Francois Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary (Penguin Classics)
Assume the position, and think.
Joshua Glenn: Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance
A delightful Thing unto itself, and perfect for page-at-a-time perusal.
Plagenhoef and Schreiber, Editors: The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present
Spend the rest of your savings on mp3s!
I'm still on writing retreat hiatus, but so as not to leave your Living RomCom appetite entirely unslaked, I offer you this news item from Japan that is its own comment, in an amusingly perverse fashion, on the contemporary state of writing and publishing.
Momentary oddity or wave of the future? You decide.
Happy Post-Independence Day!
Four years on and self-re-elected for another term, apparently -- think of it as the benign island dictatorship of romantic comedy -- Living the RomCom refuses to die.
Threat or menace? You be the judge. Meanwhile, to benefit both suckers for punishment and curious virgin visitors, here in convenient categorized form is our Best of the 2008-09 July-to-June season (w/links to Blogoversaries #1, #2, and #3).
WRITING
Half the Rules You Know Are Wrong
Writing Characters That Don't Suck
ROMANTIC COMEDY
Chick Flicks For Which Chicks?
CULTURE
Politics Ruins Couple's Love Life
Screwball Comedy: A New Golden Age
Explain to Me Matthew MacConaughey
PERSONAL STUFF
Billy & Tater's Excellent French Adventure
REVIEWS
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Given that 36 posts represents more than enough for a sane reader to chew on, I'm off on a retreat to write my shitty first draft of an adaptation of my novel (condolences welcome). See ya back here come the 5th of July.
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
--Joseph Joubert
Having previously pontificated on the necessity of plowing through a first draft, no matter how awful it may be, it seems only fair to look at how a good draft gets written, as opposed to a shitty one. Here's a few thoughts born of personal experience.
1) Put it away first.
I don't know if you go through this, but I almost always encounter Last Night's Me. Last Night's Me wrote something and went to bed thinking it was great. This Morning's Me reads it over and can't believe that other guy was so deluded. Given this natural evolution of ever-bettering me's, I find that the principle applies to draft completion.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a completely objective, marvelously shrewd and insightful version of you to go over the finished first draft and identify what needs to be fixed? Well, that person can't possibly be the you who's just finished writing it. You're way too close to the experience. The smartest thing to do with a first draft is to bury it, literally or figuratively; put it away and don't look at it, for as long as you can possibly stand it. A week is too short, so I recommend two weeks minimum, and really, a month is far better. The longer you don't see it, the easier it will be for you to really see it. The Future You, believe me, will be far less attached and more effectively tough than The You That Just Got Done.
2) Give it to readers you trust.
Hopefully you have friends or significant others who are willing to tell you the truth, without being mean-spirited about it. I recommend giving it to an odd number, so you can get a consensus, since merely having one friend who loves it and one who hates it will only leave you stumped. Screenwriter Richard Curtis is fortunate enough to live with a woman who's really his collaborator in this regard, Emma Freud:
I give her this script... and she has a big red pen... and she marks it all up. "CDB" is her favorite thing, which stands for "could do better" -- "CDB" and big crosses-out and "you must be joking." We go through that process ten, fifteen, twenty times. I'm very lucky like that. I think that's an amazing thing, to have someone take that care with you even before it gets to other people.
"Even before it gets to other people" in Curtis's case is interesting, as he's famously spoken of having completed 17 entire drafts of Four Weddings and a Funeral (that's post-Emma drafts), for his director, various producers, actors, et al; Notting Hill he estimates took 20 -- and this was in order to realize an idea that he'd been carrying around and casually poking at, for years.
Anyway, in terms of that very first read -- I've written elsewhere on the art of receiving and comprehending notes, but I'll reiterate one suggestion here: Give your readers a specific task. Let them know the kind of feedback you're most interested in. "I want to know which parts felt slow" and "I'm curious to hear what you think of my villain" are statements more apt to yield helpful responses, and forestall your receiving a list of typos. You'll get to the typos -- 17 rewrites and more to come. Right?
3) Prioritize your tasks.
The real work, and the real joy in rewriting -- generally I find it more exhilarating than torturous, though it can be that -- comes from knowing what you're after. After you've collated your own responses and those of your trusted readers, make a list. What's the most important thing that needs to be addressed? Personally, I always start with character empathy. Until I feel sure that the reader can identify with the protagonist, feel their feelings and track their logic, none of the other smaller matters really matter to me. You may prefer to start with structure. But whatever your main priority, it has to trump all others. Go after that first, and that alone.
I've found there's nothing worse than trying to fix say, characterization and structure simultaneously. You're bound to get bogged down and lost in the maze of possibilities. There's something freeing about leaving a lot of the mess alone and simply grappling with a single issue that you've got a handle on. In rewriting my novel, when I did one entire pass on one protagonist's dialogue, the clarity of focus really helped.
And at some point in this process, you'll have to kill your proverbial darlings. One of my all time favorite quotes on this matter comes from Samuel Johnson:
Read over your compositions, and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Paddy Chayefsky came at it from a more specific angle:
[Somerset Maugham] said, "If it should occur to you to cut, do so." If you're reading through and stop, something is wrong. Cut it. If something bothers you, then it's bad... It's purifying. It's refining. Making it precise... My own rules are very simple. First, cut out all the wisdom; then cut out all the adjectives.
4) Be fearless and be flexible.
Musing on Johnson and Chayefsky's ruthlessness, I realized that the subtext corresponds to that "write a shitty draft" idea. A few readers who commented on the last post decried this methodology, noting that a detailed outline or a rewrite-as-you-go approach worked better for them. Fine! My point, in that post and this one, is that judgment, second-guessing, and perfectionism, et al, are just the many masks of fear.
It's a process. You'll get it wrong, have to write it better, again, differently. You may, like Philip Roth did with one novel, write nearly 200 pages and then throw the whole thing away, having discovered what he really wanted to write. From working on movies at Universal, I can tell you that the ones that die in Development Hell are most often the ones where the writers are stubbornly unwilling to let their projects evolve.
Hand in hand with a certain kind of bravery -- the courage to do it, do it, do it until you're satisfied -- comes a willingness to accept change. You have to allow the possibility that "what the story is about" may, and most probably will, shift. The further you go, the more you find out about your characters and their conflicts, the more likely you are to reassess, re-conceive, re-vision your movie.
You start with a vision. And as you try to realize it, if you're learning from your labors (as I hope you are), that vision will expand, deepen, become more strange and distinctly... yours. You need to allow your story its room to grow.
When it's fully grown, of course, there'll be plenty of time to sweat the smaller stuff. And then you'll really be in trouble.
Paris Review: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Paris Review: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
The first draft of anything is shit.
--Ernest Hemingway
...Shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts... I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them... writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.
--Anne Lamott
In my nine-month master class in screenwriting at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, eight students wrote drafts of features. I learned a lot from working with them, and one thing I found out was just how much resistance your average pre-pro screenwriter has to doing just that: writing a draft.
Talk about it, sure: endless discussions, as well there should be, about the why of the story, the who is in it and where they go and what it means and whether the projected movie might be a viable commercial commodity. But as to actually beginning to write the draft and continuing to press on, with diligence, toward completion? Try keeping cats on skateboards.
It was a continual perplexity to me, how many obstacles got put in the way of writing a first draft. Outlining was a tooth-pulling process in itself; some not only wanted their ducks in a row, they wanted to count the feathers on each duck. Don't get me wrong: I believe in outlining, to a point, and doing character bios and all the rest of it. It's just that, at a certain point, you have to take your toes out of the water and freakin' dive.
First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain—where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
--Bernard Malamud
The ability to accept the imperfect until it is better. Oh great gods in heaven above, the wisdom, the zen and the art of creativity inherent in Malamud's phrase. I'm reminded of the top of Reinhold Niebuhr's "Serenity Prayer" -- God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
In a first draft there are indeed the things you cannot change, during this first time out, and what is sorely needed is an ability to accept the imperfect. When you're writing a first draft, perfection is not just the enemy of the good, it's Darth Vader and the Death Star. It will zap you and your big ideas into oblivion before you can get a single passable page out of your printer.
No, you have to have the courage to write badly, to write it awful, to get it wrong, wrong, wrong. You need the courage to write a really shitty draft, the sooner, the faster the better. Make your mistakes as quickly as possible, is the way one writer friend of mine puts it.
About halfway through our nine month screenwriting class process, I finally understood that what we'd had here was a failure to communicate. These writers were laboring under an all too common misunderstanding about what a draft is.
A draft is just something to change.
Fear of a first draft represents a specific kind of ignorance. You can only be apprehensive about writing the first draft of a screenplay if you mistakenly believe that what you're going to write is the movie.
Silly writer. You don't know what the movie is. The movie won't even know what the movie is until it's been shot. No, your first draft represents your first idea of what the movie might possibly be, and while you may, with some luck and pluck, get some of it right, you can consider it a job well done if you come out of the process with a clear notion of what not to write, when you start the next round.
So go for godawful. If you truly, sincerely, consciously embrace the premise that your first draft will suck, just think how liberating it will be. You won't have to compare it to all those paradigms of good writing you've studied, you won't have to worry about what anyone will think of it, you won't have to beat yourself up for any of your multitudinous easily available beat-yourself-up options. Because it sucks! It's supposed to. That's its job.
If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
--St. Thomas Aquinas
Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work.
--Paddy Chayefsky
Stay open for business.
--Gordon Lish
You have never felt more uninspired. You don't have the energy, you don't have the will, you don't have... it. The temptation to avoid the blank page is so powerful that anything -- watching reality TV, scraping poop out of parrot cages, even going to the gym -- seems a vastly more meaningful pursuit. Surely you can skip the hour or two you've set aside to write, just this once. You'll make up for it tomorrow. What could you possibly write, right now, that could be worth the effort? So you close the journal, shut down the laptop, step away from the desk.
You're fucked.
Let me ask you this: Who is the muse most likely to visit? The writer who's always in her chair at the appointed hour, day after day, or the one who has to be chased down, who shows up when it's most convenient?
Or this: How does LeBron James score 44 points in a single game?
An interview with the illustrious producer/songwriter Nick Lowe (you may know him best for his work with Elvis Costello in the late Seventies) can be found in the current issue of The Believer. He had this to say about his process:
I'm going to go out on an extremely short limb and say that Mr. Lowe's Bloke only came round in the first place because Mr. Lowe had his guitar out and his amp on and a pick in his hand. In the interview, he marvels at his friend John Hiatt, who really does go to an office every day to write songs, and Nick Lowe professes to be unable to do such a thing. But given that he also talks about what it takes, in terms of time and energy, to write a single song, I wouldn't exactly call him a slacker:
For me, writing is like breathing. I'm always writing something... Writing is like training for an athlete or practice for a musician. If you stop entirely, it takes a long time to get your pace back.
--Haruki Murakami
Then there are writers who keep writing, rewriting far beyond the point where some sane people would pronounce a work finished. The method to this madness is actually quite simple:
Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.
--Elie Wiesel
Which returns me to my original point. Until there is a draft, there is nothing. And a draft is written one page, one sentence, one word at a time. The only way out is through.
Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in half an hour. I find that can be done. I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write. There's a marvelous essay that Sinclair Lewis wrote on how to write. He said most writers don't understand that the process begins by actually sitting down.
--Tom Wolfe
You're going to die, along with the rest of us. Are you so fundamentally silly in spirit as to pretend that this fact can be ignored? So, then -- you who are blessed and cursed with the belief that you have something worthwhile to say -- what have you said today? What starting point have you given yourself that can be moved on from, tomorrow?
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
--Japanese proverb
(photos: Catherine's Room by Bill Viola)
If ever there was proof that great art is made for the ages but not necessarily for its age, it lies in the fact that you haven't seen Synecdoche, New York.
