Today’s article taught me a tremendous lesson about creating memorable main characters.
Genre: Article – Drama/Crime
Premise: Covers the unique job of Gary Johnson, a Houston cop who specializes in going undercover as a hit man to entrap murders-for-hire.
About: This article, which was written all the way back in 2001, was snatched up by indie super-director, Richard Linklater, who cast Glen Powell hot off the success of Top Gun: Maverick. He went and made the movie, which just premiered at Toronto Film Festival, and sold to Netflix for 20 million bucks, the biggest acquisition deal of the year. Linklater read the article all the way back in 2001 but couldn’t find an angle for it. It wasn’t until longtime collaborator Glen Powell came along (the two have worked together on three projects) that a movie emerged, as Powell zoomed in on the final three paragraphs of the article, which focused on a female client who wants to kill her boyfriend.
Writer: Skip Hollandsworth – article; Glen Powell and Richard Linklater – script
Details: about 4000 words
I’ve said it once. I’ll say it again a million times.
One of your primary jobs as a screenwriter is to look for stories that have a familiar element, then spin that element in a slightly different direction.
I’m not using the word “slightly” frivolously. That’s an important part of the equation. If you attempt to spin the familiar element too aggressively, it becomes unfamiliar, and audiences can’t connect with it.
Get Out spun a familiar setup – “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” – into a horror movie. Easy to understand. Beau is Afraid is a horror movie told through the lens of extreme anxiety. Nobody understood it.
Then you have the opposite mistake, where there’s no spin at all. That’s when you get movies like Blue Beetle. The exact same superhero origin story we’ve seen a million times already and, by the way, it involves a power suit that, literally, every superhero wears now.
We’ve seen a million versions of hit men. So it was a smart idea to flip that and say, “What if the hit man wasn’t really a hit man? What if he was a cop pretending to be a hit man in order to capture bad people trying to murder others?”
That’s a great starting point for a movie.
The article, appropriately titled, “Hit Man,” isn’t so much a story as it is a summary of the unique life of Gary Johnson. Johnson wanted to work in psychology but when he moved to Houston, he didn’t get his dream job. So he took some psych-adjacent work at a local Houston police office and stumbled backwards into his first murder-for-hire plot. A woman wanted to off her husband because he had taken to complaining too much about her spending. When a friend alerted the police, they threw Johnson into the fake hit man job simply because they had no one else.
Johnson went in with preconceived notions that he was going to have to put on some elaborate fake persona but the reality was the woman just wanted someone to hear what she was going through. Johnson listened, he secured the money for the hit, and the wife was immediately arrested.
Word spread that Johnson had an effective unassuming way about him that got people to open up, a crucial component to convicting these criminals, since you needed them to say, “I want to kill my spouse” for the arrest to hold up in court. So began a strange illustrious career of Johnson going on three hundred murder-for-hire calls in the span of 20 years.
The only call that went sideways was when a woman wanted her abusive boyfriend killed and when Johnson looked into her claim, he learned that the guy was, indeed, abusive. So he decided to help her instead of incriminating her. Which is the kernel of the story that seems to have inspired the movie.
I went into this article expecting to talk about concept. But the biggest thing that came out of it for me was the second paragraph. Here it is…
The man lives alone with his two cats. Every morning, he pads barefoot into the kitchen to feed his cats, then he steps out the back door to feed the goldfish that live in a small pond. He takes a few minutes to tend to his garden, which is filled with caladiums and lilies, gardenias and wisteria, a Japanese plum tree, and rare green roses. Sometimes the man sits silently on a little bench by the goldfish pond, next to a small sculpture of a Balinese dancer. He breathes in and out, calming his mind. Or he goes back inside his house, where he sits in his recliner in the living room and reads. He reads Shakespeare, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and Gandhi. He even keeps a book of Gandhi’s quotations on his coffee table. One of his favorites is “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”
The reason this paragraph spoke to me is because, in the last four screenplays I read, I didn’t have any feel at all for the main character. I knew, generally, who they were. But I didn’t *know* know. It’s hard to write a good story if the reader doesn’t have an innate feel for who your hero is.
