Tag Archives: John Wayne

What Writers Can Learn From Stagecoach

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

In recent years, when I’ve done live teaching, I’ve noticed something. The audience keeps getting younger.

How’s that happen?

And I’ve noticed something else which astonishes me. More and more of these aspiring writers have never seen Casablanca! Or lots of the old classics.

Let me remove my ear horn for a moment and declare that when I was their age, everyone who wanted to write—indeed, most everyone at all with a streak of the artist in them—knew classic movies from the “golden age” of American cinema.

Yeah, I know, it’s generational. When I was a lad, we had three networks and a few local channels. We didn’t have 24/7 stimuli pounding our eyes and ears. We knew the richness of movie history—the poetry of Ford, the heart of Capra, the pure genius of Welles, the mean streets of noir. Astaire-Rogers. Tracy-Hepburn. Bogart-Bacall.

I’ve heard on more than one occasion from someone in their 20s or 30s that they just don’t like black-and-white films. They would rather watch full-color TikTok videos of dancing parrots and people slipping on ice than the greatest movies ever made. It’s a pity, because writers can learn so much from past masters of film.

Case in point is Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford.

This is the movie that turned John Wayne into John Wayne. In 1926, when he was playing football at USC, Wayne (then known by his given name, Marion Morrison) got summer work moving props for the studios. One day John Ford walked by. Knowing Wayne was a football player, as Ford himself had been, the director challenged Wayne to try and knock him down. Wayne, not knowing how important this guy was, did so. Ford took an immediate shine to the strapping lad.

For most of the 1930s, Wayne starred in low-budget, forgettable Westerns produced on “Poverty Row.” But when it came time to cast the central character of the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Ford fought to cast Wayne. The rest, as they say, is history.

While Stagecoach has many familiar tropes of the traditional Western—Apache attack, the cavalry, bars, a climactic gunfight—most of the movie is a tight drama about nine people on a stagecoach journey across the prairie to a town called Lordsburg. How did that plot birth a classic?

Orchestration

First and foremost, all the characters are distinct and contrasting. I call this orchestration. Just like different instruments blending together create a beautiful symphony, so disparate characters make for compelling drama (and, I might add, comedy).

Played by some of the best character actors of the day, we have:

  • A drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar)
  • A nervous little whiskey drummer (Donald Meek)
  • A sly, Southern gambler (John Carradine, based on Doc Holliday)
  • A woman of ill repute (Claire Trevor)
  • A pregnant wife trying to get to her soldier husband (Louise Platt)
  • A goofy driver (Andy Devine)
  • A bank embezzler (Berton Churchill)
  • A sheriff (George Bancroft)

John Wayne as the Ringo Kid

Along the way they pick up Ringo (with a great visual intro of Wayne spinning his Winchester, an image for the ages). The sheriff places him under arrest.

Lesson: A great novel orchestrates its cast. Even the minor characters. This enables endless possibilities for conflict and tension. Take time with this when planning (or pantsing), as it will pay big dividends as you unfold your story.

Style

Ford was one of the great visual artists of cinema. Parts of Stagecoach were filmed in what became Ford’s favorite outdoor venue—Monument Valley. His use of horizon and sky is unmatched (see also The Searchers). He once said, “Monument Valley is the place where God placed the West.”

His interiors are just as striking. His use of light and shadow is masterful in Stagecoach because it’s in black-and-white.

Lesson: I liken this to a writer’s style. We’ve had lots of discussions about this. Is it worth it to hunt for the right word? The right sound? Or in this age of pervasive sameness, now churned out by bots, is such care merely slowing us down in our pursuit of prolificity and page reads?

You have to decide for yourself. John Ford could have churned out Westerns every few weeks, like the Poverty Row guys. He could have added mere content to the glut. Instead, he made his movies unforgettable, shot by shot.

This is where voice comes in. Take some time to develop this “secret power.” It will lift your work above the lifeless ubiquity of botness that marks our era.

Stretching the Tension

The stagecoach journey is leading up to Ringo finding Luke Plummer and his brothers in Lordsburg, to avenge the murder of his father and brother. The last part of the movie is the countdown to the gunfight.

Ford doesn’t rush it. He begins with Luke and his boys in a saloon, hearing that Ringo is in town. Doc Boone (Mitchell) has a tense encounter with Plummer, warning him that if he takes the shotgun just handed to him, he’ll have him indicted for murder. The moment stretches. Will Plummer gun down the doctor? Smash him in the face? This silent moment lasts nearly seconds. Finally, with a wry smile, Plummer tosses the shotgun on the bar top. “We’ll tend to you later,” he says. When he and his two brothers walk out, Doc takes a swift drink. “Don’t ever let me do that again,” he says to the barkeep.

