Falstaff and Me
So You’re Making a Sequel
by Roscid Cup
Disclaimer: If you look in IMDB for the movie discussed here, you are a gullible idiot. There is no such movie. Apologies to anyone actually named Gregory Gramble. I swear it’s a coincidence.
To:
The Executive Producer
From:
The Writer
Subj:
Re: Your drunken 2AM phone call
So you’ve produced a movie, The Garrulous Gripes of Gregory Gramble, and it just wouldn’t go away.
The critics hated it, of course. It got 12% on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety disliked it so much that its review was instead all about some public-domain reels of stock footage from the 50s, because the reviewer believed that the stock footage “better merits the dignity of discussion.” Variety’s lesser-known rival, Uniformity, had only this to say: “Garrulous Gripes is like orchestra seating at the opera: it may seem like a bargain to sit closer for a lower price, but two hours later you realize you are in a mosh pit of senior citizens with unclean diapers. If you cannot see how that connects to this movie, then, sure, consider that a recommendation to see this movie.” At the far end of the wit spectrum, POFs (Persons Of Fandom) have revived a dead meme to declare that your movie is “finally a worse love story than Twilight.” YouTube has been flooded with clickbait titles like “Why Garrulous Gripes Was Worse Than You Think.” Some of these videos are almost as long as the movie itself. (You may wonder why the videos’ content creators say they hated the movie if clearly they saw it at least fifty times in order to make such detailed videos, but to expound on the mysteries of fandom is beyond the scope of this blog post.)
None of that matters. Rotten Tomatoes’ Audience Score told exactly the opposite story. The Garrulous Gripes of Gregory Gramble, nicknamed TG4 by its fans, cleaned up at the box office week after week, mopping the floor with the competition, edging out five of the eight Spiderman movies that came out that month. It is part of the ongoing trend that first saw daylight in 1965, gathered some more publicity in the 70s and 80s, hit critical mass in the 90s, and finally blew wide open in the 2000s and 2010s: TG4 is invulnerable to critics.
The critics wasted no time backpedaling their statements. Some tried to deconstruct your movie, tried to understand why it struck such a powerful chord with people. Surely TG4 is the archetypal monomyth! It resounds deeply within each of us, awakens our own sense of self-awareness, teaches us how to be human. The Force-ghost of Critic Master Roger Ebert added it posthumously to his Great Movies column. In a brilliant flash of rhetorical gaslight, his ghost wrote “I didn’t miss the boat on this one. I stand by everything I said in my original review, but there were additional things that I failed to convey, so that is why Garrulous Gripes is a great movie after all.” Very few critics held fast to their original opinion that your movie was just plain bad. Audiences, some pointed out, only liked it because of that shot at 22:13 and again at 1:46:32 (the scenes that teenagers pause).
The bottom line is, you made a hit. Now what?
With a golden-egg-laying goose landing right on their boardroom table, the distributors and the studio are all in a panic. They tend to be a little superstitious. The bigger the windfall, the more likely someone will screw the pooch. But of course they (and as per contract, you) have got to make a sequel.
You know what this means. Everyone else have decided the money will be automatic if they play it safe. A good sequel might make more money, but a bad sequel, assuming the marketing is on point and the timing is right, can still rest on the laurels of the first movie’s success, make a ton of money the first weekend, and expect 2 to 3 times that over the remainder of its theatrical run.
Some will call this opportunity cost, but your fellow producers have three things to say about that:
- Less effort means fewer expenses. The money we save will offset opportunity cost.
- Quality isn’t what makes a movie its money, silly! It’s a mysterious formula of timing, marketing, first-weekend hype, and getting it into theaters as fast as possible before the zeitgeist moves on.
- …unless you are talking about the extra money we would make from repeat viewings on home video. But we are neither Netflix nor Disney, so we don’t expect to make a nickel from leasing it out to streaming services, no matter how re-watchably good it is. All that matters is what we can put on our 10-Q, and that means box office.
But something else is haunting you, and it has nothing to do with money: You fancy yourself an artist. You aren’t, of course, but you want to be.
You want to tell them, “TG4 is an American treasure! How dare we cash-grab a thoughtless sequel! If we do a sequel at all it must be worthy of the name of Gregory Gramble and worthy of his garrulous gripes! Just who do we think we are, anyway?”
But instead you say nothing. You are given a budget and a timeline, and a bunch of charts with trend lines and bulleted lists of what should and should not be in the sequel. These are to aid you in hitting the largest demographic possible (especially in the U.S. and China) without offending anyone.
