In Jeffrey Sconce’s piece Friends for Life, he shows how easy it is to convince ourselves that it’s Monica who now stars in TV’s Cougar Town and Chandler in Mr. Sunshine. Those two shows are, in fact, on at the same time. Sconce wonders “was this part of their divorce settlement – joint custody of Wednesdays at 9:30?”

I love conceptual faux-sequels like these. (Of course Walt from Breaking Bad is actually poor Hal from Malcolm in the Middle, a once-hapless father desperately trying over again with a new family!) A couple of years ago, I gave a few examples of these odd sequels for triple j magazine. Forgive this quick cut-and-paste:

THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (1976) -> UNFORGIVEN (1992)

This one is a gimme, really, as both films are directed by and star the David Bowie of Machismo, Clint Eastwood. Sure, every western is a kinda-maybe sequel to every other western – that’s how genre works – and Eastwood played variations on the same cool cowboy in a dozen films. None fit together better than these: Unforgiven’s William Munny is Josey Wales, unwillingly dragged back to killing all these years later. It’s all the more heartbreaking once you see it.

THE EXORCIST (1973) -> THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Think past The Exorcist‘s  projectile vomit and crucifix masturbation to when a sleepwalking Regan warns an astronaut at a party that he’s “going to die up there”. Sure, there were a pair of different but equally poorly-received sequels to The Exorcist a few years back – but original Exorcist writer William Peter Blatty called his own cult movie, The Ninth Configuration, the real sequel. Why? It features that same astronaut, Captain Billy Cutshaw, admittedly played by another actor.

While I was preparing for a hosting gig at last month’s Castaway interview for ACMI, however, I discovered my favourite conceptual sequel of all time. Is this something everyone knew but me?

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING (1967) -> MAD MEN (2007)

In How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, Robert Morse plays J. Pierpont Finch, a window-washer who bluffs his way – through the power of song! – to the top of a farcical corporation. He does it by way of the advertising department, even though the movie warns us that “advertising does something to men’s brains”.

Fast forward: the same Robert Morse plays Bertram Cooper, the enigmatic patriarch of advertising agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price, on AMC’s Mad Men.

Cooper’s secret history as window-washer J. Pierpont Finch isn’t just an amusing intertext. It actually provides Mad Men with new – some might say necessary – depth. Why does Cooper not care about Don Draper’s multiple identities? It’s because Cooper’s past is based on exactly the same brand of lies! “This country was built and run by worse stories,” he says, “than whatever you imagined to hear.”

At the end of How To Succeed…, Finch only saves himself from disaster by finally coming clean about his past. Will Don Draper find redemption the same way? Maybe. But he probably won’t sing about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love his first Spider-Man (2002). It might still be the best straight superhero film ever made. (Sorry, Dark Knight! Please don’t yell at me in your growly, growly voice!) In retrospect, Sam Raimi’s cartoon tendencies and hyperkinetic camerawork had just been waiting for the right superhero all along.

And some of my favourite movies have come from similarly left-field decisions to fit ‘alternative’ artists with more mainstream stories. Like: putting Brian De Palma on Mission: Impossible? Genius. Paranoid, hysterical genius.

While many prefer Spider-Man 2 (2004) to Raimi’s first, it never quite worked for me. It had some amazing sequences, no doubt – mostly effects-heavy action scenes, but great idiosyncratic moments like Spidey’s awkward elevator conversation, too. The problem was that the film seemed to be missing the connective tissue to fuse these moments together. Without it, it clunked from one set piece to the next, less than the sum of its parts.

The rumours that they’d started shooting without a script suddenly made sense. Shoot first; write screenplay later. No matter what writer they brought on to finish it, they’d be tasked with finding narrative excuses to stitch together already-rendered set pieces.

I saw Spider-Man 3 (2007) on opening night in New York. The whole city was celebrating Spider-Man Week. There were banners everywhere saying A HERO COMES HOME. (Forgive my blurry photography below.) The day of the premiere, one newspaper even ran the headline “See You At Midnight!” on the cover – because where else would anyone be but at the first screenings?

But even the hometown audience was so disappointed that the riotous applause that welcomed the opening credits was completely absent by the film’s end. Slice it into pieces and there was still some beautiful stuff in there – the ‘Birth of Sandman’ scene alone was worth the ticket price – but it was a mess of disjointed scenes, glitchy character motivations, and weird tone shifts.

