives.
Reading all three drafts illuminates plenty about the art, purpose and practicalities of rewriting to accommodate producer and studio notes.  The second draft is dated just 8 days after this one, while the third and final (that we know of) is dated three months later, and clearly reflects the extra time allowed to polish and refine it.  Ultimately, I decided that to maintain the structure of these pieces it would be better to address them all as different scripts.

So who's our protagonist?
Superman, silly. ;o)

What does Superman want at the start of the story?
He wants to belong.
This, once again, is a Superman for the '90s.  An alien, feeling outcast and ostracised on Earth, and flirting with therapy.  He doesn't feel this is his home, but knows he has nowhere else to go.  In keeping with the previous drafts, there's a huge hole in his relationship with Lois, but here it appears to be less formally defined.  They are clearly in love, but they're not "together" per se.

What happens next?
The alien tyrant Brainiac arrives, looking for Kryptonian DNA to stabilise his genetic structure.  Roaming the galaxy absorbing the DNA of other races, and destroying their worlds in the process, Brainiac's physical condition is slowly deterioriating as his genetic accumulations refuse to gel.
Brainiac unleashes Doomsday, an unstoppable monster with Kryptonite for blood, who kills the Man of Steel.  But Doomsday forgets to bring back the body, and it subsequently goes missing, so Brainiac turns to two Earthly accomplices, Silver Banshee and Parasite, for help.  Enveloping Metropolis in an energy field to prevent removal of the body, Brainiac demands its delivery within 48 hours, or he will destroy the city with his annihilator.

Somewhere deep under water, another alien, called Cadmus, has the body on a slab, and is busy putting his own plans for it into action when Superman unexpectedly wakes up...

Does Superman resolve his conflict, and if so, how?
When Superman awakens, his powers have vanished.  Learning from Cadmus that his abilities actually derive from a Kryptonian martial discipline known as Phin-Yar (though this is never really explained), Superman is forced to confront the notion that they have disappeared because, essentially, he doesn't want them anymore.  Faced with the prospect of a normal life, he still feels duty-bound to save the city, and begins breaking Brainiac's hold by using a mechanical suit which replicates all his old powers.  But as the suit begins to fail, and the countdown to Metropolis' destruction ticks away, he is forced to confront his feelings of isolation and loneliness, and accept that Metropolis is where he belongs.  In turn, he discovers that the city appreciates him after all, and slowly regains his powers just in time for a final showdown with Brainiac.

