Here's a question for you. What happened to the Who-Done-It genre? Were all the ideas taken by the mystery shows of the 80s? Ridiculous! Come on, writers! Who's got a good "guess who" mystery in them? Why aren't you writing it? EDIT: I suppose the better question would be 'Why doesn't Hollywood like them?" The point of this question is that I love the classic Who Done It. I keep seeing movies that should have been late reveal mysteries, but instead follow a predictable format. Introduce Protagonist Introduce Antagonist Support - Protagonist Support - Antagonist Dance End. Maybe I just miss Murder She Wrote. /shrug.
Screenwriting : Why no Who Done It? by Rick Reynolds
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I have written a bunch of scripts, and the ones that sold and were made had mysterectomys performed on them, removing the Who Done It aspect. It's just a completely dead film genre.
That makes me sad, I really miss them. But I love that you could coin Mysterectomy from the tragedy of the dead genre. /cheers.
A sense of humor is required in this business... or you'd just spend all day crying.
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Whodunits rely on surprise, and audiences have developed resistance to surprises as they've been exposed to more and more stories. Go back in history: once, it was sufficiently surprising to learn that the butler did it (who would think??) Then that became old hat, and storytellers had to amp up the reveal (EVERYBODY did it!) Once that was exhausted, we got trickier twists (the PROTAGONIST did it!) and then eventually complete twists in perception (it wasn't done at all! It's all in the mind of the protagonist!) We're running out of surprises. For a movie reveal to succeed, it has to be presented in a way that will surprise the very knowledgeable audiences of today. And how exactly do you surprise an audience with the basic structure of a whodunit, which simply presents a bunch of characters then reveals one to be the perpetrator?
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And Gone Girl is fantastic, Lisa. It's also one of the best screenplays I've read.
Loved Girl Gone, but wouldn't call it a whodunit
Hey, Rick! Curious… what would you call Gone Girl? In my humble opinion, it is built as a whodunit with a variation on certain beats. What did you see? What did I miss?
We can take this to message. I'd rather not spoil the film in an open forum.
Word.
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A who done it is audience participation, with a finite group of suspects and clues that the audience follows along with the detective. When movies like MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and LAST OF SHEILA were made, there was a TV version of ELLERY QUEEN where before the last commercial they told us we had all of the clues necessary to solve the crime, and we were supposed to name the killer and explain the means and motives during the commercial break, before Ellery came back on screen to do it. Audience participation! GONE GIRL doesn't do anything like that (not a bunch of suspects and no clues)... it's more of a thriller. (I hope that wasn't a spoiler)
Got you. I'm not versed in whodunits. Thanks for the insight, William.
Wasn't AMC/Netflix The Killing a WhoDoneIt?
I have written a parody of the genre. It takes place in Los Angeles in 1945 and the characters in the screenplay are parodies of the actors and actresses of the "Whodunit" genre. It also has the slang of the 1940s.