Recently I passed on a script even though it had a pretty good plot.

The story had the bones of a decent murder mystery: it featured two private investigators, a big city and a murder that took place in the lab of a prominent Seattle biotech company. By the last reel, the younger PI, a woman, got romantically involved with one of the lab techs, and the identity of the villain was even somewhat surprising.

So why did I pass? The script felt more like a decent episode of LAW & ORDER or DIAGNOSIS, MURDER than a movie somebody would pay $8.50 (or $9.50 in Manhattan, my sources tell me) to see. It had a TV sensibility rather than a feature sensibility.

Observant readers will immediately see that the red herring verb in the previous paragraph is "felt." If the writer were standing in front of me--carrying a large club, I suspect--she might say "What do you mean it felt like TV? How dare you say that!?! Can’t you give me more constructive advice?"

Two phenomena are in play here. The first is the usual writerly hatred of the anonymous script analyst. The reader. The unseen judging presence who can (in the writer’s mind) take out a promising and lucrative screenwriting career like a solitary gunman lurking in a book repository, and all based only on a gut feeling.

Too bad for the writer. That’s the game.

The second phenomenon is more interesting: what are the genuine differences between a TV sensibility and a feature sensibility?

Digression: Before continuing, I must point out that there is a long-standing snobbishness among feature people concerning TV. This is starting to change with the metastatic growth of new distribution platforms: pay-per-view, cable, DVD, and the long-promised, Brave New Worldian convergence wherein your computer and your cable TV will make love and spawn a new interactive device so compelling that you’ll never be able to leave your couch.

In spite of this, lots of feature development executives and feature agents still feel superior to the TV crowd. For them, "it’s too TV" is simply a semi-rude translation of "It ain’t any good" or "I don’t like it."

That’s not what I’m talking about here. End of Digression.

Let’s go back to that murder mystery screenplay.

The fatal weakness I discovered was that neither of the two PIs had a personal stake in the murder they were investigating. Sure, the younger investigator got involved with one of the peripheral lab techs, but it had nothing to do with the mystery at hand. It was tacked on. The romantic sub-plot could have been surgically sliced from the story without affecting any of the major beats.

This was a problem because the two detectives were the stars of the story. They were always onscreen. Their relationship was the most important one in the story, and the audience experienced everything through their eyes.

The two PIs helped to tell a story, but it wasn’t their story. As the final credits ran in my mental multiplex, I knew that--for the writer--the detectives were ready to be deployed into another story, and another, and another; there was a nearly endless number of possible sequels.

The screenplay, in other words, had failed to use up its two main characters.

Movies use up their characters. TV shows don’t. That’s the rule.

"Now wait just a second!" I hear you cry. "What about the three INDIANA JONES movies? What about ROCKY V, STAR TREK IX, and the endless proliferation of James Bond flicks? Movies don’t use up their characters at all!"

Yes and no. I’m going to table this objection--what I’ll call the Franchise Objection--for the moment. But I promise to return to it before the end of this column. In the meantime…

Since movies use up their characters, even secondary characters can exceed their plot function and possess fairly complicated psychology. Think of all the scene-stealing little performances that you’ve seen in movies: like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s delightful turn as Scotty in BOOGIE NIGHTS.

In TV, an individual character’s plot function is of paramount importance, and any psychology that distinguishes the character also threatens to use up the character and end his utility for the series.

Character and Plot exist in a complex dynamic. In a plot-driven story, the more a character advances a storythe less that character is a part of the story.

The best example of this is the detective story: Sherlock Holmes is endlessly recyclable because we never learn much about Holmes himself. Sure, there are the stock tricks of the character: he plays the violin, injects a 7% solution of cocaine, and deduces other characters innermost thoughts through incisive observation.

But does Holmes feel guilty for putting all those people in jail? Is he a lonely man? Late at night, does he fantasize about Irene Adler (the one woman to which he was ever attracted) wearing a silk negligée? We don’t know: the great detective’s emotions are not a part of the story. He is an attractive narrative function rather than a complex psychology.

