The title of that thread was "Never follow rules…" and that is taken from an Aaron Sorkin quote, which is simply the best piece of advice for any artist on the planet:
NEVER FOLLOW RULES STATED BY PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T READ THE REAL RULES.
Or, translating again for the modern ear: Will Pfeifer is an ass.
There was a point a few years back where he was giving interviews like a ruined politician making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows, spinning spinning spinning until, I assume, he figured he'd eventually convince us that up is down, east is west, and 2 + 2 = 5. The one bit I remember was presenting the kind of writing antithetical to his own as "Selina makes coffee." Panel 1, close up on mug. Panel 2 water in coffee maker… something like that.
I think I remembered it because in Cat-Tales, Renee Montoya had just experienced a rather amusing slapstick episode with a coffee machine, which doubled as a nodding high-five to a couple Batman writers infinitely better at the storytelling gig than our Mr. P.
The other reason I remembered was because it so perfectly illustrated Sorkin's quote. Here was a man holding up "Comics are an action medium" as the great rule, when he clearly has no understanding of the real rules: comics are a MEDIUM by which we tell STO-RIES, and those are the set of rules that we start with.
"Panel 1, close up on mug" isn't dumb because it isn't action in an action medium, and it's not dumb because a fan was high-fiving my rivals. It is dumb because stories are about the day something happens.
When we have "day in the life" episodes, like the early scenes of All the Right Moves, the wedding in Dear Hunter, or the early chapters of The
Handmaid's Tale, it is almost always to introduce us to that world. To grasp "the day something happens" we need to know the baseline. (The
alternative is to illustrate character, but 99 times out of 100 that is intrinsically tied to the something happening in the story.)
Once you know that rule, only then can you decide to break the conventions of your medium in service of a higher purpose.
Movies are an action medium every bit as much as comics. Yet we see astonishing and wonderful breaks from that convention: Akira Kurisawa gives us these long tracking shots following the woodsman at the beginning of Rashomon and the MacBeth and Banquo characters at the start of Throne of Blood, which do NOTHING to advance the story. He does it because he can. He does it because he wants to. And he added a "word" to the vocabulary of filmmaking because it was good and it stuck.
My Dinner with Andre gives us two men sitting at a table talking for 2 hours. That's it. And it's compelling because the story unfolding through their conversation is compelling - and it makes the point that THAT THING which is ALIVE in a story, that magic that speaks to us and gives us release of escape and entertainment, can be found anywhere and everywhere, in the simplest things.
In Sideways, the Paul Giamatti character gives an old-fashioned monologue on the qualities of a Pinot Noir, which we come to understand as he goes on, he is really describing himself. The payoff is indescribable, and what blew me away at the time was that I had just finished the screenplay for Copycat, and I had jettisoned that kind of thing because it was movies, an action medium, "no time for chitchat, Dr. Jones." I remember sitting there in the arthouse, watching that monologue, and part of my brain popped up and said "I didn't know we could do that!"
All these stories are about the day something happens. None of them have an explosion or a car chase. Never follow rules by people who don't know the real rules.
Here endeth the lesson.
