Living the Romantic Comedy

Airworld

Eight years ago, in the summer of 2001, I read Walter Kirn's just-published novel Up in the Air and enjoyed it, especially due to the synchronistic experience of reading a good part of the book on board a flight from NYC to L.A.  The cover depicted a number of men flying through the air as if they were mini-airplanes, with one crashing and burning.  A month or so later came an event which rendered such a book cover - let alone a story about a guy who practically lives on airplanes and in airports - a bit less than attractive to your average reader.  Maybe only a fellow writer would have such thoughts, but I remember musing, months after 9-11, on Walter Kirn's unfortunate book release date - talk about bad timing!

So it's kind of amazing, actually - and a testament to the power of a good story - to see that eight-plus years later, the big screen version of Up in the Air, on track to win a Best Picture nomination along with a host of other prizes and critical accolades, is arguably the most timely movie of the year.  I can't think of another film I've seen recently that seems to capture so unerringly the peculiar tenor of this moment we're in, and it's a testament to the talents of the team that's brought it to the screen that given such a moment, Up in the Air isn't just a big fat downer.

Instead, this story about a guy who flies around the country firing people for a living is a poignant, bittersweet sad-and-funny experience - a kind of high wire act of sorts, as it balances on the edge of where comedy turns to tragedy and vice versa.  The movie - which does a lot of shrewd, hard work to seem breezy-easy in its delivery - is about going in two directions at once.  You want to love Ryan Bingham because George Clooney's playing him, but he's actually kind of despicable, in a marvelously charismatic way.  And you want everything to turn out okay for the people in the story, even when everything in the movie's telling you that "okay" isn't really an option in the end.

 

Clooney was born for a role like this, and newcomer Anna Kendrick now has a career to reckon with.  Everyone on board - including, somewhat queasily, the non-actors Reitman roped in to play themselves: recently-fired people - lends substance to a world that breathes insubstantiality. 

Here are a few interviews wiith the director/co-adapter of Up in the Air: this one speak to his intentions, this one gives Walter Kirn's POV on the adaptation; the third talks about the director's use of real people in small (wrenching) roles. 

I've been singing Jason Reitman's praises since his first feature, Thank You For Smoking, and he's only getting better (Juno was his second).  The guy's now three-for-three, a damned impressive average for any filmmaker, and the evidence suggests that even when he eventually fails (nobody in Hollywood history has ever pitched a perfect, no-misser game), he's going to be interesting.  

From my point of view, this auteur is carving out an intriguing little niche for himself: Ryan, like Smoking's anti-hero Nick Naylor (and in a sense, Juno) is a slick talker in need of redemption.  All three of Reitman's movies focus in on the dance you do around the lies you tell in order to get along, and the truths that life ultimately forces you to confront.

Speaking of talk, the movie is a must-see for romantic comedy fans - though it's not a romantic comedy.  The banter between Clooney and the lovely Vera Farmiga is as witty as a vintage screwball's.  There's some twenty minutes of pure rom-com bliss scattered throughout Up in the Air: George and Vera's timing is impeccable and their chemistry a delight.  For most of the time they're on screen together, we really are up in the air in the best sense of the phrase, and I can only hope that the movie's success reminds the studios that such sophistication, nuance and panache is still worth pursuing.

Meanwhile, the material in the movie that brings us back to earth has a devastating accuracy and punch.  There's one heartrending shot here of an office, nearly denuded of desks and activity, inhabited only by a few walking wounded, that's the most eloquent portrait of America 2009 I've seen outside of a newspaper's front page. 

Reitman's artful existential tap-dance is no doubt already earning its backlash - there are those who'll find it too glib for anyone's good - but if you'd like to go to the movies and see some resonant sense of the world we're living in (with glimpses of the dreams we keep trying to believe in), Up in the Air has got it down.

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #5

Wrapping up this week of tips - specific aspects of craft and creativity I've found in spec scripts that sell, based on my years of reading screenplays and doing notes on studio projects...

Tip #5: Selling screenplays exude the confidence of knowing what they're about.

Back in the mid-90s, Shane Black made the highest spec sale in history (three million dollars) with The Long Kiss Goodnight.  Let's have a look at its first page.

A WINDOWPANE

Assaulted from without by SNOWFLAKES.  Wind tossed.

INSIDE

A bed, dappled with moon shadow.

A LITTLE GIRL, fast asleep. The wind whistles and sighs outside...

[Little Girl has a nightmare, and kindly Mom comes in to comfort her, then:]

The child subsides, breathing steady.  Eyes closed.

The mother rises... Heads for the door. 

Flicks on a Winnie the Pooh NIGHTLIGHT --

Her entire right forearm is slicked with blood.

More blood on her Czech-made MP-5 machine gun.

After this reveal, Black's readers were compelled to turn the page and keep reading. The writing is a model of compression, brevity, and white space (see Tip #3), and a paradigm of cinematic storytelling (i.e. Every line suggests a vivid and specific image).  But what slays me the most is that very first sentence: A windowpane assaulted from without by snowflakes.

Black's choice of words is anything but arbitrary, for the first thing we perceive is a telling metaphorical paradox: In this world, nothing will be as it seems, all conventions will be subverted, and violence will rule the day.  This is a movie in which even snowflakes attack.  Subliminally, it sets up the wonderful reversal found further down the page, as warm-and-fuzzy mother-and-child imagery - that Winnie the Pooh nightlight - gives way to "Mom is a bloodstained killing machine."

I had the rare pleasure - kind of like Woody Allen's "I just happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here" moment in Annie Hall - of quizzing Shane Black about this page when he visited my class a few weeks ago, and learned that I wasn't out on any limb here; these were indeed his intentions.  Which leads me to my point: This is a story that had been worked, broken, and realized to the extent that its writer knew what the story was about - knew its thematic core so well that he was able to paint that subtext into the imagery of his first page (and all the pages after).

Most writers go through this process with a story.  At some point, all the guesswork that's been implicit in the plotting gives way to a revelation.  You realize this is what you're really writing, the "this" being the passionately felt idea that's at the core of the thing.

Thus Sydney Pollack famously noted that the script of Tootsie only began to work for him when he finally understood that its through-line was "a man learns how to become a better man by pretending to be a woman." Until that point it was simply a funny farce about a guy running around in drag.  Once he understood its true thematic subject, that theme became the "armature" (as he called it) upon which everything else - the gags, the dramatic developments - could be hung. (For another discussion of finding that core idea and manifesting it, here's Andrew Stanton on the creation of Wall-E.)

I only wish that more of the screenwriters I read had gone that distance - digging deep enough into their stories to make them meaningful.  Too many specs I read don't seem to be about anything at all beneath their flashy, frenetic surfaces.  Truth be told, the primary mission for story analysts and development executives at my studio is more often than not to break down an already-bought project to determine what the movie really is - so that an improved draft will bring its real subject matter to life.

Our business is so slavishly fixated on product, that process doesn't get its due.  Many times I've seen a student rush to market with a draft that I knew was only half-cooked - that didn't really pulse with a clearly understood subtext.  The specs that sell have a peculiar, distinctive feeling and energy - a unique kind of confidence in their storytelling - that tells a reader in no uncertain terms, "I've gone beyond the surface of this story and broken through to what it's really about."

One senses that confidence on the page immediately.  It announces itself with a surety of focus and tone in the execution (it's a good read) that's born of a writer having successfully grappled with the true meaning of a story.  Have you gone to the mat with that issue, in your latest spec?  If you want to get your movie made, now's the time to take it on. 

[Empire artwork: pjlighthouse.com]

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #4

Continuing this week's series of tips - specific aspects of craft and creativity I've found in spec scripts that sell, based on my years of reading screenplays and doing notes on studio projects...

Tip #4: Scripts that sell speak to universal subjects in a distinctive voice.

One knowledgeable answer to the question, "What do the studios want?" is: The same but different.

They want yet another comic book super-hero franchise installment, but they want it with a new spin - say, featuring a darker-than-dark villain whose spooky nihilism calls the hero's very existence into question (see: The Dark Knight).  They want yet another comedy about an unwanted pregnancy, but they want it from a new angle - say, from a contemporary teen's arch, blackly comedic POV (see: Juno), or from the POV of an unlikely boy-man slacker-shlub who can't believe he even got to sleep with a hottie, let alone got her Knocked Up.

It's for this reason that, should the movie live up to its effective trailer, this Christmas's Sherlock Holmes is going to be a gazillion-bucks-making franchise-starter.  What could be more old hat than Holmes?  Right, but we haven't seen this Holmes before - muscular and action star-like, with the winking wit of Robert Downey Jr. in the role and an anything-but-stodgy Jude Law in the place of his traditionally fat and nerdly sidekick, Watson.  The trailer makes it look like Lethal Weapon in hip Victorian drag.

One secret to "high concept," along with originality - that lightning-in-a-bottle element that can't be manufactured or faked - is an original take: a fresh, inspired point of view on a familiar idea that has inherent universal appeal.  This is where "personal voice" comes into play on a field that often seems anything but personal.  The individual writer who has a truly unique take on a same-old notion is the one who wins the day.

Thus, a few years back, over the same six-month period, I read at least four different spec screenplays entitled Always a Bridesmaid.  The plight of "the woman who never gets to be the bride" was clearly a movie that wanted to get made.  But the one that actually did - Aline Brosh McKenna's savvy 27 Dresses - got made because it had the quirkiest, smartest angle: its heroine was The Ultimate Bridesmaid, a woman who lived and breathed other people's weddings... and got unwittingly involved with the very guy who wrote her favorite weddings column (while her older sister snatched the man of her dreams, thus replicating our heroine's always-a-bridesmaid dilemma).

Why go see a movie about a guy who's scared to meet his fiancee's parents?  Well, what if his prospective father-in-law is an ex-CIA agent with lie-detector equipment in his basement... and our hero is a nurse?  Casting Robert De Niro was the coup, of course, but Meet the Parents had its distinctive take already there on the screenplay page.

Here's the takeaway to consider: When you approach the market with your spec script, you're asking people to spend millions of dollars on your story, enlisting thousands of people in bringing it to cinematic life.  So what sauce did you put on that very pricey sandwich?  What makes your script just different enough to make us sit up and take notice?

If your concept isn't rife with originality, your execution should be.  I can't count how many "bunch of guys go to Vegas and high jinks ensue" specs I've read over the years.  But "guys wake up after a wild night's bachelor party in Vegas and have no idea what happened to them, or where the groom is?"  I've only read one of those, and you know what became of it.

The funny thing is, nowadays practically every spec comedy that's got guys, Vegas and/or a wedding in it is being pitched as "the next Hangover," but that's a load of crap.  The Hangover became a monstrous hit because it was driven by a mystery.  Yes, it had good guy gags.  But its writers' decision to tell the story by "leaving out last night" is what made the movie special.

