Living the Romantic Comedy

Girls Talk

Oh, shut up about it, already: The entitlement and the unconscious racial elitism and everything else that's wrong with the kids these days, namely Lena Dunham.  You go write some scenes that are as smart and funny and surprising and button-pushing as Dunham did in this past Sunday night's episode of Girls and get your material produced, and then we can talk. 

Love her or hate her, Dunham was inarguably articulate in responding to her critics re: the "all white girls in an all white world" issue on NPR with Terri Gross last week, noting that she takes such criticism seriously, but was writing what she knows (e.g. being half-WASP, half-Jewish, her foursome is made up of two of each) and that she isn't yet honestly equipped to write an ethnic leading role with the specificity and accuracy that it would require (the second season, apparently, will take on this issue, and without simply plugging in a token person of color).

Once the dust has settled from the backlash and the back-biting (the snarky poster above is maybe the best of it), perhaps we'll be able to acknowledge that at 25, Lena Dunham is one of the most talented comedy/romantic comedy writers who's presently working this turf.  And given what's been an upsetting paucity of active female writer/directors in the industry until relatively recently (with the stats still appallingly low), I for one am happy to give the Girls auteur her props.

Essentially a serial ensemble rom-com in form, like hundreds of such TV sitcoms, Girls is pushing its envelope on a weekly basis, with its characterization work admirably complex, and its dialogue absolutely first tier.  While it's not solving all the world's sitcom problems in a single episode, it is sneaking boldly into territory that formerly hasn't been exposed in your average bear's romantic comedy.  It investigates the mess of contemporary sex and sexual identity and gender dynamics with a refreshingly clear-eyed honesty that allows its characters to have their angst while making LOL fun of them.

The dialogue is eminently quotable; Jessa having sex with an ex-boyfriend who's supposedly over her, to prove "I cannot be smoted" evoked a "wish I'd written that" response in me (There are actually too many good lines in Episode 4 to cite a favorite, but the comments on this "Guys on Girls" post highlight many of the best).  Meanwhile, some of the subtler work is purely cinematic and theatrical: I loved the silent dawning epiphany on the face of Marnie (Allison Williams) as she realizes, mid-fuck, that she really does have to dump her boyfriend.

All of this puts me in mind of a Jezebel post that a Living RomCom reader sent me last week, bemoaning the lack of decent roles for rom-com actresses past their perky prime.  It's not that "the romantic comedy is dead" (a dumb trope that's replaced the hoary "is the theater dead?" query of past decades), but that a very specific paradigm for a very specific kind of chick flick may have finally run its cultural course.

You know the one: It stars Kate or Reese or J-Lo or someone like them, and it's about a 20-something with career issues who's out to land a man, and you didn't go to see it because you'd already seen it and been bored with it too many times over the past two decades.  The codified-to-fossilization status of this particular movie is what's dated it, not any failure of mainstream audience interest in a good date night pic.  If you don't believe me, go look at the box office/DVD figures for Bridesmaids.

The boundary-push of Girls is in keeping with the sensibilities that have made the small screen where a lot of the action is nowadays, event-movies like The Avengers aside.  And if the somewhat older rom-com women want to get in on the action, they might look to the likes of Dunham, Liz Meriwether, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Issa Rae, Amy Poehler and these other top female comedy writers (and these) to give them a new take on a viable rom-com vehicle.

If the 2000s was Revenge of the Boy-Man for romantic comedy (The Apatow Decade), the teens is looking like Game On For the Girls.  And it's certainly made my watch a lot more interesting.

Rom-Com Lessons Learned

You may've heard about the disappointing performance of The Five Year Engagement, which was bested at the box office this past weekend by Think Like a Man.  Full disclosure: I work at the studio that released this Nicholas Stoller-directed, Judd Apatow-produced comedy, but I come here not to praise Engagement, nor to bury it.  I just think that anyone who's currently writing a romantic comedy can draw a few helpful lessons from the movie.  Call it a teachable moment.

1) Nobody likes too long.

With the inevitability that its self-fulfilling prophecy title suggested, reviews from all who saw the movie led with the obvious: "Dude, it felt like five years!"  This is what happens when you neglect the hoary adage, Get in late and get out early.  It's also a pitfall with titles this specific, i.e. The audience knows that it's in for this long a stretch, so a "we're ahead of you" impatience is bound to set in.  But generally, comedy should be fast in pace and short in length: leave 'em laughing, and leave 'em wanting more.