By "you" of course I don't mean the few people who actually sought out Charlie Kaufman's unjustly unsung masterpiece when it was briefly in the theaters, or rented it after (the picture has made a paltry $3.08 million since its American release last October), but the general 2009 "you," i.e. the public.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't catch up with the film until just this weekend, despite my love of Kaufman's work (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind being one of the great romantic comedies of the decade and Adaptation one of the greats, period). I meant to see it last Fall, and then it was gone, and then life got in the way, but it's not as if I wasn't informed. My friend Manohla Dargis told me to see it, after writing a full-on rave review of the picture in the NY Times that began:
To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York
is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is
such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well
pack it in right now.
Manohla wasn't entirely a stone alone in her rapture, with colleague Roger Ebert starting his review:
I think you have to see [Synecdoche] twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely.
He was right about the confused audiences. I'm concerned about the "indefinitely." Having been moved to laughter and tears by this brave, sprawling howl of a movie, one of the most impressive first features by a director in recent memory, I'm confounded. How is it possible that such a major work came and went with barely a ripple of recognition in its wake?
The ad campaign didn't help (the poster suggests it's a movie about skyscrapers). My friend and fellow story analyst Doug, a Synecdoche believer, blames part of the film's dim reception on its title. What would possess people to go see something they couldn't pronounce (it's syn-EK-duh-kee) and didn't know the meaning of? (Synecdoche: using part of something to refer to the whole thing, e.g. all hands on deck.)
Doug also observed that the film "demands participation" on the part of its audience. Right. Synecdoche, New York isn't so much a spectacle you watch as an experience that takes over your consciousness. Kaufman has always been primarily concerned with the workings of the mind, and in the mid-section of this movie, as you enter the mind of its protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman),the very fabric of time and space seems to expand and evaporate, the question of what's "real" and what isn't becomes largely irrelevant, and you're left contemplating... well, the meaning of life and death, essentially.
Not what's considered popcorn fare -- which may account for the level of hostility that greeted the film in many critical quarters. Those who didn't get the movie trashed it with a particular passion, the indignation of a confused viewer who's been forced, against his/her will, to think. Explain this! reviewers cried, as if every movie is supposed to be abundantly clear, linear and immediately comprehensible. The outrage was inevitably coupled with accusations of elitist arty pretentiousness, as if there were something inherently despicable in Kaufman's attempt to go after something unabashedly left of center.
The film follows the attempt of a theater director, convinced that he's dying of an unidentified disease, to understand his life story by creating a theatricalized version of it -- a gargantuan work that ultimately overtakes and subsumes his life. I won't pretend to claim that I "understand" Synecdoche, just as I wouldn't make the same claim when standing in front of a Rothko painting, watching Pina Bausch dance or listening to Thelonius Monk. I can say I feel the movie, and that it speaks to me, even if I can't articulate exactly what I'm hearing. But isn't that the way art is supposed to work?
Though it recalls Fellini's 8 1/2 , Woody Allen, and bears traces of Kaufman's collaborator Spike Jonze, Synecdoche is unique: sui generis. And I can totally understand someone disliking the film for its difficulty, for its decay-obsessed, existential bummer bent. It viscerally evokes a psychedelic trip, the aura of a nightmare, and how it might feel to lose one's mind. What, that doesn't sound like date movie fare to you?
Musing on Synecdoche's failure to find its audience, I found one answer on the front page of this past Sunday New York Times' "Style" section. Alex Williams' article cites a cultural shift, in which nice has returned as a newly popular attitude:
That amiable guys and uncomplicated sweethearts could be today’s pop heroes is one sign of an outbreak of niceness across the cultural landscape — an attitude bubbling up in commercials, movies and even, to a degree, the normally not-nice blogosphere.
“We are now in an age of nice,” said Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, who... sees no end of smiley faces. He cites as avatars of a new niceness the Obama administration, which has been criticized for being too friendly to some repressive world leaders; advocates of political correctness who still hold sway in many public forums; and the director-writer-producer Mr. Apatow, whose era-defining comedies feature “nice guys who finish first — a great hope for non-threatening puerile males,” Mr. Wilson said.
Makes sense, doesn't it, after a scary economic collapse, in the midst of ongoing terrorist paranoia, two endless wars overseas and general domestic angst, that we might be in the mood for a little bit of kindliness? Well, Kaufman's vision in Synecdoche, albeit deeply compassionate, is many things, among them dark, despairing, anxious, bitter, pained, fearful, and absurd (as in, mordantly hilarious), but one thing it assuredly is not is nice.
Synecdoche was released in a cultural moment of reigning upbeat escapism (that Times page features an article on People Magazine, citing "20- and 30-something [celebrities] falling in and out of love, aging boomers growing out of and into their clothes" as the subject of this past year's most popular covers). Given that aging and death looms large in the movie, it's safe to say that when it came out, it wasn't exactly... in synch.
Same as it ever was, when you consider how the history of the arts is littered with the corpses of creators who didn't live to see their enduring works get their due. But Charlie Kaufman is alive and well, thank goodness, so see Synecdoche, New York if you'd like to support art that isn't aimed at the cover of People.
Given that the film's protagonist is a writer/director, it's left me mulling over questions like: How do you know when you're writing for yourself so much that you're not speaking to anyone else? Does a work have to achieve commercial success to be validated as "good?" When is "working through a personal issue" a viable basis for creating a project and when does that approach defeat you? If a screenplay falls in a forest and nobody shoots it, was it a vision worth having?
It's the kind of stuff that keeps a scribe up at night, and I'll wager that Synecdoche, New York -- the stuff that fever dreams are made of -- will be fueling such creative insomnia for many, many years to come.
Too many scripts spoils the mind. For my past week and a half''s work at Universal, I had four (4) back-to-back projects, meaning -- four drafts of movies Uni has in development for which I am the note-taker (note-giver?) of choice came in, one on top of the next. So I've spent the past eight days analyzing what's working and not working in four movies-to-be. They were each of them comedies and/or romantic comedies, and weirdly, they were each new drafts that were more dramedy than comedy, thus sharing as a group the predominate note of: make this funnier!
Apparently America wants to laugh (Can you blame it?) and evidently America's screenwriters are taking everything too seriously.
I got this e-mailed note from the executive in charge of one of these projects:
This desperately needs to be a comedy and stop thinking it's some kind of deep meditation on relationships, b/c it just isn't!
Right?!
In the midst of these 8 days of writing some 50+ pages of notes on said screenplays, comparing in each case an older draft to its rewritten new draft, I taught a 2-day class that involved in part listening to 16 students pitch ideas for romantic comedy scripts and giving them feedback. And I read two completed screenplays from two students in my screenwriting master class (did notes), along with a spec script by a writer friend (stick figures, at least, word-like scrawls on the hard copy). I've been as immersed in the parsing of words as, oh, say, Matthew McConaughey on a bongo bender.
Does the term brain-leak mean anything to you?
[But you don't understand how entirely insane a reading creature I am until you know that whenever I was on a break from this incessant screenplay perusal, while eating, before bed, taking a dump, I continued to voraciously devour the late Roberto Bolano's 900-page novel 2666, which is living up to its reputation as a masterpiece, and perhaps giving me nightmares. This is how my reading mind repairs itself, a brain-cleansing or rejuvenating, though the reading time you lose to industry is brain hours you never have again --]
All by way of explaining that for once, Living the RomCom must belie its own reputation for publishing mindfully written posts with a point.
I have no mind, I cannot write, and I am pointless.
In lieu of The Usual, I offer you a laugh, courtesy of friend Jen Winn over at Law of Sympathy: this beautifully rendered 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists by Harvet Ismuth, which you can click on or link to, to study in its actual-sized glory.
Until next time, that is, if I can grow the requisite brain cells.
Every now and then you just have to give it up. A fellow writer has written a piece that I could not have written better myself, expressing exactly the sentiments I've long felt about this particular subject. So allow me to turn Living the RomCom over to Richard Corliss, whose witheringly witty Time Magazine article definitively addresses the Mystery of McConaughey:
The obligatory Matthew McConaughey scene — as crucial to his fans as a Miley Cyrus
song or a Seth Rogen penis joke is to theirs — is the ritual removing
of his shirt, to reveal a torso that could have been sculpted, or
certainly caressed, by Michelangelo. The gesture is not so much an act
of narcissism as a votive offering to his core constituency. A showman
as much as an actor, McConaughey is ready to give the people what they
want; and abs make their hearts grow fonder...
Why is McConaughey a movie star? Because he gets a significant number of people to pay to see him in dreck. And
Ghost of Girlfriends Past is down there with the worst...
[His] fluffy films earn no awards, no critics' raves — nothing but healthy box-office numbers; How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days broke $100 million domestic. So somebody must love McConaughey. In Ghosts, one woman says of him, "He's all surface," and another observes, "But a really hot surface."...
You really ought to read the whole of Corliss's diatribe for yourself, but let me just add this about that. For me, the "hot surface" isn't entirely the issue; I can comprehend beefcake just as I can cheesecake (it's not always easy, for example, to defend Scarlett Johansson).
No, what confounds me is how so smarmy and smug a hot surface as McConaughey's is continues to command such a sizable audience. It's the bewilderment felt by men the world over since the dawn of time, who've watched otherwise intelligent and discerning women lose it over a "bad boy" who we can clearly see is... well, full of steaming manure.
I guess I wouldn't begrudge the guy his success if it wasn't giving my favorite genre such a bad name. But since I do want to understand this phenomenon, I really do -- I open it up to you. How come the guy isn't over yet? How's he managed to get as far as he's gotten? And is there, dear merciful powers of Heaven, any way to make him go away?
We know these people. You don't have to have been 18 in 1987, or have spent that perilous summer between high school and college working in a tacky, run-down amusement park, to get Adventureland.
Every guy went to school with a Frigo (that obnoxious little a-hole who delighted in humiliating you when you were trying to act like you'd outgrown him), and every girl has known a Connell (that dreamboat stud-muffin you knew was full of shit, but was nonetheless irresistible). In the annals of geekdom, Joel, clutching his worn copy of Gogol, has occupied a place in any young intellectual's life, google-eyed glasses, pale skin, frog lips and all.
All of the above (peerlessly portrayed by Matt Bush, Ryan Reynolds and Martin Starr, respectively) represent no reinvention of the character wheel. But funnily enough, it's precisely because they are so familiar that the characters in Greg Mottola's lovely little coming-of-ager are so engrossing to watch. Not because they're stereotypical, but due to their being credible, painfully amusing variations on universal "types" who, in this movie, are probably thinly fictionalized versions of people whom writer/director Mottola actually grew up with.
He's helped by pitch-perfect casting. Jesse Eisenberg, whom you may remember from The Squid and the Whale, has become the Jewish Michael Cera (Mottola's last protagonist-surrogate, in Superbad) and brings a heart-wrenching, gangly sincerity to his part of put-upon James, the boy-man stuck in a job from hell while he dreams of an Ivy League glory that's just out of reach at the summer's end. And though she may've gotten some flack for the superficiality of her role in Twilight, here Kristen Stewart is ideal as Em, the bruised beauty, neurotic but alluring, that he pines for, thinks is out of his league, and then can't quite believe he's really gotten to make out with.
The I've been there! (even I wasn't... there) factor in Adventureland exerts such a powerful pull that critics usually not so inclined to personally reminisce have waxed nostalgic in their reviews. Here's Roger Ebert:
I worked two summers at Crystal Lake Pool in Urbana. I was technically a lifeguard and got free Cokes, but I rarely got to sit in the lifeguard chair. As the junior member of the staff, I was assigned to Poop Patrol, which involved plunging deep into the depths with a fly swatter and a bucket. Not a lot of status when you were applauded while carrying the bucket to the men’s room. (“No spilling!” my boss Oscar Adams warned me.) But there was another lifeguard named Toni and — oh, never mind. I don’t think she ever knew.