Outside, a woman on the balcony tosses Plummer a rifle.

We cut to the newspaper office. The editor rushes in and tells his typesetter, “Kill that story about the Republican convention and take this down. The Ringo Kid was killed on Main Street in Lordsburg tonight! Among the additional dead were…leave that blank for a spell.”

“I didn’t hear any shooting,” the typesetter says.

“You will.”

Step by step, the Plummer boys head for the showdown. Ringo, spurs jingling (another trope), comes up the other end of the street.

Lesson: When you’ve created a good, tight scene with great tension, don’t cut it off too soon. Stretch that tension. Read the opening of Koontz’s Whispers, which takes 17 pages to describe a rapist stalking a woman in a house. Study the last fifty pages of a Jonathan Grave thriller. Stretch tension as far as you can in a first draft. You can always cut back when you edit. But I think you’ll find you won’t want to.

Twist in the Tail

Usually in a Western, the climactic gun battle ends the movie. The townspeople gather around the hero and his woman embraces him; or the lone hero mounts his horse and quietly rides into the sunset as THE END appears.

In Stagecoach, there’s an added beat, because Ringo is still under arrest and headed for prison…or is he?

I’m not going to tell you because I want you to watch the movie!

Suffice to say it’s perfect.

A twist in the tail is a super satisfying way to end a story. And to bring us back to Casablanca (watch it now!), that movie has perhaps the most famous tail twist of all time, the one that ends with, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Lesson: How do you come up with a great twist in the tail? You write two, three, of even more possible endings. Choose the best one for your actual ending, then use the next best for your twist.

Here’s a further hint. A great ending often involves sacrifice; the hero offers his life (Casablanca) for a greater good. But the twist gives him a reward, a new beginning, another chance at life. It’s right there in Stagecoach, too.

As film critic Roger Ebert said, “Stagecoach holds our attention effortlessly and is paced with the elegance of a symphony. Ford doesn’t squander his action and violence in an attempt to whore for those with short attention spans, but tells a story.”

Wouldn’t you like to tell a story like that?

Comments welcome.

Writing Short Fiction to Prevent the Future

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Eight years ago I wrote a post titled “How Long Before Robots Get Into Self-Publishing?” It was prompted by a 60 Minutes segment on Artificial Intelligence featuring a freaky cyborg named Sophia. I speculated about “her” saying to “herself”—

I see that there are many novels being published that are not very good. I have read every novel ever written and I have read all the books on the craft of fiction and every issue of Writer’s Digest. I have analyzed all the data on what kind of fiction sells best. Now I know what is good, and so I will write a novel every ten minutes and publish them on Amazon. I will write book description copy that cannot be resisted and I will generate social media. Hmm…maybe I will take over all social media in the world and make it only about me and my books…

Funny, not funny…now.

A year later I wrote a short story, John Wayne’s Revenge, inspired by release of the movie Rogue One. I wrote:

The story idea had its genesis in Rogue One, the new film in the Stars Wars milieu. The most striking part of the film is the meaty supporting performance by Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin. Striking, of course, because Peter Cushing has been dead since 1994. In view of his deceased status, he really brings it in Rogue One!

Of course, Mr. Cushing is actually realized courtesy of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). The effect is stunningly effective. Which got me thinking about the possibilities here. What if, sometime in the future, someone wanted to make a film with Cary Grant, or Clark Gable, or Bette Davis? Future technologies will not only make this possible, but easy.

I love what Bradbury said once in an interview about his reason for writing Fahrenheit 451: “I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.”

That, it seems to me, is the highest and best use of dystopian fiction. It’s a warning. It’s a prophet crying in the wilderness. And the nice thing is that the prophet can employ the steely voice of a John the Baptist, or the sly wink of a Jonathan Swift…

So the idea came to me: in the not too distant future, a movie studio is working on a Western starring John Wayne and Lee Marvin, featuring Jane Russell, Andy Devine, Chill Wills, and Victor McLaglen. The technology provides holographic imagery along with AI functionality. What if …

Well, I’ll leave the What if for you readers, because I’m offering John Wayne’s Revenge FREE for a few days.

One of the nice things about short fiction is that you can get an idea and just start hitting the keys to see what happens. It’s fun. You can write whatever the heck you want to, without a huge expenditure of time.

That was Bradbury’s practice. He’d hop out of bed in the morning and just start capturing what was in that fertile imagination of his, whatever his writer’s mind had cooked up in the nightly dream world. Only later would he look at the pieces and figure out patterns. He wrote with more pure joy than any other writer I know of.

But he also wrote about his concerns for the future, especially regarding encroaching, omnipresent (and omnipotent!) technology.

