Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

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Solitary Consignment: A Christmas Story

December 16, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Movies, it should come as no surprise to learn, were an absolutely critical part of my formative experience.  It wasn’t merely that my first exposure to them was during the wondrous Lucas/Spielberg heyday of the early eighties; no, we didn’t have a VCR in the household till the very end of that decade (like color TV, they were deemed by my parents to be “just a fad”), so seeing a movie meant going to the movies.  To this day, the very whiff of butter-steeped popcorn time-shifts me back to those magical days, like one that occurred precisely twenty-five years ago, when a little Christmas-themed film with absolutely no brand awareness or marquee stars whatsoever created an unforeseen sensation—it was the must-see movie of the season, and I was eager to oblige.

The perfect occasion to do so arose on one of those barren Saturday afternoons in New York—too cold to be outside for any length of time, too hard to hear yourself think over the hiss of the monolithic prewar radiator.  Well, it would’ve been perfect, anyway, if not for one small hiccup:  Nobody was around to join me.  I called everyone in the Rolodex (and that isn’t just an archaic figure of speech—these were the days of actual Rolodexes), but came up empty.  Where the hell was everybody?

There was no real precedent for this scenario.  There’d always been someone around to meet on short notice—that was the benefit of living in a building full of young families, after all.  Hell, my best friend, Chip, lived one flight below us, and was always available to team up to save the world with me by way of a spirited (read:  profane), two-player game of Contra.  But, not that afternoon.

My problems, it seemed, were rapidly compounding:  What was I going to do for the rest of the day?  Go to the movies by myself?  It was really only through pure desperation, having exhausted every other avenue, that I finally asked, “Why not?”

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Signals in the Noise: Finding Meaning through Storytelling

November 17, 2015 / / 6 Comments

It’s a strange thing, really, as anyone who knew me way back when can attest, that I now find myself in the predominantly solitary profession known as novelist.

Now, I don’t think any of them would find it the least bit surprising that I’m a creative, it’s only that I preferred to exercise my creativity as an agent of fellowship:  I was the kid who organized weekend games of “Christopher Columbus,” a large-scale, rough-and-tumble variant of hide-and-seek played on the streets of New York (its origins, so far as I know, derive from an obscure teen comedy from the eighties that I haven’t watched since, on the hunch that it’s likely better off remembered than revisited); I hosted annual “murder parties” along with my best friend, Chip, inspired by our love for Clue:  The Movie; and in senior year of high school, we enlisted half the neighborhood in a quixotic production of Lost Boys II, a handmade, feature-length sequel to one of our favorite horror films, itself a kind of ode to teamwork, that we shot on a state-of-the-art VHS-C camcorder.  To this day, I think we did a reasonably credible job of passing off the Bronx as Santa Cruz:  The Palisades along the Hudson River doubled for the coastal cliffs of the Pacific, and a cavernous subbasement I’d discovered beneath a 1970s luxury high-rise served as the vampires’ cave—not a bad bit of on-the-cheap production value, if I do say so!  (The acting and cinematography, on the other hand, from the limited footage that still actually exists, seem somewhat… unpolished.)

In retrospect, the Lost Boys project probably represents an inexorable turning point in my life:  Not only had I finally found a creative outlet that felt like a natural fit (after guitar lessons didn’t pan out and my enthusiasm for comic-book illustration somewhat outweighed my talent for it), but filmmaking would allow me and my friends to do something truly special—make movies!—and, more importantly, to do it together.  Of all the arts, this one embodied the spirit of fellowship I so cherished like none other.  It became one of the great loves of my life, and an obsessive—even tumultuous—twenty-year affair with it ensued.

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Pop-Culture Digest: Musings on Annalise Keating, Postnarrativity, and “Twilight”

October 13, 2015 / / 14 Comments

Readers of this blog (I trust I’m not being quixotically presumptuous by my use of the plural form) have come to expect in-depth, long-form essays here, but today I’d like to try something different:  I thought I’d offer brief commentary on three unrelated pop-cultural developments that are directly relevant to articles I posted this past summer.

 

MURDER!

In my analysis of the first season of How to Get Away with Murder, I concluded by asserting that series creator Peter Nowalk left himself little choice but to reconfigure protagonist Annalise Keating’s psychological profile (yet again) on account of how carelessly he exhausted her backstory in the initial fifteen-episode run.  And, boy, he did not waste any time proving me correct.