As a romantic comedy, Adventureland is a breath of fresh air, a welcome antidote to the broad, lewd and crude slapstick we've come to expect from a teen movie. Mottola, despite having demonstrated his facility with raunch-com in the farcical excesses of Superbad, has delivered a kind of Anti-Apatow picture. It's a movie of small pleasures, of little gestures and quiet moments that speak volumes. And when it does turn up the volume -- Em's brief attack on an Anti-Semitic hypocrite and James' crazed dash to get away from an angry thug bent on beating him up are two bits that come to mind -- the results are immensely satisfying, in part because they never pop the bubble of the movie's deftly, sneakily romanticized reality.
Mottola's rendering of period is so low-key and seemingly off-the-cuff that the 1987 of it all never becomes in-your-face parody. Its characters inhabit their world with the casual enthusiasm of that time -- local hottie Lisa P. doing her Madonna moves, the trying-too-hard cover band in the bar aping Foreigner -- and the soundtrack is a hipster's guide to the more subversive music of its era, since that's what James and co. were listening to; it's no accident that Brooklyn alt-gods Yo La Tengo did the honors, with the Replacements and Big Star (extra musical cool points) rocking out under the plot points.
Under is the idea here: under the surface, under the mainstream culture, literally under a bridge when James and Em's romance goes dark and messy. Adventureland has also been under the radar, in terms of box office and media attention, but its underdog story -- predictable, sure, but just quirky and personal enough to make all the difference -- is well worth seeking out before it disappears from the mall.
Without being mawkishly sentimental or cartoonish about it, the movie is a celebration of innocence: how it survives the indignities of having to hawk rigged carny games for peanuts, and the pain of having feelings too big and complicated to bear with adult grace. If you're lucky, you'll get to see it with someone you love. And if you can't do that, it should help to affirm your hope that love can be found, even in the unlikeliest, seemingly dead end-iest of places.
There's an old joke. A kid wandering around the circus tent after a show runs into an older guy who's shoveling up a trail of shit left by one of the elephants. "That doesn't look like much fun," the kid ventures. "Oh, it's terrible," says the old guy, "It's all shit and abuse and the pay is the worst." "So why don't you find a better job?" the kid asks. The old guy looks at him askance. "What, and get out of show business?"
I was reminded of this after seeing the perfectly titled Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary about a heavy metal band that's lately been delighting -- or we should say, slaying -- audiences across America. If like me you haven't had much use for heavy metal in your life, aside from repeat viewings of This is Spinal Tap, you might not be inclined to run to your local multiplex to see it. But I'm going to suggest you do just that, as it's certainly one of the best movies of the year thus far.
The New Yorker's Anthony Lane is a far wittier critic than I'll ever be, and this passage from his review should serve to set things up for you:
This film is about a failed heavy-metal band, which sounds about as purposeful as a vegan shark. Back in the nineteen-eighties, Anvil was, if not huge, on the verge of hugeness. It was never, according to the movie, one of the Big Four—a term that I always associated with the Paris peace conference of 1919, but which, on further inspection, turns out to refer to Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer. (Specialists might prefer to file them under thrash metal, that delicate subset of the genre, but “Anvil!” is wise enough to steer clear of such hairsplitting, not least because, in a world where most of the guitarists look like exploded spaniels, there is an awful lot of hair to split.) Still, Anvil had its adherents, and we find a swarm of them in a clip of the Super Rock Festival of 1984, in Japan, where the band’s lead singer, Steve Kudlow, can be seen onstage playing his guitar with a sex toy, thus raising the question of whether he takes his plectrum to bed.
But "failed heavy-metal band" doesn't really do the guys justice, as the very issue of failure vs. success forms the subtext of Anvil's saga. When you've managed to keep your band together, performing and recording, for 30 years and you still have a rabid (albeit relatively small) following, does that constitute failure? "What is success?" is one of those eternal questions, perhaps second only to Freud's big one ("What does a woman want?") in the annals of human inquiry, but Anvil does come close to supplying an answer of sorts, and it has something to do with the passion implicit in that elephant manure-minder's response.
And it certainly comes down to character. Despite their hair, leather and ear-splitting pyrotechnics, Anvil's leader, Lips (born Steve Kudlow) and his lifetime comrade-in-arms, drummer Robb Reiner (I know, I know, the synchronistic Tap resonances abound) are actually two nice Jewish boys from Toronto. Their dedication to their music (and to each other) seems however to embody what we think of as American values, neatly noted in a quote from writer Joan Acocella, in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints:
What allows genius to flower is not neurosis, but its opposite, "ego strength", meaning amongst other things, ordinary Sunday-school virtues, such as tenacity, and above all the ability to survive disappointment.
Speaking of quotes, one of the great delights in the documentary comes from Robb and Lips' philosophical pronouncements (one eagerly awaits a Gospel According to Anvil). This passage from Kenneth Turan's L.A. Times review includes a choice sampling:
Though both men are in their 50s now, with families and day jobs, they
haven't given up on breaking through the way their peers did. "Time
doesn't move backwards, it moves forwards," Lips says with
characteristic earnestness, as the group decides to give stardom one
more shot.
So, director Gervasi and cinematographer Chris Soos follow along as
Anvil goes on the European tour from hell, masterminded by a new
manager who can't seem to get the hang of railway schedules. "It's a
good thing we got those sleeping bags," Lips says, ever the optimist,
as the boys miss yet another train. Yes, he admits later, "things went
dramatically wrong, but at least there was a tour for things to go
wrong on."
Anvil's stubborn refusal to say die is a core fascination of the movie, and thus I was intrigued to learn that one of filmmaker Sacha Gervasi's credits is the screenplay for Spielberg's The Terminal, a movie that did not know how or when to end; this implies that it wasn't merely Gervasi's having been an Anvil roadie in his youth that led to the making of the film.
But are we not all Anvil, or rather, have we not been them at some point in our creative lives? The more daunting question is, are you Anvil now?
I had a particularly personal reaction to the movie, having been an aspiring rock star in my youth, who had an album released on a major label while still in college, had songs of mine covered by an icon or two, and made a reasonable living as a sideman for many years before I finally gave up the rock'n'roll ghost. I was fortunate enough to possess more than the one skill set, so I was spared the ignoble fate of say, playing synth for some has-been third-tier singer-songwriter at a bar in Podunk in my ripe old age. But as for my more recent career...
Screenwriting is generally thought to be a young man's (or woman's) game, and I'm not far from the Anvil-ites in age. And though this job has a far more ephemeral scale, re: failure and success -- the hills of Hollywood are replete with optioned, well-paid but still unproduced screenwriters who are crying in their swimming pools -- I do sometimes wonder about the longevity of my current sometimes-livelihood.
When are we too old to keep doing what we love to do? People of my generation have long given the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald's by-now wholly passé maxim, "In America there are no second acts." But it takes a good deal of insight and lack of illusion to see your second act turning point when it's upon you, and realize it's time to move into your third. That move, especially for a generation with increasingly long back ends, is a move that often requires a change in job description to insure survival.
In this regard, Anvil! The Story of Anvil brings a message of hope to the longevity-challenged those of us who are still tilling the fields of creativity. And it's a wonderful irony that the release of the film, and its warm reception, no doubt guarantees the band a longer, stronger life (and a far larger audience) than it's ever had before. In a way, they're already seeing their dream come true, though not in the way they might have envisioned it (there's something Canadian about that, eh?).
Such are the rewards of perseverance and the vagaries of fate. We can't all be so fortunate, of course, but it's good to have inspiring role models, however unlikely. So excuse me now, but I've got a first draft to get back to. For even if it goes dramatically wrong, at least there will have been a draft to go wrong with.
[Anvil photos (color) by Brent J. Craig]
By now you've no doubt seen and heard the remarkable Susan Boyle, and whatever you may think of her looks and talent, there's no escaping a certain fundamental prejudice that her sudden fame embodies -- one perhaps best expressed in the pitch-perfect headline and lead paragraphs of this Onion-like parody written by humorist Andy Borowitz, Talented Ugly Person Baffles World:
The success of singer Susan Boyle on the reality show "Britain's Got Talent" has caused both television networks and their viewers to reconsider the intrinsic value of ugly people, media experts say.
In living rooms around the world as well as in the executive suites of media giants, those exposed to the Susan Boyle phenomenon are grappling with the paradox - thought impossible up until now - that an ugly person could be talented.
Right. Aren't all beautiful people as skilled and perfect in their morals and intelligence as they are in physical attributes, whereas unattractive people must be ugly through and through?
Reacting to people's reactions to Boyle, my journalist wife Tater articulated a trope well-known in her writing circles: that people always defy your assumptions when you meet them. And it made me reflect on all the awful spec scripts I read on a regular basis, so many of them distinguished -- or rather disgraced -- by their simplistic, stereotypical and flat characterization work.
Lazy screenwriters -- much like the lazy people who were so gobsmacked by Susan Boyle -- give their characters one distinguishing physical attribute, with a corresponding personality. Steve's the smart-alecky overweight guy who's always hitting on chicks and getting shot down; Sally's the perfectly coiffed executive who's a control freak and doesn't know how to dance.
In the annals of bad writing, it's only the hoariest of two-dimensional clichés that allow for an ostensible reversal, i.e. a character who "surprises" you with a central contradiction: witness the whore with a heart of gold, and the sinfully wicked priest. But any alert and conscious writer knows that complexity is the very coin of the realm in the human dramedy, that gold lies in the contradictory details.
I've been enjoying -- nay, rapturously inhaling -- the recent BBC adaptation of Dickens' Little Dorrit (fifth and final episode coming up next Sunday night on your local PBS station), largely because Charles Dickens was so smart about constructing memorable characters. I'm reading the novel now, because I was curious to see how screenwriter Andrew Davies, who did the excellent Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice before this, so deftly dramatized it (the relationship between page and screen is fascinating and well rewards study).
While Dickens is justly famous for vividly marrying physicality to personality (even the name "Uriah Heep" euphoniously expresses exactly what that slimy character is about), he often plays upon disparity. Dickens is so keenly attuned to this key idea of reversals, i.e. the telling contradictions between a character's appearance and their inner life, that he blatantly builds one of Dorrit's characters upon it. Christopher Casby is a patriarchal older man with a shining bald dome and Biblical beard, but nonetheless a "selfish, crafty landlord who grinds his tenants by proxy," whom Dickens further describes as:
...looking so supremely benignant that nobody could suppose the property screwed or jobbed under such a man; for similar reasons he now got more money out of his wretched lettings, unquestioned, than anybody with a less knobby and less shining crown could possibly have done... Many people select their models, much as the painters select theirs; and that, whereas in the Royal Academy some evil old ruffian of a dog-stealer will annually be found embodying all the cardinal virtues, on account of his eyelashes, or his chin, or his legs... so, in the great social Exhibition, accessories are often accepted in lieu of the internal character.
What you see is not what you get -- at least not in the most intriguing characters one meets, whether in fiction or real life.
Why was Meryl Streep so hot to play Julia Childs in Nora Ephron's upcoming Julie & Julia, a woman whom many people remember best as Dan Ackroyd in frowsy-wigged drag, stumbling around the SNL kitchen blurting mealy-mouthed "oh, dear!"s as her thumb bled geysers? Maybe it's because, as Missy Schwartz notes in the current EW, the real Julia Childs "...after working as an overseas spy in the 1940s, became, at 38, one of the few students at Paris' Cordon Bleu cooking school. Then she co-write an 800-page cookbook."
Wait, wait -- you had me at "spy." Julia Childs was... Mata Hari?
If you want to write a character that doesn't suck, look for their contradictions. Want to really wow your audience? Write someone who isn't what they look like or seem to be, thus paying homage to a fundamental truth about being human. Write a Susan Boyle.
I drove to my nearest mall to see the most peculiar Observe and Report this past weekend, mainly on account of I heart Ana Faris and Seth Rogen. It's a black comedy of a genre I'll dub Stupid Movies For Smart People: think Napolean Dynamite or any indie/studio pic where the line between making fun of weirdass misfits doing outrageous dumb stuff, and romanticizing weirdass misfits doing outrageous dumb stuff gets willfully blurred.