You could easily cut half an hour out of Engagement's two hour and four minute running time by making judicious edits from start to finish.  So why didn't the guys who made it do that?  Blame Judd Apatow.  Yes, he is a comedy genius, and the most influential (for better and worse) auteur of the comedy and rom-com genres today, but all of his movies are overlong.  2005's 4o Year Old Virgin is 116 minutes; 2007's Knocked Up is 129; 2009's Funny People is a whopping 146.  The latter tanked, but last year the Apatow-produced Bridesmaids clocked in at 125 and was a smash.  So in Apatow's world, long still rules.

Good for him - usually- but not for you.  Today's comedy spec script has a page count sweet spot of 105.  Steve Carrell and Tina Fey's Date Night was a brisk 88 minutes.  Hangover Part 2? 102.  Keep it quick and short, and your buyers and audience will love you.  Nobody likes too long.

2)  Date night audiences want to feel good.

You'd think this would be obvious.  At their core, romantic comedies are propaganda for procreation, serving as stimulation for the romantically-inclined.  Opening weekend, most folks who show up for a rom-com would like to get laid and/or to fall in love, and if both or neither aren't a likely outcome for them after the show, they'll settle for the vicarious thrill of romantic arousal (Those were the days..!).

This is one reason why most successful rom-coms are upbeat adventures with a steadily escalating story arc.  They energetically track the trajectory from like to love; they ascend, constructed to maximally exploit the fun of the chase.  We're on our way, we're almost there, we're going to get it and oh-no!  We might not make it... the infamous "dark moment" - and then, Score!  We're Mr. and Mrs. Happy.

Let us give screenwriters Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller their well-deserved props.  I heartily, genuinely applaud them for a kind-of brilliant story concept: Engagement begins at the point where most romantic comedies end, with a happy marriage proposal, and then has the temerity to ask, What might happen next, in our conflicted, contemporary 20-30-something's world?  It was a brave and risky idea to pursue.  And by the way, there are some great laughs in this movie, most of them in the more enjoyable first half (though a late set piece, which has Emily Blunt and Alison Brie channeling a couple of Muppets, may be destined for Classic status).

But Engagement's "dark moment" is nearly ninety minutes.  What we're witnessing is the slow, increasingly dark dissolution of a fine romance.  And whether you like or dislike the movie as a movie, this is date night romantic comedy poison.  Way to bum out our pot trip, man - despite the eventual happy ending, by going so graphically against the rom-com grain, you've effectively harshed the audience's romantic mellow.  And given that the movie's downward trajectory is telegraphed in its trailer, as this canny article from Jezebel points out, it's no wonder that the mainstream dating crowd opted for the upbeat swing of the into-the-chase, who'll win the gender-battle? movie Think Like a Man.  Even though it's all about, like, you know... black people.

3)  It's the characters, stupid.

I return, predictably, to Living the RomCom's favorite hobby-horse.  Jason Segel was great in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (by Engagement's same creative team), but while his character is named Tom this time around, he's essentially... Jason Segel.  Emily Blunt knocked my socks off in The Devil Wears Prada, but while she's incandescently sexy-lovely as this movie's Violet, she's also kind of a drag.

It's not just that the actors' chemistry is wanting, it's that on the page, there isn't a whole lot to them.  The story's deck is stacked against poor Violet, while Tom is often reduced to repetitious mopery.  So it's hard to root for either one.  Tellingly, their central conflict isn't specific to character - the problem is mostly her career versus his, as opposed to something more distinctive having to do with who she is, and he is.  Which in this character-driven genre isn't good.

Tellingly, the supports register with far more force - the over-used Chris Parnell, even a wasted Mindy Kalling.  Alison Brie's Suzie and unlikely mate Alex (Chris Pratt) nearly walk away with it. 

If the supports in your rom-com are stealing the show, consider Engagement as a cautionary tale.  If the down side of the romance is taking all the focus?  Reconsider.  And if it's time for your story to move on, get on with it and be gone.

Little Screen, Big Characters

By now you've heard the news, if you haven't already articulated the meme yourself.  War's over: The movies lost, and TV won.  For both the writers and the fans of good storytelling, the action used to be at the multiplex on Friday and Saturday night, and now it's in your living room on Sundays.

I mean, really: If you're over 25 years old, can you think of a single feature release in the past couple of years that has galvanized your attention and made you care, fiercely and consistently (in an OMG, I can't wait for the next episode way) as a season of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad?  Sub in your own recent small screen addiction of choice, be it The Walking Dead or Downton Abbey, et al (I'm in the "Killing, you cheated on me last year, and you're dead to me now" camp, but you may be more forgiving), and now quick: Name me the movie that excited your passions that intensely.