Right in the season premiere, we learned (via one of several clunky pieces of exposition) that Annalise has a “wild-child” side (who knew?), and later we saw her partying the night away under the strobe lights of a dance club—with her students, no less!

No, sorry—that doesn’t play.  Here’s why:  It is a complete violation of one of her core traits (and a defense mechanism, at that)—“publicly composed and guarded.”

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“Grace” Notes: How Novelist J. Edward Ritchie Rediscovered a Fertile Lost Paradise

October 1, 2015 / / 15 Comments

Last month, prolific television producer Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl) secured a pilot commitment from NBC for a dramatic series about the brides of Dracula.

Intrigued yet?  I sure am!  You can already picture it:  Without knowing thing one about Berlanti’s take—based strictly on that eight-word rundown at the end of the previous paragraph—visions of something sexy, Gothic, atmospheric swirl like mist through the imagination.  Bedsheets and bloodshed.  Seduction and the supernatural.  It’s the kind of pitch in which the creative possibilities are so self-evident, a network exec—and, ultimately, an audience—is sold on the project without a further word of elaboration.

Why?

Because we all know the brides of Dracula—from Stoker to Lugosi to Coppola—but what do we know about them, really?  The pitch hooks us because it capitalizes on something about which we’re already aware… only to make us consider how much of it we’re probably (and inexcusably) unaware, and how curious we’d be—now that you point it out!—to get some of those blanks filled in.  (And that Dracula is in the public domain is all the more appealing, because no one has to shell out big bucks to secure the rights to the property; in that sense, it is almost like a natural resource waiting to be exploited by those with the wherewithal to dig it out of the ground.)

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: A Tribute to Wes Craven

September 15, 2015 / / 8 Comments

In a TED Talk from 2007, writer/director J. J. Abrams (Lost, Star Wars:  The Force Awakens) explained the unlikely origins of his filmmaking philosophy:  As a child, his grandfather had bought him a magic-store “mystery box”—a simple white cardboard container adorned with only a question mark, its contents (touted as $50 worth of magic for $15) sealed with packing tape—that remains unopened to this day; it serves as a totemic reminder to him “that mystery is the catalyst for imagination,” and that “there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge.”

This is the story of how the late filmmaker Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream) gifted me with my own “mystery box” of sorts.

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Book Review: “The Multiverse of Max Tovey”

August 27, 2015 / / 15 Comments

Disclaimer:  I was furnished with an unsolicited advance copy of The Multiverse of Max Tovey by the publisher in exchange for a candid, unpaid appraisal.

Superhero, one of Blake Snyder’s ten narrative models, accounts for so much more than the four-color fantasies of costumed crime-fighters.  These stories are, at their most fundamental, about a special someone—“Not quite human nor quite god” (Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, [Studio City:  Michael Wiese Productions, 2007], 249)—endowed with extraordinary powers, with which comes the unwanted burden of extraordinary responsibility, who inadvertently provokes jealousy or disdain from us commoners, typically a nemesis that seeks to exploit the superhero’s Achilles heel (and they all have one).  These are the tales of Superman and Lex Luthor, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Neo and Agent Smith, Dracula and Van Helsing, Simba and Scar, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.  “Real-life Superheroes” the likes of Jackie Robinson in 42 and Alan Turing in The Imitation Game also fit the bill, as do small-screen saviors Jack Bauer (24) and Olivia Pope (Scandal).

At its most emotionally elemental, Snyder sums up the genre as such:  “It’s not easy being special” (ibid.).

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The Lost World: An Unusual Hollywood Cautionary Tale

