What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1964

The Year: 1964
What the Nominees Were: Becket, Dr. Strangelove, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, Zorba the Greek
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Billy Wilder had his final great film, Kiss Me, Stupid. Mary Poppins was Disney’s greatest live action film. Seven Days in May and Fail Safe were great political thrillers (though not as satirical as our winner.) And I’ll acknowledge independent film for the first time with Michael Roemer’s great Nothing But a Man. Overseas, there was the UK’s A Hard Day’s Night, Italy’s Red Desert, and Japan’s Woman in the Dunes.

What Did Win: My Fair Lady
How It’s Aged: It’s bloated, artificial, and terribly miscast. Julie Andrews had triumphed in the role of Eliza Dolittle onstage, but Jack Warner insisted on a film star and put Audrey Hepburn in the role. Hepburn was a great actress and she did have some range, but a crude cockney just wasn’t in her wheelhouse. (Andrews got her revenge by making her movie debut in Mary Poppins instead and then beating out Hepburn for the Oscar.)

What Should’ve Won: Dr. Strangelove
How Hard Was the Decision: Easy, especially when I saw that this movie was nominated, which surprised me. The Academy almost noticed the obvious: that this was the best movie of 1964.

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter Bryant, based on the (serious) novel “Red Alert” by Bryant (aka Peter George)
Stars: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens

The Story: Mad general Jack D. Ripper orders America’s bombers to nuke Russia, so Americans and the Russian ambassador gather in the War Room to try to figure out what to do about it.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Picture, Director, Actor and Adapted Screenplay, but lost all four.
Why It Didn’t Win: Everyone had to admit that this was a great movie, but there were plenty of critics who were disturbed by it, such as Bosley Crowther at the New York Times who said, “I am troubled by the feeling, which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole military establishment.” Such voices couldn’t deny the movie a nomination but could deny it the win.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Peter Sellars plays three roles here (he was supposed to play four, but injured himself and couldn’t play the bomber pilot.) Interestingly, two of those roles (Officer Mandrake and President Muffley) are straight men, letting their scene partners carry the comedy (always an equally great acting challenge). Sellars originally played the president more broadly but Kubrick decided on set that, “We’re on the wrong track. Merkin Muffley should be the one serious man. Like Adlai Stevenson if he’d won.” It’s only when Sellars plays the title character that he really lets his freak flag fly.
   
2. Sydney Lumet’s Fail Safe, a deadly serious take on a very similar story, released a few month’s later, is also great and the two films make an excellent pairing. As film critic Alexander Walker says in the Criterion documentary: “If a man learns the news that nuclear annihilation is nigh when he’s in his office, the result is a documentary. When he’s in his living room, it’s a social drama. When he’s in the bathroom, it’s a comedy.” This is a rare chance to see two very different, both excellent, takes on the same story.
3. From the opening shots of one plane thrusting into another to refuel it, sex pervades the film. It doesn’t take Freud to figure out that obsession with manhood was one factor in the missile race, but it took Kubrick to finally call it out (like the girl calling out “The emperor has no clothes!”)
   
4. Fears about flouridation are back in the news, as is nuclear détente, for all the wrong reasons. Watching the current (terrifying) absurdity, one can’t help but figure that this version, not Fail Safe, is the more accurate predictor of what it’s really like in the corridors of power. (Ronald Reagan, who often confused movies for reality, got to the White House and immediately asked if he could see the War Room, only to be embarrassedly told there wasn’t one.)
   
5. Like Airplane and Blazing Saddles, almost every line of this screenplay is legendary. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight here, this is the War Room!” “You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company,” “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.” The movie is as consistently funny as the trailers are for most comedies.
6. As Mandrake is attempting to call the president with the recall code, the movie slows to an absurd crawl (trying to get the change to make the call at a payphone), but then after Colonel Bat Guano gets a face full of Coke, the screenplay suddenly jumps way ahead, picking up after most of the planes have been recalled. It’s brisk when it needs to be.
7. Like General Turgidson, we can’t help but root for the men in the bomber to complete their mission, though we know what they don’t: that they’ll destroy the world by doing so. This is why Francois Truffaut said it’s impossible to make an anti-war movie: Because when you’re embedded with the troops, you inevitably end up cheering them on.
   
