I watched Kick-Ass last week (Big Josh: it doesn’t suck), but left it out of my Monday Movies gig because I was short on time and I had this exercise in mind. A screenwriter’s “beat sheet” is a list of significant moments – less detail than a list of scenes, more detail than three-act structure. I’ve been in screenwriting classes where we were asked to do ten-point beat sheets. Screenwriter Blake Snyder, known for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot but better known for his screenwriting manual Save The Cat!, compiled a fifteen-point beat sheet, believing that the exact same beats should fall not only in the same order but arriving at roughly predictable page numbers of a screenplay. (For better or worse, his work has moved from observation to prescription.)

Below the fold, I’ll read the Kick-Ass screenplay by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn (downloadable via Simply Scripts) and see how it matches up to the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, a/k/a the BS2. Each beat says what page Snyder believes you should find it on in parentheses next to it, and I’ll indicate in my discussion where it actually falls. The rule of thumb for translating screenplay pages to screen minutes is 1 page = 1 minute and I’ll indicate how far apart the film and the screenplay get.

(I’m not going on record saying that this or all movies should follow the BS2 exactly — I’ve been trying to internalize the lessons of Scott Myers’s Narrative Throughline and Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey as well, both of which could be used to look at the structure of this and many other movies. I have not been trying to internalize this horse pill. Also if you have my copy of The Writer’s Journey I’d like it back.)

THE BLAKE SNYDER BEAT SHEET

PROJECT TITLE: Kick-Ass
GENRE:Superhero

1. Opening Image (1)

A costume-clad figure stands atop a skyscraper… and plummets to his death. The imagery clearly states that we’re playing with the superhero myth here.

2. Theme Stated (5)

Dave Lizewski’s monologue brings in the theme starting from page 1 with

Then follows six pages of establishing how unexceptional he and his life are, leading to this exchange on page 7:

This debate is the theme of Kick-Ass. It doesn’t quite get stated as a thesis until page 14, when Dave gets his first costume:

3. Set-Up (1-10)

According to Snyder, these pages should introduce every main character in the A story, and suggest that there are “Six Things That Need Fixing” about the hero. It’s a “full-fledged documentation of the hero’s world labeled ‘before’.” In Kick-Ass, we get Dave’s friends Marty and Todd. We see Chris D’Amico, the mobster’s son who will show up as Red Mist. We actually get a good set-up of the romantic B-story, watching Katie Deauxma look right through Dave. Dave’s main problem is that “like most people my age, I just existed.” He’s also incurably horny, and since his mother’s death, he and his father drift through life without too much connection. (In the script, the scene where they talk about cereal ends with the presentation of tickets to “Spiderman 8” – the film wisely cuts out the gift to emphasize that “life just goes on.”) Lastly, he’s an easy mark – he and his friends get their cash and comics boosted by thugs in the alley behind the comics store.

The first 10 pages all belong to Dave. The bottom of page 10 brings us our first look at the D’Amico operation, and our first allusion to Big Daddy and Hit-Girl: “This would be the guy who looks like Batman.” We don’t get to see Damon/Big Daddy and Mindy/Hit-Girl until page 14.

4. Catalyst (12)

Is the catalyst – known elsewhere as the inciting incident – when Dave gets the Kick-Ass costume in the mail on page 14? It’s unusual, because it’s an action of his own choosing. One hypothesis is that Hit-Girl is the protagonist, and Kick-Ass’s viral video is the inciting incident that gets Hit-Girl in the game. I like a provocative reading as much as the next guy, but I don’t buy it, not least because the video may accelerate Hit-Girl’s trajectory but it doesn’t really change it. I think there’s a non-traditional catalyst — the change in Dave’s life comes from within, from his idea. After all, “the comic books had it wrong.”

5. Debate (12-25)

From the moment he puts on his costume, Kick-Ass starts training. On page 22, he crosses the Rubicon: Dave spies the two thugs who laid him out in the set-up, and decides to take-them on. (In the movie this lands at minute 17, reinforcing the Page 17 Rule.)

6. Break into Two (25)

This is pretty clearly the moment where Dave, having almost lost his life to the thugs, decides to intervene on behalf of another man running from two thugs (page 33, minute 30). This leads to the Kick-Ass video going viral, bringing Hit-Girl and Big Daddy into play.

7. B Story (30)

Katie’s renewed interest in Dave starts on page 40, when she asks him to coffee. His friends assure him that it’s only because she thinks he’s gay. In the film the first date is here, but the underlying problem with the relationship gets set up in the debate section – a smart choice, because the mixed success (a girl finally notices him, but only because she thinks he’s gay) reinforces the disunity that helps move Dave into action as Kick-Ass.

8. Fun and Games (30-55)

This is the section of the movie that pays off “the promise of the premise.” The media attention to Kick-Ass falls under this (pp36-40), as does Kick’Ass’s first encounter with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy (pp46-52), though it’s not exactly light-hearted.