In a Stupid Movie For Smart People it's hard to tell if you're supposed to empathize with the stupid people and bad behavior in the movie or feel superior, because generally -- and this is true of Observe -- the people who've made the movie aren't sure how they feel about it. Such trying-to-have-it-both-ways character work has diffused the gags here. While I admire the audacity of this particular black comedy of outrageousness, it's largely full of jokes that are conceptually funny; they're more humorous in the abstract than they are laugh-out-loud funny.
This may account for the picture's disappointing box office performance, given the Seth Rogen factor -- that and the fact that a straight-up farce of a mall cop movie (Paul Blart) had already pretty much usurped Observe's turf. But Rogen deserves props for giving full exposure to his dark side, and Hill is onto something, however schizophrenic. From a romantic comedy sociological point of view, Observe and Report may mark the official end of the line for the American screwball comedy ethos. Call it "when screwball went psycho." He's a bi-polar Travis Bickle Lite, she's a dumb cosmetics salesgirl slut, and their version of high jinks ensue ends in a perverse parody of drunken/drugged date rape.
Sound like a good time to you?
Oddly enough, I'm going to make a case for this cynical/sentimental, half-great, half-awful movie as the only real sign of contemporary arts & entertainment life in an Easter weekend that seemed part and parcel of our Great Recession. Hill and crew were at least trying to, like, do something, when the movies they were in competition with felt like the cinematic equivalent of zombie banks.
Top float in this unimpressive Easter parade was The Hannah Montana Movie. Can't say I'm a Miley Cyrus fan, but she's gotta be the whole deal here: I read the script, which was so color-by-numbers I had the sensation of having read it fifty times before. There is nothing on the innocuous pages of this little puppy that makes it 2009-significant. Coulda been made in '39, '59 -- oh, pick a 9, and then go look up "formulaic" in your on-line dictionary to see if the pic's title is in there yet. But Hannah won the weekend with a $34 million dollar take, kids, so who cares what a curmudgeon says?
Second place was earned by number four in The Fast and the Furious franchise. Evidently dropping two "thes" (and bringing back Vin Diesel) worked like a charm ($28 million), but what we're looking at in Fast and Furious is a car chase.
Perched in third place, Monsters and Aliens continued to perform, reportedly helped by its 3-D gimmick and the, well, y'know: monsters... aliens...
In short, our current cultural moment is anything but memorable, which brings me to an interesting screed by Mark Harris in a recent issue of EW that bemoaned the equation of a down economy with dumbed-down movies and TV. In "Stop the Inanity!" Harris argues that in hard times, however numb and depressed we may be, we don't necessarily just want escapist airhead fare. True, literature may have gone to the bodice-rippers (romance novels are outselling everything else on the shelves), but moviegoers are ready for something else:
Hollywood types with a sense of history that stretches back farther than Titanic
love to use the Great Depression as evidence that a plunging Dow means
people just want to have a happy time at the movies. But the Depression
coincided with the dawn of the sound era, so movie-goers went to
everything. Musicals, gangster films, Westerns, romantic comedies,
monster movies, historical spectacles, biopics, sexy pre-Production
Code dramas, and even what passed at the time for gritty, rough-edged
social realism. People checked their troubles at the door, not their
brains.
I'm with Mr. Harris on this, and though I doubt that Hollywood is listening, I can always hope. While Observe and Report is an iffy place marker in the meantime, I anxiously await the arrival of some Brilliant Movies For Me People. That old stupid/smart dichotomy only gets you so far.
Beautifully backwards and perfectly metaphorical: This year, I got my parents for my birthday.
I mean this literally -- my dad was finally discharged from the Beverly Hills Rehabilitation Center, and after wheeling him from one last doctor's check-up to another at Cedars Sinai, I picked my mom up from the friend's home where she'd been staying, post-rehab, and then drove the two of them to my Venice bungalow, where they moved in with my wife and I for a two-day stay before flying back home at last.
Considering that nearly two months ago we nearly lost my dad altogether in the accident's aftermath and that my mom got seriously banged up in the crash, you couldn't ask for a better present. But other than one card in the mail and a flurry of e-mail, phone and Facebook salutations, the actual day was very un-birthday-like until its climax. Seated at our kitchen table with my parents, a perfectly normal event in any other circumstance but extraordinary in this one, I looked up to see Tater bearing a birthday cake, candles lit.
She'd baked the thing from scratch. It was gorgeously lopsided, covered in delicious chocolate butter icing and festooned with jelly bellies, accompanied by a card bearing a message that made me weepy, which I've been carrying around with me ever since. Since my dad's birthday is the day after mine, we blew out the candles together. I can hazard a guess at what he wished, and though I can't tell you mine, clearly we both had something in mind about the continuation of this miraculous occurrence -- you know, like, being alive and here with each other and all that.
It took an enormous fortitude on their part -- the resilient strength and youthful genes of two truly tough cookies in their eighties dealing with surgeries, complications, ailments old and new, the occasional callowness of indifferent medical help, the painful betrayals of the body and the traumatic effect of the whole damn nightmare on their souls. It took a great deal of ceaseless energy on the part of my brother, Tater and myself, dealing with everything from the logistics of getting them from hospital bed into rehab room, to the details of wheelchairs and an airborne oxygen tank in the final stretch of the exit, but...
They flew back to New York City on Saturday morning.
It's tempting to leave it right there, but seeing as I write about romantic comedy, I do need to share an observation from the intervening days.
Much has been made of the loving nature of "the Merry Mernits," a couple generally so fun to hang out with that more than one of my friends over the years has asked me if my parents would adopt them. But in the time since their accident, I was witness to a couple, still in love and together after 61 years, who'd been stretched well beyond their normal limits.
Anyone in their place would lose it here and there, and both my mother and my father had their dark moments. There were times in the last couple of days when Mom's despairing panic and Dad's angry impatience turned the air toxic. I was playing the registered nurse as ring referee.
But Richard and Dee Ann are both conscious human beings, and bless their hearts, they always bounced back. My Dad would make wry fun of my Mom, and she'd flip him the bird. It reminded me of those reconciliation scenes in an old Tracy and Hepburn picture where you saw that the best couples are often made up of parties who've agreed to disagree, while having the good grace to let each other be... and to appreciate the differences between them in the bargain.
Most romantic comedies are all about the chase and the courtship. They fade out when the race is won. But the movie I'd been in here, as a member of the supporting cast, was about what happens long after the real living has begun, what it can look like when two people who've loved each other for decades have been forced to look death in the face.
In the end we even had a few laughs. I don't know what more you can ask for, do you?
In case you missed the trailer: A guy who's about to get married finds that while his fiancee has friends for bridesmaids galore, he doesn't have a best male buddy for the gig... so he goes on the prowl to find one. See, our guy's been mainly a girlfriend's guy -- not gay, just a man who really does love women.
Hey, nice to know that I'm not alone. While I do have some great male friends, I've never thought of myself as a man's man. So in movie role models, I like to see a guy like me -- a guy, that is, who's a healthy heterosexual male but who isn't a guy -- a football-throwing, beer-swilling insensitivo. In John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, one of the best Judd Apatow movies that Apatow didn't make, there are two of them, and they kind of add up to one my-kinda guy.
Paul Rudd as Peter, the pic's adorably hapless hero, is such an atypical male that his chosen sport is fencing, fer chrissake, and when he drinks too many brewskis he projectile pukes. Jason Segel as Sydney, the somewhat more macho dude who loosens Rudd's screws, may be into air guitar, chasing after cougars and refusing to pick up dog poop, but he turns out to be as sensitive as a guy can be.
One I thing I love about movies: they're equal opportunity wish fulfillment fantasy machines. For years, romantic comedies have presented us with contemporary dream girls: lovely and lovable, charmingly kooky, perhaps even beautiful-but-difficult, but nevertheless the kind of woman most guys would cherish... if they could only be found in off-the-screen reality. Now that men have raided and virtually taken over Romantic Comedy-land, the contemporary Bromantic Comedy has yielded a male equivalent: the kind of guy most guys would love to have as a best friend, if they, too existed in the world as we know it.
While he may be a bit too good to be true, Sydney-as-dream-girl is the fundamental gag at the core of I Love You, Man, a movie that successfully reverses what had been the stock-in-trade of rom-com constructs for decades. Here, our boy has already got the girl -- it's the lack of a best buddy in his life that's keeping him unfulfilled. Peter's pursuit of Sydney is what drives this boy meets/loses/gets boy comedy.
Fiancee Zooey (Rashida Jones) is a perfect soul-mate match for Peter, and true to form, even when Peter and Zooey hit their requisite Dark Moment break-up beat, it doesn't get too dark for too long. And Sydney, like most rom-com dream girls before him, is an idealized perfect buddy. His less-feminized, more overtly macho persona completes the near-wussy Peter. It's the scenes where Rudd and Segel are just like, y'know, hangin', that the movie settles into its warmest and fuzziest groove.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Rudd has been waiting for a leading role like this for some time, and it's great to see him make the most of it. There aren't too many other actors around who can make social ineptitude and an infinite variety of cringing embarrassments seem quite so endearing. And Segel -- he who had "the girl's part" in last year's Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- fits into his quirky-slob Professor Higgins role with admirable ease. Watching him continually let poor flailing Rudd off the hook in one humiliation after another is an oddly satisfying pleasure.
All in all, it's the sunny congeniality of this casually raunchy rom-com that's so appealing. Nobody gets badly hurt (even when one character is attacked by the Hulk, i.e. Lou Ferigno out of makeup, he doesn't get his head busted, but put into a "sleep" hold) and despite making a total jackass out of himself, adorable Paul gets not only the girl but the guy in the end. (Oh, did I give something away? Sorry, I was writing this for people who'd at least seen a single movie.)
The peculiar appeal of Paul Rudd as bromantic hero in this pic was aptly analyzed in Richard Corliss's Time review of the movie:
There's a reason Peter seems so... so very odd. He's an avatar of traditional Hollywood romantic comedy, where the male tries to be suave and caring, to be the man women love. But that form of movie romance is anachronistic, when most pictures insist that the crucial relationship is guy-guy. Peter has honed the wrong skills; in this movie he doesn't have to get the girl; he already has her. He has to become a supporter of Guy Marriage. And he needs another guy, someone who lives in the modern movie world, to teach him. Peter and Sydney represent old and new movie men as sure as Vivien Leigh's Blanche duBois and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire cued the collision of old-movie refinement and the new brutalism.
True that. And maybe it's because the tropes of I Love You, Man already felt so familiar, that I found myself wondering after seeing it if we might be ready for the next step. With the buddy movie's bromantic subtext long-established (see Time's compendium of Top 10 Buddy Love Pics), and so many "boy meets boy" movies already extant and coming down the pike, maybe we can think about... moving past it?
If anybody has a handle on where the next nouvelle vague of romantic comedy may come from, it ought to be this gang:
Self-proclaimed "The Fempire," this quartet of hot screenwriters (Dana Fox, Diablo Cody, Liz Meriwether, and Lorene Scafaria) appears poised to give our genre a new spin, should they be so inclined. And judging from Scafaria's work on Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, one of them at least knows fresh from dated.
The NY Times' coverage of this crew has already brewed a tempest in a teapot, with its emphasis on the women's sexuality and girly-ness infuriating many in the blogosphere (It certainly was weird and culturally tone-deaf of the Times to print the profile in their Style section; I haven't seen any puff pieces on say, Simon Beaufoy relegated to the fashion pages, have you?). But controversy aside, Cody and her posse could be the ones to push the rom-com from its present boy-centric romper room into the big girl's bullpen.
