A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

HEY, YOU. GET YOUR DAMN HANDS OFF HER: There's a very interesting favorite screenplays blog-a-thon going on, and I found Miriam Paschal's structural analysis of the drafts of Back to the Future to be particularly interesting:

Marty is more an anti-hero than a real hero. Just like Dorothy, he travels to another time, or dimension, by accident, and his whole journey from there is just to get back home.

Snyder, Trottier, Hauge, Vogler, and other screenwriting experts tell us over and over that the turning points of the story turn on the action of the hero. A passive hero is death to your story. If the hero doesn't take action, or make a decision, nothing is going to happen. The protag should happen to the story, not the other way around.

So making a story about somebody who starts his journey by accident is tricky. If he never wanted to take it in the first place, how do you show that the journey starts on his active decision?

The answer is that he makes a mistake. This is the epitome of the anti-hero. He starts off as kind of a bumbling fool, a Don Quixote if you will, stumbles around for a while, and finally finds himself in a situation (of his own making of course) from which he has to extricate himself. In doing so, he discovers that he's really not such a bumbling fool.

See also Eddie Copeland on The Purple Rose of Cairo.