Nothing's more commonplace than boy meets girl, yet rom-com specs sell every year.  Sometimes it's the concept (see: Boy meets girl at the end of the movie, aka Sleepless in Seattle), sometimes it's the execution (see the it's-literally 500 Days of Summer).  But something unique and distinctive must be put into the mix.

Think about your movie.  What spin, take or tweak are you adding to the equation, that'll make the same thing different, and get it to the screen?

[Money dog art: fun24-7.blogspot.com]

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #3

We're midway through a week of "tips" - specific aspects of craft and creativity I've found in spec scripts that sell, based on my years of reading screenplays and doing notes on studio projects. 

This one may inspire rolling eyeballs and groans, but bear with me, and I'll keep it brief.

Tip #3:  Scripts that sell are models of form and brevity.

Nobody in the industry likes to read scripts, and readers - the biz's first line of resistance - are often the most curmudgeonly sticklers of all when it comes to format and length.

So ask yourself: Why, after spending anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years or more on a spec screenplay, do you want to have the first industry people who read it encounter errors in format and/or excessive verbiage, and thus want to throw the thing across a room?

You know the drill, as it's basic 101 stuff, but observe three simple rules. 

One: Write with plenty of white space.  Narrative shouldn't feature paragraphs of more than four lines (three or less is ideal), and dialogue shouldn't come in fat chunks. 

Two: Traditional format - i.e. proper slugs, savvy use of formal conventions, etc. - is the coin of the realm.  A professional tennis player doesn't want to face you on a court that has no net, and we drive on the right side of the road for a reason.  Keep up with trends (e.g. The use of "CONTINUOUS" in slugs, except when specifically used to indicate we're in the same linear moment as you cut to another location, has been out of fashion for over a decade, and "CUT TO:" is being used less and less).

Three: Write shorter scripts.  In our ADD-riddled culture, the average selling spec is no longer 120 pages. 110-115 is more the norm, and in comedies especially, it's under 110 (somewhere between 95 and 105 seems to be the contemporary comedic sweet spot).

Generally, less is more.  Some scribe once likened screenwriting to crafting "a hundred pages of Haiku," and most scripts I've read that have sold in the past few years have a compressed, shrewdly compacted energy born of achieving the most with the least amount of words.  

Don't just take my word for it, go have a look at one of 2009's most high-profile spec sales: Kyle Killen's The Beaver, which topped last year's "Black List" (a list of scripts most liked by industry insiders) and subsequently got set up with Jim Carrey, then Steve Carell, and now Mel Gibson (?!) to star. 

The Beaver is about as seemingly uncommercial and indie as they come (it's about a man whose fake animal hand puppet starts talking to him and takes over his life), but here's the thing: While it does bend rules (employing a lot of voice-over and long speeches), it positively zooms in the read - white space galore, beautifully succinct, sharp, vivid narrative.  So even someone who wouldn't be inclined to read it, if told the log line, is seduced into reading from its first energetic page to its last: page 109.

You can be lax and sloppy with this stuff; you can try to reinvent the format wheel.  Why not do what the specs that sell do, instead?

[Beaver photos originally on: Splash News]

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #2

This week Living RomCom departs from its usual format to present five "million dollar screenplay tips" - aspects of craft and creativity found in spec scripts that sell: one tip a day, Monday through Friday.  These tips are based on my experience working within the studio system as a story analyst who reads specs and does notes on projects in development.

Tip # 2:  Selling screenplays are aimed at a specific audience.

This one may seem like a "duh!" no-brainer, but you'd be surprised by the number of pre-pro screenwriters I encounter who've never seriously thought about who they're writing their screenplay for.

Here's the necessary paradox about writing a spec script: Your story should be personal (that is, be about something that's of passionate importance to you), and it shouldn't be formulaic (that is, not slavishly adhering to only the most traditional story conventions). Nonetheless, it needs to be mindful of the expectations and preferences of that mysterious beast, the paying public.

Artful though your story may be, it's an entertainment that is tacitly designed to earn its producers money.  For this reason it behooves you - at some point in your development process - to think about your movie from the buyers' point of view.  And satisfying an audience is practically all these guys ever think about.

Because studios must fill slates (roster of features they plan to release every year), and specific genres balance them out, buyers look at scripts in pragmatic terms.  First and foremost, they want to know what the script is and who it's for: Is it an action thriller?  That's one kind of audience.  A family comedy?  That's another.

Thus a family comedy that's littered with explicit sexual humor is a fish with feathers.  An action thriller that's light on scares, fights and explosive violence is a dog that won't hunt.  It's for this reason that I deplore the romantic comedy specs I've read that are neither romantic nor funny: they make no sense.  We go to a comedy to have LOL laughs; we go to a romantic comedy to have our warm-and-fuzzy romantic feelings titillated (they don't call them date movies for nothing).  So anyone writing a rom-com spec that delivers neither side of the equation is writing for an audience of one.

Does your adult drama have a female protagonist? Then you're probably writing for a female-driven audience (i.e. the women will lead the charge, and the men may come later).  If it's truly "adult," you're probably addressing women in their 30s, 40s, even (gasp) 50s and older.  Think about one of those women, and what she may want to see on the screen.

I'll wager she'll actually show up at a theater this Christmas to see Nancy Meyers' It's Complicated - a movie starring Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, about a remarried woman who's tempted to take up with her ex-husband.  Haven't seen it yet, but I'm guessing it delves deeply into the emotional concerns of a woman of a certain age and that it doesn't feature a hair-raising car chase that ends in explosive bloodshed.

Here's a good quick post about a spec script sale from this past year that illustrates this idea: the writer "had a clear understanding of the exact type of movie he was crafting."

Think about your audience.  At some point in your process, ask of your project - Who would want to see this?  Who'll pay for the sitter and the parking and the refreshments?   Or who'll see it with four friends and splurge their allowance on seeing it again?

Maybe you're writing a "four quadrant" movie (one that appeals to young, old, male and female), but my point is: there are such things as quadrants.  And the spec scripts that sell generally target at least one of them.  I'm not talking about purposely perverting your story for commercial ends - I'm suggesting that you think about who, specifically, might best enjoy the story you want to write.  If you know that, you'll be able to do the often necessary tailoring that will make your spec script a good enough fit to make a sale.

Million Dollar Screenplay Tips

In my Writers' Program courses at UCLA Extension there's all kinds of personalities, skill-sets, and intentions, within the same class, but some pre-pro writers are more dedicated than others.  So I've come up with a method to deal with latecomers.  On the first night of a course, I announce that I'll begin each class at 7:00 p.m. sharp by sharing "secrets of writing a million dollar spec script."  Those who get to class on time get to hear these tips - those who come even five minutes later miss out. 

I'm happy to say that my current crop of students tend to be prompt.  And it's occurred to me that these "secrets" - culled from my job of reading spec scripts and doing notes on projects in development for a major studio - might be of interest to Living the RomCom readers.

Instead of one long, long post, I'm going to deliver these tips in bite-sized blog pieces every day this week - five tips, Monday through Friday.  They represent aspects of craft and creativity which scripts that sell have in common.

Tip # 1: Selling screenplays are clearly, vividly rooted in their star role's point of view.

You cannot read the first page of Susannah Grant's Erin Brockovich (revised by Richard LaGravanese) without knowing that this is Erin's movie - for that matter, Erin's point of view is equally obvious on nearly every page after that.  Yes, it's a well-written script, period, and a great character - great enough to win Julia Roberts her Oscar - but a primary reason the thing got made (despite being a project that, in its subject matter, did not have a "mainstream hit" vibe) is that a major star like Julia fell in love with it.

Why?  One obvious reason is that every scene in the script is written from Erin's POV.  I don't mean literally: we're in standard screenplay format third person throughout.  But every scene gets Erin's emotions and thoughts across.  Every scene is conceived in terms of "What is Erin discovering and what are we learning about Erin?"  Every scene gives us Erin's experience.

In the opening sequence, Erin interviews for a job.  Dr. Jaffe, her would-be employer, clearly doesn't know what to do with her, and as he prepares to turn her down, he begins: "Look..."  The narrative following the line reads:

Beat.  By Erin's expression, she knows what's coming.

In the scene directly following, outside on the street, we read:

Erin is finishing a cigarette.  Her face has fallen - the enthusiasm and spirit she showed in the interview are now replaced by a desperate type of concern.  She takes a final puff...

If you were to remove both lines - the indication of Erin' reaction to being rejected, and the description of what shows in her face, on the street - you'd be removing our chance to know Erin and be in this experience with her.  It would be minimal, technically correct screenwriting - but it wouldn't create that "we are her" feeling.

After nearly 20 years of working inside and outside of the studio system on thousands of projects, I've come to firmly believe that the most important goal of a spec script is to get the reader to empathize and identify with the protagonist.  Accomplish that and any reader will go along for the ride.  And any major actor reading the thing will think, "This is my movie."

Writing for a star makes sense.  Stars want to play parts where the character's purpose is clear and strong, and the character's emotions are palpable and vivid.  These are people that people relate to.  We enjoy being with them and often we want to be them.  In great scripts, the protagonist's inner life is clear and vivid on the page.

Almost every selling spec script I can think of (that I read) has this quality.  The same basic principal holds true even for ensemble films; Rodrigo Garcia's forthcoming Mother and Child (which got Naomi Watts, Annette Benning, and Kerry Washington on board) is a script that makes the reader feel intimately involved with each of its major characters' inner lives.

Root your story in your protagonist's point of view.  Every reader will understand the story with an extra level of clarity, and every leading actor who reads it will know that the movie is about... them.

Shane Black Confronts Your Fears

I had the great good fortune to have screenwriter/director Shane Black visit my Writing the Character-Driven Screenplay class this past week.  The creator of the Lethal Weapon franchise, he also wrote The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and the by-now beloved cult fave Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Revered by those of us who know how hard it is to write good, character-driven action fare, he also became infamous, back in the day, for having committed the crime of being one of the most highly paid scribes in Hollywood history. 

Shane turned out to be an uncommonly generous, vulnerable, honest mensch of a guy.  I got to play James Lipton and ask the questions, and Shane gave us over an hour and half's worth of enlightening answers re: creating memorable characters and crafting effective big screen stories.  A few times in our conversation we talked about digging into one's dark places and dealing with one's fears in the writing process.  The last question of the night came from a student who wanted to know how Shane dealt with such fears - where the fear came from and what it was about.

"For most people, fear is daring to wish for something so bad that it matters to you, and then having that taken away.  Fear is, I'm not going to get the things I want, and I'm gonna lose the things I have already. That's what fear is, to me.  The idea of getting your hopes up? [When I was starting out] I would get my hopes up, and someone would say, What if they just smash you? And then you'll feel worse than ever! And I'd go: Oh, well, I know. I'd rather get my hopes up.