The Artist?  AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

The industry/cultural reasons for this have been chewed over in print and online so extensively that I won't waste your shortened attention span with the details, except to highlight one that doesn't always get its due emphasis: It's the characters, stupid.

Yes, cultural juggernaut The Hunger Games does have over-25 appeal, and despite its absymal direction and meh screenwriting, has finally delivered unto us if not the, at least a 21st Century Heroine We've Been Waiting For.  But in its characterization work, as in its storytelling craft, Games is a plastic Sears Roebuck guitar next to Game of Throne's Stradivarius.  And need we invoke the obvious two word argument ender, The Wire?

Of course it's a function of time and space.  It's exceedingly difficult to approach the level of depth and complexity of character in a feature's two hours that you can achieve in a whole season of hour-long episodes.  But there's a basic difference in sensibility at stake.  The big screen has become our culture's colisseum, where nuances of personality aren't exactly the main event.  The little screen has exuberantly taken on just such nuance, and succeeded in capturing the culture's hearts and minds.

[Note: SPOILAGE ahead.] Mad Men has been careening all over the place this season, which only makes it all the more watchable.  Last week's Gothic weirdness had Don Draper's murder victim under his bed (When they cut to daughter Sally under Grandma's couch, my wife said, "God, everyone's under the bed," and I said, "Yeah, including the shark!" but fortunately, said murder was only a dream sequence, so no actual sharks were jumped).  Last night was slapstick comedy.

When Laine rolled up his sleeves and prepared to duke it out with Pete Campbell in the Sterling Cooper Pryce conference room, Roger said, "I know cooler heads should prevail, but am I the only one who wants to see this?"  To which most of us fans undoubtedly replied, "Are you f--king kidding me? Get in line!"  By the way, good season setup misdirect, Mr. Weiner, since we were fully expecting Pete to come to figurative blows with Roger, not Laine.

Pete Campbell is a supporting character in this ensemble, yet in an episode that deepened the story line of even lesser supporting player Ken Cosgrove, we experienced the equivalent of a John Cheever novella in the depiction of Pete's rise and fall.  We don't "like" but we certainly understand Pete by now, in all his many layers; as a quietly tragic shadow Don who will never be Don, he's a more fully realized character than the protagonists of most major studio releases in recent memory. 

Kudos to actor Vincent Kartheiser, who's brought all kinds of shading to snivelly Pete over the years, but it's the writing, obviously, that has kept us so thoroughly absorbed in the machinations of such people who - had we met them briefly in real life - we probably wouldn't even want to know.

Putting us in the shoes of the Other has always been a primary pursuit and profound pleasure of good writing.  This past Sunday night, whether you were with Mad, Games, the new (and extremely promising) Girls, and/or all of the above, you got to revel in that pleasure.  And here's the thing.  I had to go to Imdb to double-check the writing credit of that Mad Men episode afterwards, but yes, it was that Frank Pierson - the guy who wrote the big screen movie classic Dog Day Afternoon.

Where else would a writer that good be working today?  It's not even really a question.

Rom-Com Archetypes: The Buddy and the Buddy Group

One of the most useful tools in the romantic comedy screenwriter's shed is the Buddy.  The Buddy acts as the lead character’s support and sounding board, and gives us a bigger window into this protagonist’s inner life.  Though lesser Buddies exist merely to crack wise and provide exposition, the best of them have a key function in the plot: They help move the story forward.  Tom Hank’s buddy (Rob Reiner) in Sleepless in Seattle goads him into dating again, while Meg Ryan’s buddy, played by Rosie O’Donnell, makes Meg realize she’s more into Tom than her actual fiancé, and helps her pursue him. 

Seeing how stock and stereotypical a Buddy can be, the alert screenwriter is obliged to come up with intriguing variations.  Writer-director Steve Gordon nabbed Sir John Gielgud an Oscar by casting him as an inspired Buddy, the butler Hobson in Arthur.  A precocious kid sister (Chloe Mortez) served a buddy function in (500) Days of Summer, and a Russell terrier speaking in subtitles made a distinctive buddy in Beginners. 

One popular variation on the archetype that’s also flourished on the small screen is the buddy group.  Friends, essentially a serial ensemble romantic comedy, gave all of its characters turns at buddy-ing (more recently, How I Met Your Mother has followed suit), while in Sex and the City, the three supports represented projections of the central protagonist’s personality: pragmatic cynic Miranda (ego), idealistic nice girl Charlotte (super-ego), and sexually avaricious Samantha (pure id) are the isolated and magnified attributes of heroine Carrie Bradshaw, who’s a bit of all these things and more (the neurotic creative type). 

But generally, the friends trio or quartet represents an audience surrogate version of company.  The movie’s romantic sufferings and joys become a communally shared subject for our various points of view.

Richard Curtis holds the British patent on this Greek chorus-like construction, having launched his international career with the support-centric Four Weddings and a Funeral, developed, according to Curtis, when he noticed that he kept running into his same group of friends at various weddings.  At the top of the 21^st century, the sixteen-limbed extension of the Buddy was honed by Curtis into a fine-tuned comedic empathy machine. 

The best of these clans is found in Notting Hill, where the buddies’ blend of personal discontent and vicarious enjoyment of the hero’s entanglements – it’s Hugh Grant in crinkle-eyed dear-me! mode – is given unusual gravitas by the presence of real, un-mollified pain, exemplified by the sad but brave Bella, a woman unfairly wheelchaired in her prime, and her embittered loving husband, William.  Thus the problems of a movie star in love are countered by, as Grant tells Julia Roberts at one key point, "a normal amount of perspective."

Bridget Jones's Diary had another ideal friends quartet: prone-to-crying-jags Jude, the one with the “fuck-wit boyfriend,” foul-mouthed journalist Shazzer (based on the film’s director, Bridget author Helen Fielding’s friend Sharon Maguire), and gay Tom, “Eighties pop icon, who only wrote one hit record, then retired because he found that one record was quite enough to get him laid for the whole of the Nineties.” 

You’d like to have Tom as a friend because his limited celeb status is leavened with just-another-bloke ordinariness.  The running gag of his being perennially recognized by admiring men in restaurants is paid off when Tom, in a fit of pique, exasperatedly tells a dining couple trying to get his attention that yes, he is That Guy, only to learn that they merely want him to move his chair off the woman’s coat.

It’s hard to tell if the rom-com’s Buddy Group reflects real life humans who prefer to travel in packs, or is an ideal imagined by those of us who feel companion deprived.  Meanwhile, I've noticed a more recent trend in the land of Buddies.  It may be an outgrowth of bromantic comedy - movies that are tacitly or overtly focused on the de-sexualized love between two heterosexual men (e.g. I Love You, Man) - but a number of rom-com specs submitted to studios these days are splitting the difference in protagonist focus, i.e. Two male or female leads are getting nearly equal story attention.

Movies of this ilk provide us with two romantic comedy story lines for the price of one, while not tipping into total ensemble movie turf.  Wedding Crashers comes to mind as rom-com/ bromantic comedy where one's hard-pressed to decide who's the "buddy," and who the ostensible "primary hero" is meant to be.  (Commenter Rob has subsequently pointed out that Owen Wilson's character is the hero, in the end.)

Perhaps the Buddy is finally beginning to achieve autonomy.  What I find appealing in this trend is the notion that all the characters in a given story can be fully dimensional.  And it presents an interesting challenge for any pre-pro screenwriter currently working on a romantic comedy. 

Do you want your protagonist to have one sidekick as support, or a posse?  What's the purpose and advantage of either option?  Might your supposed sidekick have a subplot that's nearly as important as the main event?  Before you simply plug in a buddy as the obligatory support for your hero or heroine, give it some extra thought.  Making this choice can have a global effect on the very structure and spine of your story.

The Triumph of Truthiness

Sorry if this post is on the brief side, but the chemo has me a little woozy.  Actually, it's just a hangover, but that first sentence got your attention, didn't it?

If you're tempted to leave this page to read something else right now, know that in doing so you'll be tripping a cyber-wire that'll unleash a deadly virus on your computer.  Well, not exactly, but you'll feel a little guilty - mainly because I'm about to tell you something unbelievably vital that could change your life.  Or that you'll find kind of interesting.  Not entirely boring?

I could go on, I can't go on.  But I will, if only to direct your attention to this article and especially this article on the Los Angeles Review of Books site.  And I'm doing this not just because LARB's editor Tom Lutz is my best friend.  Well, I had dinner with him once, but it felt like he was my best friend.

Truthiness, as you probably know, is a term coined by Stephen Colbert to define a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.  I have this from Wikipedia, which means it must be true.  

We are very much living in the age of truthiness, now more than ever, in the wake of the recent Mike Daisey controversy, and when the nature of our political discourse has crossed a certain line; see Rachel Maddow on the blatant lyingness of a certain candidate, et al (I know, I know - Gambling in Casablanca?!). 

And because I'm a writer who's working on a "non-fiction" project (well, sort of non-fiction), our general slippage into the truthiness zone has me mightily perturbed.  Which is why the central thought of Ander Monson's article really resonated, as summed up in the LARB pitch for the two pieces:

How can we trust a writer’s interpretation of a story, if we can’t trust the foundation he or she has built?

