Film Courage: What are the steps in the comic hero’s journey?
Steve Kaplan, Author/Instructor/Script Consultant: There are seven steps I recently read a paper
that that referenced the comic heroes journey and they talked about how I shoehorned the 12
steps of the hero's journey into seven into seven sips of the comic hero's journey and
I did that just because safe space make it a little make it a little bit more economical
basically the cover of your book so the hero's journey we have the normal world
which we talked about and WTF that's the comic premise and then you have reaction
in reaction you have your character in this transformed state or this transformed circumstance
but they don't want to be there it's it's Dorothy wanting to go home it's Phil Connors and Groundhog
Day trying to figure out how do I get out of this so so there's first denial and then the reaction
is okay this is happening how how do I not make it happen how do I go back how do I fix this
and and in some cases it's unfixable like in big he goes to sleep as a 13 year old boy he wakes
up he's a 30 year old man but it doesn't need to be an impossible it could be improbable in enough
said film with Julia Louis Dreyfus in the late great James Gandolfini Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a is
a massage therapist and she finds out that her new boyfriend is the ex-husband of her new best friend
both of who she now is is giving massages to so when she gives massages to her new best friend
who tells terrible things about her ex-husband she then reacts to it when she's on a date with James
Gandolfini who's the ex-husband and so as she's trying to figure out what to do about it she's
carrying on just a mild deception she's simply not telling either one about the other but but
in the beginning she's trying to make make believe like this is not an impossible situation to be in
and of course in that movie when it blows up it destroys her relationship which is what happens
in a movie at the oldest lost moment but you have the reaction then you have connections
in connections your characters are forming a nucleus around themselves and family friends
that they hadn't had before and what you have in that section is things are starting to slow down
you have characters who are who up till then had not even had a conversation with each other and
now they're kind of opening up to each other in in some comedies the opening up is a little bit
ridiculous but in in many comedies it's where the characters for the first time are relating to two
other characters in a way that they hadn't before one of the things I want to talk about in terms of
these seven steps is they don't have to happen all in the same order they don't have to happen all
at the same page this page this has to happen because they all happen in different ways in
40 Year Old Virgin the connections start pretty soon after after the lie after the truth about
his being a virgin comes out he goes to work they make fun of him he runs away and Paul
Rudd because Paul Rudd is a nice guy he's the guy who's all emo and he's still yearning after
his girlfriend he runs after him and he chases him down he doesn't have to if Paul Rudd doesn't
chase him down there's no movie that's the end of the movie that Steve Carell has has
has has quit but he chases them down and they go and they have a cup of coffee together and
it's the first time that they're talking to each other and Steve Carell even says
this is the first time we've had a conversation of more than more than
two minutes and connections is where your character who up till that point had been
a loner or either through choice or or through their own circumstances and they begin to gather
a group around themselves a group that can become their friends I mean in Bridesmaids she literally
has a group of Bridesmaids that first she's very antagonistic to or or she she give them all food
poisoning because she's trying too hard but at the end they they have all bonded so that's what
happens in connections and in connections you slow the pace down so that people can have real
conversations one of the things that Monty Python discovered when they did their first movie and Now
for Something Completely Different which was a compilation of sketches that they had done on TV
and they did this movie for the American Market because at that time Monty Python was still
not being shown in America and they did a test screening and they found out in the test screening
it went great for the first 45 minutes people were laughing hysterically and then they just stopped
for the next 45 minutes and they the pythons kind of looked at each other and thought well maybe we
have it we have this in the wrong order so they re-shuffled some of the sketches and
they did another screening and again for the first 45 minutes people were peeing in their
pants and then it stopped because you just cannot make an audience laugh for 90 minutes
non-stop without giving them something to chew on without giving them some protein
and that's why for their next two movies well especially especially a Life of Brian
they gave you characters you could care about and characters who are going through a trauma and
trying to find their way out of it so even though the pythons were very sketch based and even though
Life of Brian is still a series of sketches it was still telling a story about a guy that you
identified with and empathize with so that's why it's so important at some point in your movie to
slow down to reveal themselves it's what Michael Hague calls the getting naked which in a romantic
comedy doesn't necessarily mean the people are are having sex it means that's the moment where
in hitch Will Smith is revealing to the girl why he's become the love doctor because he was not
the love doctor in college in fact he was exactly the opposite and so this is his reaction to that
after connections comes new directions this is where the the discovered gold really kicks in in
New Directions your character has become somewhat accustomed to The Impossible or
probable situation and what has happened is new skills have arrived not because your character
sat back and thought I want to improve myself but because they've had to they're forced to
transform and so in New Directions your character literally tries to go for something has it the
