Write what you know...

[carebear]

...but what if you don't know anything?

I'm continually amazed at the writers of movies and television. They continually use as characters ostensibly the kind of people I've spent most of my life with and they continually get it wrong. Book authors have similar problems but most seem a little more willing to do actual research. TV and movie writers sometimes appear to do their research just by watching other TV shows and movies.

I'm not sure if it is because they grew up in cities, have never seen an unlandscaped tree and got their degrees in writing and only know other people like themselves, but their characters just don't seem to know the basics of anything. They may have one "Army vet" or something who actually knows how to walk and chew gum at the same time (though they usually get the details wrong) but that person is presented as an aberration. Everyone else is a babe in the woods, including the characters who grew up in the woods.

In zombie movies they write in the present day yet have their characters utterly unfamiliar with the concept of zombies. People know murders have occurred and then hear bumps in the night and instead of arming themselves or even getting a flashlight they just trot on out and wander around in the dark. Supposedly trained police officers and military panic and run at the first sign of danger and no civilian knows how to fight and win.

Why are so many writer's characters so fundamentally useless and ignorant of basic life skills? Look at just this forum. There's multitudes of us who can do all sorts of things. In the town thread, between us, we could actually build the dang thing from the ground up. Why can't the show writers grant their casts the same competence?

I'm no superman but I can build a still, repair a motor, use a compass, fashion an emergency NBC shelter, perform basic first aid, ad nauseum. I've read up on irrigation and basic animal husbandry, I've cut down trees with an axe and bucksaw. Most of my friends and acquaintances have similar skill and knowledge sets, and we live in a city. Heck, as a Cub Scout I learned more than most of the characters on TV seem to know.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Helplessness and ignorance are apparently reserved for fictional characters in movies.

 

[Lincsong]

Perhaps they aren't getting consultants to the show who actually deal with the plot and storyline of the shows. Say, for instance you have a show about police work, hospitals etc. if would be most reasonable to actually have some doctors, surgeons, officers who come in, read the script and give critiques.:eusa_doh:

 

[BegintheBeguine]

My favorite adult beverage

How did zombies start moving like a speeded-up silent film Keystone Kop? What th'? Don't the writers know the basic rule?: "Are they slow-moving, Chief? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up."

 

[carebear]

I don't mind "fast zombies". It's the idea that, unlike you me and everyone else in the real world, characters who are ostensibly in "the real world" have never seen "Night of the Living Dead" or even read anything about voodoo.

I don't believe in evil magical creatures but if shambling leprous humanoids ever start attacking and eating people alive in front of me I am going to think, "huh, might be zombies" and waste no time or ammo making body shots, I'm going to shoot them in the head until it's proven they aren't. They quack like a duck after all.

Similarly, I don't believe in vampires or werewolves or aliens, but if bodies ever turn up around town with characteristic damage, I might modify what I carry around everyday. I'm not going to be the guy who disbelieves his own eyes and dies, that's just stupid and unrealistic. I've heard of them and "better safe than sorry", it's just being reasonable.

If I ever fill a guy in a mask full of lead and he then gets back up? I'm knocking him down again and this time cutting off his head. Nothing's happier without a head.

Why can't fictional characters be at least as smart as me?

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

That's why they call it Tinsle Town.

That's Hollywood for ya.
They even make something as gruesome and hideous as murder investigations look cool and sexy with shows like CSI.
Now to the point that there has been a huge increase in the number of young college age women that are now studying to become crime scene investigators.
But once the grim reality of that line of work hits home, I believe many of the candidates will opt out.

 

[carebear]

Perhaps they aren't getting consultants to the show who actually deal with the plot and storyline of the shows. Say, for instance you have a show about police work, hospitals etc. if would be most reasonable to actually have some doctors, surgeons, officers who come in, read the script and give critiques.:eusa_doh:

It isn't even not having consultants. Why don't the writers know the basics out of their own experience? Continually characters do things no thinking person would do, or they don't know enough to get out of the rain. How can anyone (the writers) be so apparently sheltered from real life that they don't know how real people act and react?

They project their own ignorance and ineptitude onto characters whose real life counterparts would respond quite differently (and usually more effectively). I understand it would tend to make many stories, as written nowadays, shorter but why can't they work on coming up with truly difficult problems rather than just dumbing down the protagonists?

I can only assume they don't actually know how competent people would react and so don't recognize how weak their protagonists are.