"Here's what the fear does: it's something called 'The Jack Story.' Jack Story's about a guy who's driving and boom, his tire blows out in a rain storm.  By the side of the road, flat.  He sees a farmhouse in the distance with a light on, and he thinks, I don't have a jack, I can't change this tire - but maybe the farmer has one.  So he starts walking through the rain and the mud and after a couple of feet he thinks, Well, wait a minute, what if I get to the farmhouse and the guy doesn't have a jack?  Then I gotta walk all the way back and I'm getting rained on and it's murder.  And he goes, Calm down, it hasn't happened, see what happens, play it by ear, okay?

"So he keeps walking and he thinks, Hmm, what if the farmer has a jack, he does, but I bring it back and it's the wrong kind.  And then I've made this whole trip and the expectations, and it gets ruined, and then I have to go back and I can't even drive - Ohmygod, it's even worse.  He goes: Relax. It hasn't happened, just relax... Three quarters of the way there, he thinks: What if the farmer has a jack, and it's the right kind, but what if he just doesn't want to give it to me, and he says, I don't know you, fuck you, go out in the rain!

"So the point of the story is, by the time he gets to the farmhouse it's like -- "  Shane knocks his fist on the desk.  "The farmer goes, Hello?  And the guy goes: You know what, take your jack and shove it up your ass!"

"Because you have in your head, already scripted, the conversation based on fear, and you've let fear just run rampant...  And I have to remind myself, Stop having conversations that don't exist.  I'll feel like I've talked to someone for an hour, but it's the future - the conversation I would be having, and inventing the things I would say, or I'm going to say.  And then I never have that conversation.  It's just wasted fear time, spent on all the bad things that could happen, instead of the really interesting things that might.

 

"Writing and getting away from your fear, is to me... You know, you might not sell a script.  You might not be good.  You might not this and you might not that.  What's the point in going down that path?  There is none.  I know it's tough to say, 'Don't be afraid,' or 'Think positive,' but...  There really is just no other way to go.  You're up against a wall, you've decided you want to do something, you're having some adversity - you can either play out your hand or quit.  And I suggest that... My career came down to one moment like that.

"I was working on a script called Shadow Company in 1984, and I was on page one, and I showed it to my brother - he hated it.  I sat down and I thought, "I can't do this.  I sat down to write a screenplay - I don't know screenplays, what am I doing, this is so stupid...  And I thought: I don't want to write!  I don't want to do this, I can't.

"I'm a one-finger typist.  And I said - Just do it."  Shane holds his one typing forefinger in the air, and jabs it an invisible keyboard.  "I went, 'The... rain... lashes...  Ground... Bla-bla-blah.  I started typing - I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this - and all of a sudden, I'm: Huh, okay that's a good line. What would he say there?  Okay, he says this... And three pages later, I had a scene, and it became a script - and it sold, optioned - and it got me Lethal Weapon."

"It came down to this.  I had a piece of paper in a typewriter and my finger poised to hit one key and I couldn't do it, I didn't want to do it all.  All I wanted to do was stop.  And I hit the key.  And now I have a career.  So that's the leap of faith.

"I walked through the fear.  You can walk through anything.  That's the fabulous truth that I've discovered, is that fear never goes away.  But it doesn't stop you from putting one foot in front of the other.  And, the most important realization of all, it can't stop you from being creative.  It can impede you, but it will not stop you from having great ideas.  Fear will do everything except shut you down, mentally.  It can't do that."

 

Classroom photos: Erik Cooper

Yakiimo

"We were in Japan in the wintertime, and we heard this... sound in the night.  We were in Shimoda, which is this tiny little town on the coastline.  And there was this calling, singing in the night..."

Simone sings, a plaintive call in a low, lonely tone:

"Ya-ki-imo-oh, yakiiiiii-mo...  And it sounded almost like the Muslim call to prayer.  Minor, beautiful.  And then we were in Fujisawa, hanging out after the show with the promoter and his girlfriend and we were walking home and everyone was drunk, walking to the train station, and then we heard it again. I was like, 'What is that, Ohmygod what is that sound, what is that singing?' - because it was incredible to hear it again, 'cause - Why would we hear it in this other town? 

"And they were all laughing, because it was this Yakiimo sweet potato truck.  These trucks, they drive around in the wintertime, all over Japan, they have a little fire, a little stove on the back of the truck, and they roast the sweet potatoes and wrap them in newspaper and people eat them, it's like street vendor food.  And they all have these recordings, or they're actually singing it, or each has made their own recording of it, they're all similar but different.  And I remember saying, I'm going to write a song with that in it, and I started to sing what I heard.  It was touching me in some way."

 

"And a year later, it was wintertime here in L.A., and I just sat down and wrote it.  It just sort of came out.  Very simple lyrics... And I felt so ashamed of it.  I still have a weird relationship with this song, like I don't like the recording I made for the record, I keep thinking I should have redone it, when I do it live sometimes it's perfect, and sometimes I'm beating myself up about it...  And when I talked to Bob about it, he said "You're so Japanese!"  Like I'm shameful about this thing: I want to give it to people, but I'm like, Oh, I'm so sorry that it's so simple, or I'm so sorry that it's not right, or... "

Simone has her hands out, cupped, offering - but with her head bowed, as if she'd rather be taking it away.

"But I named the album after it.  There's a theme running through it of longing and nostalgia.  And I feel like the Yakiimo song is some kind of simple distillation of that.  And the people I gave it to, people in Japan who know it, they're really impressed that a Westerner somehow connected with the feeling that they themselves have about the Yakiimo man. 

"To them, yakiimo is the thing you have - it's wintertime, going to school, your mother gives you some money and you get the yakiimo sweet potato and you hold it in your pocket on the way to school and there's this... When you hear the song, to them as well, there's this feeling of nostalgia, childhood, and that kind of loneliness in winter, trying to keep warm, something warm to hold... all of these things are present in it."

Here is the song's video, beautifully animated by Hideyuki Katsumata, and here are a few videos of actual Yakiimo vendors in Japan.

Simone White's new album Yakiimo has just been released in America by Honest Jon's Records.

From Dark to Dawn

In the third season finale of Mad Men, Don Draper, the walking quintessence of ad-manology, has to pitch his formerly taken-for-granted creative exec Peggy on staying with him, and he tells her why he needs her:

There are people out there who buy things, people like you and me.  And something happened.  Something terrible.  And the way that they saw themselves is gone.  And nobody understands that.  But you do.  And that's very valuable.

The speech is a kind of blank verse reiteration of what the series is about, a neat summation of what its auteur Matthew Weiner has understood about America and embodied in the arc of the show this past year.  

"And the way that they saw themselves is gone," says Don, his eyes glistening with the pain of his own private loss, for the Don that was is no more.  Season 3's end - spoilage is unavoidable here - takes a rich, ghastly gleefulness in ripping apart every relationship the series has so carefully woven together for its characters over the last three years.

But then - at the darkest of dark moments - comes the re-bonding dawn of a new enterprise.  There's a weird sort of Christmas-y, It's a Wonderful Life vibe to the place where our mad crew ultimately ends up this time around.  After every American dream has turned nightmare, each archetypal persona punished (the genius a fool, the wife declared whore), we realize we've been witnessing the birth pangs of a new world order.

And this time we'll all get it right, won't we?

We are ruined, and we need to remake ourselves anew.   This is the story the ad men feed upon, and it's the myth that Weiner and his impeccable company have rendered so rightly in this season's canny arc.  

A great ad makes us believe in that new story about who we, however wounded, can be.  A great series is only as great as the boldness of its over-arching storyline, and in this, Weiner has mined a motherlode: reframing its first three years as essentially prologue to The Real Story, the whole Mad Men shebang has been reborn, or rather, revealed for the creation myth that it was apparently intended to be.  

The theme's right there each week in the credit sequence, a choreographed disintegration from the get: everything falls apart, but that falling body never does hit the ground.  The darkness that's swallowed us turns out to be the slick suit jacket of the same executive, renewed, reborn, set back in his chair.

In this regard what really counts is who we've gotten back on board for the next resurrection.  Throughout every Mad Man fan's long, dark wait till the start of Season Four, it'll be heartening to know that the dawn brings Joan.

  

Man at Work

 

Somehow, Living the RomCom got nearly to the end of this year without once mentioning Michael Jackson - no small feat, given the blitzkrieg of overkill information we've been subjected to since his demise this past June (I know, you're thinking: Wait, wait - Michael Jackson died?!  Why didn't anyone say so?).  The jaded Industry Insider demon that lurks within me, hearing that a documentary of his concert rehearsal footage was being rushed into production, heaved a cynical sigh.

Fie on said demon.  I have seen This is It, and I'm here to merely tell you that I'm glad I did.

Once you get past the tearful testimonials from the show's music and dance crew and some slapdash "putting our icon in historical context" footage, you're suddenly thrust into the rehearsal for the show's first number, and here's the thing: When you watch Michael Jackson singing and moving his way through Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' in the privacy of an audience-free rehearsal hall, all the rest of it - the celebrity lunacy, the sordid child abuse trial, the self-induced disfigurement, the everything baggage that usually comes with this superstar's name - falls away.

All you're seeing is an astoundingly talented artist at home (for clearly, the stage was his second, if not his first native residence), doing what only he could do.  And watching this breathes new life into the word awesome.

Honestly, I would rather see Michael Jackson like this - smudged in focus, rough around the edges, half in and out of actual performance mode - than to have seen the finished live show.  Even the circumstantial stylistic choice, born of utility - Jackson is almost always shot in full, with closeups rare, and a lot of hand-held angles - gives you the sense of "the real thing," as opposed to the unreal polished perfection, inevitably crowned with over-the-top pyrotechnics, that a stage show would deliver.

Credit director Kenny Ortega for pulling it together, and for letting This is It, with its few but telling glimpses of MJ-the-human-being, provide us with some sense of intimacy - at least, as close to intimacy as one could get with such a heavily-guarded phenomenon.  His razor-sharp band-leader's acumen (a brief discussion of feel and tempo in The Way You Make Me Feel is priceless), his high-as-the-sky standards (e.g. the awkward apologies about having to conserve his voice), and above all, his joy at being able to dance so well (there are dancers half his age who'll never come close) - all of this leaves you with a credible portrait of an incredibly gifted man at work.

All the glitz that was meant to go with this - the elaborate videos, the sets, the fireworks - is the least interesting and appealing aspect of the experience.  The documentary's low point is a hokey-shlocky "save the world" themed song, all of its bells and whistles being applied to one of Jackson's least effective efforts.  The only moment to savor here comes at the literal end of the performance, when he makes a technical decision about how the last bit should be blocked and handled, and you think - Right! - because the man's showman instincts are so invariably spot on.

