Has anyone in real life ever uttered any of these sentences?
“And your point is?”
“And you’re saying that because?”
“That went well.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“This is the part where you [leave, confess, whatever].”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“So that happened.”
“What part of [whatever] don’t you understand?”
(A tiny sample. It’s a growing list.)
Overexposure.
Even the most experienced writers fall prey to naked exposition. The line “We’ve been over this hundreds of times,” intended to take the hex off something the audience needs to know, must have been uttered hundreds of times in movies.
Needless narration.
Great narration is rare. ( “Badlands,” “Jules and Jim,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Double Indemnity,” “Out of the Past,” and the beginning of “Manhattan.”) A lot of bad narration is added in post, as a desperate measure to clarify the story, just as music is ordered to pump up lifeless scenes.
Bad behavior doesn’t need excuses.
We automatically root for someone who’s trying to accomplish something—from a bank heist to an assassination.
In “Psycho,” after Tony Perkins cleans up Janet Leigh’s murder, we’re totally with him as he waits for her car to sink below water level. In Ulu Grosbard’s great 70s noir, “Straight Time,” we get crazed when Dustin Hoffman stays too long while he’s robbing the jewelry store. Extreme case: in Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,” we’re waiting with child-molester Dylan Baker for the kid to eat the sandwich laced with sedative. We want the movie to go forward, and we know it can’t until this terrible thing happens.
The best way to kill a story.
Killing off the most entertaining character is a sure way to sink a movie. When Gregory Hines gets mauled to death in Michael Wadleigh’s “Wolfen,” a lot of the air goes out of the movie. (“The black guy gets killed off first” used to be an unwritten rule.)
To plot or not to plot.
“In the garden-variety novel,” said Norman Mailer, “the meaning of the action grows on every page.” Mailer was being faintly disparaging toward the form, as some people (a dwindling number) belittle the “well-made play.” (Jean-Luc Godard once called his ex-friend François Truffaut a “storyteller,” and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.)
Speaking on behalf of plots, E.M. Forster reversed the usual distinction between plot and story. “The king died and then the queen died,” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. In the garden-variety movie, actions have consequences.
Amoral plotting: In the 1988 movie, “Dominick and Eugene,” a young kid gets pushed down a flight of stairs to his death, just so Thomas Hulce can have an epiphany about how his father’s abuse led to his mental challenges.
Predictable?
Boy meets girl in a romantic comedy and at first they can’t stand each other. (“It’s best to begin with aversion,” as Oscar Wilde said, “since everything wears off eventually.”) Are boy and girl going to get together at the end? Of course. (Is Michael Corleone going to become a gangster like the rest of his family? It’s totally predictable, and it’s great. )
The gold standard is “Roman Holiday”—because they don’t get together in the end. And even that’s fairly predictable.
The one consistently predictable moment in movies is the last shot. The characters walk away from us down a street, the camera cranes up—what used to be known as a “coat-grabber.”
Some people like to guess what’s coming, other people go with the flow, still others couldn’t predict what’s going to happen if you held a gun to their heads. Like most things in life, it’s a bell curve.