Not that any of this deters you. Sure, you’re trying to make a sequel with a straight-jacket, but what a challenge!
Well hold on, there, fella, don’t get carried away!
Do not think because you saw the light and will try to make the sequel good, that means your sequel actually will be good! You have some additional problems to overcome. And I am going to walk you through it.
Even “Good” Sequels Are Often Bad
That’s right, even good sequels are, if not terrible cash-grabs, at least a little disappointing. This is because of one very important point that you should take away from this lesson:
Sequels fight against the very nature of storytelling.
Or, they go against the grain, or they try to swim upstream, or whatever metaphor works better.
In The Tempest, in one of the most eloquent lines of meta-fiction, Prospero explained to his daughter Miranda that she is actually just a fictional character in a play: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” (At one point in his speech he even names the theater they’re in.) My interpretation of “rounded with a sleep” is this: a good story that’s well told will create an illusion that its characters had lives before the story begins and will continue to live on after the story ends.
But make no mistake, it is an illusion. The characters were custom-made specifically for that story, for that exact setting, and that is why they work so well. The audience member’s brain fills in the gaps. Some detail-oriented Persons Of Fandom may have fan theories and such, but most people do not need the details. Instead, they fill these gaps with vague, dreamlike shadows collected from their own experiences, just enough to glue together the illusion. (As a matter of fact, “and they lived happily ever after” might be every fairy tale’s most unnecessary line.)
Here is one example of a good story that had a good-but-disappointing sequel: the two plays of Henry IV, by William Shakespeare. I don’t really know whether or not Shakespeare intended a second play while writing the first, but from the text alone it seems like Part 2 is a sequel very much in the modern-day sense. The first part was a self-contained story that needed no sequel, and it was a masterpiece. It worked on every level, in multiple genres: as the history of Henry IV, the bildungsroman of Prince Hal, the tragedy of Hotspur, and the comedy of Falstaff. And despite it being so many different things, it all falls in place like clockwork, but somehow also in a way that seems organic and artless.
So, with Part 1 being a hit, there needed to be a Part 2. Forget those Shakespeare scholars who say that Henry IV are two unrelated plays. The only satisfying way to watch a performance of Part 2 is in a cycle where the previous night you watched Part 1 with the same actors. Its plot hardly makes any sense without being put in context with Part 1. At its best, Part 2 helps create an overarching story that is bigger than either parts. However, Part 1 at least has a story of its own, while Part 2 does not, and Part 2 does not inspire any reevaluation of Part 1. (Reevaluation of the first story is key to a good sequel.)
More importantly, Falstaff and Hal lost the majority of their charisma for Part 2. This is because — to paraphrase Morecambe and Wise — Part 2 had all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. Or more accurately, it had all the right ingredients, but for a different recipe. When they were together in Eastcheap, Falstaff and Hal were greater than the sum of their parts; they made each other more charismatic. Morover, their scenes together occured at just the right time in the play, with respect to both its runtime and its story arc. But repeating that in Part 2 would be predictable and irritating (more on that technique later). Shakespeare chose the alternative, to split them up for most of the play. Now Falstaff had John of Lancaster to contend with, and all his wit fell flat on the unappreciative ears of the humorless young prince. Falstaff was no longer in his element. After all, he was created for Part 1, not Part 2.
To summarize in terms that I am more at home with: If your first story is pancakes and your sequel is biscuits, you have the problem of trying to make biscuits with pancake mix.
But getting back to my main point… Everything falls into place, and the characters are wonderful in the story for which they have been created, so the audience falls in love with them and wants to see them in a sequel. But what is the storyteller to do with these characters, now that their story has already been told? Make pancakes again?
The Lightning-In-A-Bottle Problem
Falstaff’s popularity might have been an accident. Here’s another problem with characters and sequels: sometimes a supporting character outgrows the story, and his or her popularity takes the author completely by surprise. This adds another layer of difficulty onto the task of making a sequel, because it requires the same authors who failed to predict the success of their own creation to now make a guess — and perhaps be wrong — at what made their character so popular in the first place. (Modern supporting characters who outgrew their story in a most unfortunate way include Steve Urkel, Steve Stifler, Jay and Silent Bob, Gomer Pyle, Queen Elsa, Deputy Sam Gerard, Ma and Pa Kettle, most every Jack Black role before Hollywood decided he was a lead, and of course the Fonz.)