What works?
  • Clark as alien, and alienated.  He's reaching a point in his life where, as a normal human male, he's expected to be thinking about settling down, having kids, and setting up the second act of his life.  Instead he's running around dealing with everyone else's problems, and his career is at risk as his distraction manifests itself.  He generally feels like he doesn't belong.  This is a far stronger position for the character than either of the last two scripts because he wants something, even if he's not sure what that is.  Kevin Smith has gone on the record with his annoyance at this; "Superman’s angst is not that he doesn’t want to be Superman. If he has any (angst), it’s that he can’t do it all; he can’t do enough and save everyone... Batman is about angst; Superman is about hope. It's not enough to make him want to quit being Superman; it's enough to make the guy stay up at night so he's out doing shit constantly.”  Ultimately, this comes down to whether one's view of the character is immutable, which I sense Smith's is.  I certainly don't feel there's anything wrong in exploring his sense of alienation if it means getting to the hope in the end.  That's his arc.
  • Cadmus is not a bad character, he's just completely derivative.  He's been chasing Brainiac for hundreds of years so this is personal for him.  He's Obi-Wan Kenobi crossed with Han Solo.  Old and wise, but street-smart, cynical and not interested in taking anyone else's shit.  He is, however, so derivative that there's really only one way his story can end.
  • Lois and Clark; there's a bitter-sweet angle to their relationship.  This is a friendship that could once have been something more, but whose time seems to have passed.  Once again, Clark's potential as "Mr Right Now" is highlighted in stark contrast to the pedestal-dwelling Superman.
  • Poirier actually tries to give us what I wanted from the Bates/Jones draft; a tough protagonist's decision in the 2nd act.  Clark is torn between abandoning his life as Superman, and ensuring the safety of Metropolis.  If the suit works well enough, he could walk away when Brainiac is defeated and live a normal life.  Ultimately, he remembers who he is and why he does what he does.  Once he realises that, we suspect he would carry on even if he had to use the suit for the rest of his life.  It's the decision, the intention and the will that help make him Superman, not just the powers.  It's this that treads the same ground as Batman Forever, far more so than Lemkin's draft.  Will the hero choose to forsake his alter-ego for the sake of a normal life?
  • A ticking time bomb.  48 hours to bring Brainiac Superman's body, or Metropolis is razed.  That's a decent, driving incentive for Acts 2 and 3.  The watch countdown motif is dumb but effective.  Why Brainiac suddenly downgrades from planet-popping to mere city-razing is another question entirely.
  • The Super-suit.  Just.  It feels like it was designed to sell toys, but crucially, the suit serves a useful narrative function; with it, a powerless Superman can still be Superman.  It's not perfect, but it gives him a means to continue being useful during Act 2, and helps drive his arc by enabling him to consider how he can save the world AND think about walking away from it.  It also works because it doesn't work; it replicates his powers but can wig out at any point, which at least makes it dramatically interesting.
  • Superman gets to see his own funeral.  Carillean technology allows Cadmus to record the final days of a planet for holographic playback, and so Superman can witness his own burial, see the outpouring of grief, and starts to realise that perhaps he is appreciated here after all.  As motivations go, it's pretty on the nose, but effective.
  • Kryptonite.  Again, it's given more to do than the usual "hang around and make like a green rock".  Yes, the idea of Doomsday having Kryptonite blood is dumb, but it's actually one of the least offensive dumb ideas here.
What doesn't work?
  • Poirier's draft takes Jonathan Lemkin's assertion that Superman is like Batman crossed with Star Wars and runs with it.  Very, very far.  The first scenes are of a princess being kidnapped and forced to watch her planet destroyed by a super-weapon.
  • Far, far too many antagonists.  Once again we have the curse of the comic book movie; a hilariously illogical alliance of villains.  Reborn almost simultaneously sounds the same notes as Batman & Robin:
    • The Brute, crudely adapted from an era-defining villain - Bane/Doomsday.  Grown in a lab with Kryptonite for blood to do one thing; kill Superman.  However, he is later seen off by Lois jamming a knife under his fingernail, and is ultimately killed by… falling rubble.  Doomsday was never exactly a rounded character, but he's little more than a device here, and once he's served that purpose there's nothing for him to do.  He makes Schumacher's version of Bane look almost reverential.
    • The Femme Fatale - Poison Ivy/Silver Banshee. Silver Banshee (a Scotswoman who says "me" instead of "my") has a retinue of male models who laze around her apartment 90% naked, steal diamonds for her, and are routinely dispatched post-coitus by the effects of her magical voice-box. If that sounds like something you'd want to see, I can only assume you are Joel Schumacher.
    • The Accidental Supervillain - Mr. Freeze/Parasite.  Who knew a lab fire could turn a guy purple and enable him to harvest the life-force from anyone he touches?  Parasite also serves as the comic relief; except there's little comedy and next to no relief.  There may well be a place for him in a Superman movie one day, but there are roughly a dozen better antagonists to get through first.