There's also a few moments of fun and generosity - watch, for example, as he urges guitarist Orianthi to hit and sustain her highest possible note on Beat It, saying, "This is your moment to shine!" - and of course, there's always a poignant sadness in the subtext.  Why did it all have to go the way it went, given how incandescently alive this man was?

Questions like this have been much on my mind lately in the wake of my father's passing, and they're not really meant to be answered.  As the singer sang, Why? Why?  Tell them that it's human nature. 

Let the critics and historians try to make their sense of Mr. Jackson.  For anybody else asking, What was the deal with this guy?, this sketchy, incomplete, "Michael Unplugged" of an almost-concert film will be one good place to start.

A Letter to My Father

Dear Dad,

It's still near-impossible to believe that you were here in the world with us only a week ago, and now you're gone for good.  None of us - Mom, John, no one who knew you, evidently - can get their minds around this.  The word that keeps coming up when people talk about Dick Mernit is vital.  A big presence like yours leaves a palpable hole, and there's been quite a wave of emotion rushing in to fill the absence.  You wouldn't believe the things people have been saying about you.

I am so glad that I had the great good luck to meet your dad.  It makes me smile just to think of him.

Such a sweet, lovely man - so warm and welcoming.

Dick was always so alive and on the mark.

A big person and just a big fucking joy.  And better at tennis than you or I.

So many things I didn't get to tell you.  The love between us is so strong that I do believe you know most of it, anyway, but I guess this is what I would've wanted to lead with, back when I really could have had this conversation with you: You brightened up the world, Dad.  And this is no ordinary thing.

Such a good, kind-hearted uplifter of spirit, your father was.

I found Dick both energizing and inspiring, particularly in his cheer, bounce, curiosity and graciousness.  He really seemed to be living in the here and now - he gave the impression that he was truly living in the thick of things, luxuriating in the richness of life.  His eyes, mind and heart were open.

One little consolation is that you died at a point in your life when you still had hope in your heart: you were regaining your strength, and you yourself didn't believe you'd be leaving us this soon.  A larger consolation is that the four of us - father, mother and both sons - were together when you took your leave.

Still, it's stubborn, this death of yours.  Every hour I come back to it; it's there and will never go away.  Meanwhile there's the ongoing challenge of keeping you alive, around, amidst and among us.  One stopgap measure: I already associate you (you the lover of good drink and people and the infinite variety of life's most colorful details) with pleasure.  So it's natural enough, when I bite into say, a particularly well-cooked, truly rare piece of steak, to think Dad would like this.  Or to see a woman's fine legs and know your reaction ("Great gams") or watch an amazing return in a tennis match that scores a point and hear you cry "Too good!"  So there you'll be.  I can do that.

The harder part is dealing with what can't be tricked out - the ache at the center of my soul when I know I can't share with you something new.  Finally we do have to keep walking forward, into the future, without you.

What a cool, lovely guy!  Thank you for offering us a chance to know Dick Mernit.  I can see him in front of me right now, and life feels so much richer with him in the room.

A man imbued with a great love of life and a fabulous sense of humor.

He and Dee-Ann were real inspirations for how to age gracefully and live life fully!

If someone were to ask me what the deal with you was, I'd tell them my story of that first morning after.  I went out to get coffee for Mom and John and myself, and Peter the doorman asked how you were doing.  I hated having to be the one who told him.  He drew back against the wall like he'd been hit, and his eyes filled with tears, and he took me by the arm and told me what a great man you were. 

Soon after that we went to the physical therapy place across the street to tell the manager, and before he could say a word the receptionist gasped and clapped her hands to her face and said "Oh my God!", her eyes tearing up.  When Ginette at the gym around the corner heard the news, she really started wailing.

Later John went to pick up your watch at the shoe repair shop, and when the Russian woman at the counter heard you were gone, she got on the phone with Simon her husband, who had to be told three times (he didn't believe her).  He had her put John on the phone, so he could praise you to the skies - and make sure his wife gave John back the money for the watch.  And when John thanked him and said the kinds of things we'd been saying to people, Simon said: No, you don't understand - He was the best customer I ever had.

That was Dick Mernit, one great salesman himself, is what I would tell this person who didn't get to meet you: My dad was the man who in his passing left the doorman, the receptionist, the gym lady and the shoe repair man bereft.  So you can only imagine how it is for his wife of 62 years and his two aging sons.

He will be missed by all.  Such a bright spirit.

Your dad was a beautiful spirit.  I feel so delighted and lucky to have gotten to know him just a little.

He was a burning light.

A great soul serves everyone all the time.  A great soul never dies.  It brings us together again and again.

Yours forever,

Bill-Brian

The Silence of God and Other Great Gags

Oh, those Coen Bros.  Love 'em or hate 'em, there's no denying they make technically stunning films (as opposed to movies) with a distinct auteurist voice, and they keep churning them out, gaining Oscars or being ignored, producing a body of work that seems to exist in its own private cinematic universe, about as free from matters of market and popular taste as the oeuvre of Woody Allen.

I've had a conflicted relationship with their work from the get, exalting in some (count me in as a happy member of the cult of Lebowski), reviling a few (I'm of the minority underwhelmed by No Country, which struck me as a particularly mean-spirited formal exercise) and being merely puzzled by others (a decade from now, will anyone want to take a second look at Intolerable Cruelty?).

The thing that's been consistently disturbing in their films, from Blood Simple onward, is their attitude.  More often than not, in watching even one of the great ones, say Fargo, you're left wondering: Do Joel and Ethan even like these people?  In some cases, an aura of not-so-thinly-veiled contempt seems to hover around protagonists and walk-on characters alike.  You identify with their hapless heroes and anti-heroes at your own peril, because in the Coen-ian universe, naive hope will assuredly be trumped by random disaster, and there's always a sense that the joke is deservedly on us.  A working title for their collected works might be Stupid Human Tricks: A Celebration.

However: Finally, at this late date, the Brothers Coen have pulled away the curtain of their dispassion, and made a movie that explains a whole lot.  A Serious Man offers, among its many pleasures, a reasonable explanation for their peculiar sensibility: the Coens are a couple of middle-class Reformed Jews who grew up in a small Minnesotan suburb in the '60s, and their dad was an academic.

Inarguably their most personal work, Serious Man provides us with a context for their black-humored point of view; it fills in the background on the existential shrugs that have been the hallmark of their filmmaking for years.  Leave it to these guys to take on what was once the province of European heavyweights like Ingmar Bergman, and frame the same question - What is God trying to tell us, if anything, and why do we have such terrible reception? - in the province of Jolly Roger Inns, the Columbia Record Club and Manischewitz Wine.

 

Though they're quick to point out the differences between fiction and autobiography in this brief interview (which also offers tantalizing sequel talk re: Barton Fink), the Coens have provided us with a portrait of their seminal coming-of-age years - caught on the cusp of cool, listening to Jefferson Airplane stoned during Torah class, in a community filled with naturally caricature-like neighbors and family members fraught with all manner of dilemmas.  It was a place where acquaintances might drop dead and Wizard of Oz-like tornadoes appear at equally inopportune times.

Full disclosure: I was a Hebrew School dropout, and my wife grew up in a town within bicycling distance of the one the Coens depict here, so our mutual delight in this movie is admittedly subjective.  A contemporary take on the story of Job, it features no stars, has a plot constructed of perversely arbitrary twists, and refuses to answer the fundamental queries posed by its poor protagonist's ever-escalating tsuris.  It's nonetheless one of the most visually arresting, darkly funny and philosophically intriguing films you'll see this year.

Like Bright Star - another movie I've blogged about recently that will probably make all of about ninety dollars at the American box office - A Serious Man may also provide an antidote to this week's soul-crushing studio fare (don't get me started on Couples Retreat).  To see it on the big screen, it wouldn't hurt.

 

The Fat and the Thin

Small children and babies ought to be plump.

So wrote Sei Shonagon in her Pillow Book over a thousand years ago, and her intimation was that everyone else ought to be not. 

Those of us currently living in Fat America salute her prescience. 

Shonagon also said, Nothing can be worse than allowing the driver of one's ox-carriage to be poorly dressed, so I don't consider her to be an infallible sage.  But I thought of her while doing two days of studio notes on a comedy project that had last come in at 144 pages and was now weighing in at 124.

110 pages is okay, just over 100 is good.  Why?  Ask a stand-up comic about going in late and getting out early.  Disturb, delight and depart before they can think about what hit 'em.

Life is short.  Comedies should be shorter.

Movies in general are too freakin' long.  Here's Ryan D'Agostino at the Daily Endorsement, in a compressed version that makes a leaner read:

Normally in life, getting more for your money is a good thing. But movies aren’t Pringles, and 20 percent more free isn’t necessarily what you want. Even 10 minutes of unnecessary screen time can cause a good, tight story to fray. “I Love You, Man” was funny at 104 minutes, but it would have been precisely as funny at 95. ... And was it me, or did the fifth hour of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” start to drag?

You’ve probably never walked out of a movie and said, “It was about 20 minutes too short.” ... The original Rambo is an economical 91 minutes. “Annie Hall” is 94. So is “The Road Warrior.”  “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” needs only 92 minutes to convey the entire high school experience. Every frame matters. Some stories are better longer, of course. Even at three hours, “The Godfather” doesn’t waste a millisecond. But lately too many directors are indulging themselves at the expense of your time.

Consider Judd Apatow.  The 40 Year-Old Virgin: 114 minutes.  Knocked Up:  126 minutes.  Funny People: 146 minutes.  Given that his first is his best, what are we watching as these times engorge?  The sight of one man's ego becoming obese.

Here's a quote for those of you in the world of pre-pro spec-writing, overheard in a studio story department: 

"It's 104 pages?  Thank God!"

The best movie I saw this week is under five minutes long.  Courtesy of fellow blogger Scott Myers, here it is.

 

[images: showhistory.com, images.smh.com, pzrservices.typepad.com, fesfilms.com]

The Draft Withdrawal Shakes

On the first night of every new writing class I teach, I have the students introduce themselves and be greeted in the manner of an AA meeting ("Hi, my name is Melvin..." "Hi, Melvin!!!").   This is not an arbitrary ritual.

The writing junkie: No matter how many times we quit it, we go back.  No matter how sick the process makes us, we keep at it; no matter how we endeavor to reduce the dosage ("One little blog post - how could that hurt?"), soon enough we need more and more of it ("This novel ought to only take me a few years"). 

Reams have been written (this in itself a testament to the awesome power of the disease) about the wonders and attendant angst of the writing process.  Yet despite the terrible reputation of this pursuit (no one's scientifically determined the ratio of joy to horror, but my money's on higher figures for the latter), we obsessively pursue it.

Everybody has their reasons.  I suspect that for me it's about control: It's only by having a self-created alternate reality continuously unfolding in my head that I can cope with the general hopelessness of trying to affect, you know, reality.  So without my daily writing fix I'm prone to copelessness. 