   
   

Ah, 1964: 

New episode of A Good Story Well Told about Ace in the Hole, featuring Keir Graff!

It’s a special crossover episode with the The Filmographers Podcast! They’ve been spending their second season looking at the films of Billy Wilder, so we invited Keir Graff on to discuss Wilder’s most underrated film, Ace in the Hole! Can he convince us that it’s great? (Spoiler Alert: Easily)

 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1963

The Year: 1963
What the Nominees Were: America, America; Cleopatra; How The West Was Won; Lillies of the Field; Tom Jones 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: America produced Charade, Shock Corridor and The Great Escape. Overseas there was Kurosawa’s High and Low, Godard’s experiment in color Contempt and Fellini’s greatest film 8 ½.

What Did Win: Tom Jones
How It’s Aged: It’s a fun movie. Lawrence of Arabia’s editing had hints of the New Wave, but this movie embraced it fully: Suddenly we have jump cuts, metanarratives, and a general air of sexual frankness that the Academy hadn’t recognized before. But, as with any daring movie, it quickly dated, becoming a time capsule of a particular moment where the rules were slipping but not let loose.

What Should’ve Won: High and Low
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard. My favorite American film of the year is definitely The Great Escape, but it’s a little too lightweight to win, and I didn’t want to do two epics-with-not-a-woman-in-sight in a row. So I decided I had to invoke, for the first time, “The Parasite Rule” (which states that a foreign film of particular greatness can sometimes, when all the stars align, win Best Picture). Even then, I had to choose between this and 8 ½, but High and Low has always been my favorite of the two, and it seemed appropriate for our first foreign film to be an adaptation of an American novel.

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Hideo Oguni, Ryûzô Kikushima, Eijirô Hisaita, and Kurosawa, based on the novel “King’s Ransom” by Ed McBain.
Stars: Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyôko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Isao Kimura, Kenjiro Ishiyama

The Story: A Tokyo shoe company executive, in the middle of a takeover deal, gets a phone call that his son has been kidnapped—then his son walks into the room. It turns out that the kidnappers have accidentally grabbed his chauffeur’s son instead, but they insist that the executive pay up anyway. After the fateful decision is made, the movie becomes a gritty thriller as the police swing into action to do their part. 

Any Nominations or Wins: The Golden Globes nominated it for Foreign Film but the Academy didn’t recognize it at all. 

Why It Didn’t Win: Given the make-up of the Academy at this time, it’s pretty ludicrous for me to imagine this movie could have been the first to pull a Parasite, but we can certainly say that the Academy should have recognized its greatness, and in a year with no strong American contenders, I’ve decided to pull that trigger for the first time.

Why It’s Great:

1. This is one of the most conceptually audacious movies ever made: it is all about dualities of high and low in every possible way: rich vs. poor, a mansion on a hill vs. a slum in a pit, high-quality shoes vs. low-cost knock-offs, high-minded moral decisions vs. lowly police work. Kurosawa’s brilliant idea was to mirror these dualities by splitting his movie, right down the center, into two different styles: the first half (the moral conundrum) is very “high-art”: all on a tripod, very still, much like the classical Japanese cinema that Kurosawa had always resisted. Then, once the decision is made, we are abruptly slammed down into the chaotic “low-art” of Kurosawa at his gritty best.
2. Only in the justly-famous final scene do the two worlds finally come together, as the high-minded businessman and the lowly criminal finally come face to face, but each can only see the other as a reflection of himself. Money may have changed hands, but the line between high and low (or Heaven and Hell, as the title could also be translated) can never truly be crossed.
3. I was such a fan of this movie that I tried to track down the source material, an American pulp novel called “King’s Ransom” by Ed McBain, one of his “87th Precinct” police procedurals. It was long out of print and I couldn’t find it, but I did find other “87th” novels and started reading those. They quickly became great favorites of mine, so I’m eternally grateful. When I finally did land a copy of “King’s Ransom” years later, I was surprised to see that the first half was more loyally adapted than the second half. I shouldn’t have been surprised: moral conundrums are more universal than the particulars of police work.
4. Moral dilemmas that revolve around money are very compelling in real life, but it’s almost impossible to portray them onscreen. We all have a vague sense that it would be a bummer to lose a lot of money, but if you’re going to show someone agonizing over giving up their fortune for a human life, the audience is going to be disgusted—unless you create a very specific, very compelling need for that money on that day. First Kurosawa gets us to strongly root for Mifune to use his money for a one-time-only opportunity to pull off a daring takeover of his shoe company, saving it from greedy opportunists who want to drive it into the ground, then he gets hit with the dilemma. Amazingly, we agonize along with him.
5. This movie is much better than Spike Lee’s recent remake titled Highest 2 Lowest.  For one thing, the millionaire in Kurosawa’s version really does get financially ruined, whereas in the remake he was just temporarily inconvenienced.  Real consequences are always better.  