How about a girl meets girl romantic comedy? Not a lesbian love story like Saving Face or Kissing Jessica Stein (what is the deal with these gerunds?), but a movie where the feuding-at-first buddies are babes. It's been done before, of course (in this sense, Leslie Dixon's Outrageous Fortune is a girl/girl rom-com classic, and Audrey Wells' Truth About Cats and Dogs was a great one, too). It'd be a welcome shift, 'cause as I never tire of asking in this space: Where are the rom-com women?!
We couldn't call it a Chick Flick, obviously... Romanchick Comedy doesn't exactly sing, so I put it to you folks. Say we give the guys a rest and let some girls take over, be they slackers or mackers or some types yet unseen. What'll we call the female version of a bromantic comedy?
Maybe if we name the genre, someone will start making the movies.
Claire: If I told you I loved you, would it make any difference?
Ray: If you told me or if I believed you?
Adults -- you remember them, the phantom demographic that no one in the industry seems to care about -- often complain that there aren't enough movies for them to see. This past weekend, they had little reason to bitch. Here was Duplicity: Julia Roberts and Clive Owen in a smart, sophisticated spy caper/romantic comedy, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, one of the best in the biz.
Weirdly enough, it was that noisy, special effects-driven Nick Cage sci-fi shlocker called Knowing that won the weekend box office, proving that gerunds rule the day -- no, proving, apparently, that the industry is right to ignore people over 25, because they simply don't show up in theaters. Or that Julia Roberts isn't the star she used to be, that female-driven pictures (as studio wags believe) don't necessarily open big, but they do have legs (i.e. end up profitable over time). Or is that Duplicity isn't any good?
Nah. You can carp about it (though the critical establishment, remarkably enough, had little to find fault with), and such a light piece of glossy escapism may not be your cup of capuccino, but on a basic movie-movie level (i.e. is it fun?), Duplicity is anything but bad.
Personally, I wish it had more of an emotional charge -- I can understand how this kind of heady, brain-teaser of a picture can leave some people cold -- but it's a nifty ride: shamelessly glamorous, near-seamlessly constructed, and possessed of an unusual ability to keep one guessing up until its final moments. I have a feeling it's the kind of durable, deftly-crafted feature that will inspire more affection over time. After Michael Clayton, my pick for The Great Underrated Classic of the 2000s, I had way too high expectations for Mr. Gilroy. But how much do we want to beat up on the guy for being... entertaining?
After all, it's said that the great chefs are the ones who can deliver a perfect soufflé, in addition to their more substantial four-star entrees. Don't want to go into too much detail, since the confectionary fun lies in the specifics of the game that Gilroy's playing here, but I'll just briefly cite Two Things I Like About Duplicity, since they're two things near and dear to Living the RomCom's heart.
One, it really is a combo platter. I'm always going on about how many of the best romantic comedies are two movies at once, and Duplicity is the proverbial breath mint and a candy mint. It proves the maxim that mixing genres, far from being ill-advised, can be a great way to go.
While the movie is clearly a corporate espionage thriller (played as drama, albeit with tongue sardonically wedged in cheek), it's inarguably a romantic comedy. Its core conflict lies within its central romance (largely played for laughs, albeit with a dark strain of stick-in-your throat seriousness). The play between its two genres is the very tension that keeps the movie so intriguing. It's a story that wants to know: which is more important, love or money? And its answer, while not entirely surprising, comes with a very satisfying bittersweet edge.
Two, it's that surprise thing. As Gilroy has pointed out (in an edifying New Yorker profile), today's audiences are reversal-jaded. We've seen so many unexpected turns in so many movies by now, that we're infinitely hard to surprise. Gilroy's self-stated goal is to top known reversals so that even the savviest genre audience won't get ahead of him. And impressively, Duplicity manages that feat. I so want to talk about the ending (there's a bracingly rude perfection to its ruthless logic) but I can't, I can't... and that's a peculiar sort of pleasure that not enough movies these days provide.
It's also cool to see One of These espionagers that has not a single car chase -- an explosion -- a somebody flying through a plate-glass window. There is suspense, and a little bit of violence (perversely, the biggest physical fight is in slow motion and occurs within the first 15 minutes), but mostly the excitement comes from dueling wits, as opposed to the usual witless body blows and mayhem.
In its zeal to keep its audience on its collective toes, Duplicity may annoy you. Its labyrinthian network of flashbacks requires uncommon alertness, and a movie that makes you work too hard can provoke resentment. I happen to like a picture that appeals to my intelligence, and having been forewarned by some naysayers that the movie was "too clever for its own good," I didn't mind that extra level of brain taxation -- not with all the pretty locations, the snappy dialogue, the chemistry between its stars that for once felt genuine (and the whole cast is dreamy: the not-enough-seen Kathleen Chalfant, the increasingly watchable Denis O'Hare, and a sly, Coen Brothers-esque turn by Paul Giamatti, et al).
Make no mistake, this is Good Movie Lite. But though it's no Michael Clayton, I'm actually looking forward to seeing Duplicity again, to see just how the duping was done.
My life as a schizophrenic: As a writer/instructor, I spend my time on the page and in the classroom trying to realize writing ideals, my standards lofty and role models iconic. As a studio story analyst, I slave in the industry coal mines, often enabling shameless hacks to be horrifically overpaid in the service of creating artless schlock.
Tonight, I show a group of students how a cleverly crafted series of setups in a script's first act is the key to effective pay-offs in a credible, contrivance-free climax. Tomorrow, I spend a day doing notes on a script that's a credibility-free contrivance-fest that has no climax... and has already been bought by the studio for half a million bucks.
How weird it is, to preach the tenets of mindful, elegant craft one evening, and to clean up the mess left by bloated, mindless philistines the morning after. Clearly the tension between these roles has been getting to me, as you can see by my last post. After all, I make a certain portion of my living consulting on scripts and teaching screenwriting, so what exactly do I have to gain by telling an audience of fledgling screenwriters that many of the so-called rules of screenwriting are meant to be discarded? Way to lose your client base, dude.
Nevertheless, I continue my self-destructive streak, trying to reconcile the two worlds I straddle, since many of the comments made on that "virtues of writing badly" post made me all the more aware of a yawning gap between What Is Taught and What Is Actually Done in the world of working screenwriters. For example, Chris writes:
Ok, so if no one should actually follow the rules... should those still be the rules? ...I'm baffled by everyone's demand for rules while no one successful actually follows them.
I think we need to define rules on both the micro- and macro- ends of the spectrum. Tony Gilroy, in a great profile of this great screenwriter/director in The New Yorker, cites only two "fundamental rules" that he lives by in writing his movies: "Bring it in within two hours" and "Don't bore the audience."
Well, yes. But on a microcosmic level, there are tons of rules -- the bulk of them, I'd say, having to do with form and format. Simply put, there is a standard: there are tacitly agreed upon craft precepts having to do with what makes a piece of material look like a viable screenplay. There are established margin-sizes for narrative, for dialogue, regulations for length of a scene, of a script; there's even a preferred font and amount of white space advisable to create a maximally-readable draft. Screw with this stuff, and you will be perceived as an amateur.
Go beyond form and there's a smaller set of rules having to do with basic storytelling issues specific to the art of dramatic writing. Most scripts observe the conceit of a three-act structure; most are attuned to certain time-honored traditions of characterization and conflict-building.
Radically mess around on these levels, and you're taking real risks. This is the arena of "learn the rules before you break them," equivalent to learning representation before one attempts abstraction, where talent is the crucial dividing line between being innovative and being capital-r Rong. Discarding the rules of linear time in a story isn't generally advisable... unless you happen to be Tarantino writing Pulp Fiction.
But beyond these two spheres -- call them Rules of Form and Rules of Dramaturgy -- is a great gray area where exceptions prove the rules, and where a little rule-bending can go a long, long way. That's what I was talking about when I observed that professional screenwriters "writing from inside the character" often used supposedly verboten technique, from employing the dreaded "we see..." to baldly stating subtext ("She can't believe he said that, so she...").
Chris, I'm not advocating throwing babies out with bathwater. Observe the rules that work for you -- but don't be fear-based in your devotion to them. That's my issue with R Dobbins:
Established writers can get away with more than the unproven. A script written by heavyweight who was hired to write it compared with a spec script written by an unknown hoping someone will read and buy it is like apples and oranges. For the unproven, unsold spec writer, breaking the rules might mark you as an amateur giving a reader an excuse to put down your script.
Forgive me, Mr. Dobbins, but you really haven't thought this through. Sure, established writers can get away with all kinds of malarky (excessive draft length, using specific song titles because they have the clout to acquire the rights, et al). But in terms of the specific approach I was touting (i.e. writing from the protagonist's point of view and supplying his/her emotional reactions and thoughts), how do you think these writers were writing before they were established? Do you really think Richard LaGravenese suddenly started writing that way after he'd gotten some movies made?
These boys (and girls) who became Big used such techniques from the get -- and what they got, for such rule-abuse and risk-taking, was produced.
Finally, commenter Dave Morris gets me to the point of all this point-and-counterpoint-ing:
William Goldman has a sample script in his book Which Lie Did I Tell? and lots of writers who he asked to critique it tell him off (rightly) for stating things in the screenplay that we couldn't possibly know if we were watching the movie. And Goldman's riposte is that you've got to start with a "selling" version of the screenplay - and that's not good writing, it's the version that's intended to spoonfeed the studio exec who's speed-reading it.
There you have it: the idea of The Selling Screenplay. Goldman, who certainly knows of what he speaks, is talking about a reality that isn't often articulated in newbie screenwriting circles --that a spec script's purpose is to sell the movie.
There's often a world of difference between the draft that sells and the shooting script of a given movie. The selling draft may be the one that slays people precisely because it's out-of-the-box risky. Its writer puts in the provocative ending that'll never get shot, or the anti-heroic character choice no studio will support, or any idea that makes an unforgettable read... but may never see the light of the silver screen.
Point is, it gets the movie in the door. Of course they'll change it in the development process -- but the writer has gotten a reader (executive, director) excited enough to go to bat for this script. You may remember J.F. Lawton's dark spec script Three Thousand, with its black hooker protagonist who didn't get the guy in the end. No? Oh, that's right: you saw it as Pretty Woman, and whether Lawton wept on his way to the bank or shrugged good-naturedly... he had a check to cash.
Similarly, the style of a spec that's meant "to spoonfeed the studio exec" may break the rules of good writing in order to get an emotion, an action, or a visual moment across. Goldman himself is partially to blame for this trend, having infamously invoked a (then) new style of hyperbole in his screenplay for Butch Cassidy when he described the dynamiting of a train as: The biggest explosion you've ever seen.
What could be ronger than that? Vague, unfilmable, and talking to the reader, no less, yet it spawned an unholy style of screenwriting that proved uncannily effective in getting those darn puppies sold, especially in the '80s (see: the career of Shane Black). This kind of "sell" persists today, albeit with a less in-your-face bent. You can see it at its craftiest in the work of Tony Gilroy. Here's the opening paragraph of Michael Clayton, praised by Goldman in the published screenplay's introduction:
It’s 2:00 a.m. in a major New York law firm. Ten floors of office space in the heart of the Sixth Avenue Canyon. Seven hours from now this place will be vibrating with the beehive energy of six hundred attorneys and their attendant staff, but for the moment it is a vast, empty, half-lit shell. A SERIES OF SHOTS emphasizing the size and power of this organization; shots that build quietly to the idea that
somewhere here -- somewhere in this building -- there’s something very important going on.
There's so much wrong with this passage, in terms of the doctrinaire "what you see is what you get" edict of most Good Screenwriting, that it's liable to make Professor DuCinema faint. But it's undeniably compelling and it makes you want to keep reading (see Gilroy's fundamental rule #2, above, and for that matter, do read the New Yorker profile: Gilroy is a living rebuttal to Goldman's snipe about Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything"). Making you turn the page is what a good spec script does, no matter the height of its writer's status.