Not that getting one's fix is fun.  The terror of facing the blank page has been plentifully chronicled.  I consider myself a curator of procrastination methods, and I can't count how many times over the past three months spent writing the first draft of a screenplay, I used up almost all of my allotted writing time in trying to avoid writing.  Yet here I am, barely four days past completion, fingers shaking, stomach quaking, psyche unsettled, brain nettled - itching to have that empty screen in front of me again, and bitching about its absence.  It's like that Woody Allen joke from the beginning of Annie Hall:

Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ‘em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’

For Alvy Singer, this is a metaphor about life; I'm applying it to the writing life.  Why would I want to be back in that particular saddle, after having been bucked and thrown from it on a near-daily basis?  If you're a writer, you know why, of course - there's something inarguably divine about the experience when it happens to go right - but still...

Still, it helps to be mindful that such is the junkie's life.  I was complaining in an e-mail to a writer friend yesterday that I was in a funk, had become a slug, didn't want to go anywhere nor do any thing, that I felt worthless, in despair over having wasted the best years of my life, etc.  His succinct reply: It's called finishing a script. 

Right.  So as I dutifully practice my own preaching (i.e. I always put away and lock up a draft for a minimum of two weeks after completing it), I'm trying to come up with ways to cope.  Bicycling is generally helpful.  An Allagash can be pretty effective.  But boy, am I open to suggestion.

What do you do for your writing withdrawals?  Living the RomCom wants to know.

[images: alternativereel.com, wtnrradio.com & pharmacy-and-drugs.com]

Time Machine

It's hard to think of a more sure-fire recipe for disaster than to try to portray the life and loves of a famous poet on screen.  Add period and setting (1818, England) and one conjures a certain deadly-dreadful Masterpiece Theatre fare, at its best embarassing (blasted heath, declaimed verse, heaving bosoms) and at its worst the cinematic equivalent of narcolepsy.  Yet Jane Campion, herself capable of creating such disaster (O, but to have the two hours of my life spent watching Portrait of a Lady returned to me!) has gotten away with it in Bright Star, her portrait of John Keats in love. 

*

It's actually Fanny Brawne in love; we see Keats through the peculiarly intimate point of view of his chaste though impassioned lover, played with instant star intensity by Abbie Cornish.  And the movie is not so much about what you'd typically find in a historical biopic, as it is about what's left out.

Bright Star is focused on the interstices between the big stuff - the meaning of art, beauty, poetry and all that - and the hopelessly mundane: how a hem gets sewn, how tea is served, what exactly wind and light can do to a bedroom drape on an English afternoon.

For this reason - that it's a sincere attempt on its filmmaker's part to meet the world of Keats' poetry with a cinematic language of matching intensity - Bright Star is filled with ravishing images.  When Keats takes to the top of a tree to contemplate the sky, you feel nearly just as drunk on sumptuous physicality. 

The movie is essentially a time machine - a vehicle designed by an anthropological film poetess to take you to another time and place, so remote from our own as to seem truly otherworldly.

It is, of course, a movie that could easily inspire hatred.  Though it succeeds in avoiding Biopic Mawk for the most part (you can't have such a movie, unfortunately, without Keat's untimely tubercular cough) it's mostly gossamer - an ephemeral experience that could easily drive even the most dedicated art house/indie buff to seek out say, five minutes of Fast and Furious 4.

If on the other hand, you're interested in contemplating what a new book looked like in 1818 and how it was gift-wrapped, this could be for you.  Fans of perfect casting will also favor it.  Ben Whishaw as Keats is hot; Paul Schneider is an ideal big bearish buffoon of a romantic obstacle, and Edie Martin was born to be little Toots, a chubby fledgling pre-Raphaelite nymph.

It wouldn't hurt to have a deeply romantic streak.  And a taste for fashion.

If you're lucky, you first read Keats when you're young enough to embrace being that unashamedly carried away.  The film brings the music of his words to life again - as you watch Campion's imagery (Greig Fraser's work with Campion here is as exquisite as Coutard with Godard), the famous lines read aloud sing with the shock of the new.  It's oddly Zen, this butterfly wing of a movie: Bright Star takes you to the past and makes it very, very present.

Spirit Willing But Body Not

Apologies: Living the RomCom has been downed by stomach flu, and the one consolation is that it surely hurts me more than it does you.  We return next week at our usual station, and in the meantime, here's a link that nicely sums up this month's historic low in civility.

And congrats to Jon Stewart for his Emmy win!  At least someone's doing something right and some others ones have acknowledged it.

[images from: paddyk.wordpress.com & animals.howstuffworks.com]

...But I Will Read Your @#%&+! Comments

 

You gotta hand it to Josh Olson.  I can't remember the last time having a tantrum in public got a writer (i.e. not a congressman) so much attention.  Screenwriter (A History of Violence) Olson's deliciously mean-spirited, mordantly amusing screed in The Village Voice this past week, entitled I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script, earned him instant notoriety, becoming the online magazine article equivalent of such viral videos as Sarah Silverman's I'm Fucking Matt Damon.

Every reader I know has read it and loved it; every story department in town has chortled over it; pros and pre-pros alike have Facebooked, blog-posted and Twittered this rant into immortality - or what passes for immortality in our ADD culture (one looks forward to the inevitable "Whatever happened to Josh Olson?" posts, say, just after the Christmas holidays).

If you haven't yet read the piece, let's cut to the chase; here are the opening paragraphs:

I will not read your fucking script.

That's simple enough, isn't it? "I will not read your fucking script." What's not clear about that? There's nothing personal about it, nothing loaded, nothing complicated. I simply have no interest in reading your fucking screenplay. None whatsoever.

If that seems unfair, I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living.

You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II.

But I will not read your fucking script.

At this point, you should walk away, firm in your conviction that I'm a dick. But if you're interested in growing as a human being and recognizing that it is, in fact, you who are the dick in this situation, please read on.

And I heartily encourage you to do so (here's the infamous link), since what made Olson's article so popular is not merely the uncomfortable truths at the core of it, but his eminently readable writing style and humor.

As a writer, reader and script consultant, I've often been in the position bemoaned by Olson.  A Facebook friend whom I haven't seen since high school recently saw fit to blithely e-mail me some 200 pages of his friend's novel manuscript to read with a catch-all request: he was considering a consult, thought I could help get the book made into a movie, and wanted my general "participation" in the project ("Maybe a part in the movie.  Who knows?").  When I replied, apologetically demurring with details of my unholy reading load as explanation, he fired back a follow-up query: "So who's the second person we should approach. Also, book publisher if you have a suggestion."

There are too many things wrong with everything about this fellow's methodology to go on about here, and in this, Olson has done many of us a great service: from now on, faced with such requests, we can simply defer: "Have you read Josh Olson on the subject of reading unsolicited material? If not, here's a helpful link for you."

The obvious caveat that must be cited, of course, is that many a fledgling writer has gotten invaluable guidance and mentorship from an established writer who did, for whatever reason, read their fucking script or story (and a few have even lucked into a jump-start for their careers).  But the young and hungry writer who has at least some modicum of sensitivity learns early on what is and what isn't appropriate when faced with such a potential opportunity.  Olson's diatribe is directed at the less-savvy roiling herd.

Was Olson cannily self-aggrandizing in writing it?  (The IMDB hits on this formerly less well-known scribe's page must've been off the charts this week.)  No matter.  The late great Larry Gelbart (there's a good interview with him excerpted here) would've gotten a chuckle out of Olson's rant, and would probably have enjoyed this inevitable response to Olson from an online humorist. 

The Hollywood Roaster has neatly connected the dots in what is, after all, an eternal circle.  Rest assured, ye read-me writers who've suffered the wrath of an Olson: There is undoubtedly someone higher up in the hierarchy who won't read him.

 

[images from: life.com, village voice, esquire.com, peter stackpole, readingwithrover.org]

The Big Move

It seemed like such a good idea at the time - and for a time, it really worked out fine.  When Tater and I were in the early months of our relationship, she had to move out of her apartment, and it so happened that the apartment next door to mine was unoccupied.  It didn't take long for the lightbulb to blink on over my be-smitten head.  How about moving her in next door?

My Venice Beach bungalow is made up of two units, with a converted garage space in between that serves as my office, and a small yard that wraps around the property.  The landlord had recently renovated the other unit, which now boasted beautiful hardwood floors, track lighting, AC, a freshly built outdoor deck and a freakin' rose garden, no less, plus that most valuable of all Venice commodities: a parking space in the back.  The rent was steep, but I offered to chip in for some of it to acquire that parking space; the landlord liked keeping everything in the family, so to speak, and thus, the lease was signed.

What could be more perfect for two writers in love?  Tater is a journalist, who was soon comfortably ensconced at the built-in desk in front of the bay windows - where Flower, one of Tater's two cats, quickly took up her pasha-like residence.  On the other side of the wall, I was typing out my fictions.  When either or both of us needed the space to write, that space was plentiful.  For boundary-respectful communication, we set up walkie-talkies in lieu of an intercom, and life was good.

Truth be told, I'd cherished this particular literary romantic fantasy for years.  I'd heard tales of Samuel Beckett living down the hall from his wife Suzanne, and had vague memories of reading about a similar arrangement at some point in the marriage of playwright Harold Pinter and his biographer wife Antonia Lamb.  Given that despite our spending every night together and being generally inseparable, Tater and I both really did require uninterrupted solitude to do our work, I saw our bohemian together-but-separate existence as ideal.  So did, as you might imagine, many of our married friends.

And it was fun, in its peculiar way, to bounce around from home to home.  Our two dogs were ecstatic with the runaround yard; up until her death last winter, Molly the pitbull was particularly fond of playing around with Tater and Thomas the terrier at her place, then leaving to come scratch at my door and keep me company at mine.  I got to keep my former bachelor digs in pretty much the same fastidious, control-freak condition, and Tater - who is, let's say, less tidy - was free to do what she willed with hers.

Slowly but surely, however, the subtle drawbacks became less subtle.  We were always losing things.  One weekend, every coffee mug we owned turned out to be at her place; one dinner party was such a comedy of dashing back and forth between residences to claim everything from an errant corkscrew to the wine itself that I don't remember having a chance to drink any of it.  Keys went missing, as did articles of clothing, books and papers.  Invariably, the one vital thing one of us needed - say, at one in the morning - would have to be fetched from next door.  And the walkie-talkies kept bursting into loud, static-ridden exchanges between passing truck drivers.

Meanwhile, Tater and I were growing closer, more intertwined in our intimacies.  We were married last November, but we still weren't actually living together, and it was beginning to feel... strange.  Another major event of last year - Tater quitting her nearly two-decades long staff job at a weekly publication - began to put a big strain on my wallet as her freelance life yielded work, thank goodness, but not the same steady weekly paycheck.

Things came to a head this past summer with Tater's tearful meltdown.  She'd been talking about her  unhappiness with living in isolation for awhile now, but neither of us had fully comprehended its fundamentally negative effect.  After a first year of back-and-forth novelty bedding, we'd been sleeping fairly regularly at my place, and Tater yearned to wake up in the morning with her own things, her own books in the shelves to look at, her own underwear in a drawer close at hand. 

She was suffering from cat neglect guilt as well: poor Flower and the Bean, insider cats always at Tater's, didn't see enough of us, and in protest Flower had taken to peeing on everything in sight.  And the basic daily trauma of never being able to locate... whatever, promptly, was making my addled wife feel like she had early Alzheimer's.

Not to get too simplistically gender-stereotypical about it, but truth is, she wanted to nest, while just like a typically thick-headed male, I didn't see anything odd about maintaining my own space, and was in fact feeling like the big provider, in making our two-home arrangement still financially sustainable. 

The funny thing is, the entire conversation that led to our inevitable decision - give up the second apartment and have Tater move in with me - took all of about fifteen minutes.  Despite my fears that my wife would see this as a diminish-ment in status (we were literally and figuratively downsizing), she felt it as a glorious expansion into a fully married life.  She's been happier and happier with each day of the move.  And I gotta admit, so have I.

That's the beauty part of moving when you don't need a truck - though we did rent one to put some things in storage, and get help carrying Tater's piano into my place: We've had the leisure to move in slow-motion - fill a box one day, carry a pile of them over on the next.  The first of the month has come and gone, and due to our landlord's generosity, there's still some unpacked items lingering next door.

Meanwhile, my place - I'm sorry, our place - is a combination of the newly cozy and the utterly chaotic.  My masculine aesthetic has been invaded by stuffed animals; meanwhile, the real ones are adjusting remarkably well for a small household with two dogs (puppy Tabitha now wrestles with Thomas) and two cats (the reign of pee has ceased).   I've enjoyed throwing things out to clear shelf space for my honey, and I don't even mind giving my living room desk up for Tater, given that I've got my garage-office space now as a full-time Mernitman workplace.

Nearly three years after meeting and hooking up, my love and I are finally living together under the same roof.  We did the meet-lose-get in an oddball order (marry first, move in later?) but I feel there's a romantic comedy somewhere in all of this, don't you?

Meryl & Ellie

How do we mortals experience a little glimpse of heaven on Earth?  For some, it's a certain recipe for beef bourguignon, published in 1961, that reputedly transformed the eating habits of America.  For me and many others of my generation, it begins with a unique drum figure first heard in 1963, in two bars of music that announced one of the wonders of the rock'n'roll world: bum-bum-bum-BAP, bum-bum-bum BAP!

This opening salvo (played by legendary studio drummer Hal Blaine) at the top of the Ronettes' Be My Baby has been a part of the genetic code of popular music ever since.  People have been cooking Julia Child's beef perhaps more than ever, with the release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia;  no doubt many have recently dusted off their copies - or purchased their mp3s - of the Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry-penned classic single (produced by Phil Spector) to savor in the wake of Greenwich's death.  I happened to catch up with Julie & Julia only days after Ellie's passing, and was struck by the juxtaposition of master songwriter with a master thespian.

Love her or hate her, Meryl Streep's artistry is undeniable, and hard as it may be to believe, she is the only contemporary actress in America whom studios can currently depend on to open a movie - at the age of 60.  How exceptional is that?  Watching her as Julia Child, lighting up and wiping up the screen with her younger co-star (one feels bad for the delightful Amy Adams, in a thankless role that was even less sympathetic on the page), I found myself thinking of Ellie Greenwich.

With her partner Jeff Barry, Ellie entered a predominately male world in the early '60s, and proceeded to kick major butt, almost single-handedly creating the wildly popular "girl group sound" that dominated American airwaves at the time of the British invasion.  Mike Ragogna's informative Huffington Post tribute quotes some eye-witnesses:

"Ellie was a real pioneer both as a songwriter and producer," Tommy West explained. "She was one of the first women to break through the exclusive men's production club. Sometimes she had to get down to a man's level to get them to listen, and there were times when she would cry after a session because they wouldn't listen to her as readily as they would a man. But her legacy is one that will never be duplicated."

Meryl, when she first came on the scene, was up against similar resistance.  Famously dismissed by Dino DeLaurentis when she auditioned for his King Kong remake ("She's ugly," he commented to his son in  Italian, "Why did you bring me this thing?"), she had an uphill climb in the Hollywood trenches, even after winning her first Oscar (Supporting Actress in The Deer Hunter).  Here's an interesting bit from Wikepidia:

Asked to comment on the script for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in a meeting with the producer Stan Jaffee, director Robert Benton and star Dustin Hoffman, Streep insisted that the female character was not representative of many real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles, and was written as "too evil." Jaffee, Benton and Hoffman agreed with Streep, and the script was revised.

That Streep will inevitably receive yet another Oscar nom for her turn as Julia seems only fitting, given the similarities of gender struggle common to both famous women (the movie chronicles how Child out-cooked the men at her Cordon Bleu classes and overcame male publishing prejudices - with the help of some smart female editors - to get her eventual bestseller published).

So where is Ellie's movie?  You could say that in a sense it's already been made, in the form of Allison Anders's Grace of My Heart, which was loosely based on a fictionalized version of songwriter Carole King's career, Brill Building days and all.  But there are some choice nuggets in Ellie's own saga I'd love to see on the screen, such as the time producer Jerry Wexler asked Ellie to work on the back-up vocals for Aretha Franklin's Chain of Fools (the result is another piece of pop music history).

To contemplate Julia, Meryl and Ellie is to behold power (Put on River Deep, Mountain High today and it's still like... stand back!)  Yet Streep's anecdote about being cast in Deer Hunter ("They needed a girl between the two guys and I was it") sounds like almost any young actress discussing the vagaries of casting, circa 2009.

Same as it ever was and ever will be?  Maybe not for long.  From Beyonce to Imogen Heap, women to be reckoned with are still having at it, in spite of it all.  There may never be another Ellie Greenwich, but her spirit (a-woh-oh-oh) lives on.

 

Cinematic Dementia

Will Quentin Tarantino ever grow up?  I think we can assume by now that the answer is no.  So where does that leave the rest of us?  Fans of Pulp Fiction (or for that matter, Reservoir Dogs) have either long since abandoned the director or doggedly kept up with his oddball output since 'the early good ones.'  I got off the Tarantino train right in the middle of Kill Bill (i.e. was mesmerized but sickened by 1 and never did see 2), but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to check out the reputed "masterpiece" he's taken over a decade to produce.

Here's the weird thing: Though on some levels the movie is a godawful travesty, on others it's downright masterful; I wasn't emotionally affected much by it... yet images from Inglourious Basterds have lodged in my head and refuse to go away.

Almost a textbook definition of guilty pleasure (the movie is utterly indefensible in terms of its infidelity to the world that exists beyond the silver screen, and in terms of its confused, even incomprehensible morality), Basterds is nonetheless a delirious celebration of movies.  Its excesses are indeed wretched, but the film geek in me can't help but be tickled by its harebrained passion for all things cinematic.  Nearly its entire plot revolves around a movie premiere, and this is the only mainstream feature ever made (I think) that designs its entire climax around the literal use of film reels and nitrate film stock.

So what? would be the reaction of naysayers - I'm not saying this filmo-centric focus is a good thing, it's just... How often do you get to sit in a theater and watch a talented filmmaker lose his mind?  It's the cinematic equivalent of a car wreck. 

And a glorious wreck it is.  Despite everything that's wrong with Basterds, there are things in it that are notably right.  Here's three reasons why Tarantino's latest is worth seeing.

1) It's fun to watch a star being born.  If you've read one review or spoken to a single person who's seen the movie, you've heard about Christoph Waltz.  Hitherto unknown in this country, an Austrian actor of some European renown, Waltz is going to work like crazy over here now (should he so choose), because you walk out of Basterds talking about his performance as one of the great villains of all time (inarguably the strongest screen Nazi since Ralph Fiennes in Schindler).  The camera loves Waltz, and whenever he's on screen, you're a happy camper.

Tarantino's own script has done him in, unfortunately, since Waltz can't play any scenes with Brad Pitt for most of the film's two and a half hour length - a shame, in that it's nice to see Pitt play an actual part for a change, instead of merely being a presence, and Tarantino's best dialogue is found in two-hander scenes between well-matched foils (see: Cheeseburger Royale).  A major problem with the movie is that Waltz walks away with it: not exactly the right effect, when a Nazi is the thing you like best in a rabidly anti-Nazi picture.

2) The imagery is ravishing.  Like I said, still seeing the images and colors, particularly red - not the red of bloody violence but the crimson of lipstick, of a fabulous evening gown, of Third Reichian drapery.  I'm still haunted by little gestures writ large - the twitch at the corner of an eye, the splayed fingers of a hand in the air, the whipped cream on top of a piece of strudel.  I keep replaying the most outrageous image of the movie's thoroughly over-the-top climax in my mind: avoiding spoilers, I'll just say it has to do with black and white and smoke.

Tarantino's first features had a funky, slapdash, gritty look to them, but here, with able D.P. Robert Richardson behind the lens and a sumptuous period production design by David Wasco, his work really has entered the pantheon of movie-movie beauty - even if the content behind those images is often absolutely whacko.

3) It's an object lesson in sustaining the moment.  Here's what separates the men from the boys in director-ville: Any schmuck with a camera can construct a scene from a welter of two-second shots, using flashy montage techniques to create at least the illusion of an event (see: the career of Michael Bay).  But it takes real balls to let a scene play - to have your actors sit at a table and talk and not cut away, but instead, to trust in the beat-by-beat tension that happens when actors act and the drama unfolds.

Tarantino's opening scene is perhaps his best here; it's certainly the most grounded, and once we're past the obligatory homages (a shot cribbed from Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the de rigeur hat-tip to Ford's The Searchers), we're able to experience the rare joy of simply hanging out in a scene that knows what it wants to do and does it well.  The movie begins to subtly slip off the rails right after this opening tour de force ends, but while we're in it... Not too many writer/directors can be this kind of brave about letting the seconds tick by, and it's a scene that's apt to stay with you for some time to come.

See the movie, let it pass?  Inglourious Basterds is not for everyone.  The annoying subtext one feels is that it's for Tarantino, period - the perpetual adolescent lost in an incoherent film fever dream.  But here and there, in spite of itself, Basterds transcends being sublimely awful, and approaches the nearly sublime.

Love and Disability

Story analysts for the studios live in a state of consistent incredulity.  Not a day goes by when we aren't confronted with a piece of material and/or a business decision that defies logic.  Why did this Useless Executive champion a piece of absolute drek?  Why did the studio pass on this killer script we loved?

