The eight original stories

Go ahead. Give me any movie. And I’ll tell you where it comes from.”

It sounded like a party game, some drunken bet shouted out from the end of the bar, or raised in the middle of a cocktail party by some boisterous boor. But I felt like I could knock any takers out of the ballpark.

“Surely you’ve heard about the eight original stories? The fact that 99.9 percent of Hollywood scripts and movies derive their basic plots from Greek mythology, folklore and well-known fairy tales?” I was being relentless, obnoxious. I was sick of hearing people describe such-and-such a movie in breathless tones and tacking on, in apparent reverential disbelief, “How did they ever come up with that story?”

Well, it’s easy when there’s only eight of them.

Let’s face it. You get a little tired of Hollywood product after a while, after three or more decades of watching the stuff, and you begin to realize there’s a certain template — not just genres like “horror,” “comedy,” “mystery,” but actual templates: cookie-cutter stories that keep coming back, season after season.

I’ll admit I heard about it in a screenwriting class, a short course offered by The New School in NYC, a four-hour seminar taught by a studio “insider” (though not a noted screenwriter himself) who was explaining the “eight story” theory of Hollywood product, but also noting some iron-clad facets of successful scripts: that they must lay out an “inciting incident” within five minutes of the movie (or five pages of the script). If a studio honcho or script reader doesn’t see such an “incident” — some action that gets the story rolling — within five minutes, they’re most likely going to toss the script onto the deep-shag carpet and book a massage instead.

I liked the class, short as it was, but it left me with a few annoying quirks: after that, I could always spot the “midpoint” of a movie — it’s that halfway mark in the script where a big revelation or change takes place; from there on, it’s all climax, climax, and anti-climax. I got so I could tell, without looking at the DVD timer, where the midpoint was — I just knew the scriptwriters were wrapping up their arguments, and preparing to send the film into its second half.

The person I was baiting was game. She said, “Pretty Woman. What story is that?”

Oh, come on. That’s too easy, I thought, shaking my head. “Cinderella (No. 1). It’s one of the eight. ‘The overlooked beauty prevails.’ ‘The ugly duckling that grows into a swan.’ Basically, any chick flick with a makeover scene comes from Cinderella.”

She nodded, but pressed on. “What about horror movies? Silence of the Lambs? Alien? The Blair Witch Project?”

I had my list in front of me. “Silence of the Lambs comes from Odysseus’s battle with Circe (No. 2). So does The Exorcist. It’s the template for all the ‘spider and the fly’ stories — Se7en, In the Line of Fire, all the serial killer movies, basically.” Odysseus is drawn to this island, see, seeking comfort and rest, but his crewmembers are offered herbs and potions by the island’s enchantress, lulled into complacency and turned into swine. It ends badly for Circe, just as it does for most serial killers in Hollywood movies. Same thing with the Alien movies. The common thread is the sly, seductive hunter (or huntress) and some kind of prey. This accounts for about 25 percent of the movies out there, I’m sure.

“Blair Witch actually falls under a couple categories,” I went on. “It’s Circe, mixed with your basic Candide scenario.” Candide (No. 3) was Voltaire’s slim satire of an “innocent abroad,” a young woman who finds that the world outside her small village is not what she expected, yet keeps rhapsodizing over “the best of all possible worlds.” Perhaps the basic plot predates the 18th-century Candide, but the “fish out of water” storyline is very familiar to anyone who’s watched Beverly Hills Cop, Legally Blonde or even the recent Tropic Thunder: someone (or a group) plunged into unfamiliar surroundings, and the comedy that ensues. (Well, not comedy in the case of Blair Witch Project, but definitely a “fish out of water” script.) It’s a high-concept pitcher’s wet dream: mix two unrelated milieus, stir, and collect box office bucks (Beverly Hills Chihuahua, anyone?)

It doesn’t take long to find movies that fit into the “Orpheus” template (No. 4), either: Meet Joe Black, surely, but that has a happy ending; Ghost, The Lake House, The Love Letter, The Notebook, Bridges of Madison County and others of its ilk are basic fantasies about finding a love beyond the grave. Or beyond the restrictions of time. Many Hollywood movies delve into this “endless love” scenario, disregarding that Orpheus’s fate was far from happy.

Once you’ve told all this to certain people, you notice a flickering light going out in their eyes: the movies they’ve loved all these years for reasons unknown have been revealed as basic plots, dusted off and peddled again and again to happy consumers. Most people aren’t charmed at receiving this information. I can’t help what I see, though.

You’ve got your Romeo and Juliet (No. 5) stories of star-crossed lovers (such as Love Story, Crazy/Beautiful, Autumn in New York — basically any movie where the quirky but “meant for each other” lovers are torn apart by illness or ill will). Then you’ve got your Faust-type (No. 6) stories: either an explicit pact with the devil (The Devil’s Advocate) or more subtle reflections on such an arrangement (Godfather II); then you’ve got the “Tristan and Iseult” variations (No. 7), tales built around a love triangle (no shortage of those in Hollywood) and which was also a source for the King Arthur folklore revolving around Lancelot’s desire to protect Guinevere, whom he falls in love with, much to the King’s displeasure. As with the original story, all love triangles in Hollywood movies end badly — at leastfor someone.

And finally there are those Hollywood plots derived from the myth of Achilles’ heel (No. 8), usually an overlooked or fatal weakness that causes the hero’s downfall. A quick look at a couple of last year’s Oscar nominees (There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men) confirms that this myth is, indeed, alive and well in Hollywood even today. In fact, the Coen brothers, who made No Country For Old Men, have set up a pretty good cottage industry drawn from flawed heroes with an Achilles’ heel that causes their downfall. At least they have the good sense, usually, to turn it into comedy.

Why do we crave the same stories, again and again? There is Joseph Campbell’s explanation, drawn from Jungian archetypal theory: we seek the “hero in a thousand faces,” the retold tale of great trial and toil that leads to home or victory (see: Homer’s “The Odyssey”). For us to easily connect to this story again and again, as moviegoers, there must be “transparency” — it must be readily recognizable, practically interchangeable with dozens of other movies. See how long it takes you to pigeonhole the top-grossing movies of 2008 (so far): The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Hancock, Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! (For me, it’s Circe, Faust, Achilles, Achilles, Candide, Candide, Romeo and Juliet, and Romeo and Juliet again.)

This rundown of archetypal Hollywood stories got me a little depressed. I began thinking there was little room left for original stories. Even something as seemingly original as Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind falls somewhere in the Orpheus/Faust territory: someone who attempts to resurrect a dead memory bank, and makes a disastrous deal in doing so. But the cool thing is, screenwriters don’t necessarily know they’re tapping into this archetypal stuff when they’re working on a script; they’re free to create, drawing from a limited well of human scenarios that yield ever-intriguing combinations. (Or not, as most predictable Hollywood flicks remind us.)

Still, watching Pineapple Express on pirated DVD the other day, I was momentarily flabbergasted. Perhaps the haze of marijuana smoke that seems to have enveloped the actors and scriptwriter Seth Rogen as they cooked up this head-scratchingly bad pot comedy was affecting me, too. I couldn’t peg what category it fell under. Stoners aren’t exactly heroes, though Harold and Kumar perhaps belong to that other unspoken category that contains most movies, to some degree — “the quest,” whether it be for the Holy Grail, Colonel Kurtz, or White Castle burgers. But the two dudes in Pineapple Express veer from one ridiculous episode to the next, with scarcely a laugh involved. The only common thread is their complete and utter stoned befuddlement. Ah… then it hit me. It’s Candide. “The best of all possible worlds.” The fish flopping around in strange waters. Now I can rest in peace.