[WRITING THRILLER & ACTION-ADVENTURE FILMS with NEILL D. HICKS]

Ever since the Almighty booted the Satanic butt out of Heaven, Number Two has been trying harder. Naturally, the crafty opportunist has made some of His most successful intrusions into the souls of fellow poseurs, Hollywood screenwriters. He's stood them on the mountain top and shown them the untapped whiz-bang audience exploitation available for the asking by any hack willing to invoke His name. Yea, and multitudes of those trite scribblers have enthusiastically embraced the Archfiend to suckle at the tit of effortless achievement. But Beelzebub is ever the master prevaricator, a beguiler whose promises are the essence mendacity itself. You see, He neglects to tell these covetous second-rate typists that once the Serpent is set loose, there is no way to contain it. In other words, by inviting the supernatural into the screenplay, the writer just sold his soul to a script that he cannot possibly make work.

For the longest time, as human history goes, Lucifer made hardly any headway at all on earth because there was far too much competition from commonplace personal devils. As anyone of Gaelic or Jewish descent can attest, the ancient banshees and dybbuks were merely anthropomorphic specters of the soul-maiming internal chimeras that we now do battle against with anti-depressants. However, as the Church subsumed these barbarian demons into fat, jolly elves, romping bunnies, and jaunty leprechauns, ironically, by slow diminution organized religion eliminated the mysterious and powerful spirits that inhabited the forests of the mind, to blaze an open pathway for the Prince of Darkness himself. Hell, somebody had to be made responsible for the ills of the world, and if you couldn't blame warring gods or earthly imps any longer, then who could you condemn? What the Bible was fuzzy on, Dante made quite clear, and Old Nick was slowly ascribed greater omnipotence in the absence of any other figure mighty enough to sustain the incomprehensible.

Now, the advantageous quality of the ancient, capricious gods of earth and mind, was that they could be appeased, bought off, and sometimes completely avoided if one knew where not to step, or how to recite the proper incantations, or the exact garlands to wear at what time of year. Certain rituals, both communal and private, could protect and pacify. There were rules by which the underworld could be managed. The rules might be as perplexing as a Gaelic knot, but appropriately invoked, evil could be kept at bay. But even these powerful antidotes were eventually lost to the pallid sacraments of milk and cookies by the chimney.

As a result, in the West we have culturally imbued Satan all other ungraspable forms of the immaterial, with an infinite power of control and that is the writer's predicament. If there are no rules, the fundamental dramatic contest cannot be won. If the context of the screenplay world cannot be limited, there is no way to end the story. The main character cannot possibly triumph, and the audience must, necessarily, stagger out of the theater disappointed.

The establishment of context, the cosmos of credibility in which your story occurs, is of paramount importance. The audience has made a deal with you to suspend disbelief as long as you deliver them a story that makes sense within the context you set up. You must locate the audience solidly in the first few minutes of the story and you must not violate or add to those rules as your story progresses.

Ira Levin had the good sense to realize principle, and stopped his story with the threat of Rosemary's Baby, but countless other writers since then have unleashed their beastly creations full force. The most recent of this misguided souls is Tim Burton. Of course, the credits read Screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker from a Screen Story by Kevin Yagher & Andrew Kevin Walker, but Satan makes sure we can't miss His proprietary grasp of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Burton's film has absolutely nothing whatever to do with Washington Irving's original tale, but, of course, stealing from writers, long ago ceased to be a sin, even in the eyes of the Creator. The Almighty figured that stealing from writers has about the same moral wallop as tick squishing. It takes a powerful lot of creative thievery to earn you so much as a nanosecond in purgatory.

Nevertheless, Burton provides Sleepy Hollow with the kind of high-budget visual adroitness you would expect. At the turn-of-the-century (19^th Century, that is) a proto-Sherlock-Holmes-Inspector-Gadget, Constable Ichabod Crane, is dispatched to upstate New York in order to solve a series of grisly beheadings and, not incidentally, prove that the murders have no relationship to the superstitions held by the local yokels.. But the locals aren't so yokel after all. They're prosperous, intelligent, and damned conniving Yankees, each of which has a very good reason for committing the profitable crime of homicide. So, a little Sherlock Holmes, a little Agatha Christie, a breath of blossoming modernism in the face of folkloric superstition, some chiaroscuro lighting, and the cosmos of credibilit established for an intriguing, shadowy detective mystery story. The audience snuggles down for a thumping good tale.

This article is adapted, in part, from Neill's forthcoming suite of books on genres which will follow his successful Screenwriting 101 The Essential Craft Of Feature Film Writing.

Other articles by NEILL D. HICKS