But I can't believe that, because now they actually mock the stupid choices (don't split up, don't go down the stairs et.) in movies but have characters make them anyway.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, to comment on the original question I'd suggest that during the Golden Era, scripts tended to be written by people who came out of a fairly broad range of experience before they landed in Hollywood -- you had burned-out novelists, hard-boiled reporters, Broadway wiseguys, ex-vaudevillians who had travelled all over the world, in other words people who had *been around*. Nowadays, you have to go to college to learn to be a screenwriter -- and while you might learn a lot of film theory and technique, four years of sitting in a classroom doesn't exactly give one a broadly-based life experience from which to draw one's stories.

Although one *might* meet a few zombies there.

 

[carebear]

Well, to comment on the original question I'd suggest that during the Golden Era, scripts tended to be written by people who came out of a fairly broad range of experience before they landed in Hollywood -- you had burned-out novelists, hard-boiled reporters, Broadway wiseguys, ex-vaudevillians who had travelled all over the world, in other words people who had *been around*. Nowadays, you have to go to college to learn to be a screenwriter -- and while you might learn a lot of film theory and technique, four years of sitting in a classroom doesn't exactly give one a broadly-based life experience from which to draw one's stories.

Although one *might* meet a few zombies there.

Hungry zombies.... very few braiiiiiiiiins around. lol

That makes sense. I guess that's part of my frustration. There are characters in movies that are obviously supposed to be a loose type of "me" or people I know, but they are written with such a broad and inaccurate stereotype it's almost insulting. When you are rooting for the badguy because the protagonists are too dumb to live, there's a writing disconnect.

Reading that, it sounds awfully arrogant, but please.

 

[carebear]

In a more positive vein, movies don't have to be "realistic" just somewhat reasonable within their own reality.

The odds of someone going to Vienna and getting caught up in a faked death and black market conspiracy are low, but the character who was caught on fairly realistically and started putting the pieces together. It had nothing to do with his job (nowadays they would have made him an "ex-cop" or something, G-d forbid you or I be able to deduce anything without special training), it was just something any reasonably competent person could do.

I kind of liked Anthony Hopkins character in "The Edge". He didn't really know how to do anything (like the magnetized needle), but he'd read a book once and had decent recall so he put it together. That was refreshing even if the details were fuzzy.

In North by Northwest, DOA and others the protagonists were more or less "everymen" but they muddled through, by and large making decent choices and having the general ability to do what they needed to do. They were generally competent and so the writer had to come up with (non-supernatural) difficult situations they really had to work to extricate themselves from.

 

[Feraud]

The bottom line is most regular folk are much smarter than your average Hollywood screenwriter!!
Did you ever go to a horror film at a theater? People constantly scream, "don't go in there", "aim for the head", "he is not dead yet", etc.
We all know exactly what is coming and how the picture will end. This is why most Hollywood films are garbage. The gems are few and far in between.
What scriptwriters in Hollywood will not do is be creative or intelligent in their writing. They justify their lazy, conformist scripts by saying we would not want a movie that makes us think.
Does anyone here really want to see another Rocky or Rambo film? Do we need to see Will Smith in Bad Boys 3? Did they really remake a formulaic 80's cop show called Miami Vice into a feature film??
If I were not so optimistic I would think Hollywood thinks we are idiots.

 

[carebear]

The bottom line is most regular folk are much smarter than your average Hollywood screenwriter!!

Smarter might be harsh, I find it hard to believe any living creature could be as dumb as the movies they make. Ignorant of anything resembling useful knowledge though? Yes. I think Lizzie has it nailed. Much like journalists, screen writers know how to tell you things, they just don't (on the whole) seem to personally know anything about what they're saying.

What scriptwriters in Hollywood will not do is be creative or intelligent in their writing. They justify their lazy, conformist scripts by saying we would not want a movie that makes us think.

I'd be okay with not having to think. lol What I want is to not be forcibly removed from the experience by glaring acts of dumbness.

If I were not so optimistic I would think Hollywood thinks we are idiots.

We (the greater we) keep giving them money...

 

[Zemke Fan]

Not to defend the dolts...

But having spent approximately 4,000 hours (yes you heard me right) working on movie scripts over the last few years, I can tell you that telling a cogent story with one main plot and two or three interesting subplots, while developing deep and rich characters who speak as real people do without relying on cliches and echoing films of the past, all the while having to bend the story based on one or more executives "whim" is not just difficult, it's damn near impossible. If you complicate this by trying to write without sufficient life experience, the result will be the kinds of unsatisfying movies that we see year after year. How many scripts get written each year that are deserving of Oscar nominations for best original screenplay or best adapted? About 10. No more. Writing for the movies is the single most difficult, exasperating, and exhilarating thing I've ever done. Now if my agent would just sell one already!

 

[carebear]

Thanks Zemke, I was hoping someone with industry experience would look in.