What Holmes does is enter, advance, and wrap up other characters’ stories. When he leaves a story, Holmes is largely unaffected by that story.

On the small screen, mystery series like MURDER, SHE WROTE follow the Sherlock Holmes model precisely. Jessica Fletcher can never change--can never marry, or get a disease, or adopt a small child--because if she did she wouldn’t be available to solve mysteries anymore.

Cop shows work the same way: Perry Mason, Sergeant Joe Friday, and all the characters in LAW & ORDER find a story, tell it, and then move on to the next story. That’s why those series last for so long.

Sit-coms are similar, the characters can be almost totally reduced to plot function, changing as little as possible over the course of many years. You take a bunch of contradictory plot functions, put them in a confined area, and allow them to change as little as possible.

The end of the GILLIGAN’S ISLAND theme song spells this out clearly: "The ship’s aground on the shore of this uncharted desert isle, with Gilligan, the Skipper too, the Millionaire and his wife, the movie star, the Professor and Mary Ann…." The psychological make-up of the GILLIGAN’S ISLAND characters was so vestigial that after the black & white pilot in 1964 we never heard the names of the Skipper (Jonas Grumby) or the Professor (Roy Hinkley, Jr.). Similarly, Mrs. Howell’s real name wasn’t "Lovey." It was Eunice Wentworth Howell.

The exception that proves the rule: what made M*A*S*H* so extraordinary was that the characters did grow and change, whereupon they either changed plot function (Hot Lips Houlihan went from a cranky adversary to a real colleague) or left the series (Henry Blake, Trapper John, Frank Burns and Radar O’Reilly were each replaced, by Sherman Potter, B. J. Hunnicut, Charles Winchester, and Max Klinger). The important point, here, is that none of them could both change AND retain their initial plot function.

All of this might sound like just a more detailed version of the anti-TV snobbery I talked about earlier, but it’s not. TV may be more plot-driven than movies, but that doesn’t make it a lesser form of entertainment. Instead, TV is a different animal altogether.

Let’s approach the movies use up their characters rule from a different route, by analyzing the cognitive differences between watching a movie and watching TV.

Cognitive differences? Yup. An audience member’s brain does different stuff watching a TV series than it does while watching a movie. Knowing what that stuff is might help you to be a more effective writer.

(Note: I am indeed talking about series when I talk about TV. In a TV series--as opposed to a Movie of the Week or miniseries--writers can’t use up their characters. They have to string them out, miserly, making them last for at least five years of permutations. Five years is "golden time" in TV land. If your show lasts for five seasons then it will be in syndication forever, and everybody gets residual checks forever too.)

When you watch most movies, you watch two hours of stand-alone story. While the stars of the movie may be old friends with whom you have a million associations (just think of how Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pregnant character in JUNIOR played off his usual macho persona), the characters have a beginning, middle and ending. Every Meg Ryan romantic comedy ends with her getting the guy. At that point, her story is over. She’s been used up.

In contrast, when you watch a TV series is it merely an endless stream of individual stories that happen to have some characters in common?

Of course not.

When you’re watching a TV show, you aren’t just watching an individual episode: you’re watching that episode on top of every other episode. It is a cumulative exercise. In 1956, the art theorist Steven Pepper named this phenomenon "aesthetic funding."

Be patient, the ride gets a little bumpy for about half a page now.)

In aesthetic funding, "a late perception in a series… carries to considerable degree the results of previous perceptions as its constituents."

For our purposes, a "late perception" is the most-recent episode in a TV series, and the "previous perceptions" are all the earlier episodes.

Pepper was writing about what it’s like to look at an El Greco painting many times over the course of years, but his theory applies equally well to a TV series.

Here’s the long version:

The object of aesthetic judgment and of appreciation in a work of art, then, is not this, that, or the other perception as it comes, but rather the total series, P1-P2-P3-P4, which we shall call the perceptive series. This is literally the aesthetic work of art.… The actual aesthetic object for the practical critic or everyday spectator is not a physical object, nor an idea, nor even a single act of perception, but the intermittent cumulative succession of perceptions.*

Arrrgh! What does this mean in English? And how does it apply to TV?

