There’s a scene in X-Men: First Class that I would gladly show in the screenwriting class I teach. It happens in the first ten minutes, so it’s not as big a SPOILER as some things I could mention from the movie, but if you don’t want this pivotal scene laid out in detail for you in advance (some of you are that pure in your desires, bless you), then read no further.

The movie opens with a reprise of the scene that opened Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men –a young Erik Lensherr (Bill Milner) being separated from his family at a World War II concentration camp, and revealing his mutant magnetic abilities in a desperate rage as he twists a metal gate. This was always the key to making this franchise something more than just superheroics – you could never tell Magneto that he was completely wrong in his belief in the capacity of man for evil.

But this time around we see the immediate aftermath of that scene, where Erik is brought to Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) for study. In this scene, Shaw wants Erik to show off his powers, and offers him patronizing encouragement and chocolate. He asks the boy to move a coin – the boy can’t. Now Shaw sighs, and says that for all their small-sighted bumbling, the Nazis have ways of getting results.

And now the camera switches position, and reveals a room on the other side of a glass wall filled almost floor-to-ceiling with surgical tools; a nightmare lab. In the characters’ world, this was there the whole time, but we’re seeing it for the first time. The filmmakers have chosen to expand the context, and make us dread in that exact moment what Shaw could have in mind next. We would not put it past someone to cut into a mutant to see what makes them tick.

The room didn’t change, but storytelling changed it for us, gave it additional meaning.

Now guards come in with Erik’s mother. Again, Shaw says, move the coin. Only this time, if Erik cannot, Shaw will shoot his mother. Fear is quite a motivator – Erik wants to do it more than ever. Still he cannot. Shaw counts to three. His mother tells him everything will be alright. Erik can’t do it. And Shaw pulls the trigger.

(Slightly more SPOILER-y tangent: grown-up Erik seems to have an obsession with stopping bullets, deflecting bullets, even turning missiles back on those who fire them. The movie never needs a character to say that it’s because of the one he didn’t stop here. Good writing has faith in the work it does.)

Now Erik is grieving. Now Erik is enraged. A bell on Shaw’s desk crumples. Then a filing cabinet. Then the helmets of the guards – crushing their heads and killing them.

And now all those surgical tools on the wall start to rattle and fly. And for the second time in this really cracking scene, the room is transformed by storytelling. Suddenly, the dread is not what the Nazis could do to little Erik with that stuff. It’s what Erik could do to someone, anyone, who has hurt him, with all that lethal metal. As Rorschach best said it in Alan Moore’s Watchmen: “None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with *ME*!”

But Shaw doesn’t react with fear – he’s delighted. Laughing. We just learned something about him – he’s either more of a maniac than we knew, or there is something about him we don’t know yet that makes him less afraid. Later we will find out both things are true.

Erik, the future Magneto, holds onto that coin. One of a hypnotist’s most basic tricks is to put a coin in their subject’s hands and tell them that, after they count down from 10, they will drop it. Erik carries this coin for a long time, and has planned meticulously the moment when he will let it go. His fatal flaw is to think it will have enough meaning to the person he became getting there.

The message Shaw has for that little boy is “I am going to take away your childhood and make you a weapon.” And the way the writers and director use that manipulation of environment, the introduction of an object that will become a talisman representing a volcanic emotion, and the mysterious, horrific behavior of a character who will obsess us the way he obsesses his creation, is an elegantly-constructed mount for a gem of a scene that dramatizes exactly that. That someone could do that to a child, and that it cannot be undone by kind words or Charles Xavier’s unwavering friendship, gives Erik Lensherr more dignity and pathos than most comic book villains could ever dream of.

That little scene gets that much right and more, and yet never feels dense or complicated. It never looks like it’s working that hard. That’s what good screenwriting does.

If Marvel had announced they were re-casting Thor before his first movie was even released, THAT would be a disaster. Re-casting Iron Man would be fatal. This will be more of a hiccup than re-casting Rhodes/War Machine for the Iron Man sequel, but still survivable.

I don’t see this as a financial move – Norton isn’t up in the stratosphere, salary-wise, and he has demonstrated by his choices that money isn’t the primary motivator in his career. There are at least ten actors that fit his profile in terms of visibility and affordability, and no doubt their agents are keeping their phone lines open right about now. As for Norton’s twice-Oscar-nominated talent – that’s more difficult to replicate, but the question is: is that even relevant? His run in the gamma-irradiated stretchy-pants provided a basically pedestrian level of wow, failing to improve either critically or financially over the Ang Lee/Eric Bana collaboration that preceded it. And since The Avengers is going to feature a giant ensemble of heroes and villains and continuity plugs, whatever non-CGI human portrays Banner is likely to have little screen-time.