July 27, 2015 / / 11 Comments

The other week, journalist Olly Richards published a heartbreaking piece in The Telegraph called “How Kerry Conran saw Hollywood’s future—then got left behind.”  It’s worth reading in its entirety, but, in short, it recounts the unorthodox journey of the Conran brothers, Kerry and Kevin, the former a magazine designer and the latter a freelance ad illustrator (neither with any apparent foothold in Hollywood at the time), who set out to make a cost-efficient, feature-length, dieselpunk effects fantasy entirely via blue-screen compositing, a speculative project that ultimately came to the attention of producer Jon Avnet (The Mighty Ducks, Fried Green Tomatoes), who secured the participation of big-screen stars Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law.  The resulting film, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), which Kerry wrote and directed (with Kevin serving as costume and production designer), represents a quantum leap in contemporary effects-driven filmmaking, in which immersive, world-building spectacles, once achieved strictly via painstaking practical effects and/or arduous location shooting (think the original Star Wars, with its model spaceships and exotic Tunisian locales) would forevermore be rendered digitally—and economically—from the comfort of a Hollywood studio.  In the wake of their cinematic accomplishment, the Conrans were invited to participate in a summit at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in which visionaries the likes of James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Brad Bird, and Robert Rodriguez were in attendance—and professed to be genuine fans of the Conrans’ groundbreaking work (as did J. J. Abrams, per Kevin, on another occasion).

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He Said, She Said: Lessons in (Buddy) Love

July 3, 2015 / / 7 Comments

For as long as there’s been literary analysis, there has been an effort to determine just how many variations on plot there are, and to codify them accordingly.

Your high-school English teacher no doubt taught you that all conflict can be boiled down to four types:  “man versus man,” “man versus society,” “man versus nature,” “man versus himself.”  Remember that one?

French writer Georges Polti asserted there are Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1916); more recently, English author Christopher Booker argued for Seven Basic Plots (2004).

For my money, none of them quite “cracked the code” until screenwriter Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! identified ten types, or “genres,” and delineated the specific criteria (three apiece) that distinguish one from another—and they’re not what you’d think.  Rather than vague categorizations like “horror,” “comedy,” and “action,” Snyder classified his genres like so:

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Journey’s End: Rushkoff and the Collapse of Narrative

June 22, 2015 / / 21 Comments

And now for something completely different:  How about a magic trick?

Think of your favorite story—book or movie.  (Hell, say it aloud, if you’re inclined—I can’t hear you.)  If you’ve got several candidates, just pick one quickly, at random.

Got one firmly in mind?

Betcha I can tell you how the plot unfolds.

Here goes:  The protagonist is faced with an unforeseen crisis that upends the status quo, and, after some initial resistance, accepts the call to adventure.  Through a series of trials and setbacks in which both allies and enemies are made, our hero finds the strength to rise to the challenge and, in doing so, achieves personal catharsis (what we in Hollywood call the “character arc”), returning once again to an ordinary state of affairs… a little bit wiser for his troubles.  The End.

How’d I do?

It’s a little general, I’ll grant you—I probably wouldn’t wow them in Vegas with that act—but, at your story’s most basic structural level, that pretty much sums it up, no?

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Rendering a Verdict: Annalise Keating of “How to Get Away with Murder”

May 14, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Spoiler Alert:  Plot points from the first season of How to Get Away with Murder discussed herein.

In the previous post, I touched briefly on the subject of character arcs.  An arc is the personal transformation or catharsis a character undergoes—almost always against his will—over the course of a story:  In fulfilling his obligation to get outlaw Russell Crowe on board the titular 3:10 to Yuma when everyone else bails on the dangerous endeavor, rancher Christian Bale learns at long last to have dignity; in the process of uncovering who framed him for murder in Minority Report, PreCrime detective Tom Cruise comes to terms with the devastating loss of his son some years earlier (excellent movies both).

Arcs are what give a story its emotional resonance.  Take Dirty Dancing:  It could’ve easily been one of a thousand 1980s teen-romance movies all but forgotten here in 2015.  But, it became a worldwide phenomenon—and lasting cinematic classic—because not one, not two, but five characters experience profound transformational arcs in that film:  Baby, Johnny, Penny, Lisa, and Mr. Houseman.  That’s rich storytelling—deceptively so.

Transformational arcs are designed to force a character to confront his so-called “fatal flaw”—a psychic wound that’s been haunting him, that’s been holding him back, since incited by some trauma in the backstory.  (So, in 3:10 to Yuma, the traumatic catalyst would be Bale’s shameful cowardice on the battlefield; in Minority Report, it was the unsolved kidnapping of Cruise’s son that led to his personal downward spiral).  There are exceptions to this design—Luke Skywalker, for instance, has a very powerful arc that spans three movies, no less, yet he bears no fatal flaw when we first meet him on Tatooine (for reasons we’ll perhaps discuss on another occasion)—but, by and large, protagonists typically suffer from some measure of psychic scarring that makes the events of the plot emotionally difficult for them, forcing personal growth in the process.

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