So enjoy the story, on me. It’s an under ten-minute read, perfect for the waiting room at the doctor’s office, when you’re lunching by yourself, or after choosing the wrong line at the grocery store.

What if John Wayne… 

I’ll leave you with a couple of questions. I am, however, in travel mode today and may not be able to check in. So chat amongst yourselves. Have you ever written short fiction as a way to deal with an issue or idea? As a way to warn about the future or the present? Or just for the heck of it? How’d that turn out?

What is your favorite Ray Bradbury story?

Ending Lessons From a Couple of Movies

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

So the other day I watched Pretty in Pink, the 1986 Molly Ringwald film, written by John Hughes.

Why was I, a thriller author, watching Pretty in Pink? Because of James Spader. I’m a Spader fan, and I had been listening to Rainn Wilson’s memoir, The Bassoon King. Wilson (who played Dwight Schrute on TV’s The Office) was talking about his odd upbringing and high school days, and made a passing reference to being around rich kids who were like James Spader in Pretty in Pink. I didn’t recall that Spader was in the film.

So I went to the library and got the DVD and watched it.

I can see why Molly Ringwald captured hearts back then. She’s adorable and spunky and irresistible. The movie …

… okay, here netiquette demands that I insert a ***SPOILER ALERT***. I will be talking about the ending in detail, so if you want to see the movie fresh, now’s the time to go pour yourself another cup of joe.

As I was saying, the movie is about a high school girl, Andie (Ringwald), who comes from the wrong side of the tracks. She’s in school with a lot of rich kids, who look down their imperious beaks at her. Chief among these privileged snoots is Steff (Spader) who can’t stand that Andie won’t give him a tumble. When Steff finds out his best friend Blane (Andrew McCarthy) likes Andie, he tries to shame him out of it.

Andie is attracted to Blane, which is a cause of serious heartache for Andie’s friend, “Duckie” (Jon Cryer). Duckie loves Andie with a passion, but Andie loves him only as a pal.

Perfect John Hughes formula, eh?

Prom is coming, and no one’s asked Andie. She doesn’t expect it. But of course Blane does, and Andie is in heaven. Duckie is in hell.

But then Steff steps up his campaign to break up Blane and Andie. He tells Blane he’s got to choose. If he insists on seeing Andie, they will no longer be friends.

Blane is conflicted, but decides to break it off with Andie. He doesn’t return her calls. When she corners him at school, he makes up a lame excuse about having invited someone else to the prom and that it slipped his mind. Andie doesn’t buy it, calls him a liar, and runs out in tears.

Prom night comes. Andie decides to take a pink dress and do some of her quirky design work on it. She gets all ready to go to the prom, alone. When her dad asks her why, she says “I just want to let them know they didn’t break me.”

She gets to the hotel but is scared to take the final step inside the ballroom. She looks up. And sees Duckie. He has also shown up alone.

They run into each others’ arms and enter the ballroom together.

Blane, who is also sans date, sees them. He gets up to go to her. Steff tries to stop him. Blane tells him off (finally).

Blane goes up to Andie and Duckie. He apologizes. He says he always believed in her, he just didn’t believe in himself. Then he says, “I love you,” kisses her on the cheek, and walks out.

Duckie, the noble friend, says, “If you don’t go to him now, I’m never gonna take you to another prom again. This is an incredibly romantic moment, and you’re ruining it for me.”

Andie thanks him, runs out to the parking lot. She and Blane kiss in the rain.

The End.

Okay, here’s where it gets interesting. I felt the ending was not right. I thought:

a) Andie shouldn’t go running after Blane. He acted like a jerk. He gave her up over a measly threat from James Spader! Come on! He deserved to suffer for being so spineless.

b) Andie running after him so quickly brought her down in my estimation. She owed her loyal friend at least a dance.

c) Duckie deserved that dance, seeing as how he saved Andie’s dignity by walking into the prom with her.

d) The dialogue line “I love you” is almost always manipulative and lazy (see The Art of War for Writers, Chapter 39).

So as I’m thinking all that, I look at the Special Features menu on the DVD and see that there is a segment on “the original ending.”

And guess what? My instincts, and indeed those of John Hughes himself, were correct. In the ending that was in the script and which they shot, Andie and Duckie do dance together and then it fades out.

Which was, as they say, justice. But apparently test audiences weren’t so happy. A majority said they wanted the cute girl to end up with the cute guy!

An internal battle broke out over the ending. Most of the creative team wanted it to stay as shot, but the suits with the purse strings feared a negative audience reaction. Guess who won that fight?

So six months after the movie had wrapped, they got the cast back together to film the ending that’s in the movie.