Still, Marvel decided to turn this into a public pie fight with their press release, so here’s how I see the scorecard for the moment:

Marvel: That press release was not exactly cricket, nor was it exactly smart. The story looks ugly right now; they made it that way by taking public potshots at Norton, and the way they made it ugly also gave it longevity. In the short-term, all the good light is going to fall on Norton in this story. If it gets longer, and if Marvel feels like playing ugly, they could make some mud stick on him, but that doesn’t clean them up, it just makes everyone ugly.

They should want to squash this, and the only way to do that is to introduce the new Hulk, do it quickly, and make it a chatter-worthy enough choice to turn the conversation so this flap doesn’t shadow the new guy’s efforts. One option would be a casting coup, which is difficult for the screen-time reason mentioned above, but since Joss Whedon is all-but-confirmed to direct, an actor who has logged time in The Whedonverse would provide an instantly appealing alternative storyline. Or they could go for the headline-grabbing counter-intuitive gamble that hits brilliantly. They pulled off one of those with Robert Downey, Jr., but The Avengers is a unique project – it’s tough to think of another mini-studio that even has the creative opportunity to put all their intellectual property eggs in one tentpole basket like this, much less the capital to gamble on it. With a gamble that big, you want to reduce the number of medium-sized gambles you’re making within it as much as possible.

Norton’s reps: Brian Swardstrom is doing exactly what any good agent (and Swardstrom is a VERY good agent) has to do right now – pick up his biggest, meanest bat, stick a couple of nails in it, wrap it in some barbed wire, and start swinging. Norton presents unique challenges as a client (more on that below), and Swardstrom has to be thinking long-term viability. His client is still relatively bankable on the small-to-medium-sized films he favors. But to be publicly, humiliatingly dumped from something this big – especially after you have accepted the characterization that he really wanted to be a part of it – can have a poisonous effect around town, especially in an era when star salaries (and the financing calculus that assigns values to all these names) are under ruthless assault. Swardstrom has to defend his man, and is earning his money today. I can’t fault him his actions in the slightest.

Norton: Norton wins by clamming the hell up right now. This development peels back the curtain on what, until now, has been a problem only in the Los Angeles Basin: the man is a genius, but he is a genius With a Reputation.

I have not met the man, and will say with no caveats that he is tremendously talented. All I have to offer is scuttlebutt and hearsay – most of it bubbling up from newspaper articles over the years, as well as vague things you hear in the Hollywood knitting circles: That he insists on re-writing every script in which he’s going to act. That he becomes impossible to deal with if he is not acknowledged as the smartest person on the set. That he treated Paramount with rude disdain over enforcing their contract with him in order to cast him in The Italian Job – that’s a long and obscene story that you can go find if you want.

I have no direct knowledge of any aspect of His Reputation – could be he’s a misunderstood sweetheart, and I don’t want to say that the above is gospel truth because no one person knows if it is or not, and I don’t like the laziness of trading in assumed knowledge which is actually just a rolling dung ball of gossip.

But what I have noted over the years is this – filmmakers who work with him once, don’t work with him twice. See for yourself. In two dozen movies over a nearly fifteen-year career, only one director, John Curran (for whom he starred in The Painted Veil and the upcoming Stone), has ever cast him in a second movie after directing him. That’s an insane anomaly. Russell Crowe is a volatile, challenging perfectionist known for running roughshod over unprepared directors, but Ridley Scott keeps calling and Crowe shows up every time. Christian Bale got to be a fifteen-minute laughingstock over his Terminator: Salvation set tirade, but Christopher Nolan has not only kept him in the Batman cowl, he cast him in The Prestige, his between-Batman-s movie. Downey used to break into peoples’ houses on drug benders and went to jail; and Hollywood forgave all and had its happiest day when he achieved both health and fame.

Norton is on a par with these guys creatively. Absolutely. So when you are that talented, how much of a pill do you have to be that filmmakers aren’t fighting to have you back?

D.C. Comics: If they want to score the public bitch-slap of the year, they will announce Edward Norton starring in a Martian Manhunter movie next week.