Your spec doesn't have to suck. But it helps to acknowledge that it is a sell. It's not a work of art, it's not a priceless pinnacle of writing perfection, it's a draft of a story that wants to be movie. And if letting go of some rules you were taught is what it takes, to get people to see the movie you see in your head... have at it, I say. You have nothing to fear but another rewrite.
Generally after teaching a screenwriting class, I feel a sense of positive accomplishment, however meager. Something's been learned, even if it's as trivial as the proper formatting of sound effects. But after my last class, I felt like I was leaving a trail of fire and brimstone in my cloven-footed wake, the air thick with the stench of sulfur. I had become the screenwriting instructor Devil incarnate.
Call me a heretic, call me a hack, here's the horrible reality I'd preached, the one that sent my students screaming into the night: The surest path to getting your screenplay sold is to write it badly.
One of the cardinal rules of the screenwriting craft is "Show, don't tell." Good writing, we all are taught, doesn't over-explain, doesn't pander and pre-direct the action. Parentheticals, the script writer's equivalent of "indicating," are frowned on: If you need to add (sadly) after a character's name before a line of dialogue, then you haven't written the dialogue right -- the line isn't inherently mournful.
Same goes for characterization work. "What you see is what you get," another bit of screenwriting gospel, says that you don't talk about a character's emotions and thoughts when you're writing their actions. The character moment should be self-evident. Actions speak louder than indulgent inner-voice aping: If you need to explain how a character is feeling, or fill in his reaction to someone else's action, you haven't written the character right -- their personality hadn't been properly articulated.
Good screenwriting is supposed to appeal to a reader's intelligence. Be clear, be precise, and they'll get what you intend in a given scene. Your prose should be as spare and smart as a Raymond Carver story.
But as a writer who's been a story analyst and script consultant in the studio system, and thus has read something like 6,893 screenplays over the past 17 years, most of them agented, many of them since sold and developed, I say:
Bullshit.
I can only report to you what's actually going on, speaking to you from the belly of the industry beast (where the gaseous air, come to think of it, is often sulfurous). Here's what most screenwriters don't want to hear: In the working industry, these rules of "good writing" don't apply. Most of the scripts that sell are loaded with what's thought of as bad, with telling-not-showing, and I'm talking about the big boys. Eric Roth does it. Stephen Zaillan does it. Robin Swicord, Richard LaGravenese, James L. Brooks... Highly paid Oscar-winner Ron Bass (or his massive "research" staff) does it.
Now let me define this it. The Big Boys and most of the less heralded writers who get their movies made observe a less well-known rule of the screenwriting trade: The fundamental job of a selling screenplay is to get the reader to empathize with its protagonist.
Paraphrased for emphasis: The most important task a screenplay must accomplish is to get whoever is reading it to identify with the lead character. It's really that simple, although often tricky to pull off. If you can't get an executive, an actor, a whoever the hell is reading the thing to see the story through the eyes of its protagonist, to experience your story's emotions as they're experienced by the person in the starring role... then you are dead in the water.
This is, after all, what we all do whenever we see a movie. As we watch the leading man or woman, we're subliminally doing a lot of emotional math in our heads: Why's she doing that? Oh, she's outsmarted him (she's smart). Wait -- is she nuts? Oh, no, that was funny (we like funny). Hmmm, I don't get why she reacted that way (now I'm curious). Wow, I didn't see that coming! (This is intense). Etc. And the sum total of these largely unconscious lightning responses to a character in action is meant to be: We get them. We're with them. We are them.
Like it or not, the savvy screenwriter, ripping up rulebook pages to fuel her audience-identification fire, gets right to the heart of this process. Here, for example, is Oscar-winning original screenplay writer Dustin Lance Black, early in his script for Milk. Young Harvey is trying to pick up a guy named Scott who's just caught his eye on a subway platform:
HARVEY MILK: I'm part of the big, evil, corporate establishment that, let me guess, you think is the cause of every evil thing in the world from Vietnam to diaper rash.
SCOTT SMITH: You left out bad breath.
Falling for it, Harvey covers his mouth. Scott laughs. They both smile, realizing they share a wry sense of humor. A TRAIN IS COMING, Harvey has to work fast.
HARVEY MILK: So... You're not going to let me celebrate my birthday all by myself, are you?
SCOTT SMITH (gently teasing): Listen, Harvey, you're kind of cute for a suit... But I don't do guys over forty.
OhmyGod! The telling, the explaining and even (gasp) the parenthetical!!! A doctrinaire screenwriting teacher would cut that "realizing..." clause, question that "has to work fast," probably damn the "gently teasing." They'd probably have problems with this bit from a little further in:
HARVEY MILK (an idea, half-jokingly, half-seriously): Why don't we run away together?
SCOTT SMITH: Where to?
INT. FLASH FORWARD - HARVEY'S KITCHEN - NIGHT
Harvey speaks to the tape recorder. (Throughout the film, these scenes should feel intimate, as if Harvey is telling us things no one else knows.)
HARVEY MILK: In those days, San Francisco was the place where everyone wanted to go...
That last parenthetical in the narrative is the epitome of a tell-don't-show. But it sure makes a difference in our understanding -- our "feeling the story," does it not?
Sometimes the "you are the character" POV work is more subtle. As Simon Beaufoy brings us into the world of Jamal in the first flashback of Slumdog Millionaire, note how succinctly and eloquently
the action in this first flashback is pitched from Jamal (and no one else's) point of view:
SALIM: Jamal! Catch it! Catch it!
The seven-year old Jamal stares up at the ball, jinks around trying to get into position. He pays no heed to the rest of the children who are scattering fast to the edges of the tarmac. The ball seems suspended in the blue sky. Shouts from the other children seem very far away. He doesn’t notice that they are screaming for him to get out of the way. Jamal adjusts his feet for the perfect catch. Then out of nowhere, a light aircraft almost takes his head off as it comes in to land on the tarmac runway.
This is actually good writing (it avoids the interior editorializing while vividly transcribing a "you're a camera in Jamal's head" trajectory in the reader's mind), but the principle (make us be him) still applies. Here, conversely, is an extreme example from another screenplay, describing a daughter talking to her elderly mother, who's on her hospital deathbed:
CAROLINE: I wanted to tell you how much you’ve meant to me. I’m going to miss you so much...
They hold each other for some time... They separate... And there’s an awkwardness. They have nothing left to talk about... nothing left to say to each other... a hole in their relationship... Caroline fills it with the eternal question...
CAROLINE (CONT’D): Are you afraid?
As a screenwriting instructor, I'd be tempted to throw this maddenly ellipse-riddled schmaltz right out of class... except... it's painful to acknowledge... this is an Oscar-nominated screenplay (Benjamin Button) from Oscar winning scribe Eric Roth (Forrest Gump).
Bad or good (and such terms begin to lose their bearings on this turf), getting across exactly how a character is feeling, in its varying degrees of subtlety or on-the-nose excess, is the coin of the realm in professional screenwriting. When it's done deftly (e.g. Beaufoy) you barely notice it, and it's hugely effective. Personally, I find Roth's end of the spectrum hard to stomach, but I can't knock his agenda.
"Telling the story from inside the character" is what sells the story to prospective stars, directors, producers... and while it's absolutely Wrong as a supposedly proper approach to screenwriting craft, it's employed by ostensibly A-list writers on a daily basis. That's because with this kind of neon indicating on the page, nobody reading such material can misunderstand or fail to comprehend the emotional beats in a character's arc. And these screenwriters know that getting the reader on that same page with their protagonists is their fundamental task.
I ain't sayin' I like it. I'm just saying... it works.
Now maybe you can understand why in preaching such heresy, I felt like I was telling my students to sell their minimalist-sophisticate souls to the studio devil the other night. But this is my story and I'm sticking to it: bad writing, shmad-writing -- don't shy away from doing some "telling" in your show, if it'll put your reader more vividly and palpably into your protagonist's shoes. It's a dirty job, abusing (i.e. over-using) the technique may get you in trouble, but writing your movie from inside the character will get you further with that spec script than most of the rulebook do's and don'ts ever written in stone.
Let the hissing begin.
My dad finally had his surgery and (though long and apparently a bit complicated) it went well. He'll be in the hospital for a few more days, but the worst (knock wood) of this whole nightmare is finally behind us. Mom is walking with more strength each day, and with any luck, the Formerly More Mobile Merry Mernits will be reunited in rehab before long.
We're infinitely grateful.
Thank you for all the love. You know we love you back.
Peter Travers, a film critic for Rolling Stone magazine described He's
Just Not That Into You as "a women-bashing tract disguised as a chick
flick" and Kevin Maher has written in the Times that the "so-called
chick flick has become home to the worst kind of regressive
pre-feminist stereotype". Dr Diane Purkiss, an Oxford fellow and
feminist historian, feels that we have reached a nadir in the way that
women are portrayed on screen, and says that there's been "a depressing
dumbing down of the whole genre. That's not to say that I want all
movies to be earnest and morally improving. But I think that you can
actually have entertainment with sassy, smart heroines, rather than
dimwitted ones."
(--Kira Cochrane, The Guardian)
As a
young single gal, in Australia, I saw He's Just Not That Into You twice... both times in
packed cinemas, and both with extraordinarily big audience interaction.
This movie is exactly what us girls are craving right now. The
women in the movie seemed real (not such over-the-top 'characters' that
rom coms typically have). We could relate to their situations, and how
they reacted... Finally a movie that explored issues that we're all thinking/feeling in
modern relationships, with no simple answers, just the complexities,
dilemmas, ups and downs that happens in real life!
(--Alley K, comment on a Living RomCom post)
Kinda confusing, isn't it? While I can't say I'm as befuddled by the success of HJNTIY as some of my colleagues (in my largely unfavorable review, I did acknowledge the factors that seemed to cinch its popularity), it's always a bit perplexing when there's a serious disjunct between critical consensus and the box office. But what do I know? I'm just another blog-hard.
So let's hear from the front lines of this particular teapot tempest. Cochrane, quoted above, did an interesting experiment for her London newspaper (thank you Simone White for the link): She watched some recent so-called chick flicks "with a group of teenage girls, all
studying for their A-Levels at Kingsmead school in Enfield, London, to find out how the target audience for romantic
comedies responds to them." She then showed these girls, who are very much the intended demographic for such studio fare, some classic rom-coms to see what they thought of those.
...[17 year-old] Bronté Terrell says of [Isla Fisher's character] Bloomwood in Confessions of a Shopaholic, "She
was very dopey, wasn't she - a woman who can't grasp love or a job or
manage her bills." She adds that she "can't think of a recent film where the
main female character has been someone successful, someone normal".
"And if they are successful," says [17 year-old] Shanice, "it's like they have to get
married so that they're not so concentrated on their work."
Rhiannan Brown, 17, is impressed by Meg Ryan's character in When Harry Met Sally. "She's more subtle, more real life than the women in rom-coms today. She's working, she has her own house, she knows what she wants, and what she wants is very similar to what the average woman of today wants – even though," she adds, as only a teenager can, "it was made back in the eighties."
Reacting to the recent spate of wedding rom-coms like Made of Honor and 27 Dresses, these teenagers are "bemused." Cochrane asks whether they're obsessed with marriage themselves, and they laugh... "I see marriage as a bit of a negative thing," says Bronté. "You're signing your life away. Very few of our parents are still together, so why would we want to go through all that?"
The group write off many of today's rom-coms as predictable, cliched and exaggerated, but they're not too bothered. They prefer horror films.
Right, then -- and who can blame them? Meanwhile, back here in the less enlightened States, Hollywood is evidently crowing over having supposedly found the formula for pleasing females. This L.A. Times article by Rachel Abramowitz cites HJNTIY, Shopaholic and other recent successes as indicative of chicks finally coming home to the studio roost:
"The movie industry has distinctly underestimated the female audience
and their box-office clout for a long time," said box-office analyst
Paul Dergarabedian. "...Now movies that have innate appeal to women are paying off. Finally
Hollywood has cracked the code of what is appealing to women."