And got negative reaction anyway! Even now, people are split on the ending. The stars (Ringwald, McCarthy, and Cryer) who were being interviewed on the DVD (these interview were filmed in 2006, twenty years after the release) talked about the controversy. Cryer remembered feeling robbed when they changed things. And he says people still come up to him, sometimes quite livid, insisting Andie and Duckie should be together at the end!

Why would they think that? Simply this: Justice was not served!

But, the other side insists, there was no sexual chemistry between Duckie and Andie. Molly Ringwald herself is of that opinion.

Ah, but there was another way it could have gone!  Andie and Duckie enjoy the prom together, then Duckie tells Andie to go to Blane. And when she goes to Blane it shouldn’t be to fall into his arms. Let it be left that they may end up together, so long as Blane proves he’s not shallow. The ending can therefore be hopeful, but not wrapped up in a pretty pink bow.

What’s the lesson here?

a) Don’t listen to the suits.

b) The best endings are about justice, not necessarily about the cuties getting together. Exhibit A: the most famous ending of all time, Does Rick end up with Ilsa? No! But justice is done, and Rick does gain “a beautiful friendship.”

Next, I watched Big Jake, a later John Wayne western. I watched Big Jake to balance out Pretty in Pink and restore order to the universe.

Big Jake is a straightforward rescue plot. Jake McCandles (Wayne) learns his grandson has been kidnapped for ransom. With his two sons, an Indian friend, and a loyal dog named Dog, McCandles sets out to get the boy back.

Dog is trained to attack bad guys when prompted by the command, “Dog!” (John Wayne films are not complex). There’s a big showdown between Wayne’s group and the bad guys, one of whom wields a machete. Dog, wounded by a gunshot, nevertheless puts the bite on the machete guy. There’s a struggle. Machete guy breaks free, and hacks the heroic Dog to death!

Here’s my lesson from Big Jake: Don’t kill the dog!

And those are my random thoughts about two ending in two films.

So now it’s your turn: Do you have any lessons you draw from disappointing endings?

The Joy of Writing Whatever the Heck You Want

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

One of the biggest influences on my desire to write was the late, great Ray Bradbury. I’ve written before about meeting him, and how The Illustrated Man blew me away in junior high. In high school I read Fahrenheit 451, which is of course a classic of the dystopian genre.

I love what Bradbury said in an interview about his reason for writing the book. “I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.”

That, it seems to me, is the highest and best use of dystopian fiction. It’s a warning. It’s a prophet crying in the wilderness. And the nice thing is that the prophet can employ the steely voice of a John the Baptist, or the sly wink of a Jonathan Swift.

I don’t specialize in speculative fiction (though I suppose you could call my zombie legal thrillers, written as K. Bennett, speculative. At least I think most lawyers in Los Angeles are not zombies, but I need to check on that). But I recently found myself pounding out a short story and having a lot of fun doing it.

The story idea had its genesis in Rogue One, the new film in the Stars Wars milieu. The most striking part of the film is the meaty supporting performance by Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin. Striking, of course, because Peter Cushing has been dead since 1994. In view of his deceased status, he really brings it Rogue One!

Of course, Mr. Cushing is actually realized courtesy of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). The effect is stunningly effective. Which got me thinking about the possibilities here. What if, sometime in the future, someone wanted to make a film with Cary Grant, or Clark Gable, or Bette Davis? Future technologies will not only make this possible, but easy.

Then I thought about the discussions we’ve had here at TKZ recently about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the prospect of machines getting into the writing game.

So the idea came to me: in the not too distant future, a movie studio is working on a Western starring John Wayne and Lee Marvin, featuring Jane Russell, Andy Devine, Chill Wills, and Victor McLaglen. The technology provides holographic imagery along with AI functionality. What if …

Well, I’ll leave the What if for you readers, because that’s what my new Kindle short story, JOHN WAYNE’S REVENGE, is about. It’s FREE through Thursday. (For those who don’t have a Kindle device, remember you can download a free Kindle app to your phone or tablet or computer, and enjoy Kindle books that way.)

One of the nice things about short fiction is that you can get an idea and just start hitting the keys to see what happens. It’s fun. You can write whatever the heck you want to, without a huge expenditure of time.

That was Bradbury’s practice. He’d hop out of bed in the morning and just start capturing what was in that fertile imagination of his, whatever his writer’s mind had cooked up in the nightly dream world. Only later would he look at the pieces and figure out what was going on. He wrote with more pure joy than any other writer I know of.

So enjoy the story, on me. It’s an under ten-minute read, perfect for the waiting room at the doctor’s office, when you’re lunching by yourself, or after choosing the wrong line at the grocery store.

What if … 

So what have you written lately purely for the joy of it?