What movies impacted me as a writer?
I mean, you don’t just start writing movies and novels because you’re on hold with Dell tech support – although that probably is a good way to get seven pages of script, or 800 of your 1667 words you need today.
Two should jump out if you’ve been reading this blog for a long time. It’s really funny, almost all of the movies that impacted me seemed to be movies that I watched with my father.
“Three Days of The Condor” was pure gold to me. I watched the movie, and it was the typical stuff my father loved – shadow government, conspiracies, CIA hit men and foreign assassins, code words… yeah, that movie represented everything he loved reading. And since he was special forces Marine Corps in Vietnam, he would often regale me with tales of what the real code words were, what the real assassins were called, etc.
In other words, he’s trying to tell me what I was watching was fictional in name only.
And it was the story of the One Man. That’s been a story I’ve gravitated to, the One Man scenario. Everyone seems determined to boldly plunge headlong into stupidity in these stories, and only One Man will say, “this makes no sense”. To coin a line from Battlestar Galactica, “History is full of the One Man who overthrows governments”.
The funny thing about the story is it seemed to be almost about me. The line by the pivotal character sums up the premise of the movie – “How was he able to fire a handgun just below the bulletproof est?” “He reads.” “He reads what?” “everything.”
In essence, Three Days of the Condor was about all the underestimated and misunderstood book readers in the world, and what they’re capable of if you drag them out of their comfort zones.
I could go on and on about this movie.
“Dirty Harry.” I watched this movie with my dad also. Again, a story about the One Man, dedicated to stopping wrong – the only problem is his methods are overwhelmingly violent. My father kept a running commentary during scenes with no dialog. Absolutely, Harry Callahan was right, according to my father. Being Marine Corps, his opinion was that Harry Callahan viewed the streets as combat, war – and the command above Callahan didn’t grasp that. His opinion was that Callahan was right. To me, the movie vindicated the One Man, a theme that stays with me in almost everything I write.
There’s nothing more admirable than a man of principle who will not stop. Hence the line from “Braveheart” – “Men of principle are easy to admire.”
The only thing I think now about Dirty Harry is there was a sleazy element to the movie that kept it from rising to real heights, parts I can do without. It’s why I don’t own a copy of it.
“The Good, The Bad, The Ugly”.While the intended goal of Leone was that nobody be 100% good and 100% bad in his movies, the characters of El Indio and the Rojo clan had no redeeming good to them at all. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the only one of the three where this element shows up. To me, it was about the transformation where Blondie can’t help the goodness of his nature. For those who think of the three movies as being about the same character, this proves GBU as the first of the three stories. The change in Blondie as the movie goes along is permanent. He’s a hero from here on in.
There are many movies that had emotional impact on me, but not all of them impacted me as a writer. These movies really impacted me in my youth, because they had elements that still show up in my writing.