Evidently quality -- however that increasingly ephemeral factor can be quantified -- is becoming beside the point, as no one (in her or his right mind) compares these current hits with acknowledged classics of the genre. But what is one to make of the ever-ditzy, neurotic and man-crazed caricature leading ladies found in these contemporary winners, which relegate the strong, capable and competent career women of His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib to the dustbins of distant celluloid memory? The conundrum can't be entirely explained away by Abramowitz's answer:
For most in Hollywood, it's not a particular mystery why the chick
flicks are suddenly gaining so much traction in the marketplace. It's the economy, stupid. So these often portray fluffy, happy worlds where life's woes are
settled with a song or a martini. There are no foreclosure signs or
stimulus packages (at least of the economic kind).
This strikes me as simplistic, especially since all the chick flick rom-coms cited were made before our current economic downturn (even Shopaholic was in the can before last Fall's big crash, though it received some tinkering in the aftermath). So their appeal must be rooted in something deeper within our collective unconscious.
My suspicion is that the term "chick flick" is in need of revision, as the question seems to be: Which chicks are we talking about? Hillary fans were rightfully enraged by the idea that Sarah Palin would earn their vote simply because of her gender. So isn't it time to acknowledge that chicks are actually a more specific subset (and a fuzzily defined one) of women? And that many women -- both 17 and older -- abhor "chick flicks?"
I won't pretend to understand why it is that He's Just Not That Into You delights one kind of tomato while another one throws to-mah-toes at it, so I open it up to you. What's going on here, people? Living RomCom wants to know.
MONDAY MERNITS UPDATE: My dad's major surgery is still scheduled for this Tuesday (3/3). Thank you everyone for all the good wishes and prayers. I'll let you know how it goes.
What my father is wearing here is a shampoo cap -- a hospital device, lined with chemicals, that gets cooked for 30 seconds in a microwave and then gives a patient a hair wash and dry. The bear to his left is a gift from his granddaughter Lucy, and the red plaid shirt draped over the chair is one of Mr. Mernit's longtime favorites (the photo was taken by brother John's cell phone, at my father's own request).
You might think that a man who has endured the immense cruelty of what's amounted to a 12-day hospital wait for a procedure that's supposed to save his life (punctuated by other procedures less major but also stressful) might be a little... testy. But Dad spends a good deal of his time cracking up the staff. Most of the nurses are in love with him ("You're my favorite," I heard one tell him, "Whenever I have the time, I come over here so I can hang out with you"), as his good humor is palpably infectious. He's actually an embodiment of the concept of grace.
Dad's surgery, after many postponements, is finally slated for Tuesday. My mom is gamely learning to walk again, over in her rehab room. We watched the Oscars at her place, and then his. We are all of us, wife, brother, and the Formerly More Mobile Merry Mernits, hanging in there. Love continues to be the answer, despite so many painful questions, and you guys -- readers of this blog -- have given us some that is deeply appreciated. Thank you for all the wonderful comments on the last post, which I read to my father (and he later read to Mom). It made them happy.
I'll update you Tuesday night (we think good thoughts). And then next weekend I fervently hope to return to the usual Living RomCom bloggery. Thanks again for being with us.
& CONGRATULATIONS PENELOPE!!!
WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Dad did NOT have his procedure yesterday. We have now officially begun a production of The Merry Mernits Meet Kafka (or maybe it's Beckett?). It was discovered that his defib implant site was swollen -- Dad was bleeding. This required another small surgery to fix up... which of course requires a few days recovery... which puts the big triple-A operation to be done on... We have no freakin' idea. With any luck, round the weekend, but it could even drag into next week. When I'm done screaming I'll get back to you again...
SATURDAY UPDATE: Dad's aneurysm procedure is now scheduled for Tuesday. He's patiently enduring, as are we all, with fingers crossed on every front.
Every now and then life gets in the way. I'd planned to see and write about another new movie, to do all the normal trivial things one does when one isn't paying particular attention to how precious and fleeting being alive is. But so much for plans. My parents, visiting me here in Los Angeles, were planning to have some leftovers for dinner at their hotel the other night, when they made the left turn into their hotel's parking structure and were broadsided by another car that was speeding down Wilshire Boulevard.
Amazing how everything can change in an instant. That they're both alive is somewhat of a miracle, considering that the force of impact, besides spinning the car round and shattering the windshield, threw my father's glasses to the far right corner floorboards and ripped one of his hearing aids loose, still to be found in the wreckage. Paramedics had to cut the steering wheel and slide my mother out on the driver's side. The car was totaled.
My mother, 83 years old and still in the best of health, suffered a fractured pelvis, a broken collarbone and rib. My 87 year-old father, although suffering the agony of feeling (wrongly) responsible for my mother's injuries, came out relatively unscathed -- whiplash, a pulled muscle, a few cuts and bruises. And this is where the story turns bizarre, written with the perverse pen that only reality can wield. My father's CT scan revealed that, entirely unrelated to the accident, he harbored an abdominal aortic aneurysm: a swelling of the aorta in danger of imminent rupture, an event that usually is instantly fatal.
"You're a time bomb," is how one ER trauma doctor put it to my dad. Which is why as I write this, he's slated for surgery tomorrow, in a high risk procedure (my father has a history of heart disease) that Cedars-Sinai's expert team of doctors nonetheless believe is doable, and God willing, will allow him to emerge from the hospital alive, with perhaps another decade ahead of him.
It's ridiculous to observe that this car accident was a good thing in that it may have saved my father's life, but really, what does one say? We're all too busy reeling and dealing with the many curveballs any hospital stay inevitably throws at you -- my mother's reaction to the anesthesia, for example, after the surgery that successfully realigned her pelvis. She became agitated when she emerged, as many elderly patients apparently do, and needed to be sedated. Which is why my older brother John and I -- he'd flown in from Baltimore the day of her operation -- ended up each holding one of her hands, in lieu of hospital room restraints, to keep her from clawing off her oxygen mask in her delirium.
Considering that Dee-Ann Mernit had never, up until the night of the accident, been a hospital patient in the over-50 years since she gave birth to me, she has come through the whole traumatic experience like a trouper, retaining the same sweet and benign optimism that has helped keep her and my father Dick Mernit such a loving couple for past 61 years of marriage. In the midst of her drugged fog that night, as we held onto her hands, she spoke a lot of indecipherable babble, but one phrase emerged that she kept repeating like a mantra. "Love and kisses," she murmured, over and over again, "Love and kisses."
We celebrated Valentine's Day together in the hospital, me, my wife Tater, and my brother moving from his room to her room and back, bearing gifts of chocolates and cards and fruity non-alcoholic, faux-champagne beverages. My father couldn't get over the fact that my mother had already bought and inscribed two Valentine cards for him, days before the accident. "She gets it done before the bill arrives," he said wryly, wondering over the cards, then joked, referring to his own lack of preparation, "You see what's wrong with this relationship?"
There is nothing wrong with their relationship. And one of the things so wonderfully right about it is my father's deep, reverent devotion to his wife, which he shows each day in a hundred ways. I wish you could have seen their reunion, that night she came out of surgery and was finally lucid, how he bent so carefully over her hospital bed, he in his own hospital gown, to tenderly kiss her forehead. It could renew your belief in love, in the awesome force of the human heart, if that's something you've ever questioned.
Tomorrow, the heart has to triumph again. I'm not a praying man, but I am a believer. And it's not that I'll ever take the gifts we've already received for granted. I simply refuse to believe that a story like this could come to some poorly written ending.
I'll let you know how everything goes.
SATURDAY UPDATE: Dad had a relatively minor operation on Friday -- the insertion of a defibrillator -- which went well. However, his team of docs are being cautious about the major operation and so even Monday is now iffy as the target date; the procedure could happen as late as next Thursday the 26th. He's being great about all this, but it's a trial. Mom on the other hand is beginning her rehab therapy work and determined to heal as fast and best as she can. It's frustrating/sad for all of us that they can't be together, but we go back and forth, and there's the phone... Thank you all for your good wishes and check-ins. I'll keep you in the loop.
Interesting provenance for a project: the concept of He's Just Not That Into You came from a line in a 30-minute Sex and the City episode, which was then turned into a thin but nonetheless bestselling self-help book of the same title by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo. So should it be a huge surprise that the resulting movie (directed by Ken Kwapis, screenplay by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein) isn't exactly Citizen Kane?
From the largely negative reviews and the outraged on-line outcry that's greeted this innocuous, essentially lightweight picture, you'd have thought the romantic comedy Anti-Christ had arrived. Accordingly, I showed up at my local multiplex prepared to see something car wreck-level horrible. Well, there's nothing like having low-to-no expectations. I went, I watched, and I've lived to tell: It's not awful.
However.
HJNTIY belongs to that most difficult to get right of rom-com sub-genres, the ensemble film. These kinds of movies, with Richard Curtis's Love Actually being perhaps the most successful in recent memory, put a number of disparate couples through their romantic comedy paces, and are usually loosely organized around a theme, however substantial or wispy (see Actually's fairly fatuous "love is all around you" motif).
HJNTIY's thematic concerns are so ephemeral as to barely bear examination. There's a stab at organization in there, reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally's imitation of the Woody Allen oeuvre, where the title's self-help theme is sounded in a title card (e.g. "...if he's not calling you,"), followed by a faux "real person" interview on the topic. And certainly the spine of the thing is embodied in the story line featuring Ginnifer Goodwin and Justin Long: Goodwin is the girl who needs to be taught the meaning of the title's lesson.
As to the grab-bag of story lines surrounding hers, the ultimate meaning of it all is pretty damn fuzzy. There's something in here, as the various couples do or don't work through their various romantic issues, about women needing to shed their illusions on the one hand, and stand up for themselves on the other, but it's tough to sort out. That's mainly because despite the many winning actors on display here, there really aren't any characters.
It's like a romantic comedy video game, or more properly, a board game: pick a card from the Conflicts pile, roll the dice, and see where you land. The players themselves are largely incidental. Thus Scarlett Johansson is a confused and confusing construct: she's the girl who's sort of with, but not with Entourage's Kevin Connolly (himself likable but so insubstantial that he threatens to float right off the screen), and intent on sleeping with married man Bradley Cooper. Why? Because the plot demands it; who Johansson is, beyond some loose idea of a narcissicist, is never clear.
The same superficiality afflicts all the couplings on screen, which are lazily sketched in sitcom gloss. Every now and then, sheer sentimentality pulls some emotions to the surface; you'd have to be romantic comedy immune to not feel the tug when Ben Affleck proves he's there for Jennifer Aniston, and Jennifer Connolly brings a welcome edge and heft to her turn as a betrayed wife, given the slimness of the stereotypical role. But speaking of stereotypes...
The aforementioned on-line tumult arose -- rightfully, to a large degree -- from both the black and the gay community's reaction to HJNTIY's offensive tone-deafness. For a movie set in Baltimore, with its prominent black community, it really is absurd that there's no couple of color in the film. Black characters are consistently relegated to background, and the most prominent one, given only a few lines, is a waiter.
The homosexual men depicted in the movie are wince-worthy, cliché gay.
Where is it written that a romantic comedy has to be politically correct? Nowhere, of course, and if one accepts the notion that all the film's central characters travel in roughly the same social circle, one could rationalize the color-blindness of the group (one could, that is, if the insular, upper-class white nature of the HJNTIY cast were at least acknowledged). But it's inarguable that HJNTIY represents a missed opportunity. Imagine if the creative team behind it had tried to stretch the long-established boundaries of the genre, instead of dutifully playing connect-the-formulaic-dots.
Meanwhile, as we carp and bloviate, the evidently critic-proof pic has captured its opening weekend, with a stellar $27.5 mil take. And it was instructive to see the movie with a full house. I realized, gauging the tenor and volume of the laughter, that what's getting HJNTIY over is its pop cultural conviviality. In its best moments, not unlike a good Sex and the City episode (minus the truly sharp wit), the movie is speaking its contemporary urban audience's language.