  • The Batman cameo.  The Dark Knight pops up at Superman's funeral to say a few words.  Five, to be exact.  He then vanishes, ignoring the force-field surrounding the city, and apparently dismissing this most inter-galactic of crimes.  We can only assume that Metropolite problems aren't in his job description.  The point is, if you're going to have Batman pop up, have him do something useful.  Will he splinter the focus of the story?  Of course he will. So why is he here?
  • Superman as Rocky Balboa.  We already established that Cadmus is basically Obi-Wan Solo, but come the second act, he's become Mickey Goldmill and Mr. Miyagi too.  For Superman, act 2 is basically motivational psychology and training montages.  Speaking of which…
  • Phin-Yar.  The Kryptonian martial discipline is a means of dramatising Superman's struggle to unite his heart, body and mind.  It's the external goal of getting his powers back twinned with the internal goal of accepting himself and his place in the universe, but it's hard to argue with Kevin Smith's assertion that this displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Superman mythos.  It's part The Force, part self-help, part Sun Tzu.  At one point Cadmus tells him to "think about why you lost your powers.  What are you supposed to learn from it?" and my eyes rolled so far back in my head I almost lost them for good.
  • RET-CON ALERT!  It turns out that Brainiac destroyed Krypton.  Because landing in Metropolis Central Park, unleashing Doomsday to kill Superman and threatening to destroy his adopted city clearly hasn't made things personal enough.  Not only that, but through Cadmus' Carillean technology, Superman gets to witness the moment his parents packed him off in the life-pod as Krypton came crashing down around them.  There are just so many holes in this version of events that to pick at them would be the very definition of fish in a barrel.
  • Jimmy Olsen plays a fairly prominent role, but in this continuity he's moved into TV, and it's done nothing for him.  Frankly, he comes across as a bit of a douche.
  • The "MTV Generation" again.  At one point Jimmy and Lois spill out of a chase into a basement rave, described as "MTV's Grind inhabited by sexy zombies".  Yes, SEXY Zombies.  Presumably they try to mate with you before/after/whilst eating your brains.  Poirier at least seems to be playing it for satire, hence the entirely straight-faced line "Blend in, we'll be okay."  
  • Lois "listens to THRASHING ALTERNATIVE music like Green Day or Alanis Morrisette."  That sentence pretty much satirises itself.
  • Superman's magic glasses.  Not only do they appear and disappear at will, they make the wearer look 50% frumpier.  Lois puts them on, and is shocked when she looks at herself in the mirror and thinks she's seeing another woman.  This is actually a great idea for a revelatory scene, but... MAGIC GLASSES.  There's no explanation of how they work.  There's no deeper thinking.  They just are.
  • A ticking time bomb.  We already covered this in things that work, but come the third act, it ceases to work at all.  By page 109, Brainiac knows Superman is alive, and his location.  In fact, Brainiac has everything he wants on board his ship.  Why doesn't he destroy Metropolis at this point?  Take off, obliterate the planet from orbit.  Job done.  Needless to say, he doesn't.
  • Superman kills.  I don't have a problem with him using necessary force if there's no other way.  If that means he has to kill, so be it.  Others will argue that it's Superman's very resistance to killing that makes him interesting.  But here, he never explores options other than killing to win.  I wasn't at all upset by him breaking General Zod's neck because it was clear that Zod could be neither captured nor pacified; the same goes for the Zod in Superman II.  There's no such groundwork laid here, so it feels like killing for the sake of it.  There are four antagonists, and he brings not a single one in alive.
Conclusion
We're waaaaay outside the Chris Reeve era here, but this is no reboot.  We're mid-continuity, with established characters and paradigms of a franchise in need of complete recasting.  Now, we tend to think of every change in principle cast as being a cue to reboot.  But back in 1995, Bond had changed (often), Batman had changed, and nobody started again... the films simply carried on.  Why not Superman?

In 2013, it's easy to wonder why these unmade scripts kept falling in between stools, but at this point the reboot hadn't even been invented yet.  There weren't so many sequels back then that the notion of starting from scratch was even viable.  Now, almost twenty years later, even successful franchises are due a reset.  Consider Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy; it's because of the success of his vision that Batman is going to end up rebooted.  Nobody is going to want to play in Nolan's universe, in his timeline, with new actors.  The result will be another reset, and likely another origin story.

