One of my weaknesses when it comes to watching movies is I put almost the entire onus of whether a movie works or not on the screenplay. So if the screenplay fails to deliver, I’m let down. Whereas, the average moviegoer and a lot of you guys are better at taking in the entire experience of the movie. You’re moved by the imagery, the acting, the sound, the music. That creates a stronger impression on you than me, which is why I feel that there’s a disconnect between myself and audiences when it comes to movies like Dune.
Dune 2 looks absolutely epic. The costumes alone are some of the best I’ve ever seen for a sci-fi movie. But that first screenplay, man…. That screenplay was so slooooooooooooooooooooooow. And I just can’t get over that. That and the fact that the movie is 90% world-building and 10% story. Maybe the first film was solely a setup so that this second film could fly. But Blade Runner 2049 (also directed by Villeneuve) had pacing issues as well. So my assumption was that I was going to get more of that in Villeneuve’s latest which is why I didn’t spend 20 bucks on it.
It’s weird because I run into people who absolutely loved the first movie. I remember I was walking on Larchmont (a fun little community-driven street in Los Angeles) and I saw this guy with the Dune book in his hand. I asked him if he’d seen the movie and he couldn’t stop raving about it. His love for it was so infectious I decided not to share how I thought the government should consider offering the film as the definitive solution for sleep apnea. But it was just a reminder that I’m seeing this film differently from everyone else. I mean, the movie has amazing critic and audience scores.
Despite my disinterest in the franchise, I’m thrilled that Dune 2 made 81.5 million dollars, doubling what the first film made on its inaugural weekend. What that means is we’ll get more adult sci-fi. And more adult sci-fi is better than whatever the heck the last five Marvel movies have been.
Those of you who didn’t watch Dune 2 probably stayed home and watched the other big epic release this weekend, Shogun, on FX. Just like Dune, the critics are infatuated with it. And, although it’s too early to rely on the audience scores, they seem to love it as well.
I read about one-third of the famous novel that the show is based on a decade ago. It’s one of those novels, ironically, like Dune. It’s world-building after world-building. There’s more building in this thing than Manhattan and Dubai combined. So it’s slow-going. What surprised me about the pilot episode was how quickly it brought me back to the novel. When a big scene popped up, it was as if I was right there in the book again. That’s how true it was to the novel.
The show also achieves something that’s critical to any show working – which is to get a lead actor that, whenever he’s onscreen, it’s impossible to look away. The second Cosmo Jarvis, who plays the lead character, John Blackthorne, showed up (he was being held in an underground prison with his fellow sailors) I was laser-focused on him. His eyes are mesmerizing. But he also has a really unique voice. Hey, maybe I’m better at focusing on the stuff outside screenwriting than I thought! Actually, hold tight, cause we’re going to get to the writing.
Here’s where I’m worried.
In a lot of ways, these new giant TV shows have become modern day “movies.” They may not have the presence of a feature film. But their longevity gives them a heavier weight when it’s all said and done. And therein lies the unique challenge of writing these series. They mimic movies with their sequential storytelling, but do so over a much longer period of time, which requires a much higher level of skill than the feature screenwriter.
I mean imagine writing an Avatar movie compared to writing eight seasons of Westworld. Which one do you think is harder?
Westworld by far. Which is why it fell apart and why a lot of these shows fall apart. They require a level of writing that only a few people in the world are capable of delivering. I don’t know a whole lot about Justin Marks, who created this series, but I do know that he wrote one of the worst screenplays of all time. That would be 2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.
This is where things get tricky because there’s this entire sub-level ecosystem when it comes to the screenwriting industry that makes it hard to know who’s responsible for what and how much they’re responsible. I’ll never forget when this producer who gave me too many extremely specific details for him to be lying, laid out why the credited screenwriter of Groundhog Day, Danny Rubin, was only responsible for the unreadable early drafts of the script, which is why you never heard from the guy again.
My point is, Justin Marks may not be responsible for how bad Chun-Li was. Maybe it was even worse and he made it “readable.” But even with that, his IMDB page doesn’t get my samurai sword extended, so to speak. He has The Jungle Book, Counterpart, and a ‘story by’ credit on Top Gun: Maverick. That last one is obviously huge. But Top Gun is a 180 degrees different universe than Shogun.
But the big thing that tweaked me was Marks hiring his wife, Rachel Kondo, to co-write and run the series. Rachel Kondo has zero writing credits. We all know how big nepotism is in this town. But this is one of the most outrageous examples of it I’ve ever seen. Would Marks have hired Kondo, someone with zero writing credits, to help him write a 300 million dollars show if she WASN’T his wife? I’ll let all of you guys answer that one. If you’re truly invested in creating the best series possible, you need people who have done this before.
Why am I bringing this up when the first episode was a solid 7 out of 10? Because, to me, this is why shows like this fall apart all the time. Cause the people writing them don’t have the developed skill to write a long-running complex series. Westworld is one of the best examples of this ever. And that had two pretty big names running it itself (ironically, another husband and wife team, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy). I saw the wheels falling off the writing for that in the fifth episode. And every episode got worse from there. And that’s because it was this big giant story and the writers didn’t have the talent to visualize it and tell it.
This all stems from this new hybrid form of storytelling that streamers have created which is the “never-ending movie.” It used to be it didn’t matter that TV shows didn’t end because they were episodic. Each episode was contained to a murder or a group of people in an apartment yukking it up. But now, with the story continuing, you need to realllllllyyyyyy understand what you’re doing as a storyteller to make a story last 40-50 hours. The last show I can think of that achieved this was Breaking Bad. No show has done it since.
Maybe there’s a bit of a defense mechanism going on with me here. I’m saying this so that I won’t be hurt, once again, when Shogun gets sloppy in episode 5 and starts dovetailing. But it’s really a bigger issue. We’ve created this new TV genre that we don’t know how to wrangle. It’s the world’s biggest bucking bronco and no writer knows how to stay on it. Does that mean that it’s impossible to write these long-form movies? Should we even try since 95% of them fail?
The solution may be to do what Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder did. Just write one contained season of a show (The Curse). It starts and finishes within eight hours. Even THAT’S really freaking hard to do, though. It’s harder than writing a traditional feature. But it’s certainly easier than writing a 50 hour movie when you’ve only got 8 hours of story in your head and a history of average creative choices on your IMDB page. Give me The Mare of Easttown. One great season and you’re out. Or The Bear. Keep your episodes short so you don’t have to tell as much story. And focus more on the characters than some giant plot the writer can’t keep up with.
What are your thoughts on Dune 2 and Shogun? Did either of them blow you away? If so, put me in my place!
