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One of the reasons the first [Jaws but it could be true of the first two STAR WARS] works so well, and the others don't, is because of its attention to how the conflict affects the characters.

I don’t think she’s talking about long internalizations that we novelists short story writers are so often putting in to explain things and feelings and even motives. She’s talking about screenwriting where, unless you have voice overs, that doesn’t happen. She is talking about scenes large and small that are active and which the audience watches and draws their own conclusions. Oh, he really DID love her! or That snake! He was lying the whole time!

Cowgill’s example from JAWS (which I have not seen so her example will probably make more sense to those of you who have) .

It’s when in the first act everyone thinks they’ve killed the shark and is happy. A woman confronts the sheriff, who is happy and reminds him that her son is still dead [I assume from the shark attack]. He takes responsibility for the death even though he fought hard to close the beaches. He goes home and is morose. Then his young son imitates him trying to get his father’s attention. In the end he leans close to the boy and says, “Give me a kiss.” The boy asks why and the sheriff says, “Because I need it.”

See? It isn’t a told bit of information, but shown. Dramatized. And all the more moving for being given to the audience that way. I think in many cases this technique will work for written stories, too.

What do you think? Can you see this being something that was present in the first two filmed STAR WARS movies but missing in all the following ones?

It wasn't written. That was done on the spot as an ad-lib by Scheider and the kid.

I suppose it doesn't matter how it got in the movie (movies being such a committee product), just that it proves Cowgill's assertion.

and rich also said -- the ONLY good one was Empire Strikes Back. Precisely because of the conflict with ALL the characters.

So it's perfectly setup for a story that can be told without delving too deep into the internal workings of the characters. I can't say too much about what happened later because they lost me when they put teddy bears on airborn scooters, nor the book you mention.

The film version of Jaws also has a set of fairly clean character types. I read the novel so long ago that I don't remember much about it.

The tendency for show vs. tell in modern written fiction is often argued to be the result of influence from the arrival of movies. You don't have the advantage of a true picture in written fiction, nor music (and don't discount the role of music in establishing mood and emotion in films). What you have instead is the ability to tell the story from inside a character (or characters), which is pretty clunky in film.

The internal workings of a character can be "shown" or "told", the same as anything else in a story, so drawing on them doesn't violate the show vs tell characteristic. But it is something a fiction writer can readily show where a film producer is pretty constrained.

Yet both are compelling stories that have reached millions of people.

Hmm. We so often worry that without compelling characters, our stories won't go anywhere. Is this a difference between screen and page writing? That you can put an archetypal character on screen and still tell a good story, but you can't do it in written fiction? Or can you?

To further one of your points, to do so in written fiction would be to squander the greatest opportunity we have in writing for the page versus the screen, and that is that psychic access - we get to get into the heads of the characters and show what's going on inside. Movies that try to do this usually fail, or are art-house small pictures that don't reach mass audiences the way classic stories like Jaws or Star Wars (there are many others, these are just a few.)

I guess my main point is that we seem to be using movies instead of written works to assess how conflict affects characters. Maybe it doesn't matter, it's just that, as you said, arriki, moves are made by committee (for the most part).

As far as the Star Wars stuff goes, that's just my opinion. I come by that opinion 'cause I think Star Wars was juvenile crap that got worse the more I thought about it/watched it. Empire was better because there was a dynamic that had more to do with them being "real" people as opposed to archetypes (as dee mentioned). Han Solo and Princess Leia are trying to ignore their attraction to each other; Vader says he's Luke's daddy; Luke is trying to overcome his own fears/anger and become a Jedi. It's just a more rounded film.

I just caught KayTi's comments...

I don't think writing compelling characters is that much different from screen to novel, except that novels (as you said) allow us greater access to the characters' thoughts/backstory.

No, I don't think it's necessarily divided between the screen and the page. Most of the archetypes have their origins in written stories, and have been transposed to the screen.

I think the early Harry Potter books were generally populated with characters that were archetypical, starting with an orphaned hero introduced into his real role in life after a prolonged fostering.

Maybe it's more of a function of the type of story and type of audience. Much is targeted at the 10-15 year old demographic, and I think the widest swath of that group will still respond most readily to purer character types. Young readers were clearly the target audience at the onset for Harry Potter, and probably the first released Star Wars films too. As Harry and his core audience grew older, the characters and story became more complex. I haven't followed the new Star Wars films, but it seems to have happened there as well.

Maybe you could generalize that a swashbuckling adventure tale might do better on the screen, and a story of growth and discovery centered around a single character like Harry Potter might work better in writing (for the internal perspective) when both are populated with archetyical casts. Dunno. Maybe it's how much the story requires witnessing the internal workings of the characters for completeness, or who you are telling the story for. Fun things to think about anyway!

There will probably always be room in the world for a simple old fashioned good-guys-versus-bad-guys story, and when one is done well, it's apt to find a wide audience. There's a reason the archetypes evolved--because they work, and they keep finding new guises under which to appear, another millieu, another idea, new generations--something to cast a fresh light onto those core story elements that have so long resonated with the human audience.

I know that I loved those two, was very disappointed in #6 and only saw 1,2,and 3 out of some sense of wanting completeness, not expecting the same depth of experience as with 4 and 5, hoping for it, but disappointed by the films.

I remember rumours that Lucas was himself at a loss as to why the last four were less good. Also, I heard that Leigh Brackett was behind the stories of 4 and 5 but died before 6.

So, what I'm trying to do is figure out in a more concrete way what Cowgill means and if that is what happened with STAR WARS, too.

Were there fewer emotional moments like the sheriff and his son in the subsequent JAWS movies?
What moments in SW 4 and 5 were like that and were not seen in the rest of the SW movies?

In the Star Wars prequels there were moments of character development (similar to Brody kissing his boy), but they felt forced. They didn't naturally come from the story line; it felt like the writers just stopped the story for a character moment.

The best example I can think of is looking at the developing romantic relationship between Han and Leia in comparison with Anikan and Padema.

The relationship moments between Han and Leia also advanced the plot. Their personalities clashed when Han and Leia first met with Leia taking over her own rescue (clashing personalities is classic romance). Their first kiss is when they are fixing the ship while being pursued by the empire. She tells him that she loves him when Darth Vadar is about to flash freeze him. All of these character and relationship building moments occur naturally within the story.

With Anikin and Padama the plot stops cold so that they can have romantic moments. I know that Anikin was hiding Padama away from the assasins, but it is not like in the "Empire Strikes Back" where the threat continues. All tension is taken away while they frolic in the meadow and eat dinner together. The character and relationship development does not work because these scenes don't flow naturally with the story. The pause in the story line is jarring and makes the audience uncomfortable and prevents them from accepting what the scene is forcing on them.