It's not at all hard to see why all involved thought Poirier's Superman Reborn needed more work, at the very least.  It's a mish-mash of basically sound narrative technique with some truly horrible ideas.  It fails on too many levels, skirting Batman & Robin awfulness whilst never, thankfully, descending into the seventh level of camp that film occupies.  It's big, it's bloated, it would have cost a bomb, and with a multitude of narrative and logical disconnects at play, it doesn't actually make much sense.

That said, it'll be interesting to examine what, exactly, Poirier changed in the next draft.  What problems had he, Peters and Warner Bros. identified and how did they go about dealing with them?  In Hollywood, it's very easy to throw writers from the train and get someone else in; Poirier at least got three shots at hitting whatever target Peters and Warners were pointing him at.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating (where Man of Steel is a 10): 5  Comparatively little preventable destruction (even though he doesn't ever try to divert Doomsday away from populated areas), but Superman is directly responsible for at least two deaths, and there are two more he could, perhaps should, have prevented.

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(All sources have been linked to except the script: if you happen to be the creator or originator of any materials you feel have been misappropriated, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct the problem.) 

Wednesday 10 July 2013

Thoughts on Protagonism

In the previous posts about unmade Superman projects, I didn't wrestle with the notion of protagonism enough, or correctly.  I've been thinking about it since immediately after they went up.

I concentrated too much on my faulty understanding of what a protagonist does (i.e. their function in the story) and ignored what they are (i.e. the story as a means of exploring them).  That's not a good way to think when you're trying to develop character-driven stories.  It's mechanistic.  I'm not even sure it's an easy mistake to make, as it's rather a fundamental misunderstanding.

The word Protagonist comes from the Greek Protos, meaning "first in importance" and Agonistes, meaning "actor".

Who is first in importance in this story?

Whose story is this?
The protagonist is the character in whose story (whether that involves a dramatic arc or not) we need to be invested.  It doesn't necessarily follow that this character has to be the one behind the inciting incident (hence my mistake in attributing Brainiac, Morpheus and Delia as the protagonists).  

But it DOES follow that their inner/outer turmoil in dealing with the inciting incident and how it changes their world should drive the story forward.

Reframed in the correct context, Superman is clearly the protagonist of both the scripts we've looked at.  The villains are the antagonists.  The inciting incident is, well, incidental (at least to this argument).

I'm not going to go back and change the posts, as it's a learning experience and I've got to cop to my mistakes.  I will put a link to this post in though, for posterity, so you'll all know I've changed my ways. ;0)

Monday 1 July 2013

Superman Unmade #2: Superman Reborn (Take 2)


Here there be spoilers.


Confronted by aliens who manifest physical projections of his darkest fears, Superman is killed in battle.  Transcending his body, he is reborn as Lois Lane’s son and raised in the sewers by a rag-tag band of mutants and freaks.  As Metropolis is torn apart by fear and chaos, the reborn and rapidly maturing Boy of Steel must find a way to emerge from hiding and preserve his father’s legacy.

Who wrote it?
Jonathan Lemkin, credited writer on Lethal Weapon 4, The Devil’s Advocate, Shooter and Red Planet.

When was it written?
This draft is dated 24.3.95.

How long is it?
58 pages (scanned from hard-copy).

What's the broad structure?
Act 1: pages 1-25
Act 2a: pages 26-58

What's the context?
With Superman back in Warners’ hands after buying out the Salkinds, the studio put Jon Peters to work on the franchise, confident his experience herding Tim Burton’s Batman to the screen would pay off for them again.  Peters hired Jonathan Lemkin to write the first draft.  

Lemkin goes on the record in David Hughes’s The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made

I think, based on the action of Lethal Weapon 4, some of the more supernatural elements of Devil’s Advocate and the fantasy elements of Demolition Man, everyone felt comfortable with going forward with me as the writer of Superman Reborn”.

There’s a curious cyclicity to the whole business.  Movies take a long time to make.  Scripts can be in development for years before even pre-production starts.  Curiously, Lethal Weapon 4, which Lemkin cites as one of the reasons he got the Superman job, wasn’t released until more than 3 years after this was written.  It was also, famously, rushed into production with no finalised script, allegedly because Warner Bros. had a Krypton-sized hole in their 1998 release schedule caused by the implosion of… Superman Lives, which Superman Reborn had evolved into.