Sitting in that packed crowd, all of whom were getting more bored with every passing moment, I remember seeing a burst of skewed camera work and thinking “There you are, Sam.” I’d completely forgotten Raimi was the director. I know I was just complaining about the ridiculousness of auteur theory – but that doesn’t mean I want to give up the feeling of a distinct creative force at work. Even if that feeling is an illusion, and the composite result of a dozen hands working together.

As films become bigger and bigger, featuring special effects sequences requiring new technology and terrifying man-hours, I’ve been getting that Spider-Man 3 feeling more and more: disconnected scenes, some amazing, some less so; clunking awkwardly one into the next without a unifying narrative thread or sense of style to hold them together.

Maybe we’re approaching the time when multiple directors need to be credited: action scenes by X, quiet character scenes by Y, romantic moments by Z. Screenwriting already can work that way – “Hey, let’s bring in that funny guy to add some, you know, funny stuff!” – only without knowing exactly who did what.

Years later, Raimi came out and said that he didn’t have the control he wanted on Spider-Man 3 and that he was disappointed with it, too. So I’m not disappointed he’s moving on rather than be pressured into making the movie before he thinks it’s ready. He gave us an amazing Spider-Man story, and now that he’s had Drag Me To Hell to clear his throat, creatively speaking, I hope whatever he does next kicks ass.

Today’s news is that the Spider-Man franchise will be rebooted, not even a decade later. It’ll have a new cast and more of the angsty high school focus of the Ultimate Spider-Man series. It’s not a bad idea. Let’s just hope they finish the script first.

(Admittedly, I’ve been a fan of McG since the first Charlie’s Angels, which combined the shimmering, high-energy fun of an old Hollywood musical with a sword-fighting Crispin Glover.)

Others have written in detail about what went wrong with the movie: how John Connor’s scenes were reportedly added piecemeal to the screenplay, explaining why they feel so redundant and barely half-stitched into the fabric of the film. HowTerminator Salvation fails most spectacularly, though, is as a satisfying sequel.

A good sequel is a complicated tightrope-walk between repetition and variation, and back in 1991 Terminator 2 struck the ideal balance. It took familiar elements and twisted them, so we saw Sarah Connor transform from lonely waitress to pre-apocalyptic warrior; saw the unstoppable high-tech terror of the first film become the desperate underdog when pitted against liquid metal; and saw the superb bad-Terminator-becomes-good-Terminator fake-out (which, yeah, everyone knew in advance, but still).

Now John Connor’s been told he’ll be the Saviour of the World from long before he did anything to justify it, and pop-psychology dictates that’d screw you up into a fascinating wad of dramatic issues. He should be inspiring fascinating madman-or-messiah reactions everywhere he goes. In Terminator Salvation, it’s like the screenwriters were told not to mention the earlier films in any detail – with no time travel talk, especially. John Connor knows that he has to save the young Kyle Reese in order to later send him back in time to become John’s father. We know it too. But for some reason it can’t be said out loud, leaving John shouting about how “the future’s at stake!” without anyone reacting beyond a kind of “Oh, that John…”.

Instead, Terminator Salvation trades on the surface affectations of its sequel status, like Linda Hamilton returning to record some pointless Sarah Connor voiceover tapes, or the much-discussed digital Schwarzenegger cameo, or John Conner saying “I’ll be back” – with an appropriate didja-catch-that-huh? music cue.

Sure, James Cameron used all these tricks too, but he balanced it with masterful high-concept storytelling techniques. His dialogue might occasionally exhibit a blistering case of the George Lucases, but in Terminator 2 his sequel-logic is note-perfect.

One last thing: there’s another pitfall inherent in going back to the same stories again and again, and it’s the reverse of the old ‘show don’t tell’ that’s inevitably bandied around during the first week of any creative writing class. The problem is that some things are much more powerful when they’re just imagined than when they’re actually splashed up on the screen for all to see.

Is the looming apocalyptic robot-war more interesting as a terrifying hypothetical? Reese explaining the future is much more harrowing than any of the flashbacks to the future in the first Terminator. (Okay, okay, except for the iconic scenes of a tank-tread rolling over human skulls, which haunted my misspent, violent-movie-watching youth.)

The first film’s final moments of an approaching storm hold much more menace that the grim reality of Salvation: