Homosexualist established screenwriter John August (q.v.) and his irrelevant second-fiddle podcast cohost discussed the heroic men who subdued Islamic terrorists on a French train.
AUGUST: [A] couple episodes ago we talked about how [whatever random event] would be a movie, and one of the things we brought up was the French train heroes… these three Americans who were on a train in France and they ended, like, taking down this guy who was shooting at the train. And they were hailed as heroes…. [W]e were really wondering… what would the second act be? How do you structure that? […]
If that big incident happened in the first act, what is the life like for those guys moving forward? And as those 15 minutes start ticking down, interesting to think about sort of what happens when this heroic person goes home and whether that becomes a factor in other things of his life. […]
IRRELEVANT SECOND-FIDDLE COHOST: I mean, if I had passed on this movie initially and then someone came back to me and said, “Well, what about now?” I’d say it’s still a pass.
— Yeah. I think it’s still a pass, too…. Obviously we’re talking about sort of a fictional movie about maybe some fictional people.
No, you’re talking about a fictional movie about real people. There’s your first problem.
But I think it was an interesting way to think about sort of what happens next, if you structured this kind of story with the big dramatic train incident happening at the start. What is the ongoing story of these three young men?
When reality does not fit Syd Field’s three-act structure, reality doesn’t get made into a movie. Bret Ellis would call this Empire thinking and would explain how and why Tarantino eats Empire’s lunch.