Why didn't it happen?
Lemkin cites the similarities in theme and tone to Batman Forever as the reason Warners decided not to press ahead with his script.  Peters hired Gregory Poirier for a page one rewrite.

The Script
To call this script bat-shit crazy does bat-shit crazy a disservice.

Let's not kid ourselves; similarities between this and Batman Forever are not the reason it didn’t get made.  Yes, they touch on some of the some themes, but the underlying reasons it never went further are much, much more obvious.  Lemkin says that his only briefs were to write a great film, and to reinvent Superman for the MTV generation.
 
Lord knows what Jon Peters thought of the MTV generation.

Lemkin was also, allegedly, bound by the commercial realities of Hollywood film-making.  In this case, the deals which can be made with toy companies to off-set the huge production and marketing costs inherent in blockbuster film-making.

“This is a huge corporate asset, and if you look at the marketing that can come from this, it’s phenomenal. So they’re being very careful with what we do.”

Apparently there’s a word for the suitability of a film to be turned into toys.  Toyetic.

Superman Reborn is not toyetic.

It is not a script for a family movie.  In fact it opens with the legend: “No one is here to save you anymore”.  Can you see that plastered all over little Johnny’s Christmas morning prezzies?  The notion of toy companies merchandising a film which involves the death of the entire principle cast in the first 20 minutes, murder, rape, orgies and general chaos as society collapses in on itself is… a stretch, to say the least.  It’s not impossible that it was those companies who nixed this, having first look rights under their merchandising deal.

So who's our protagonist?
Once again, it’s not Superman, but two transient alien energy beings able to assume human form: Morpheus and Delia.  Their origin is never explained.  I haven’t been able to find a trace of them in the Superman mythos so it seems they were Lemkin’s original creations.  Without their arrival, smashing to earth inside a meteorite, the story doesn’t happen.
*For updated thoughts on protagonism, see my new post*

What does our protagonist want at the start of the story?
 
They’re tricksters; their aim is not just to conquer but to toy with worlds, to destroy champions, wreck the planet, feed on the fear and chaos they generate, and move on.

What does Superman want at the start of the story?
Once again, he’s doing fine.  But much like the previous script, Lois is unhappy, unable to see them ever settling down and having a normal life.  In short, she wants out.

What happens next?
Interrupted mid break-up, Superman goes into battle with a being formed from his darkest fears, the final iteration of which is a giant Kryptonite being.  With the Man of Steel six feet under, Morpheus and Delia set about creating chaos.  But Superman’s spirit has undergone some kind of transference, impregnating Lois with his child, which comes to term in a single week.  She and Jimmy Olsen are killed protecting the baby, who is taken in by Harry Cadamus, a 120 year old geneticist living underground in a hidden community of mutants he helped engineer.  The boy, whom he names Miles McGee, continues ageing rapidly, growing to the age of 11 in a week.  But the older he gets, the quicker his powers develop, and the more curious he becomes about who he is and where he came from…

Does he resolve his conflict, and if so, how?
If we ascribe Kal-El’s conflicts to his son, given that he is essentially Superman resurrected…  It’s still tough to say, as there's only half a script.  What we do know is that it's about hope versus fear.  The internal goal is represented externally by Morpheus’ visual readouts, which document the city’s levels of hope versus fear like some kind of emotional stat bar.  Every night, fear wins.  But every morning, people wake with the hope of a new day and better day.  Morpheus is infuriated by this; what does it take to break these people?  It’s a little on the nose, but not ineffective.

So let’s extrapolate, given what we know and where the arcs start.  Given that the film is about hope versus fear, and Superman’s fear is what ultimately destroyed him, I don’t think it’s outrageous to postulate that it’s Miles’ faith in himself that allows him to triumph.  Are we sure he wins?  No.  But given that this script was designed to breathe life into the character on screen and resurrect the franchise, it’s a fairly safe bet.  It’ll be Miles' ability to push through his fear in a way his father couldn’t which will ultimately be Metropolis’ salvation.  It's hinted that he's also able to manifest his own thoughts physically, so this would probably have had a part to play in the final confrontation.