Ah, 1963: An actual ad in “Sports Illustrated” that feels like a fake ad in “Mad Magazine.” Hey kids, like this profile of Joe Namath? Just wait until you meet Che Guevara!

What Should've Won That Could've Won: 1962

The Year: 1962

What the Nominees Were: Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day, The Music Man, Mutiny on the Bounty, To Kill a Mockingbird
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It’s crazy that John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance didn’t get a nomination. You’d also think The Miracle Worker would make the cut. It’s less surprising, but still disappointing, that the Academy passed over The Manchurian Candidate, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Orson Welles’s hallucinatory The Trial. Overseas, more masterpieces kept rolling in, like Jules and Jim, Knife in the Water and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Lawrence of Arabia
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence would be very worthy winners. As with West Side Story, this movie casts white actors in brownface make-up, so I was tempted to disqualify it for that, but ultimately this movie is so good that I just couldn’t take its Oscar away…

Director: David Lean
Writers: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, partially based on “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T. E. Lawrence
Stars: Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy

The Story: British Officer T. E. Lawrence goes rogue during World War I and convinces Arabian tribesman to follow him into war against the Turks. Lawrence soon develops a messiah complex, becomes disillusioned, and finally abandons his troops when they are on the verge of getting their own independent state. He goes home and dies quietly in a motorcycle accident.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It also won Director, Art Direction, Cinematography, Editing, Score and Sound. It lost Actor, Supporting Actor for Sharif and Adapted Screenplay.
How It Won: The Academy does love epics, and this might be the most epic American movie ever made, but it’s still impressive that it was able to beat out some of its truly amazing competitors.

Why It Won:

1. O’Toole ignites the screen every time we see his quivering crystal blue eyes. His intensity is almost unbearable. It’s so unfair he had to go up against Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird, who beat him out for Best Actor. It must have seemed like Peck was overdue, whereas O’Toole would have plenty more chances. In fact, O’Toole was nominated seven more times, but he never won, because none of his other performances could live up this one. (The exact same thing has happened with Ralph Fiennes and Schindler’s List: Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive was so good, and he had earned an Oscar, whereas Fiennes was just starting out his career, so he could get one later. But he never did, because he never got a part that great again. And then Fiennes would star as Lawrence in a sequel to this film!) In the end, O’Toole, not Peck, deserved it, because this may be the greatest film performance of all time, certainly the best debut performance.
   
2. Two minutes longer than Gone With the Wind, this is the longest Oscar winner and doesn’t waste a second of screentime (well, except the Overture, Intermission, and Exit Music.) Freddie Young’s sweeping Super Panavision 70 cinematography alone would be enough to guarantee this a spot on any list of the greatest films ever made (My only real knock on the film, however is the use of too much “Day for Night” shooting. The daytime, sunrise and sunset scenes look spectacular, but the movie just cheats on the after-dark scenes, which is disappointing.)
   
3. But the genius of the movie is marrying “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore” cinematography with “they’ve only just started to make them this way” editing from Anne V. Coates, who was inspired by the French New Wave to experiment with smash cuts (a match going out smash-cuts to a burning sunset) and sound pre-laps (hearing a new location before we actually cut to it) 
4. Lawrence was probably gay, and Lean, the screenwriters, and O’Toole agreed to hint at it without saying it. Viewers at the time were probably more aware of it than we are today because there’s lots of code that is no longer used. One of the first things he does is light another man’s cigarette. Everyone knew what that meant at the time, but modern-day viewers may not.  
   
