Barry's Numbers, and The Mystique of Movie Characters

A Personal Rant
Do you ever get that helpless feeling about events like the Gulf oil spill? For me the Gulf debacle stirs up stormy emotions including fear and hatred. Not helpful.

So the personal feature today is -- Barry's Numbers.

Number of dollars the Gulf oil spill will likely cost -- 33 billion.

Number of big windmills we could build for that much money -- 73,370.

Number of megawatts those windmills would produce -- enough to supply 10% of the power needed by the whole United States, every year, according to  the Alpine Power Company of Oregon.

The Mystique of Movie Characters
Last post I pointed out the prevalence of 3 major characters in Hollywood movies:  the Hero, the Bonding Character, and the Villain.

In my study of movies, I discovered that these three characters each have a certain collection of attributes.  If we were talking about stage plays, we might say that each character is an archetype.

Over the course of the 100-odd years movies have been in existence, movie characters evolved, and the nature of the three main characters has become more defined.  So, like Darwin's description of evolution, the "fittest" story patterns have survived and we find those patterns repeated in wondrous varieties.

The writer who understands these patterns is more likely to write a successful screenplay.  Let's take a basic example.  In the movies, as in real life, characters have their likenesses and differences. Those disparities appear in the same form in almost every movie.

Question:  which character would be most unlike the Hero, the Villain or the Bonding Character?

Answer:  See if you can deduce it from this description of the movie Witness.

Harrison Ford plays the Hero, a workaholic homicide detective.  Kelly McGillis plays the Bonding Character, an Amish mother, whose husband has just died.  Richard Jenkins plays the Villain, a police captain on the take.

Harrison Ford (the Hero) With Kelly McGillis (the Bonding Character)


[Next blog:  Differences and Likenesses in Movie Characters]

The Right Connections

Last bog, I was talking about building a story around three characters.  If successful screenplays have this principle in common, why aren’t they simple to write?  Why can’t a writer just dream up three characters and create a lot of events that involve them?

The answer is that, if a writer studies the structure of screenplays, he or she will eventually discover that in order to make a screen story work, it’s necessary for the writer to “connect” the three major characters in a way that will produce the best dramatic impact on a movie audience.

Obviously before that happens the writer has to have some inkling of who the three characters are, and what their role will be in the story.

In my own study of screenplays, I was highly interested in which three characters had the greatest amount of screen time.  What did I discover?  Well, nothing earth-shaking, but I found that the allocation of pages to characters was extremely consistent across all the genres except two (which I’ll deal with in a later blog).Inevitably, the greatest amount of screen pages (and therefore screen time) was allocated to the main character, whether you prefer to call that character a Hero, a Protagonist, or something else.  I like “Hero” for its brevity and familiarity.

The runner-up in pages (surprisingly to me at the time) was not the “Villain,” but a character that is dominant in movies.  I dubbed this character “the Bonding Character,” mainly because he or she typically develops a strong bond with the Hero.  Other writers have named it the “Impact Character,” not a bad monicker, since this second-most-important character has a great impact, both on the story and on the Hero.

Matt Damon (the Hero) and Franke Potente (the Bonding Character) “bond” in The Bourne Identity.

In third place is the Villain, even though the evil characteristics and threat of the Villain often makes him or her seem to be more important than the Bonding Character.


[Next blog]  The Mystique of Characters