In a similar vein, humanity’s arc, from a society molly-coddled by the presence of a living God upon whom it relies for salvation, could end in a new-found heroism amongst the civilian populace.  It’s hinted at earlier, but I’d expect to see it ratcheted up in the final act as both Superman and Metropolis face their fears, bring down Morpheus and restore hope for the future.

What works?
  • It’s a good story, essentially Batman with Superpowers.  Miles’ parents are murdered, and he grows up in a world racked by fear and chaos, a metaphorical darkness, only to emerge from that to avenge them.  The themes are timeless; fear versus hope.  The absence of a father and the appearance of a new father figure are very much in keeping with previous iterations of the character.
  • Kryptonite.  Instead of an inert rock, it’s used sparingly, given form and purpose; the Kryptonite monster which manifests itself from Superman’s darkest fears is a proactive use of the classic Superman storytelling crutch.
  • As much as certain aspects of the original Superman’s portrayal jar (see “what doesn’t work”, there’s an interesting concept underlying them.  Superman here is, as Morpheus points out, “a hero with a logical appreciation of his own shortcomings.”  We’re starting to move towards a more sophisticated, nuanced psychology of the superhero.  A man with doubts like any other.  In this case “what if something else is stronger?”
  • In keeping with this, Superman’s strength makes the monster stronger.  This idea was also explored a little at the end of the 1992 script.  When someone is as strong as Superman, how do you develop drama?  By turning that strength against him.  He can’t outmuscle it, so what does he do?
  • The infamous life-force transference.  I never had a problem with it.  If we’re going to suspend our disbelief enough to believe that a baby can travel billions of miles from an alien world, and then do all the stuff he can do… who’s to say how he procreates?  “The son becomes the father, and the father the son.”
  • As much as the script dwells on hopelessness, there is a message of hope in there.  “It’s good to be tough, it’s not good to be hard”.
  • 20 years before Batman Begins, Lemkin asks; what if the presence of your hero created your villains?  He also asks whether Superman’s presence has actually retarded humanity’s growth.  Doesn’t the presence of a god encourage us not to rely on ourselves, to expect to be saved?  It’s hard to know if he more deeply explored the implications of this in the second half.
  • Morpheus is pretty funny, and not altogether detestable because of it.  It’s easy to imagine Jim Carrey pulling the role off in his sleep, but The Riddler was also a manic trickster, and that’s one of the things here that isn’t all that far removed from Batman Forever.
What doesn't work?
  • Superman’s strength makes the monster stronger.  I know, we’ve been here in “things that worked”, right?  But having set up this interesting action dynamic, Lemkin squanders it by having him… outmuscle it anyway, pulling its head off and hurling it down the street.  (Man Of Steel haters take note; it could have been much worse.)  Having established an obstacle, Lemkin conveniently does away with it as soon as the monster has done its job, which is to usher out the established cinematic Superman on a gurney.
  • That death is a little perfunctory.  It takes only five pages to detail a battle that kills a being as powerful as Superman.  Go big or go home.
  • Morpheus wants to rule.  He states that he needs 80,000-100,000 minds enslaved to match Superman’s power… But he and Delia just killed Superman, the most powerful being on the planet by some stretch.  So what’s the end game?  The villains’ motivations aren’t outlined very well.  “To rule” seems a pretty amorphous goal.
  • Superman is not the Superman we’re familiar with.  Morpheus describes him as cold-hearted, hopeless and faithless.  It plays up the alien aspect.  This is partially the tack that Goyer and Nolan have hung Man Of Steel on, but that’s a reboot.  Here, Superman is essentially mid-continuity; established in the world, working at The Daily Planet, in a relationship with Lois.  To paint this Superman as lacking faith, hope, and warmth would have been utterly jarring, because Reeve’s Superman is anything but.  Conversely, Morpheus also refers to those dregs of humanity who power him in the same terms.  They can’t both be true.
  • The whole “MTV generation” vibe.  It's 1995, and Superman isn't cool anymore.  That means no cheesiness.  Only dark, grungy heroes need apply.  Our new Superman grows up in a sewer.  This emotional aesthetic seems to translate not only into a rumination on despair and hopelessness, but incredible amounts of sex, swearing and violence.  We’ve got more decapitations than Sleepy Hollow, skeletons being pulled out, head-shots, rape, hand-jobs, child-porn palaces, smashing a 9 year old with a pipe… and worst of all, Techno.  It’s almost Dickensian in its grimness, like Lemkin was daring Warners to fire him by writing something so outrageous it would never get past this draft.  Yes, it sets the scene and establishes the stakes, but this is a Superman movie.  It's too much.
  • Meta-references.  My biggest issue with the whole thing.  Superman comic books exist in the Superman universe.  That’s useful as a device to inculcate Miles into the lore surrounding his father, but also show how humanity has abandoned its adoration of Superman.  Trouble is, it’s nothing some discarded newspapers and memorabilia couldn’t have done.  Similarly, Cadamus refers to “Ma and Pa Kent” like it’s common knowledge the couple raised him.  It doesn’t work.  It’s confusing and bizarre, the story-telling equivalent of the ’92 script’s wink to camera.