5. But maybe the most daring thing about the movie at the time was its anti-colonialism. Wilson was a blacklisted ex-communist and Bolt (who wrote the final draft) was arrested and imprisoned for an anti-nuke protest in the middle of writing his draft. One could certainly accuse this movie of “white savior-ism” but it rises above such accusations by harshly examining and skewering those tropes.
6. Sharif gets the greatest character introduction of all time, appearing as a tiny dot in the middle of a distant mirage, then graaaaadually getting bigger, then BAM, just when he’s big enough to see, he whips out his rifle and kills Lawrence’s guide, before finishing his camel’s stroll into frame. This is a badass, and this is a movie star. (Steven Spielberg says, “The mirage sequence is still the greatest miracle I’ve ever seen on film.”)
   
7. The screenplay is a masterpiece of historical fictionalization, combining many characters into a few composites in a way that must be done. The most brilliant choice is the one to have the man he goes back to save be the same man he has to kill later. If they were different men (as they were in real life) the point would still be there, but would be far less powerful. We accept such fictionalizations for the purposes of a good story.

Ah, 1962: Try not to think about what you saw on “Mad Men” when you smoke our brand, please.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1961

The Year: 1961
What the Nominees Were: Fanny, The Guns of Navarone, The Hustler, Judgment at Nuremberg, West Side Story
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Other than one racist depiction, Breakfast of Tiffany’s is a great film. Over in France, Jean-Luc Godard was still turning out great films like A Woman is a Woman.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: West Side Story
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard, because Judgment at Nuremberg is pretty great, and West Side Story is rightly criticized these days for not casting Latino actors as some of the Puerto Rican characters, but that can’t stop it from being one of the best movies ever made. As it turns out, I’ll be giving the award to two brownface movies in a row, and I do so reluctantly, but I just can’t deny them…

Directors: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins
Writer: Ernest Lehman, based on the musical by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents (and, of course, “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare)
Stars: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris
The Story: The white Jets gang rumbles with the Puerto-Rican Sharks gang. Jets co-founder Tony falls in love with Maria, the sister of Sharks leader Bernardo. Bernardo kills the other co-founder Riff, so Tony kills Bernardo, then gets shot and killed by another shark, dying in Maria’s arms.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It also won Director(s), Supporting Actor for Chakiris, Supporting Actress for Moreno, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Editing, Scoring, and Sound. Only screenwriter Lehman lost (losing to Abby Mann for Judgment at Nuremberg)
How It Won: Not hard to figure this one out—It was a hit and universally acclaimed so it cruised to success.

 
Why It Won:

1. Wise got his start making lean little film noir masterpieces, usually about 75 minutes long, so he would seem to be a bizarre hire for a 2.5 hour Broadway adaptation, complete with intermission, but it was a brilliant choice. He hasn’t lost his noir grit, even when the gang members suddenly start doing pirouettes.
2. Sondheim fans are always horrified when I tell them that this is my favorite musical of his. “But he didn’t even write the music to that one!” Exactly. Don’t get me wrong, I love “Into the Woods”, “Company” and others, but as a composer, Sondheim was no Leonard Bernstein, and I cherish a chance to hear his delightful lyrics with even-better music.
3. I first saw this film while also watching “Twin Peaks”, which reunited Beymer and Tamblyn, and it took me years to realize that neither had worked very much in the thirty years between the two projects. I think that Beymer especially is great here and I have no idea why he didn’t become a star, instead laying around fallow until David Lynch finally rediscovered him.
   
4. This is my favorite film musical. Of every one I’ve seen this is the one where it’s most natural when the characters burst out into song and dance, because, while it’s a convincingly grimy world, everybody is supercharged with rhythm at all times. It almost feels unnatural when they manage to go a whole scene without a song or dance. When they’re not actually performing a song, they’re always snapping, or whistling or letting rhythm burst out of them in some other way.
   
