Good writing will soon be in demand in Hollywood.

Hollywood doesn’t realize that they need to figure out how to find good writers, separate the top people from the thousands of wanna-bes. What sort of storytelling should they be looking for? Here is the kind of music we need to hear.

Great writing in general: Casablanca, Juno; Children of a Lesser God made the sign language work, Amelie made long exposition speeches work.

Telling a tricky story well: Social Network, All the President’s Men, Argo, 12 Angry Men, Martian, Big Short, Imitation Game, Caine Mutiny.

Inventive plots: It’s A Wonderful Life, Sleeper, Midnight in Paris, Local Hero.

Improving problematic material: Branagh’s Henry V, Dragon Tattoo, Lord of the Rings.

Great endings: Spartacus, Planet of the Apes.

Original characters: the hero/villain in Music Man, the two insane leads in Doctor Strangelove, Amadeus with the jealous rival and the nutty emperor.

Original relationships: Big Country, the Apartment, Lion in Winter, Thin Man, Maltese Falcon.

The return of mid-budget stories. The ones that perform best are intelligent: Oscar-bait, high concept romance and thrillers, stories with smart kids; intelligent sci-fi is also under-explored.?Characters, stories, emotions,?adult drama, everyday people.

Stories that serve actors, so that they are hired for their talent, hard work, intelligence, professionalism, rather than athletic skills or ability to slide into spandex.

Stories that let people see themselves, including women, minorities, LGBT.

Wilder and Lumet would tell you: get a good script and tell the story. Make sure you know what the essential elements of the story are, who owns each scene, and what you want the audience to feel. Make sure the story keeps moving. Short scenes, short speeches, conflict. It’s not just that you want to show-not-tell, you want the story so clear that the audience would know what’s going on with the sound off.

Bradley Whitford told a story about his father watching the West Wing pilot: “It looks great. I have no idea what’s going on.” Aaron Sorkin knows what he’s saying, these characters know what they’re saying, but Aaron is racing just ahead of the audience.

Backstories and world-building are deathly boring. Everybody in the world has had bad things happen to them: enough with the cop-on-the-edge.

You can go too far with the realism, and it can be boring.

Pull the audience in. Be the audience’s eyes and ears. Throw them into the story, think more Spielberg and less Kubrick. Engage the audiences feelings and emotions. Injustice, romance, conflict. Make them storytellers by leaving things out: when you let the audience brush in the last few paint strokes, they become artists alongside you.

Many directors cling to themes, which means their work can sometimes be repetitive. Capra depicting the common man; Fellini, fantasy; Bergman, loneliness; Scorsese, violent sinners and their guilt; Hitchcock, the everyman against evil; Lean and Huston and Zinneman, underdogs in a fight; Kazan, realism; Lumet, fighting for justice in the Big Apple; Ford, the west; Oliver Stone, exposes; Godard, another noir; Lucas, extremely juvenile and cuddly adventure; Tarantino, racism and exploitation of tragedy.

Spielberg believes in “child-like wonder” and P.T. Barnum-like showmanship, in finding a commercial story and then trying to squeeze some art out of it, as an afterthought; he is obsessed with opening-weekend box office numbers; he thinks ET is a dark movie; he admits watering down the Color Purple; he thinks James Cameron is an emotional storyteller; he likes stuff like Transformers and the overrated lesbian porn in Blue Is The Warmest Color. Yikes.

Great directors rise above genre; they can shoot anything. Ang Lee, Ron Howard when he’s in an adventurous mood, Alfonse Cuaron going from Harry Potter to the Oscars; Billy Winder, Michael Curtiz, Ridley Scott. A good director know that he shouldn’t have a style: the story should have its own style. It’s all about getting out of the way so the characters can tell a story to the audience.

Some films follow a genre map; others start with a genre and add a twist. The audience may get lost if we take them on a journey they’re not familiar with, but they won’t be bored. This the message Berthold Brecht was trying to make clear to us. Only toddlers want to return to a story they’ve already heard.

The television series is an unnatural art form. Storytelling began around campfires ages ago, with a story running through a beginning, a middle and an end, just as the fire was burning low and everyone was sleepy. A finite tale with an ending. But in television, you can’t really get to an ending because that would kill the show, and you can only go so far in changing the lives of the characters or you ruin the dynamic that made the show work in the first place. So how do you keep an audience’s interest in characters who go through a hundred episodes without actually doing much?

You try to maintain suspense between antagonistic and dangerous characters (Weeds, Deadwood); you throw in subplots and new characters (Game of Thrones, House of Cards, the Wire, the dreaded Cousin Oliver); you go slow (Luke Cage); you drag out a will-they-or-won’t-they romance (Greys, Heartland); nutty gimmicks like musical episodes (Greys) or shock kidnappings (Broadchurch, Orphan Black). If you have a procedural, your main characters never change, but the guest stars do (SVU, CSI), and other shows like Doctor Who and the X Files keep things fresh with a new monster of the week; although even that can get stale. Any of these tricks can stretch things out somewhat, but eventually each gimmick outlives its usefulness and you just can’t do any more with the characters. Eventually the story must end, the enemies must stop flaring their nostrils at each other and fight, the flirting must lead to wedding bells or a split, the misfit must find his fit.

ER came up with an odd solution: they rotated through their whole roster of characters twice, essentially, before pulling the plug.

Shows can run into trouble if they violate the immutable laws of storytelling: weak, unbelievable plotting (Designated Survivor, the Americans, Scandal), badly contrived conflict: (several times on Grey’s Anatomy), conflict that never resolves (the villain in Suits, the wife-beater in Good Wife), obsession with sex (Grey’s Anatomy), sliding into a boring procedural story-telling mode (Blindspot), failure to create likeable characters (Veep, Flash, Suits, Scandal, House of Cards), sloppy endings (Battlestar Galactica,?Sopranos, How I Met Your Mother).

On the happier side, shows that were better than I expected: Supergirl for the writing, Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife, Good Wife, Travellers, Last Kingdom, Rome, Stranger Things, Doctor Who, Shetland.

For a while there, networks were steering toward comedy because their dramas couldn’t compete with cable, but now the futures of both broadcast and cable are in doubt.

How many terrible movies and shows have had terrible speeches, the plot dumps, the villain monologues, the ringing philosophical declarations? And who can write a good one?

A great speech is not necessarily the one that is so well set up that any actor could hit a home run: Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, Paul Scofield in Man For All Seasons, Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith, George C. Scott in Patton, half a dozen people in Judgment at Nuremburg, Ned Beatty in Network, Chaplin in the Great Dictator.

It’s not the long speech either, like Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or Peck in Mockingbird, both of which could use a trim.

Sometimes it’s just down to a great actor, like?Peter Finch going insane in Network.

The best speeches often happen on a small scale. An actor must take over the room and the people in it, and he must do it himself, without dramatic flourishes from the script.??Alec Baldwin owning the sales room in Glen Garry Glen Ross. Bogart saying goodbye to Bergman. Jason Robards growling at his reporters on the lawn in All The President’s Men. Robert Shaw with his tiny cup of peach brandy, telling shark tales. These are not big speeches about justice or nations, they are small speeches on a human scale. And, almost no shouting.

Something that can totally save a movie that might sink otherwise, is the ability to spot the mistakes in your source material and fix them.

So, Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien is justly credited (or blamed) for creating the genre of fantasy fiction and the concept of world building, but as an actual writer he was terrible. Happily, Jackson and the gang had the right tools, and fixed most of the right things.

Endless page after page describing the scenery? Gone.

Flimsy characters? Give them more depth and emotion.

Total lack of conflict among the characters? Fixed, in large part by Gimli, Legolas and Theoden.

Ridiculous faux-medieval dialogue? Junk it.

The deadly, chloroform-like passage with Tom Bombadil? Gone.

Stupid plot contrivances? Aragorn ignoring Frodo’s Mordor quest, so he could rescue Merry and Pippin, the two most useless characters in all Middle Earth? Fixed. Now Aragorn has a motive for turning west.

Half the characters are three feet tall? Put them on their knees, or don’t do two-shots and group shots.

Of course there was stupid stuff, Legolas surfing down the stairs at Helms Deep, Gandalf breakdancing at Isengard, the green-slime army at Minas Tirith, the appalling special effects when momentarily making Bilbo, Galadriel and Gandalf scary. And part of me would like to have tidied up that long messy ending and added in more of the scouring of the Shire. But they’re not going to get everything right.

There are thousands of good screenwriters whose scripts will never be read. Hollywood needs to start reading those scripts.

?Jack is a writer with 29 feature screenplays and a series completed, almost all of them with female leads, three under option. Check them out on this site and let’s get one filmed! https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/