Thus a largely wasted Drew Barrymore got one of the movie's biggest laughs when her character decried a technology where you have to go through seven different portals to receive the same rejection you used to get from one home answering machine. And the script's grasp of what constitutes today's social faux pas (e.g. Bradley Cooper being the sole person to clap at the end of Scarlett's yoga class is the embarrassing give-away that he is that into her) is just knowing enough to give its audience the grin of recognition.
It's this sense of "we're talking to you," I think, combined with the undeniable star wattage such an ensemble musters, that's making HJNTIY the date movie de jour. The movie is at least hipper than your grandmother's rom-com, as its viral promo that advertises 10 Chick Flick Clichés That Aren't in HJNTIY demonstrates. But will such a trifle of a movie endure? Not highly likely. And much as it's heartening to see any romantic comedy top the box office, the movie's momentary success is giving me that queasy, we-get-the-movies-we-deserve feeling.
If this is the kind of sub-par rom-com that makes a lot of money, what's going to make the studios want to produce a movie that's much better?
It's that time of the year again. Romantic comedy lovers, romantics, lovers comedic or serious -- all humans with beating hearts know that as soon as February rolls around, there's a major holiday to be reckoned with, one that's come to symbolize the meaning of love and romance for America, if not the world.
I'm speaking, of course, about Groundhog Day.
Granted, there was a time, long, long ago (i.e. before 1993), when this holiday lacked the romantic associations since bestowed on it, due to the efforts of Danny Rubin, Harold Ramis and Bill Murray. But ever since the writer, director and star, respectively of Groundhog Day created what's now generally acknowledged as one of the great American movies of all time, February 2nd has become synonymous with romance and comedy. In fact, when people ask me to name a couple of my favorite romantic comedies, this one invariably comes to mind.
What's that? You've never thought of this cinematic classic as a romantic comedy? For shame. I have it on unassailable authority that the film qualifies. For starters, it says so right on the friggin' DVD box's front cover ("A romantic comedy fantasy that is Bill Murray's best screen performance" -- thank you, Gene Shalit). But you can also look up the definition of romantic comedy in the um, definitive text on same, and find (p.12) that "a romantic comedy is a comedy whose central plot is embodied in a romantic relationship" and that (p.13) "the central question posed by a romantic comedy is: 'Will these two individuals become a couple?'"
As you well know, when TV weatherman Phil Connors (Murray) gets inexplicably trapped in the same repeating February 2nd, his sole recourse to getting out of it becomes the object of his affections, producer Rita (Andie MacDowell); his salvation lies in the answer to their coupling question. (Screenwriting theorist sticklers may point out that the story's central question is really, Will Phil ever get out of February 2nd? To this I say, also true, because the movie is a rom-com hybrid -- ibid, pp.21-28 -- a romantic comedy/high concept fantasy, and thus the couple/escape conflicts are intertwined. But let's stop boring our civilian readers, shall we? Thanks.)
Strange but true, there still exist deprived, disadvantaged people who have not seen the movie Groundhog Day. If you are one of those poor souls, what better opportunity to improve the quality of your life, than to view it today, on the official Day itself? And even if you're one of the many enriched individuals who's seen it, Groundhog Day is of course a movie that you can watch over and over, and over, and over and over and over...
And if you're a major Groundhog Day fan, you might even consider journeying to the scene of the crime: the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is having its annual celebration, and it promises to be quite a hoot. Such a trip was actually enjoyed by Day's writer and star before the movie was made, and therein lies a tale that speaks, I believe, to the true spirit of romance, or as we might say, what love's got to do with it.
Danny Rubin recounts the following in his illuminating interview accompanying an early draft of the screenplay in Scenario (Spring '95 issue, regrettably out of print). He talks of having been hired, fired and re-hired to work on the script, and when he, his wife Louise and kids were preparing to move from Los Angeles to New Mexico, getting a call from Bill Murray:
He says, "Do you realize that the day after tomorrow is Groundhog Day?"--"Yep."--"And do you realize that between the director, the producer, the star and the writer of this film, nobody has been to the festival at Punxsutawney? Doesn't that seem wrong to you?" And I said, "Absolutely. And I think you should go, I think that will be a great thing." And he said, "I think we should go." And I said, "Bill, that's a really nice offer, sounds like fun, but I'm moving, I'm moving my family, we're up to our necks in boxes, I can't just abandon them and go off to Punxsutawney." And he said, "Well, think about it and call me back. Here's my number." When I got off the phone, Louise asked who it was. "Bill Murray," I said. "He wants me to go to Punxsutawney tomorrow." And she said, "Cool." And I said I'd told him I couldn't do it. She said, "Are you nuts?" So I talked to [the studio] and they said, "We'll pay for the move, we'll get someone to help pack, we'll fly out a friend of your wife's to help her move in so you don't have to be there."
This level of support was very nice, and I embarked on the most surreal adventure of my professional life. All of a sudden I'm flying in a private plane from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with Bill Murray and we're talking about the script. We landed somewhere near Punxsutawney at 2:00 in the morning. And there were fans out there waiting for him--it was supposed to be a secret...
Rubin goes on to say that he used a lot of what he saw on that trip in the script. He'd originally only spoken to the town's Chamber of Commerce and looked at their literature, but:
After we actually saw it, there was a whole different feel to it than we had imagined. It was delightful, really delightful--a wonderful civic event. We incorporated a lot of that into the movie... Everyone there knew it was a goofy ritual--it was almost sophisticated in its hickyness. What was so much fun about the festival is, it's the middle of the night, zero degrees, they've got bonfires going--and they're playing Beach Boys music.
Sometimes I read this excerpt to a screenwriting class when I'm talking about the inestimable value of research, to illustrate how really being there can make all the difference in writing a given project. But I quote it now in this pre-Valentine's Day context to highlight my favorite moment in Rubin's story, which is when Louise says, "Are you nuts?"
I just love that! Gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling every time, because it seems to me that Danny Rubin's wife is the hidden heroine of the Groundhog Day saga. Love doesn't mean never having to say you're sorry. It means having someone be able to say "Are you nuts?!" to you at a crucial moment. Love is sometimes about saving loved ones from themselves -- which come to think of it, is kind of at the core of what the movie ended up being about, don't you think?
Go watch it again, again, and see if you agree.
Spending my days believing in impossible things and chasing them towards an inner truth, now that's a pretty good gig.
--Danny Rubin
(photograph at post's top by sabine)
It's not for nothing that, according to charts on boxofficemojo.com, the second most popular (i.e. biggest moneymaking) romantic comedy of all time is called What Women Want, a movie which suggests that the answer may be: Mel Gibson. (Another possible answer to this age-old query, most famously voiced by Freud, may be found within the title of the number one box office-successful rom-com: My Big Fat Greek Wedding -- but I'm kidding, of course... Right?)
Figuring out what the female of the species is after, really, has been a challenge for men, and a human preoccupation for all of us since the Stone Age (somewhere in the cave paintings of Lascaux, I'll wager, there's a portrait of a red-faced Cro-Magnon guy holding his freshly-beaten head in confusion as an angry Cro-Magnon woman shows him the cave-door). And it's certainly been a focus of the romantic comedy genre since the silent era. This is why, as a sort of public service, Living RomCom would like to virtually turn over its post-space this week to another writer and his subject.
What Do Women Want? Discovering What Ignites Female Desire is a fascinating article from the NY Times by Daniel Bergner about the work of a number of women researching this subject: psychology professor Meredith Chivers, sexologist Lisa Diamond, and professor of psychology Marta Meana, along with some eminent male counterparts.
It should surprise no one, I suppose, that Bergner finds more additional questions than answers in this field, or, more aptly, these woods:
“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.”
I'm not going to attempt to summarize this lengthy, in-depth report, beyond noting the inevitable contradictions that surface between ostensible experts, who not only occasionally disagree about fundamental approaches and findings, but at times knowingly contradict themselves. After all, this is extremely complicated stuff:
“The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”
The biological and the chemical roots of feminine desire get a thorough investigation, although...
Among [Lisa Diamond's] answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.
And yet...
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Marta Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.
In terms of relevance to screenwriters, I found this particular paragraph of Meana's intriguing:
Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”
At last -- a theory for why there were all those up-against-the-wall sex scenes in the '80s and '90s! Though it doesn't explain Denzel's dearth of romance/rom-com projects...
But this is only a fraction of the fertile food for thought Bergner's article presents. I'd suggest that anyone interested in sexuality, gender, and That Whole Mind-Body Thing give this piece a careful read.
After all, if there's one thing women want -- I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here -- it's for us to give them their due attention.
Always surprised on those days when the mind makes her shotgun, metaphoric leaps for reasons I've never been able to trace. Remembered that Wang Wei said a thousand years ago, "Who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door?"
--Jim Harrison
There's a story told about James Thurber at a dinner party, caught by his daughter staring into space while the rest of the guests were in the midst of conversation. "What's the matter with Daddy?" she asked, and her mother assured her, "Don't worry, honey, he's just writing."
You're still writing, you just aren't aware of it. Somewhere in your brain, in the "not-top-of-mind" part, you're arranging, rearranging, connecting, disconnecting and more or less figuring out what needs to be done. Inspiration is when the guys in the R&D area of your brain knock on the door and say, "Here it is."
-- Bill at WriteLife
Bill's quote came in a comment on my last post, in which I was kickin' some writer butt, saying that now, now is the time to get your writing done, as in: get your ass in the chair and your hands on the keyboard, whether you feel inspired or not, because waiting around for inspiration is a loser's game.
This time out I feel obliged to offer a corollary, as suggested by my subsequent musings and Bill's comment: When you are writing regularly, really working and working it, immersing yourself in the writing on a daily basis, it is equally imperative that you stop.
Take a break. Leave it alone.
Because it is when you are deeply steeped in the work, writing as much as your hands can stand to keep up with your brain, that the other less conscious parts of you are freed to take over the reins when your hands give out.
When you're out in the world, you listen to dialogue and think about other things while your subconscious is working on whatever the problems are in the script. Once, when I really got stuck on something, I took a weekend off and went to Santa Barbara. I wasn't thinking about it and woke up in the middle of the night suddenly understanding where I had gone wrong and what I had to change. Sometimes, your mind has to be released in order to get past things, like a muscle that knots up so tight, there isn't enough blood going through it. It has to relax in order for the blood to flow again.
-- Amy Holden Jones
So many Eureka! moments for writers occur in the car, in the shower, at the dinner party. But I do believe they occur because the writer has been down in the mines every day, shoveling away. Naturally enough, many writers integrate away-from-the-desk time into their schedule.
Walking is best. Any physical activity helps. For instance, I'm often full of ideas the day after my wife and I go dancing.
--Tom Schulman
If a man who writes feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it.
-- E.B. White
Whatever your chosen alternate mode of activity, it's useful not only for letting that other side of the brain take over, but for holding onto your mind, as well.
The solitude of writing is quite frightening. It's quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.
-- Nadine Gordimer
So peculiar, this pursuit of ours, that feeds on the world yet needs to hide away from it, to create another world all our own. Is it any wonder -- Write! Don't write! -- that a writer often lives from one confusion to another?
There was a period last fall when every time I began to write, I went into a perfect blank-minded euphoria, where I stared out the window and felt a love for and oneness with everything. I sat in this state, sometimes for the whole time I had planned to write. I thought to myself, "Lo and behold, I am becoming enlightened! This is much more important than writing, and besides this is where all writing leads." After this had gone on for quite a while, I asked Katagiri Roshi about it. He said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work."
-- Natalie Goldberg
But seriously --
Flogo photo by Mark Humphrey
Amy Holden Jones and Tom Schulman quotes from: The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters by Karl Iglesias, a useful tome for all screenwriters to own.