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On Screenwriting

Editor's Note: Authorlink welcomes Los Angeles screenwriter and teacher Neil Flowers and his new monthly column on the subject of writing for film and television. Neil's columns appears on the first of every month.

Now let's have a closer look at Collateral, an excellent, contemporary L.A. noir thriller that would seem on the surface to be light years removed in every way from a 55-year-old Western. The two films are, indeed, very different in genre, locale, and the qualities each hero brings to his challenge.

". . .that's Max, all right. Round and round dirty L.A. in his super-clean cab he goes. . . "
—Flowers

Whereas Will Kane presents us with the epitome of dynamic, heroic manliness, Collateral presents us with a protagonist, Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx), who has lived an illusion for 12 years. As a result, his life is in stasis.

Max is also an obsessive-compulsive clean freak, the sort of trait we associate with the stereotypes of sexless geeks or 50s white suburban housewives such as Cathy Whitaker in Far From Heaven. But that's Max, all right. Round and round dirty L.A. in his super-clean cab he goes, getting nowhere. He carries a postcard of an island, symbolic of his fantasy life, because the real island is his self-imposed exile from himself and the world. No wonder he prefers the night shift. It's safer. Not as much traffic. No benefits in Max's job, no sicks days, and the night dispatch, Lenny, abuses him regularly. But hey, the tips are better at night. Right.

In sum, Max is a man stuck in a very deep rut. A liar and a neurotic. A grown-up mama's boy whose mama berates and embarrasses him in front of strangers, and he barely protests. A wounded man. An emasculated hero. Not your regular Will Kane or James Bond type, Max. Quite the opposite.

In fact, at one point, in the club scene with Felix (Ruben Blades), Max must become Vincent. He must assume the identity of a man he abhors: A hit man, a nihilist, a man "indifferent " to everything—as Vincent claims to be—because the cosmos is indifferent to us. And if Max doesn't pull it off, doesn't find that macho chutzpah that Vincent has, then Max will be dead.

But let's go back a bit now.

Now Max is a typical reluctant hero, perhaps more certain than most, that he wants no part of that journey. But Vincent insists—at gunpoint. The entire external trajectory of the second act that follows is hung upon the series of four of the five witness murders that Vincent commits. This in general is a fairly common means of moving the action along in a second act. Someone is given a series of tasks to complete. Each of the tasks becomes increasingly difficult, for different reasons, until finally the last task is the most difficult. In Collateral, the tasks and the increasing difficulty are true for both pro- and antagonist. And—

Like Buck Rogers, X-Men, Wonder Woman, and Superman: To be continued...

Special thanks to Claire "Sunny Girl" Kinnane for her valuable insights into Collateral.

There are many good films in wide release now due to to the Oscar season being upon us. Recommended: Children of Men, Venus, Pan's Labyrinth. Babel, Notes on a Scandal.