I want to make it clear that I don't think I could necessarily write better characters (or I'd be doing it I guess) but when you can't relate to the "everyman" character (as opposed to the specialists) because they don't act like anybody you know, I think there's a problem.

I have read about the danger of making a protagonist an idealized version of the author. (there's a term for that right?) Sometimes it seems that, even if they lack some practical skills or knowledge, some writers go too far the other way and don't even think about what they, knowing what they know, might actually do in the situation they are creating.

In your experience do a lot of writers really not know anything about, say, wilderness skills? If so, are they projecting that lack on the audience? Extrapolating from themselves and their peers onto the larger society?

My dad brings up occasionally the old, purported New York Democrat quote of "I don't know how that man won, no one I know voted for him."

Is that part of it, not only personal knowledge limitations but also an insular worldview?

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

I think for the most part, they want the reader or viewer to get the idea that there are no real lifeness in the picture. Think about a soap opera, even if I haven't watched one. Or a person who's running from zombies. The viewer is thinking and saying things like, "what are you doing!? Why aren't you running!? Get away from there! Angelina should have married that nicer man, marrying that ignorant man to only to get her dvd collection back".

Having the characters being naive makes the viewer more entertained because it builds up the suspense or drama or comedy, etc. For every day lives, we'd use a compass if we were lost in a jungle or a forest. We'd use the wonderments of the constellations and the position of the sun. Tire tracks or moss. Things to keep up to survive. But the fictional but supposedly real characters don't have any clue what to do in those situations, just endlessly getting lost and just happened to stumble upon a forgotten civilization. It's all for your entertainment and to amuse you. Not for you to take advice from them. If there's a flesh eating zombie chasing after you, find a gun and shoot it between the temples!

 

[carebear]

I'd rather shoot the idiot who can't find their way out of the woods.

What I'd like to see is someone at least as smart/capable/whatever as me get out of a truly dicey situation. They SHOULD have a clue what to do. I typically do.

The African Queen - Bogey's capable and tough but he's almost outclassed by the sheer difficulty of the mission

Blackhawk Down - The Rangers and Delta are hyper-competent, but they make just a couple real (in this case) mistakes and are in a fight for their lives

North by Northwest - a regular joe, not an idiot or a fool, is suddenly faced with opposition he is neither trained nor ready for and survives and wins

That's what I want. Real suspense and drama, not pseudo-difficulties created and justified solely by contrived character flaws.

To depend on character's out and out incompetence and stupidity to create suspense is (in my opinion of course) a cop out. There's plenty of truly tough situations, real and fictional, out there to call on, if the writer could be bothered to know anything about them or even think about them a little.

If I can figure out a solution that only takes a few minutes and the characters can't, the writer isn't trying hard enough. He had all the time in the world before that movie or show hit the screen to look for easy outs and figure out a complication to prevent them.

 

[Twitch]

I have only written about WW 2, WW 2 air combat, air combat pre and post WW 2, and about the vehicles used. It's what I know so I won't be penning any harlequin romance novels any time soon

 

[TM]

Carebear,

It is important to remember who the intended audiance is for a film. Films such as The African Queen were intended for an adult audiance. The typical dumb horror film is intended for teenagers. And the purpose of those horror films is simply to give a cheep thrill. So it isn't necessary for Hollywood to invest in superior writing in those.

One could extend this comment to claim that Hollywood rarely invests in superior writing, period.

Tony

 

[carebear]

Carebear,

It is important to remember who the intended audiance is for a film. Films such as The African Queen were intended for an adult audiance. The typical dumb horror film is intended for teenagers. And the purpose of those horror films is simply to give a cheep thrill. So it isn't necessary for Hollywood to invest in superior writing in those.

One could extend this comment to claim that Hollywood rarely invests in superior writing, period.

Tony

Good point.

There are still "adult" characters out there in adult-targeted film and TV who display a lack of useful knowledge that their characters should have. I guess my initial assumption is more or less true. The people who write movies and such nowadays just plain don't know the basic things that most anyone who hasn't dedicated their life to being a screenwriter or director knows as a matter of course.

 

[John in Covina]

IIf I ever fill a guy in a mask full of lead and he then gets back up? I'm knocking him down again and this time cutting off his head. Nothing's happier without a head.

This is why I have a live blade Samurai sword, inspite of the firearms.

 

[John in Covina]

Huh?!!!

Why can't fictional characters be at least as smart as me?

You have superior training, rational thinking, the understanding of being prepared, and the desire to persue these things. Others live in a bubble as you have said and don't relate or recognise or really have a cognative relationship with the real world but are totally insulated from it. Let alone extreme circumstances.

"Don't go up there, the monster is up there!"

"I'm going up there!"

Well not with out weapons and a plan!!!!!:eusa_doh: