Wesley Rowe: Proactive Protagonists

Of all the notes a screenwriter can receive from a reader, one deserves a special, more fiery and rusty-nail-pierced coffin in hell: "The protagonist needs to be more proactive." I have seen it applied to nearly every genre, and it is almost never the story's actual problem. I think it's worth discussing here, though, because the issue of proactiveness reveals so much about who we are and what draws us to be writers and readers in the first place.

It is one of the most jarring of all notes, in large part because it sounds like such an all-encompassing, page-one rewrite sort of criticism. It is also one of the most frustrating because, while the reader may have found a flaw that needs to be addressed, he probably doesn't have even the foggiest notion of what the real problem is. It immediately puts you on the defensive and tempts you to debate story principles instead of critiquing your story.

A quick dissection of Back to the Future, for example, might help your case: It features a protagonist who sighs a lot at how lame his family is, listens to endless exposition by super-chatty dog lover Doc Brown, flees from terrorists in the only vehicle available, and finds himself the victim of a vicious case of oedipal trouble. Actually making this argument to defend yourself would be a mistake, though, because it will prevent your reader from teasing out the underlying problem.

Instead, probe your reader about the major beats of the story and whether each one "worked" for him or her. This simple, vague question focuses the reader not only on her response to particular story beats, but on her expectations for those beats. When you find the emotional spine of your story and get the pieces of the story integrated with its genre, the passive character complaint will hopefully drop away.

One of my favorite horror characters is the teenage boy in The Hills Have Eyes (both Wes Craven's original and the remake). He is the only character with direct evidence that something dangerous lurks, yet he fails to tell anyone about the slaughtered dog. Whether his motive is fear or denial is never explained, yet the behavior is frustratingly human. Similarly, Marty McFly's perspective of teenage repression, and his exasperated inability to even find a ride to the lake for a night of romance, is identifiable to anyone who ever felt oppressed by the limitations of youth. His eventual triumph -- fixing his family -- is really the fulfillment of a collective wish that we could control the things beyond our control.

We live from one decision to the next, and so generally do our heroes. What makes drama or comedy captivating is the uniquely realized relationship between the circumstances and the character. Monster protagonist Aileen Wuornos' turn toward serial killing starts with a violent but nonetheless passive case of self-defense. Another protagonist, such as in Thelma & Louise, might have stopped after the first murder.

Readers, along with the rest of us, are cut from the same cloth as the prototypical hero of the Hero's Journey story archetype. Even when "called to action" on page 12, we keep looking for an easier path until page 25 or 30. Even then, we have to be chased into action by an old Volkswagen van bristling with terrorists. We only start to take the reins when the stakes have raised to a point that we will be destroyed if we don't forge ahead. If only we could find a way every day be the daring Hero of the third act Confrontation! But I usually feel like I'm muddling through an endless series of second-act complications.

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Wesley Rowe, a freelance writer and independent producer, draws upon work experience ranging from, more recently, creative executive positions at two studio-based production companies, to, in his youth, designing mechanical parts for an NASA satellite that tested Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He lives in L.A.

Wesley Rowe: The Common Touch

It has been argued by various teachers -- convincingly, I think -- that students stand to learn more from the failures in their chosen art field than the successes. The best failures to learn from are your own, and writing teachers -- from actual instructors to the members of a writers group or just interested friends -- can provide you with very useful critique of the mechanics of your work.

But it's a truism in Hollywood that commerce comes before art. If you want to make money as a screenwriter, you must learn not only what interests people very much like yourself, but the vast swath of America (and the world) that is not. As helpful as these "instructors" can be, their very interest in your screenplay makes them highly unlikely to have tastes in line with the "bubba factor" -- masses that must turn out in droves to a Hollywood movie for it to be profitable. In this regard, people like you don’t have much more insight than you, though they may be able to inform you that the general audience wants or needs you to "keep it simple, stupid (KISS)."

While you can't reach 100 million bubbas on the phone, they have a highly evolved method of communicating their loves, wishes, disappointments and appetites. No, not voting on American Idol. Box-office data. Movie tastes are tallied in dollars.

So, which box-office lessons offer the best instruction on Wide America? The answer is different for everyone. The failure with the most to teach you is the one you didn't see coming or, even better, the one whose box-office failure you still can't fathom. Conversely, the success of a movie you loathe can show you a lot about your blind spots as an aspiring writer.

Even though each individual's tastes are different -- and you, Dear Reader, are the absolutely unique snowflake your mom has told you over and over that you are -- I can make a few educated guesses about what movies might teach you a lesson. You are, after all, a film buff. And the very definition of a movie that film buffs love but bubbas don't is the "cult classic."

The classic I'll pick this time is The Big Lebowski. It only made $17.4 million in the U.S., and about half that internationally. And it must not have wholly satisfied those people who saw it, reflected in its 37% drop in box office from the first weekend in release to the second. Yet your interest in screenwriting makes you quite likely, in my experience, to rank it among your top 5 or 10 comedies of all time, and you probably own a copy. This is the kind of disconnect between student and bubba that is instructive. Lebowski is a big blind spot for me (I own a copy), but I'll give you my most objective effort at gleaning lessons (spoilers!):

1. Don't do drugs. People in big, coastal cities tend to overestimate the "drug tolerance" of people everywhere else. Harold & Kumar smoked a lot of pot in New Jersey to the tune of a very Lebowski-like $18 million. Half Baked did the same.
2. Don't kill the one character in the movie who absolutely doesn't deserve it, and certainly don't do it near the end. It leaves a bad taste.
3. Don't leave a lot of fat in the second act. The thing with the private detective in a VW bug was funny, but probably asked too much of attention spans.
4. Don't go watch the movie again until you get to the end of the list.
5. Don't build a third act from a series of anti-climaxes. The Dude's "big realization" leaves him with no one to pursue. He and Walter brawl with the red herring (the Nihilists), and then the funeral home, and the funeral, and finally the last scene at the bowling alley, but it's not the tournament we've been hearing so much about ...
6. But that's what happens when the movie's main inspiration is The Big Sleep, which is legendary for its anarchy and lack of cohesion. Best to avoid that, too.
7. Bubba probably hasn't seen The Big Sleep.
8. Don't expect a broad audience to dig the resonance between the anticlimactic ending and your theme of nihilism. Corollary: use language everyone understands.

Please critique or rage in the comments section. Or drop a suggestion for other movies that bear such discussion, and maybe we'll get to them in a future episode.
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Wesley Rowe, a freelance writer and independent producer, draws upon work experience ranging from, more recently, creative executive positions at two studio-based production companies, to, in his youth, designing mechanical parts for an NASA satellite that tested Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He lives in L.A.