This is the same problem you have with your own character Gregory Gramble. He was just an afterthought — the actor who played him was your nephew, and the director owed you a favor. You didn’t think anyone was going to notice him, much less start a #WheresGregory Twitter campaign, make 【AMV】 tributes to him, write fanfic in which he and Jack Frost from Rise of the Guardians are lovers, and make little girls’ Internet games where they play doctor on him. (Seriously, the Internet is a weird, weird place.)
So how can you bring back Gregory Gramble without disappointing your audience? What follow are some of the most common techniques used, most of which are quite bad.
Method 1: Fanservice
Pander. Look up what fans say they want and give it to them. I’m talking mainly of influencer fans, the ones who post articles and videos with titles like “TG4#2: What It Needs to Have In It.” (cough IGN … cough cough YouTubers … gag choke Collider …)
Of course this method doesn’t work, first because giving fans what they ask for makes your sequel predictable by definition, second because Persons Of Fandom are a loud but insignificant part of the paying audience, and third (and most importantly) because fans demand the stupidest things.
Returning to the character of Falstaff, legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I (influencer and Falstaff fangirl) commanded Shakespeare to write a play in which Falstaff fell in love. (Was this the inspiration for Misery? Never mind…) The legend also tells us that the play written to fulfill the queen’s wish, The Merry Wives of Windsor, was a rush job, written in only fourteen days. I don’t know if that legend is true, but I do know that The Merry Wives of Windsor sucked.
Method 2: More pancakes
Repeat the same story arc as TG4#1. Shoehorn the characters back into their original situation. It won’t be easy. If Gregory Gramble had a more interesting love interest then you could do what others do: exposit that the couple broke up some time between movies, so that they can fall in love all over again. But your spreadsheets show that the love story was the least-liked feature of TG4#1, and the Internet is awash in cringey memes about Gregory Gramble telling his love interest why he doesn’t like stucco (describing stucco’s tactile properties, like being rough and coarse and other things).
Moreover, Gregory had all eleven of his toes in the first movie, and a key part of his development was in losing a few. To repeat that story arc would require some kind of time-travel storyline, which is a bit risky, or else have him lose even more toes, which is just plain cruel, especially to the actor, who actually sacrificed his toes for the movie in hopes that his dedication would finally earn him an Oscar.
You have other recyclable plot points available anyway. As the Taken and Home Alone movies have shown, even the rarest of premises for a movie can be repeated in the sequel with the same characters and still take home the money. As we recall from TG4#1, Gregory Gramble spontaneously combusted and survived. The audience won’t buy that this could happen to the same person twice — even if he deserved it — but maybe they’ll at least buy a ticket to watch it happen again.
But you’re trying to be an artist for a change, not a producer! Surely you won’t try any of this! It is the closest thing to what all your fellow producers would have you do, but it’s lazy, and it violates the law of entropy. Smoke doesn’t form back into wood. Real life has hysteresis.
Method 2½: Raise the stakes
Even more toes! But like I said, cruel.
Method 3: Linear progression
Try to follow the logical consequences of the first story, and show what the characters will do, based on what was learned about the characters in TG4#1. The problem is, the audience already did this for you. Remember what I said about the illusion of life after the story, and peoples’ brains filling in the gaps? The audience already saw TG4#1, so they already know Gregory Gramble and will not be surprised by his actions.
Method 4: Hail Mary Pass
Try to surprise the audience by having Gregory Gramble do exactly the opposite of what the audience expects him to do. This is disingenuous and it usually just pisses the audience off. There is no verisimilitude in acting out of character, and for a story to be satisfying it must be believable. There is also no surprise in having a character do the exact opposite of what the audience expects, because it is still co-linear to what’s on the audience’s mind.
Method 5: Synthesis of Methods 3 and 4
Make a sequel that unlike method 3 is surprising and unlike method 4 is inevitable. What method 3 gets wrong is that a person’s character is mutable and more complex than can just be explored in a two-hour movie. But — and this is what method 4 gets wrong — that isn’t license to have them contradict what we already know about them.
So how do you break the linear-progression rut without making it seem like a contrived “surprise?” There are many ways, some which remain undiscovered. One well-known way is to actually violate the “out of character” rule, but with a particular constraint: There must always be some rational hook; it cannot be discontinuous. So if Gregory Gramble is a different character in #2 than he was in #1, he is different specifically because of how the earlier story changed him.
A good pre-existing example of this is Sarah Connor in the two Terminator movies. (Shut up!!! There were only two!!! Not listening, hum humm, can’t hear you…) In Terminator 2 she bore very little resemblance to her old self, but the first movie nevertheless gave her reason to be what she had become.
