The Fall Guy Part 2: Write For Hollywood Without Selling Out

This episode, we are going to be continuing our discussion of The Fall Guy (check out Part 1 of The Fall Guy Podcast). Now, you're probably wondering, why does this silly blockbuster movie get a two-part podcast installment? There are a couple of reasons for that: First, if you remember from last week, we're in a pretty interesting conversation about subtext. We talked about the three different levels of subtext and how that related to metafilm, which is a concept that we haven't discussed a lot on this podcast. So I'm excited to take a little bit of extra time to look closely at these concepts. Second, it’s valuable to get a little deeper breaking down a light, superficial Hollywood popcorn movie like The Fall Guy because it is representative a lot of the “work for hire” projects we writers are going to be presented with in the industry.  There’s a belief among many writers that “in order to succeed, you have to sell out.” But Drew Pearce’s writing on The Fall Guy shows us that, even within the container of a Hollywood popcorn movie, you can still bring your voice and your artistry to the writing process.  One of the things that I appreciated about The Fall Guy was that the writer Drew Pearce is working inside a framework which is probably not a writer's dream.  He’s adapting an 80s silly TV series. Everything's got to be light. It's a huge $150 million budget so he has to make sure that doesn’t alienate anybody and that everyone leaves feeling good. Everything's got to work out at the end.  So how do you actually perform as an artist inside of a container like that? Usually, the way you break into the industry is either with a really great script or a really great indie film. Usually, we're breaking in with our disruptive content- content that maybe isn't going to make a trillion dollars, but is going to move people and grab people.  And then suddenly you’ve “made it” and you are getting these work-for-hire assignments where you start to wonder, "I can make them happy, but is it going to make me happy?" One of the things I find interesting about Drew Pearce's script for The Fall Guy is that even though he's working inside of the framework of what the studio wants, he's also finding opportunities to show you who he is as an artist, to say something, to have some fun, and even to poke some fun in a metafilmic way at exactly the container that he's been put into. For all of these reasons, we are going to look at part two of The Fall Guy. We're going to continue our discussion of subtext, but we're also going to get a little bit deeper into the concept of metafilm and into another really important concept related to building a marketable screenplay: how do you make things worse and worse and worse for your characters? How do you attack the character at, in this case, the action level, but also how, at the same time, do you attack them on the relational level? Often in movies, we end up having lots of different threads, and sometimes it feels like those threads are separate from one another. But one of the things The Fall Guy does really well is bringing all of those threads together at the worst possible moment. Today we're going to look at the “split-screen” sequence of The Fall Guy really deeply. We're going to talk about how the scene works structurally, relationally, and meta-filmicly. And we’re going to talk about how pressure is loaded and loaded and loaded onto the character.