discovery goal go for something that they hadn't even thought of at the beginning of the movie in
the beginning of the movie is Steve Carell in 40 year old virgin is he thinking about
having a relationship with a woman no doesn't even it's not even on the on the horizon in the
beginning of the movie does Phil Connors want to have a relationship pursue a relationship without
with Rita no we at first he tries to get her to go to bed with him but he's
unsuccessful because she's not that kind of a girl to go to bed with a guy in the first day
and so he gets to a point where he just wants to be in her company and spends as much time
with her as he can in her company because he he's fallen in love with her and and he can't figure
out a way to get out of the time Loop so he just becomes the best boyfriend in the world somebody
who's not grasping for something not not having some ulterior motive just there for other people
Danny Rubin's a Buddhist so is Harold Ramis for that fact and so the Buddhist philosophy infuses
the groundhog day because the whole point is they answered the question how can you be a good person
in the world and the answer is to be of service to other people so then you have the Lost Night
of the Soul The Dark Knight of the soul in which the All Is Lost sequence now in a romantic comedy
this is often when the lovers break apart which happens kind of two-thirds or three
quarters of the way through but even in a film as ridiculous and as offensive as Tropic Thunder
there's a breakup they the the platoon literally breaks up from Ben Stiller and the rest of the
actors in The make-believe platoon and that happens about 50 of the way through the movie
so all these all these stations of the cross occur they just don't occur all at the same place all
at the same time and the and those and the the progression can alter based upon the need of the
story the last section is race to the finish again in many romantic comedies you have a character
literally racing to to his loved one in When Harry Met Sally Bill Billy Crystal is racing through the
streets to get to the New Year's Eve party to express however ineptly his love to Meg Ryan
but even in enough said your character needs to take some positive action I've read several
scripts where at the end the good thing happens to the character happens that protagonists
protagonist does nothing to accomplish that that's probably a mistake that's I know that's
a mistake because because your character has to take positive action to to accomplish what they
need to accomplish to get what they need to get and to resolve not just the narrative but also
the theme and enough said she's broken up Julie Louis Dreyfus has broken up with James Gandolfini
and it's broken her heart she broke up with him because the deception that her new best friend
was his ex-wife and she was nagging about nagging about him about his weight because that's what
his wife was filling Julia Louis dreyfus's head with during their massage therapy sessions so
he breaks up with her for deception so every now and then she drives past his house and just parks
just looks out the window that's all she does just drive and park and one day he comes out
he sits on the on the stoop and she looks at him and he looks at her and he kind of goes
so the the important elements of Race To The Finish
you don't have to show us a happy ending but you have to
you have to hint at the promise of a better world you don't have to have the lovers come together
but we we have to know that it's going to be okay in The Breakup which is this kind of revolutionary
unsuccessful rom-com with Vince Vaughn and oh she's the girl from Friends Courtney Cox no the
other one oh Kudrow Lisa Kudrow no the other one Jennifer Aniston yeah tell her what you’ve won! in
The Breakup which is this kind of revolutionary unsuccessful comedy with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer
Aniston they they have this big fight they break up there's all this deception happening
and then Vince Vaughn does the speech the speech it's the speech that melts the heart
of of the magical object desire it's the speech that makes the person go you had me at hello
and but what was interesting about interesting but unsuccessful about the film is that
he does the speech everybody in the audience is prepared for her to go oh it's fun and she goes
no not having it too late oh my God they've really broken up the film's called The Breakup we should
have figured that out so they they had a final scene in which they meet at a at a like a fair
somewhere in Chicago and Vince Vaughn has a new date that looks exactly like Jennifer Aniston and
Jennifer Aniston has a new date that looks exactly like Vince Vaughn and there's this uncomfortable
dialogue and then they part and it tested terribly because even though it was a cute joke
it left us feeling horrible about spending two hours in this…I mean we've had our own breakups
we don't want to have to live through it again so did they get the pill the the couple together no
all they did using the same exact dialogue was they kind of meet each other on a street
in Chicago and one of them's holding a bag of groceries and they have the same exact dialogue
they didn't change a word only this time it was you got you felt that they were okay
they had had this relationship it broke up they're okay and they might not be friends but
they're okay and it was much much better ending to the film because you need to give us the pro
if not the happy ending you don't need to give us a happy ending it could be an indie film
but you need to give us the promise of a better world the other important thing about race to
the Finish is that you're not finished when the lovers kiss that's not the end of the
film that's not the end of the story you need to finish the theme you need to complete the theme
what's the question you were asking well what's the answer we have to make the theme complete
before the film is complete before the narrative is complete as opposed to just ending the story
so those those are the seven steps which I've shoehorned I've shoehorned the 12 Steps From the
hero's journey into into shoehorn them into the common hero's journey which by the way
oh look at there look it's economic Heroes Journey fans.