The true coin of the WTF? realm, however, has to do with choices made by writers in project after project, where the world we live in is routinely discarded in favor of only-in-a-movie un-realities, and nowhere is the "this would never happen" plaint more common than in the romantic comedy genre.

He's a this, and she's a that, and high jinks ensue because of contrivance X, which ultimately causes this unlikeliest of potential couples, after singing karaoke pop tunes from another decade into a hairbrush, to go running to the airport to make declarations of love.  Uh-huh.  And I will now fart tweety-birds out my butt while rocketing into outer space to spray-paint "Obama Wants to Off Your Grandma" on the moon.

What I often find myself wondering - in a spate of stare-at-the-wall procrastination that's obligatory in the midst of covering such specs - is why more writers of romantic comedy don't base their characters and situations on people and circumstances encountered in real life.  That's where one finds stuff, genuinely outrageous and near-unbelievable, that nonetheless has an air of relate-able, comprehensible truth to it.

I've come across some of the most intriguing movie notions, for example, in the New York Times wedding "Vows" column of their Style section, and this Sunday's was a doozy.  The article, written by Francesca Segre, starts out with a great setup:

Before asking Anne Miller out on an official first date, Michael Davoli knew he had to make two major disclosures. “I was terrified how she might react,” he said. “I didn’t think she would break up with me, but it was one of those things. You don’t know. You can’t help but be afraid.”

 Nice teaser.  The cute meet's pretty good, too:

A friend had introduced them at a concert in fall 2005, and they happened to see each other again the following February when he was coincidentally moving into the same Albany apartment building where she lived.  They recognized each other, and she immediately offered to watch his beloved Weimaraner on the stoop while he and his father hauled boxes to the third floor.

Within the week, he locked himself out of his apartment, and because she was the only person he knew in the building, he knocked on the door of her second-floor apartment. She used a credit card to jimmy his door open.  “She’s hot, my dog likes her and she picked my lock,” he thought. “That’s pretty cool.”

The story goes on to its very effective first act turning point: Michael makes the first of his major disclosures, which is that he has Tourette's syndrome, manifesting itself in...  a combination of physical tics including constant eye-blinking, head-nodding and rapid arm movements. “I wanted her to know I may never be able to hold her hand in the way I would want to,” he said. “I needed to know she’d be O.K. with that.”

You really should read the entire article to enjoy, among other things, the nice surprise of Michael's second major disclosure.  The couple's story is poignant, even moving, and while it includes no dashes to the airport, mistaken identities or scenes of a forlorn Anne eating a tub of ice cream by herself, I'd say it's pretty damn good rom-com material.

It reminds me of the not-bad romantic comedy/dramedy Adam, currently in theaters: a boy-meets-girl story where the boy is afflicted by Asperger's, a form of autism.  Adam is the sort of small, indie-flavored picture that some may find delightful and others, deplorable.  I kind of liked it, mostly, though I found the sentimentality too strong (one Hollywood-unreality in this movie is its Hallmark card vision of New York City).

But the thing is, unlike say, Rain Man, the movie manages to deal with the characterization of its disabled protagonist in a largely realistic way; the story is bracingly un-sentimental in its third act crisis and resolution.  And I liked that the central romantic relationship exhibited the kind of detail work you only get from real-life research (apparently organizations associated with Asperger's have generally given writer/director Max Mayer their seal of approval).

I'm not saying that one needs to write about the disabled to find conflicts as dramatic as those trumped up in a contrived rom-com.  An African-American journalist friend of my wife's once went to interview a white teacher who'd been accused of racism, found the accusation to be baseless and that he cooked a great lasagna... and they've been married for fifteen years.

I suppose I'm merely pointing out that there's enough weird-flavored, unexpected reverals and conflict to be found in the romantic lives of neurotypicals (as those afflicted with Asperger's term "normal" folk), if the alert screenwriter is willing to take a look.  Read the paper.  Go for a walk, talk to a friend - you might just come across the kind of material that makes you say, They can't make up this stuff up. 

Aha!  Now you've got my attention.  Keep it real as you write about it, and the story lovers of the world will salute you.

No Success Like Failure

There's a running gag in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories: The comedian, playing a writer/director much like himself named Sandy Bates, attends a festival of his work where he keeps running into fans who tell him they love all his films, "especially the early funny ones."  The joke is ultimately topped late in the movie when a flying saucer lands in the countryside where the festival's being held, and a martian named Og alights.  When Sandy asks him, "If nothing lasts, why am I bothering to make films, or to do anything, for that matter?" Og replies: "We enjoy your films. Particularly the early funny ones."

Consider the plight - if you can stand to - of Judd Apatow.  The backlash against his Funny People began with its release, as many viewers and critics wondered why this wildly successful funnyman filmmaker (comedy in the 2000s will be remembered, for better or worse, as the Apatow era) was trying to be say, James L. Brooks.  This is the age-old no-win paradox of being an artist and/or entertainer: Give the people exactly what they bought the last time, and you're accused of being stuck in a no-growth rut; give them something new, and you're attacked for not giving them that thing they loved the first time.

In Apatow's case the irony is inescapable.  Because when else in your career should you have earned the latitude to try something different, than right after you've had two massive hits in a row?  Yet the schadenfreude surrounding the soft opening of Funny has been loud and shrill, and reporting the movie's poor performance in its second weekend (nearly a 70% drop-off in attendance), the industry and its watchers sound positively gleeful in pronouncing the movie a failure.

We should all fail so successfully.  There's actually a lot of good work in Funny People.  Apatow's sweet spot - exploring the cruel but loving crux of male camaraderie - gets hit with frequent finesse (the terrible trio of Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen is a joy to hang with).  Some of the gags are choice.  And love it or hate it (my sentiments lie squarely in the middle), FP is clearly the movie its director wanted to make - which is, of course, a good part of its problems.  I heart roughly half of this movie, and here's three reasons, I think, why not too many people have gone whole hog for Funny People:

1. It's too freakin' long.  Only a writer-director too confidant in having an audience would be this over-indulgent.  FP is a rambling, meandering shaggy dog tale of a story that could easily have lost 30 minutes of running time, thus coming in at under 2 hours (and if Mr. Allen could bring his serious/funny Crimes and Misdemeanors in at 1 hour and 44...). 

Even if you're not aware that Apatow's own kids play the two kids who are chomping up screen time in the movie's back end, you find yourself reaching for a fast-forward button, thus rendering the phrase kill your babies (aka kill your darlings) unusually apt.  It's this kind of "I do it because I can" sensibility - the director indulging his taste in both musical playlists and celebrity cameos - that makes FP so frequently annoying.  And judicious cuts throughout its first two-thirds would have made it seem less like two different movies (the "funnyman w/ fatal illness" movie and the "funnyman wants his wife back" pic).

2. It wants to have its cake and eat it.  FP takes pot shots at the kind of inane, facile comedy features and sitcoms that make a fortune by appealing to the lowest common denominators of humor and sentimentality.  Yet it sets a new record for the amount of dick jokes in a single picture (I gave up keeping count early on, so take this on faith), while appealing to our sympathies with the all-time basest of base manipulations: it's that story of the lovable jerk who's going to die.

FP can't talk out of one side of its mouth without the other side contradicting it.  Anytime the hapless Seth Rogen character starts to get weepy, his Adam Sandler boss slaps him out of it - yet we're constantly being asked to feel sorry for this Man Who Has Everything and Abuses It All.  Betrayal and treachery are decried, then acknowledged as a necessary evil; Sandler's superstar George Simmons character is clearly a narcissistic monster... but a good guy in his heart.  Even the central plot twist of the movie is a classic Hollywood compromise - going dark, only to suddenly let in the light.

I suspect there is a leaner, meaner, uncomfortably cynical little movie hiding in the shadows of this one.  That pull-no-punches picture would've been tougher and more daring.  But Apatow wants to have it both ways.  Some of the movie's funniest bits come from its shrewdly observed moments of the sort of comedic mean-spiritedness that dwells in the realm of show biz comedy.  Yet it seems that finally, Apatow's warm-and-fuzzy core can't let such mean truths rule the day.  So what we end up with is a meal that's too sweet and sour.

3. It's telling us things we don't want to hear.  There's an expression that a friend of mine and I use to describe someone who's bitching and moaning about some supposedly horrific problem that isn't actually so serious in the larger scheme of things.  That actor who thinks it's the end of the world when he can't make the movie he wants to make during a hiatus from his hit TV show?  We call this crying in your swimming pool.

FP is about a guy who's rich and famous and miserable.  Is this, in the summer of 2009, what America wants to get emotionally invested in?  Apatow is at his smartest, funniest and most incisive here when he's portraying the bitchiness, the cutthroat competition, and the nasty egotism that's coin of the realm in this business of show, and my laughter during FP was often the harsh laughter of recognition.  But folks in Kansas aren't as liable to be in on the joke, and they especially aren't likely to cotton to being blamed for the rich, famous miserable guy's unhappiness.  One of the tacit tropes of the movie is that Sandler's character has dumbed himself down to make money off the dumb.  Can you make fun of the very audience you're hoping will make you a hit?  Evidently, nuh-uh.

Meanwhile, I must say there's a perverse pleasure in watching Adam Sandler finally play a smart, mature, non-pandering adult, in a role that feels ominously close to his not-so-funny bone.  Though it isn't his truly inspired Punch Drunk Love turn, it's probably as close as we'll ever get to getting the real Sandler deal (whether we want to get it is another issue).  One only wishes the writer had truly let his star go as dark and as cruel as he's clearly capable of being.

As for Apatow, bravo: He's gotten it out of his system, and he's given us some truly funny scenes to relish.  He hasn't yet solved the problem of how to write a credible female (Leslie Mann's character is perhaps the least convincing contrivance of the movie).  But maybe after he pulls his camera out of his own swimming pool, he'll be ready to hit another one out of the park.

Big Screen Shrews v. Small Screen Truths

I had an e-mail the other day from my good friend Bob Dolman, enclosing this link to an L.A. Times article by Mary McNamara, which represents a prevalent state of perplexity in both the critical and moviegoing public community:

Watching Katherine Heigl attempt to inject life into yet another cardboard cut-out of a controlling, manic working woman in "The Ugly Truth," you have to wonder: For this she wants to leave television?...

There are more and better roles for women on one season of "Brothers and Sisters" and "Big Love" or "Damages" and "Desperate Housewives" than there will be in an entire year of Hollywood films. Roles that require depth and wisdom and boundless energy, that demand of their performers the dramatic flexibility and exploration of character. Roles that don't seem to punish them simply for being women.

Unfortunately, an actress who wants to be a movie star doesn't have that kind of choice, especially now that bromance has replaced romance and so many comedies seem happy to dispense with women altogether.

Bob's e-mail went on to query: "What is it I wonder that makes so many movies so bland in the romcom department?  It’s as if the TV execs are saying 'more like movies' and the movie execs are saying 'more like TV' ...But then there’s a TV crowd who want their TV lives to be spicier." 