5. We begin with the dancers on real NYC streets (the neighborhood where the musical was set had already been torn down to make room for Lincoln Center so they shot it in my old neighborhood of Spanish Harlem) then segue to massive and very convincing Hollywood sets in a seamless transition (and go back to real streets a few times to keep us convinced). The result is a type of hyper-reality: real but hallucinatory at the same time.
6. This does a great job with one of my rules: Always begin with discontented heroes. Tony and Maria both have longstanding personal problems, and then, when they meet, boom, they instantly ignite.

Ah, 1961: It begins…

Best Movies of 2025, #1: Superman

Is this a perfect movie? No, but I didn’t think there were any perfect movies this year, and this was the one I liked the best. This is the one I rushed to rewatch as soon as it was on Blu-Ray and liked it even more on a second watch.

The ending of this movie, watching the tape of his Earth parents, hit me like a cannonball both times I watched it. It’s very powerful, and my favorite movie moment of the year. I’m tearing up as I type this, in fact.

(But the movies biggest flaw was, once again, that it didn’t have something for everybody to do in the finale. The Daily Planet folks are flying around in a ship but they don’t go anywhere. This was fixable: Lex should have been operating Ultraman from hiding. Then the Daily Planet folks should have tracked him down and led Superman there.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: There Are Always New Stories to Tell

The movie’s first twist, which I will now spoil, is that Superman belatedly finds out that his Kryptonian birth parents intended for him to conquer earth and to repopulate his species by taking a harem. I was impressed by this new take and wondered what comic it was from (presumably an Elseworlds graphic novel?) Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was original to the movie. It’s amazing that, after 87 years of Superman comics (with sometimes as much as 8 issues a month) (not to mention the daily comic strip and weekly radio and TV shows) no one had told this one.

Gunn had the choice of thousands of stories to adapt, but instead he asked, what is the worst thing that could happen to this hero emotionally. It also helps that it’s entirely logical his Kryptonian parents would have wanted this of him.

There have been a lot of character-similar-to-Superman-but-he’s-a-bad-guy comics in recent years (two of which, “The Boys” and “Invincible,” have been successfully adapted to TV), but no one had asked “What if the real Superman was supposed to be bad, but chose to be good because of his good Earth parents?” That’s an original take.

(I did find one source online claiming the storyline was from a comic, but I’ve read that comic and it’s really something very different, so I’m counting it as original to Gunn)

(Now of course, you’re probably thinking: Wait, Matt, doesn’t this obligate you to choose this movie when you get to 2025 in “What Should’ve Won that Could’ve Won”. This is when I tell you that no, you can’t go through my lists since 2011 and figure out what movies I’ll say should have won. The criteria are different. My picks will be surprising.)

New episode of A Good Story Well Told about The Brave Little Toaster, featuring Betsy Bird!

Jonathan Auxier and I welcome my legendary wife Betsy to discuss one of the weirdest movies ever made, Disney's direct-to-video epic The Brave Little Toaster. Is it oddly great, or just greatly odd?

Best Movies of 2025, #2: Marty Supreme

If I had to choose for Best Actor between Chalamet in this movie and Hawke in Blue Moon, I’d be mighty stumped. They’re such different performances, but equally great, in their own way. Hawke’s is a masterpiece of subtlety, but this is a masterpiece of intensity.

This is the tale of petty criminal Marty Mauser, who dreams of being world ping-pong champion in the 1950s, but his sleaziness keeps getting in the way. Yes, it’s the fourth movie we’ve looked at about a man who thinks, incorrectly, that by being a “great man” he’ll be able to get away with mistreating women. That’s the theme of the year!

Rulebook Casefile: Winning by Losing, Losing by Winning, and Everything In Between

When discussing F1, I talked about how, in great sports movies, the hero either wins by losing or loses by winning. And in this movie they actually say something like that out loud in the dialogue! But is that actually true of this movie?

Marty thinks that by intentionally losing in an exhibition match, he will win the chance to compete in the main tournament, but then he finds out he will never be allowed to compete in the tournament, so he decides to win the exhibition match, and does so. Then he seems to have grown as a person, and goes home to take responsibility for his child and girlfriend.

So he’s supposed to win big by losing small, then loses the chance to win big, then wins small instead. But even then, he’s pissing off his benefactor by winning the exhibition round, and losing his plane flight home …only to win the support of the American military, getting him another way home.