But can we push it further? Can we find a way to break the continuity rule too? This is where it gets tricky. There is discontinuity in Sarah Connor between the two (and only two!) Terminator movies, but some well-parcelled-out and tastefully-short exposition filled in the gap, so the audience was surprised without being incredulous. On the other hand, The Last Jedi tried to do this with Luke Skywalker, and — though it worked for some, including me — a lot of people were very put off by it. Perhaps there was just too much dissonance in tone and character between Return of the Jedi and The Last Jedi for Luke’s change of attitude to be explained in just a couple of flashbacks, no matter how much time had passed.
So even though this method creates the best kind of sequel when done well, it’s extremely tricky to pull off. The only thing more difficult is the next method.
Method 6: Plan it all ahead
You know why this doesn’t work, right? Everybody tries it, but everybody fails.
“But what about Marvel,” you say? “And Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars and and and…?” First of all, I don’t buy that cock and bull story about George Lucas having the Star Wars trilogy planned out all in advance. And as for the others, that’s just survivor bias. For every successful movie that came out prior to an already planned or even filmed sequel (like Kill Bill: Vol. 1) there were a hundred wannabe franchise starters that flopped in embarrassing fashion (like 2017’s The Mummy).
The problem is that Cinematic Universes require someone to predict what will work in advance. Movie producers like to think inside the box about this; they assume that if they tell a mediocre story but market it to death and toss a ton of spin-off bait into the movie — superfluous characters, dead-end plot threads, back-door pilots, and such — basically turn the movie into a two-hour commercial for more movies — then people will want to show up for more. This is the strategy where you sacrifice a high-margin, short-term hit in order to get years of steady cash flow from all the future movies. I don’t know what idiot thought that after watching a crappy piece of movie mediocrity I would want to come back to watch its sequels and spin-offs, but somebody in Hollywood listened to him. That’s why the “Dark Universe” crashed and burned, and I suspect that’s the real reason why so many people disliked The Last Jedi.
The correct way to start a Cinematic Universe is a little counter-intuitive. Make a movie that has nothing to suggest a sequel — no subplots whose resolution are saved for a sequel, no cameos of someone you want to make a spin-off about, absolutely none of that. No cinematic bloatware. But here is the gotcha: it has to be so gosh-darn good in a crowd-pleasing way that audiences will want to come back and see more stories set in the same time and place. Moreover it has to come out at just the right time so that it will seem fresh and original. That is why no studio attempts this; every movie that fits this description came out of nowhere, catching all the competition off-guard.
(Movie studios have already given up on the imitate-Marvel model of franchises, anyway. These days, they prefer to reboot old IP. If it is a hit, like Jumanji, they will make a sequel. If it is a flop, like Ghostbusters, they will reboot it again a few years later.)
Of course, with The Garrulous Gripes of Gregory Gramble being one of those from-nowhere hits, this option doesn’t exist for you anyway. So, moving on…
Method 7: Don’t Make a Sequel
Here are two facts that, taken together, will blow your mind:
- The Sound of Music and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial were the third and fourth biggest box office hits of all time.
- The Sound of Music and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial never got sequels.
- (Bonus) Unless you seriously count that ridiculous miniseries with Timothy Dalton, Gone With the Wind also never got a sequel, and that was the number one hit of all time.
Apparently no one got fired or blacklisted over this.
But since you certainly will, let’s move on.
Which method should I use?
Well, since you didn’t kill off Gregory Gramble, you managed to avert the most difficult scenario: bringing back a character by popular demand after his swan song has been sung. It was said that Sherlock Holmes went down that waterfall but someone else came back. People are more susceptible to Capgras delusion when fictional characters are involved.
But your work is still cut out for you if you want your sequel to be true to the fans and worthy of Gregory Gramble and his garrulous gripes.
Here’s what I suggest: Ask yourself if this whole “I’m an artist” thing isn’t just part of a midlife crisis. I get it. You’re a producer. You’re name is the one people ignore when the credits roll. Well, you and the key grip. But on the other hand you make a lot of money and you live on easy street.
Since I am the “artist” who wrote the story and screenplay for The Garrulous Gripes of Gregory Gramble, I must tell you, friendly in your ear: it ain’t art. I only took the writing job because I wanted an AGA, and those things are bloody expensive. I conceived the story in the bathroom while perched upon my porcelain throne conducting my regal business. The whole movie was a big joke to me. And if you hire me to write the sequel, that will be an even bigger joke to me. So forget about making a “worthy” sequel and just crap something out. But don’t hire me, because I already got that AGA paid off.
— Sincerely yours, Alan Smithee