That being said, that’s for not being ashamed to admit you saw Wolverine. I knew it would suck, and I still went to see it, and I still… kind of enjoyed it for what it was.

I think your take would have been a great starting point for repair and made the move is it was much more watchable, but agree with John a bit in the sense that they dug a damn deep hole for themselves. Screenwriters/director/whoever really should be ashamed. Nevermind my annoyance with STILL casting white people as Natives of various flavors (Really, is it THAT hard?).

On the last, to be very clear, I wasn’t suggesting an orthodoxy for all writers and stories everywhere—the abolition of the soft opening. Please don’t misrepresent me as such as you debate me on this. And for that matter, neither was Ford. Ford’s theory began as a description of what most writers of his time were doing in reinventing the novel to represent consciousness, and was supposed to be illuminating, not the declaration of a new order. And it was an illumination many were suspicious of, including Conrad, who felt it was better not to know how one made anything.

Your and Brian’s point about the misuse of it suggests that these people know what they’re doing–and they don’t, is what I’m trying to say. They’re more like the apes in Planet of the Apes inside the space ship, trying to make something fly and not knowing how it was made or why.

Also, I really had no problems with the special effects that I could recall. For this exercise, I was working inside of the elements the film provided—partly because I didn’t have the inclination to pursue Wolverine’s many back stories outside of what the current film provided (see under “the corn syrup of…”)—Wolverine currently exists as a character in at least 12 comics right now, all ongoing, and with different incarnations of him.

As for White Tiger, I found the first chapter unbearable the three times I tried it, and gave up. Whatever charm the book exerts is lost on me.

I’m with Brian to a degree. “Action, and then this” far too frequently translates to “Flashback, and then this” or “Flashforward, and then this” in film and in the prologues of Fantasy novels, and I’m pretty tired of them. Your recommendation to do that for X-Men Origins: Wolverine wouldn’t fix the awful special effects (his claws often look photoshopped on), egregious alteration from what was interesting about the source material (Sabretooth’s his brother now, he got the adamantium willingly, and I can’t believe *that’s* how he forgot all this), or anything else that’s wrong with it (stapled-on romantic treakle, Reynolds/Deadpool is the most entertaining character and we get rid of him as soon as possible). The movie did not just need a tweak.

Making things out of sequence does not fix everything and is cloyingly common these days. It can be done well – Batman Begins follows your advice and was quite good. The film version of Jurassic Park does the same, and Crichton’s novel actually does it multiple times before giving you the plot. But it’s really on authors, screenwriters, directors and producers to come up with better uses of Ford’s idea. I’m not even convinced that all stories need dramatic openings – Shakespeare managed to open several of his most successful plays with little action, and sometimes with pure exposition (even if what was said about Denmark was dramatic). I recently read Avarind Adiga’s Man-Booker-winning White Tiger, which has an amusing first paragraph, but an incredibly inactive first chapter that was nonetheless charming and drew me into the voice that defined the book. Even more low key openings do work. It may actually be that the first scene does not need to be particularly dramatic, but to introduce a worthwhile quality of the book (or comic book adaptation summer blockbuster) before entering storytelling proper. I’m more convinced that the “Action, and then this” model is one way to open a good story, and not the only one.

The ABDCE mode Lamott describes makes that into a soapbox derby racer, though it is handy as a mnemonic device, even if it erases subtlety, as…all mnemonic devices tend to do.