9. Midpoint (55)

The midpoint is the middle of the script and the middle act of two (most three act structures imagine a roughly 30-60-30 divide in the three acts. Which totals 110 pages. Keep up.) Here, the stakes are raised: it’s either an “’up’ where the hero peaks (though it’s a false peak) or a ‘down’ when the world collapses all around the hero (though it’s a false collapse).”

The victory, aided by Hit-Girl, against Rasul’s men is definitely a “false peak”. And directly following on page 53:

10. Bad Guys Close In (55-75)

Chris D’Amico hatches a plan to catch Kick-Ass (p61, m57). There’s a setback (due to Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s interference, p68-70 m63-70), but Chris persists in using the Red Mist ruse to find Big Daddy and Hit-Girl (p81, m80) leading to…

11. All Is Lost (75)

Big Daddy’s death (p 93, m91) definitely qualifies. According to Snyder, movies from Star Wars to Elf introduce “the whiff of death” here (Obi-Wan bites the dust in the former; in the latter, Will Ferrell ponders leaping from a bridge).

The whole script is only 104 pages (the film 111m), so we’re running late – my screenwriting teacher George Melrod once explained that he likes to think of movies as three acts followed by a finale, which may make more sense here.

12. Dark Night of the Soul (75-85)

This exchange (p94-97, m92-95) anchors this section:

13. Break into Three (85)

On p.97/m.96, Hit-Girl knocks on the bad-guys’ door (to a great Ennio Morricone riff), then cut to:

The script shows Dave finally jumping off a rooftop, aided by the jetpack. The film keeps the jetpack hidden.

14. Finale (85-110)

The assault on D’Amico’s office, p97-101, m96-107.

15. Final Image (110)

(p104, m110): With the Joker quote, a final ironic twist on the theme that reinforces an age-old comic book theme: if ordinary people become superheroes, ordinary people will also become villains.

Kick-Ass takes a while to get started, then has a compressed first half of Act II, a long second half, and a compressed Act III. Much of the structural idiosyncracies come from the Hit-Girl/Big-Daddy plot, which has much greater development than that of an typical ally. Strong scenes for the romance B-plot and the D’Amico/Red Mist characters also shape the structure.

Here’s why I don’t think the Hit-Girl plot qualifies Kick-Ass as a dual protagonist vehicle: while Hit-Girl’s problem is obvious — she’s been turned into a killing machine by her father at the cost of her childhood — the movie doesn’t really make that a problem for her. Instead, it’s part of Dave’s final puzzle: he has to be physically courageous enough to help her win the final battle, but the normalcy that he carries around for the entire movie is the even-greater gift he’s able to give to her at the end.

In the romance plot, Dave goes from invisible to wrongly perceived by Katie. When, on page 79, he comes out to her as both Kick-Ass and as straight, he’s really happy, and he’s achieved a great false victory — he’s stopped lying to Katie about his identity (on two fronts) and he’s finally getting laid. But that truth comes at the cost of one more lie, to himself: he promises her that he’ll stop being a super-hero, breaking the promise to himself that catalyzed his adventure.

Hit-Girl and Katie highlight what Scott Myers likes to talk about as the protagonist’s move from Disunity into Unity. Dave’s initial attempts at physical courage fall apart because they’re based on lies, and his journey requires him to accept be Kick-Ass while insisting on the value of his true, unexceptional self.

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In general, Bluestone’s Law as I understand it secondhand is based on the idea that deviation from the original is more respected when the original is not beloved. We’ve largely gotten past that whole problem of “deviation” when it comes to novels, but we haven’t with comics, and I think it might be instructive to consider why.

Most people, I think, still see comics and movies as really pretty similar. Comics are the closest one can get to a movie on the page, goes the subconscious expectation. Both tell stories with dialogue supported by visual depictions of action, and comic book authors have adopted many visual storytelling tricks from movies. Comic book scripts and movie scripts even look a lot alike, and many TV screenwriters have dabbled in comic book writing.

The fact that their comics have not generally been very good should give a hint, though, that the visual support to dialogue works pretty differently in movies and in comics.

Art in comics must be very simple. It has to convey an action in a space maybe two inches tall by two inches wide. Artists will pack only as much into those small spaces as can be intelligible.

But within those limitations it can be extremely evocative. It activates the imagination when done well, leading us right into the  “vivid and continuous dream” that John Gardner names as the action of all good fiction. We see movement and emotion in our heads.

Because that movement and emotion is linked to specific visual cues, however, we believe mistakenly that it’s all there on the page. Beloved comics get transferred to the screen by directors who want nothing more than to reproduce what everyone loved so much in print, and they sit there, visually dead.

When comics do work on the big screen it’s usually because directors find ways to make them look great there. Vince Locke’s art in A History of Violence the book is forgettable, so Cronenberg was free to go his own way. Harvey Pekar works with different artists in every story, so Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini were similarly free in American Splendor.

Which brings me to James Gunn’s Super, just out on DVD, and its contrast with last year’s Kick-Ass. Like Kick-Ass, Super is based on the idea of an ordinary guy dressing up as a superhero.* Unlike Kick-Ass it was not preceded by a comic, and when I try to imagine it as a comic I can’t see it translating well.

Rainn Wilson plays The Crimson Bolt, aka Frank D’Arbo, a guy who finds himself adrift when his wife abandons him and returns to heroin. A vision from God and some late-night Christian superhero TV convince him to become a costumed hero, and when he visits a comic book store to do research on heroes without superpowers he accidentally picks up Ellen Page as a sidekick, Boltie. Because he doesn’t have powers he settles on hitting his villains with a wrench. Or shooting them when necessary.

All the way to the bloody climax Gunn rides the line between comedy and despair. He lets the actors play their roles with absolute seriousness, and doesn’t ever try to undercut how messed-up and deluded Frank is supposed to be. He and Boltie are crazy people, and when he bashes a guy in the head for cutting in line at the movies, it’s appropriately horrifying.

In the same moment, though, the violence is undercut by a slapstick visual tone. Not Three Stooges slapstick where the violence doesn’t hurt, Troma slapstick, where the gore is extreme and doesn’t feel quite real.

That specific tone simply wouldn’t work in a comic. I’ve tried to imagine some of the most arresting images in Super as comic panels, and I think they’d either be unleavened horror, or else that nasty, mean-spirited visual slapstick that characterizes most of Mark Millar’s work (including Kick-Ass) and Garth Ennis titles like Crossed. There simply isn’t enough space in a panel for most artists to enact that uncomfortable middle ground where Super lives. All of which means that while Super may be a far better movie than Kick-Ass, I’m not sure it’d be half as good a comic.

*It’s weird that in neither of these movies do the protagonists bother to learn about the Real-Life Superhero movement. The Kick-Ass 2 comic book series offers something along these lines, but in this day and age it’s hard to fathom anyone doing non-Internet-based research, as Rainn Wilson’s character does in Super, and when they did wouldn’t they immediately stumble on the RLS phenomenon? Plus both movies assume RLS’s would be vigilantes, whereas in truth they seem to be motivated more by an endearing concept of heroism. Less crimefighting, more soup-kitchen fundraising.

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The action choreography and direction were particularly strong. As one of the people I went with pointed out, the action speeds up and slows down, Matrix-style, in a way that’s deliberately reminiscent of the way comic book action moves across panels. We see blurs punctuated by frozen frames, and it works.

A few words of warning. First, it’s gory. (I overheard one moviegoer say on the way out of the theater: “That was more violent than Quentin Tarantino.”) Second, it’s just an action movie. Don’t go in there expecting anything more.

That said, pace K-sky, it doesn’t suck.

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The last issue of the first Kick-Ass story arc just came out, and since the movie release is only three months away, it’s worth looking back over the book’s first two years (yes, only eight issues in almost two years) to try to figure out why this story I loved so much at first went off the rails.

The premise was fantastic: a nerdy kid with no training or special abilities decides to put on a costume and go out and fight crime. In his first real altercation he foils a mugging, taking on three guys at once. He also gets beaten so badly he ends up in the hospital. But someone records the fight on a cell phone, uploads it to YouTube, and Kick-Ass the superhero becomes a national sensation. Of course in his secret-identity life, in which he still goes to high school with his costume on under his clothes, he’s busy pretending to be gay so that girls will deign to talk to him.

I thought this would be a story that took the desire to be special seriously, and let the kid be special in a real way, in a real world. (See, for example, the true story of Master Legend, a guy who lives in Orlando, dresses up in a superhero costume, and goes out to fight crime. He also rustles up donations of supplies for the homeless, launches a campaign to educate them about a staph epidemic, and helps force the state government to relocate endangered gopher tortoises out of the path of a freeway. He is simultaneously ludicrous and, in a deep sense, a hero.)

But instead Mark Millar ended up using his fake superhero as a backdoor into a plot involving real superheroes, a Punisher-type character and his ninja ten-year-old daughter. As soon as they made their entrance the tone shifted and we got several straight issues of slapstick violence, culminating in this issue 8 bloodbath. (There’s an onomatopoetic joke involving shooting a guy’s penis off and then splitting his head with a cleaver, for instance.) Maybe I should have known Millar’s intentions didn’t lie in the direction I wanted from the tag line on the cover of issue 2: “Sickening Violence…Just The Way You Like It!”

From the previews it looks like Kick-Ass the movie follows the comic’s storyline pretty closely. For once I wish the screenwriters who wrote the adaptation had decided to diverge more. I don’t think Mark Millar would have cared—Wanted the movie had only the vaguest of resemblances to Wanted the comic book.

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