Half Grand on John Milius’ Lack of Acts

Timothy Morrise

This morning I reached for my pearls at *this* article a friend posted — an interview with Good Screenwriter John Milius. It features this clickbait tagline: “I was never conscious of my screenplays having any acts. It’s all bullshit.”

Oh is it now John Milius?

Milius has some salient points, about how MBA grads are ruining films, which let’s be honest they are. A recent egregious example being The Hunstman: Winters War, which no doubt suffers from someone seeing Frozen, thinking the takeaway was “magic Ice Lady” rather than the compelling relationship between sisters, pulling out the shoehorn and jamming Snow!Emily Blunt into TH:WW.

Milius also has lots of good things to say — his take on mysticism, his code of honor. But there’s a few things I take umbrage with, namely ways in which dude is getting all “the kids these days.” E.G.:

“I mean, look at all these independent films that should be interesting. Most of them are about a bad dope deal in the Valley. The rest of them are about a homosexual love affair that’s misunderstood. There’s really just not a lot of ambition there.”

I mean come on, man! Did you see any indies recently? That’s not to say there isn’t an increasing homogony to prestige/festival movies (I’m looking at you Outfest) but to say there’s no originality is to be blind to what is actually out there. This year at Sundance alone we had:

Woman becoming sexually obsessed with a wolf

A hotel where you have to get married or turn into an animal

Polish flesh eating mermaid musical

The Daniel Radcliffe Farting Corpse movie

Slave Revolt titling itself “Birth of a” F******g “Nation.”

If you think no one in the indie scene is making anything ambitious, you aren’t paying attention.

Also dude has a prickly attitude about formula which gets under my skin. Not that formula isn’t an oft used crutch, but it can be an empowering tool. To say that formula can’t empower mysticism is to disacknowledge years of alchemy, religion and art. Symmetry’s proper employment creates an accessibility to the weird and wonderous. Why else would we have literal actual formula being constantly used as a universal shorthand for “magic?”

Which brings me back to that original quote on how “acts are bullshit”. Please, please, please don’t let this become a new excuse for writers to get lazy. Things like character arcs, pathos, and yes, Milius, *acts,* have a place, one not at the exclusion of instinct but to strengthen it. You can have a highly conscious brain in writing. Hey, what about Shane Carruth? Upstream Color is one The Most frontal lobey movies of the last several years, but it is also rife with freshness. Favoring the id unilaterally over impulses that allow for the harmony, or perhaps even the end of distinction between the “conscious” and “subconscious,” approaches dogma.

Please still eat your vegetables, kids, even if John Milius doesn’t think they’re cool.