Translation: Each time you watch an episode of a series, you get a memory coin. The more you watch the show, the more coins you earn. The more coins you earn, the larger the aesthetic fund you have that is applicable to the show in question.

Let’s say you’re a Trekker, or, if you’re a little older, a Trekkie. As a fan, you have a huge aesthetic fund of STAR TREK-relevant memories.

Because of your fund, the experience you have watching the latest episode of STAR TREK: VOYAGER is qualitatively different than the experience of somebody who--having lived in a cave for the last 35 years--has never heard of STAR TREK.

The cave guy has a minimal aesthetic fund, so his experience of that VOYAGER episode is more like the typical movie-going experience.

A big aesthetic fund has a magnification effect on how audience members evaluate the significance of onscreen action. Little things seem big, and big things seem positively catastrophic.

For non-fans, the recent finale of SURVIVOR was a non-event. If you came into the series for the last fifteen minutes to watch Richard win the election over Kelly it was hard to care which of those oddly un-telegenic strangers emerged as "the sole survivor." But for loyal viewers this was the culmination of weeks of intense watching.

Another example: by the time Ross and Rachel finally got together in the second season of FRIENDS it was a monumental event for fans precisely because they’d been waiting for nearly two years.

Most movies only last for two hours. That’s not long to wait.

In TV, aesthetic funding magnifies the importance of little events. Context lends significance.

In movies, there’s only a little bit of time, so the events themselves have to be larger.

When a story analyst or development executive says that something is "too TV," one way to translate that comment is to say that the events of the story are not significant enough for the main characters without a magnifying couple years of additional context.

Subjective? Of course. It’s a subjective business.

The moral of this story is that when writing a movie you can’t be afraid to have huge, life-changing things happen to your characters, even the secondary ones.

Use them up. You can make more.

Earlier, I promised to return to the Franchise Objection. How can I say that movies use their characters up when there have been so many James Bond movies, STAR TREK movies, etc?

There’s a theoretical answer and a practical answer.

The theoretical answer is that the Franchise Objection is absolutely correct.

007 never changes all that much, is infinitely recyclable, and only exists in movies rather than TV because no executive could make a financial case for spending the astronomical budget a Bond story requires on a TV show. The same is true for Indiana Jones.

Plot-driven characters exist in movies too, they just come with a big price tag.

However--and here’s the practical answer--a new writer will never successfully break into the movie-writing business by writing a James Bond movie. Your spec script--whether it sells or functions as a great calling card to get you an agent--has to tell a full movie story that gives your characters big arcs and lots of changes.

The first LETHAL WEAPON is a great example: the Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) character was much edgier and psychologically complex in the first movie than he was in the fourth. Screenwriter Shane Black took huge risks with the character, barely having him survive.

At the end of the movie, viewers understood that Riggs' tenuous grasp on sanity was entirely due to his new place at the Murtaugh family dinner table.

In Black’s original script for LETHAL WEAPON II, Riggs died in the end. But the studios knew they had a profitable franchise and nixed that idea.

By the time the fourth movie ended, Riggs was an entirely ordinary character: a married family man no longer haunted by his experiences in Vietnam.

If the Riggs character had looked like his LETHAL WEAPON IV self in the first movie, the script would never have sold, and Shane Black would not be a millionaire screenwriter.

I’ve seen many cover-letters by new writers saying that the enclosed script is just the first part of a 12 part series, and that whoever buys the script will make untold billions of dollars by the time the series is over.

Don’t do this.

When you’re trying to break into the screenwriting business, write one story, a self-contained tale with a beginning, middle and end. Write a story that can stand alone.

If it makes money, the studios will find a way to make a sequel, even if you kill all the characters.

Remember, at the end of the first HIGHLANDER movie the game was over and the world was saved. The tag line was "there can be only one."

Only one?

The fourth HIGHLANDER movie opened the first weekend of September, 2000.

AND there was a long-running TV series.

* The Steven Pepper quotation comes from page 149 of his book The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Harvard University Press, 1956).