The primary reason this happens in a screenplay is the writer’s reluctance to add detail. Threre’s a distinct lack of detail in the character’s appearance (an athletic frame tells a completely different story about a person than an obese frame). But, more specifically, there’s a lack of detail in their everyday life. As I read this second paragraph, I was overwhelmed by how quickly I knew this person. The fact that he has two animals he takes care of. The fact that he has this small pond with goldfish that he feeds every morning. That he tends to his garden. The fact that he meditates. Then he reads.
This morning routine tells us SO MUCH ABOUT Johnson. Just the fact that he has a morning routine and doesn’t wing it, tells us that he’s responsible. That he takes care of multiple animals tells us he’s loving. Meditation tells us he values giving time to himself. Reading Carl Jung and Gandhi tells us that he’s an intelligent man.
I probably know this character better in 10 lines than I do any character I’ve seen in the last 20 movies, despite spending two hours with each of them.
The next thing that caught my eye was this paragraph describing Johnson:
In law enforcement circles, he is considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, so talented that he can perform on any stage and with any kind of script. If he is meeting a client who lives in one of Houston’s more exclusive neighborhoods, he can put on the polished demeanor of a sleek, skilled assassin who will not sniff at a job for less than six figures. If he is meeting a client who lives in a working-class neighborhood, he can come across like a wily country boy, willing to whack anyone at any time for whatever money he can get.
In other words… ACTOR BAIT! This is one of things you should be looking for when reading an article or a short story that you’re considering turning into a screenplay. You’re looking for the kind of roles that actors would die to play. You should naturally extrapolate that out to the screenplays you write as well. Roles like this allow your main character to become different people which is the ultimate actor catnip.
I find it interesting that Linklater was unable to see the movie angle here. Because it’s pretty obvious. Here’s the last part of the article…
But not long ago Johnson did something out of character for him. He got a call about a young woman who had been spending mornings at a Starbucks in Houston’s Montrose area, talking to an employee there about the cruel way her boyfriend had been treating her. There was no way to escape him, she said. Her only hope was to find someone to kill him. She asked the Starbucks employee if he knew someone who could help. The employee called the police, who put him in touch with Johnson.
But before Johnson contacted her, he did some research into her case. He learned that she really was the victim of abuse, regularly battered by her boyfriend, too terrified to leave him because of her fear of what he might do if he found her.
This is what I call the “but then” hook. You don’t have a movie unless you have a “but then.” Of course it’s going to be fun to watch this police detective inhabit various costumes as he impersonates a hit man. Sooner or later, though, something needs to occur that gives us a plot for our movie! That’s the “but then.” “But then” this woman comes along who it turns out ACTUALLY NEEDS A HIT MAN. Cause her boyfriend is dangerous.
Now you can start to play with narratives, such as, does Johnson become romantically entangled with this girl when he starts to protect her? And who is this boyfriend? Is he a nuisance? Or is he connected to a more dangerous, potentially criminal, network? In which case, is Johnson now in over his head? Now you’ve got a movie.
Finally, when you’re looking for movies that don’t exist in the bigger flashier genres that keep Hollywood afloat (Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Action, Horror, Adventure), there must be the threat of death. You need those LITERAL life-or-death stakes. Cause you’re not giving us any flashy special effects to look at. You’re not scaring us to death. You’re not wowing us with your bottomless imagination. So you need to have the highest stakes possible. People hiring people for murder is a life-or-death situation.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Give your main character a morning routine and make it as specific as possible. This morning routine doesn’t have to be in your script. But you at least need to write it out for yourself. Because one of the most telling parts of who someone is, is what they do when they wake up. Do they go on a five mile run? Do they go order 5 sausage and egg McGriddles from McDonald’s? Do they tend their garden? Do they go straight to social media? Do they have an elaborate half-an-hour skin care routine? Note how each of the things I just listed paints a different kind of character. You can create that same effect when describing your own character’s morning routine.