Conclusion
It’s strange that only half of Lemkin's script has ever shown up.  Was there every any more?  If there is a second half, why has it never surfaced?  It stops right in the middle of page 58 with a CUT TO, so it doesn’t look like someone just lopped it off at the end of an arbitrary page.  The script came to light as part of the deposition in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, wherein several unmade Superman scripts were produced to show the company’s continual investment in kick-starting the franchise. 

Given this context it’s hard to believe the second half wouldn’t have been part of the deposition.  Did Lemkin never finish?  If not, why not?  Did the toy companies nix it?  Did the notoriously mercurial Peters change his mind?

As much as it pisses on the movie continuity, there’s no doubt that the first 58 pages of Superman Reborn work as a story; just not necessarily a Superman story.  If you thought the Bates/Jones/Salkind draft read a little Elseworlds, this’ll blow your hair off.  The only thing I can think of to compare it to in that context is Frank Miller’s draft for the aborted Batman: Year One.  The one where Alfred is a black guy called “Little Al” and the Batmobile is a Lincoln Continental.  Superman Reborn looks over that script’s remolding of the basic story and sneers at it for not going far enough.  It’s so different I couldn’t imagine it ever getting made, but perhaps it’s very value lies in its reimagining of the basics.

Like the previous draft, Superman Reborn pre-supposes the existence of galactic cultures outside of Krypton and Earth, not to mention the existence of earthly mutants and the underground world they live in.  In that, it too feels more like the comics than the previous movies.  But it too has the same issue of jarring with those movies.  Regardless of age and accidents, the original cast could conceivably have started this story (the script mentions that Jimmy has now aged and has a family), but it’s hard to imagine them intending to invite Christopher Reeve back for what amounts to a 15 minute cameo before offing him.  By the same token, which actor would settle for being the new Superman all of 15 minutes before handing the mantle over to a series of kids and someone who passes as 21?  It’s not a hard reboot, so it’s tough to imagine anyone else in these roles.  It’s a hand-off movie, but it's so tonally inconsistent with the previous films that the only continuity would be the actors.  Once again, it falls between stools.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating (where Man of Steel is a 10):
3 – A fair amount of property damage which Superman does nothing to try and prevent by removing the dream creature from Metropolis.  Having said that, he’s a little busy getting his arse kicked.  Property damage isn't the first thing on his mind, frankly.  It's hard to say where it all goes from there...

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(All sources have been linked to except the script: if you happen to be the creator or originator of any materials you feel have been misappropriated, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct the problem.)