How I see it is that studios sell "situations" when they pitch and develop movies - then they try to write characters into them.  On the other hand TV series, particularly on cable, tend to write and develop character-driven material, precisely because such concepts have to feature substantive characters to sustain a series.  You tune in to see what happened to Jane/John (i.e. What terrible fix have they gotten into now?), not because there's a new "event," necessarily, but because you want to see how this character responds to a given situation. 

Note that when a long-running TV series is feeling low on character-driven developments, they a) introduce new characters or b) go for the event, e.g. ER having a chopper crash into the hospital, or a criminal take hostages, etc.  By contrast it's usually not characters that pull people into a multiplex to see a movie, unless it's an "event-driven character" (Spiderman, Batman, etc.) who wouldn't be of any interest unless they were, in fact, facing some major world-threatening crisis.

The problem with women in cinema and to a lesser degree TV strikes me as analogous to the current Obama/Gates/police flare-up, i.e. We pretend that Obama being elected means we've dealt with/ transcended race, only to find that of course we haven't.  McNamara criticizes "Heigl playing a woman like this in 2009?!" as if our society had somehow dealt with/ transcended sexism, when obviously it hasn't (We're shocked, shocked, to see gambling in Casablanca).

Here's the disjunct that confounds me: With both The Ugly Truth and The Proposal doing so well at the box office this summer (i.e. trad-stereotypical, formulaic rom-com chick flicks) and women being the target demographic (btw, three women wrote Truth and a woman directed Proposal), apparently women are just fine, thanks, with everything that McNamara (and Bob and me) are decrying.  I don't really believe that, mind you, but the evidence is there in box office ducats.

These days it seems a challenge to find a reasonably recognizable human being, female or male, in American romantic comedies - you know, just like it is when you go looking for any in Congress.  I'm actually in the midst of musing on the stereotypical representation of men on the big screen (meet me here next week for a look at Funny People), but this Woman Thing - the terribly dated, stereotypical portrayals of them v. the seeming widescale acceptance of same - is a head-scratcher, so I turn it over to you.  Tell me, dear readers: What's up with that?  Living the RomCom wants to know.

Fragile

Tater, my friend Gilbert and I were out at Joe's, eating at the bar, deciding to have that second drink and settle into a fun Saturday night, when Tater got a call on her cell.  Familiar number but an odd time to hear from this friend, so she stepped outside to call him back and see what was up.  Moments later, when I looked through the front window to check on her, I instantly saw that something was terribly wrong.  I hurried outside to join my wife.  She blurted it out as she cried in my arms: Lily was dead - the teenaged daughter of our friends Debbie and Greg had been abducted and murdered.

There is nothing worse we can imagine, no pain more terrible for a parent to bear than this kind of tragedy.  Seventeen years old and gone.  The light of their lives - lives now forever altered.  Whatever tears we shed and shock we suffered could only be one-millionth of the horror Deb and Greg are going through.  But you do feel it - this sense of an infinite wrong having been done to all of us.  These things aren't supposed to happen.  And when they do, the very fabric of our lives seems to have been defiled.  The foundations of everything shift.

A friend of Lily's posted on her Facebook status update: I hate this world.  And what can you say in response?

There's no silver lining in this, no spin to put on it.  And certainly no blame - Lily was a mature young woman who'd earned her independence, and the awful luck that befell her was just that: she was in town running a routine errand, and there is nothing anyone could ever write in any manual of parenting that would forestall such happenstance; as Tater put it, the chances were about equal to those of a meteor colliding with the earth.

This morning I went to the newstand to get the Sunday paper.  "How's it going?" I asked the woman behind the counter.  "Good!" she said, "I'm alive." I looked at her and nodded dumbly.  Right.  At least this was something she knew and appreciated.  Which is the only takeaway I can think of: a notion that if there's anyone you want to know better, anyone you want to let know how much you care about them, do it now.  Right now.  We're here for an instant, and so much gets in the way.

Tater's been haunted by the last encounter she had with this magnificent girl, someone who embodied that old cliché: she lit up a room.  She was talking to Lily about how grown up she was, how she'd become as easy to talk to as any adult.  And Lily had said something witty and true about the things people talk about.  What's driving Tater crazy is that she can't remember exactly what it was that Lily said.  "Why didn't I pay more attention?" she asks me.  "I thought she was someone who'd be there, someone I could talk to later!"

But we never know, do we, and we get as distracted as anybody does, in the day-to-day.  Short of becoming Zen monks or ingesting psychedelics on a daily basis, can any of us really learn how to be here now?  Maybe all you can do is try to pay a little more attention, to actually believe that this moment - pfft, gone - is the only one we've got.

Here's what Lily's parents said in the statement they released to the press: “Lily was looking forward to going to college, to being a writer, to what was ahead.  She had a really bright future and it was cut short. If there is anything that people can take away from this horrible tragedy, it’s that life is fragile and that they should live every minute of it fully.”

 

Answered Prayers

One thing that's galling about being a lover of romantic comedy, given how bad they've generally been of late, is that you always feel defensive about recommending one.  But here's the great exception we've been waiting for: (500) Days of Summer is a romantic comedy that doesn't require any apologies.

Perfect?  No.  Instant classic?  Debatable.  An enjoyable entertainment that's got enough substance to more than hold its own with any other movie released this year?  Absolutely. 

Don't want to over-hype a movie that's already creating a healthy buzz (since low expectations are the best expectations, I should just say "it's awful, but go see it"), yet I can't help adding my voice to Summer's well-deserved chorus of praise.  I also can't help venting a personal "I told you so" re: why the movie is as good as it is, since its appealing attributes speak to issues I've been going on about, here and elsewhere, for years.

In Entertainment Weekly's current issue, the film's leading man Joseph Gordon Levitt nails one of them succinctly: "The relationship between the two characters in our movie felt like something that would happen in the world we live in, as opposed to some propaganda fantasy of Hollywood's to sell tickets."  Exactly.  And the unusually savvy screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber is a testament to the power of utilizing the most crucial factor in this character-driven genre:

It's the characters, stupid.

The problem with your average studio-developed romantic comedy project is that it comes up with what's perceived as a hook-y comedic/dramatic situation... and then the studio tries to write characters into it.

Summer, like many a memorable character-named rom-com before it (Annie Hall, Tootsie, Arthur) takes the opposite tack: it starts with two credible characters - an idealistic romantic named Tom and a somewhat cynical free spirit, Summer (the incandescent Zooey Deschanel), who work at the same greeting card company - and shows how, because they are who they are, their not-quite-a-love-story is doomed to fail.

This is no spoiler - the romance's end is announced within the opening minutes of the movie and is implicit in the title.  My point is that the collision between Tom's issue (he's perhaps more in love with the idea that there is a perfect One for him, than he ultimately is in love) and Summer's issue (she hasn't yet experienced the kind of romantic love that convinces her such a thing really exists) is what drives the story. 

There's only a story here because of the unique people who pilot it.  This is not, say, a wild-and-wacky mistaken identity farce, but a rom-com where the very real and distinct identities of its protagonists are the actual subject and dramatic fulcrum of the plot.  Sure, plenty of funny high jinks ensue, but the movie's focus is on its lovers' inner lives, which illustrates another of my oft-blathered principles:

The good ones are about something.

You know what When Harry Met Sally... is about.  Groundhog Day makes its theme abundantly clear.  What's equally refreshing about Summer is that in a delightfully un-dogmatic way, it examines our contemporary culture's point of view on what love might be, and what commitment is or isn't.  In that same EW article (sorry, the link's unavailable), director Marc Webb speaks to theme:

"Growing up in the post-divorce-boom era, we're more skeptical of marriage.  Most romantic comedies sacrifice honesty for the sake of wish-fulfillment.  The theme of (500) Days is that happiness lies within, not in the big blue eyes in the cubicle down the hall."

This subtext, termiting its way below the frothy, funny surface of the film, is what makes the whole thing meaningful.  And meanwhile, Webb's directorial contribution should be acknowledged, as it illustrates another of my ever-pushed buttons about this genre:

Romantic comedies can be films, too.

One constant criticism I've made about even the better romantic comedies of the past few years is how bereft of visual style and distinctive cinematic storytelling they are (Judd Apatow, network television called: it wants its pedestrian camerawork back).  Webb, a graduate of music videos, has finally given us a contemporary rom-com that snaps, crackles and pops with innovative and inherently filmic visual ideas.

He's done his homework, obviously - the film unabashedly borrows from both the French New Wave of the late '60s and its American imitators (e.g. The Graduate and the Woodman's oeuvre).  But the film's energetic invention represents a compendium of the best contemporary techniques that videos (and cinema) have to offer, and they aren't arbitrarily applied.

They're evident in the movie's one musical number, two minutes of exuberant enchantment.  Another gem, late in the film, is a neat split-screen sequence where on the left side, we see "Expectations" of a scene enacted, as on the right, "Reality" plays.  It's an ideal marriage of technique and intent: we viscerally experience the contrast between hapless Tom's hopes and dreams and the way his real life unfolds.

Such stylishness enlivens the material in ways that only good filmmaking can, and finally, the collaboration between Webb and his writers illustrates how observing one more principle separates the garden-variety rom-com from the great:

Tweaking execution is the smart way to go.

Like a number of successful device-driven rom-coms before it, such as Bridget Jones's Diary (device: the diary) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (device: see title), Summer demands that its audience consciously participate in a game.  There are 500 days to be dealt with, as an on-screen graphic consistently reminds us, and a good deal of the fun in the viewing stems from our seeing where we are in this near year-and-a-half period, as we hopscotch back and forth in time.

One of my favorite moments comes from inspired use of the device.  At the end of that blissful musical sequence celebrating his seduction of Summer - which has been introduced by a low two-digit number - Tom bounds into his office elevator, looking radiantly happy.  The doors close, and we flip to a three-digit number from the back end of our 500 days.  The doors open, and there's Tom: infinitely miserable as he gets off the elevator to face a Summer-less office workday.

Here, in a matter of seconds, is a brilliant encapsulation of one of the movie's central themes: the ephemerality of romance - how everything that one loves about being in love can be everything one hates about it.  And the moment comes out of having a concept about how the story's being told.

I'm going to stop my told-you-so-ing right here, since it's in danger of overloading with academic pomposity what's actually just a really fun ride.  There's things to carp about in (500) Days of Summer (for one thing, Summer's character seems to take an uncharacteristic turn in Act 3), but far be it for me to snipe at the first non-guilty-pleasure romantic comedy to come down the pike in a while.  I've been asking and asking for somebody in Hollywood to please make a non-formulaic, deeply felt, Real Thing rom-com that would transcend all the Old School hackwork, and this little movie amounts to answered prayers.