So yes, the emotions are complex enough to qualify as literature, not just entertainment. But I kind of wish he had lost the match, admitted that he’s not the best, and that realization had led him home to take care of his girlfriend and kid.

It’s interesting that all four of the “problematic great men neglecting their kids” movies (Hamnet, Sentimental Value, Jay Kelly and this) end with the great man being professionally celebrated. It would be interesting if at least one of them admitted that great men, for all their other faults, are sometimes just not that great.

Best Movies of 2025, #3: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

This is an astoundingly good movie. Apparently Josh O’Connor has been acting for a while, but I wasn’t familiar with him, and I found his performance here astonishing. He steals the movie from Daniel Craig, which takes a lot of doing, because Craig is once again great as detective Benoit Blanc.

In both of the first two movies, Blanc helps a poor woman-of-color navigate a community of wealthy white assholes. I was expecting the same the third time out. How on Earth was I to guess that it would be a story about helping a decent (white, male) Catholic priest navigate a crappy congregation? It’s a shocking swerve away from what seemed to be the heart of the franchise, but it works beautifully.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Create Unique Obstacles

In the movie’s best scene, Blanc and Jud the priest are racing against time to try to solve the clues, when suddenly they hit a roadblock: The person who has promised to help them needs pastoral counselling before she gets off the phone.

Everything screeches to a halt as Jud listens to the woman’s problem and helps her with it, while Blanc’s eyes are rolling out of his head with frustration.

You really have to read the text of all three movies carefully to figure out that Blanc was probably kicked out of the house by a religious mother for being gay, giving him good reason to reject religion and have little sympathy in this situation, but he’s a good detective and knows this is not the time to press his case. And he’s found one priest he can approve of enough to respect his process.

(I kind of wish the movie had been a little more clear that this was what was going on with Blanc and not made us scratch for it, but if you do the work, it’s very rewarding.)

There are all sorts of obstacles you can throw in your heroes’ way, but the best are ones that are unique to this one hero’s values and commitments.  Only Jud would be stopped in his tracks here, and we love him for that.  

Best Movies of 2025, #4: Weapons

I don’t usually see horror movies, but the trailer for this was so good that I couldn’t resist and I was very happy with what I got.  All the children but one from a third-grade class run out of their homes at 2:17 am, and still haven’t been seen again a month later, when most of the action takes place.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Tease That You’re Not Going to Solve the Mystery

We begin the movie from the teacher’s perspective. Everybody blames her, but she has no idea what’s going on, and she’s snapping under the pressure. Here’s one reason why this section works: Hollywood movies have gotten artier in recent years, and you almost believe they won’t ever explain what happened to the kids. You’re watching it and thinking, “Is this ‘The Leftovers’? Are we never going to know?” (After all, the poster flat-out lies and says “They never came back.”) Keeping that possibility open just makes it all the more gratifying when everything does fall into place, and all mysteries are gradually revealed. (It’s okay for posters to lie.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Wring Out the Juice

You’ve got a juicy idea for a movie, but what’s your in-point? As it turns out, there is one character who knows exactly what’s going on: The boy who didn’t run away. He was forced by a witch to help kidnap all the missing kids and they’re in his basement.

This poor kid is a very interesting character. He’s so interesting, that the natural tendency would be to focus the whole movie around him. But the brilliance of the movie is to give us several other POV characters first (starting with the teacher, then an obsessed parent, then a cop, then a criminal, etc.) only getting to the boy well into the second half.

This mystery is so juicy that many characters have interesting reactions, not just the boy (who ultimately saves the day). It would be a shame to deny us the perspectives of those who don’t know what’s going on, or give the truth away too quickly.

Rulebook Casefile: Have Them Do Something Clever (Even Awful Things)

The boy has been ordered by the witch to bring home an object from each classmate so she can take control of them all. We see him sitting at his desk scanning the other desks, focusing in on the objects some of his classmates have …but they don’t all have an object. We don’t support what he’s doing, but now we’re worried he won’t succeed. Then he sees it: Every kid has decorated a piece of art to go on their cubby. He just has to remove all of those. We’re relieved: He’s solved his problem cleverly. (And now all of the kids are literally cursed.)