I'm finding the LARB site in general to be a great resource of food-for-thought.  And I hear that the people who frequent this site have been statistically proven to be the most intelligent and enlightened readers in America.  Or, y'know, readers.  Something like that.

Mommy's Reading

You may have heard the heavy breathing going on in both the movie and publishing biz this past week.  The hot topic of discussion could perhaps be summarized as "Does Mommy prefer her pornography on the page or on the screen?"

50 Shades of Grey is a little book that originated on a fan fiction website, but after, um, pleasuring many female readers, it's become an uber-hot commodity, selling large to a big publisher and occasioning a bidding war amidst the major studios.

It's about a young woman who gets involved with an older man.  As Time Magazine's Erika Christakis explains it:

Told from the perspective of a girlish innocent, the Seattle-based story features an emotionally tortured, hyper-controlling boyfriend who can’t get a grip on his baser instincts. If this sounds suspiciously like Twilight, you’re right: it started out as a piece of Twilight fan-fiction by E.L James and the story strenuously echoes the tone and plot of the blockbuster Stephenie Meyer series. But this time around, things are a bit more reality-based; the hot guy is a sexual dominant, his innocent co-ed a reluctant submissive. And the sex scenes don’t fade to black.

These sex scenes have earned the novel the sobriquet of "mommy porn," given that its major demographic appears to be made up of older women.  The basic plot elements - the man is rich, of course, and the woman would like to change his ways, naturally - say Harlequin, and/or pretty much most romantic fiction since the late 1800s.  So clearly the graphic kinky sex (hero Christian Grey, picky with his caps, is only into S&M and B&D) is what's causing the sensation.  And now, according to the Hollywood Reporter...

Sources say the book has attracted attention from Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros. and Fox 2000, among others.

To which I can only respond: Guys? Glad you like the nudity, 'cause you're about to lose your shirts.  I can't think of a single theatrical feature with sex (let alone kinky sex) as its primary subject, aimed at a female audience, that has been a hit.  People keep bringing up 9 1/2 Weeks, which only shows how poor people's memories can be: That movie tanked.  It did well in Europe, and got much publicity, but its intended audience did not show up to see it.

The "why?" of this finds an interesting explication in this article from the Wall Street Journal:

Kindles, iPads and Nooks "are the ultimate brown paper wrapper," says Brenda Knight, associate publisher at Cleis Press, of Berkeley, Calif., a publisher of erotica since 1980... At the end of the month, HarperCollins UK will launch Mischief Books, with the tag line "private pleasures with a hand-held device."

...Tori Benson, a 41-year-old married mother in Eustis, Fla... graduated to erotica a few years ago, when she got her first Kindle. She now has two, one of which her 10-year-old daughter calls "Mommy's naughty reader." Ms. Benson says the digital format helped her get over her embarrassment... She says she wouldn't read these books in print if she were in view of anyone. "Some of the covers are very explicit," she says.

So why would Ms. Benson want to go to the multiplex, buy a ticket, and go sit in a theater with hundreds of other people, to enjoy 50 Shades: the Movie - especially if, say, its leading man might not match the Christian Grey she'd imagined in the privacy of her, ah, Nook?

Call me kinky, call me crazy, but given the numbers of non-erotic bestsellers that have failed to translate into movie box office bonanzas over the past few decades (Snow Falling on Cedars, anyone?  Any one?!), this bidding war looks to me like nothing but a pissing contest and a boondoggle. 

Video on Demand seems a more sensible way to go with such a project, and it's a shame that Zalman King (Red Shoe Diaries) isn't still around to helm it.  But "Hollywood" and "sensible" is often an oxymoronic combo, and I believe the studio that buys this for big bucks is ultimately going to regret it.  What do you think?  Living the Rom-Com wants to know.

The Practice

   

[In honor of having lost an hour, that most precious of commodities, in the Daylight Savings Time leap, I'm reprinting this post from six years back.  What it discusses came up in a conversation I had just this past week.]

Eighty percent of success is showing up.   

-- Woody Allen

How to become a writer?  Someone who not only starts projects but finishes them?  Someone who's always learning the craft and getting better at it?  A for-real, do-it-for-a-living, legitimately call-yourself-a-writer? 

The answer's so obvious, so hiding in plain sight, that I feel silly going on about it, so I'll try to make this brief.  I can give you the whole thing in four words:

Do it every day.

You know I love romance as well as (well, probably more than) the next guy, but there's one romantic notion I would dearly love to explode, and that's The Romance of Inspiration.   We've all got a touch of it, this fantasy of being touched by the muse, bolted from the blue, stealing the fire from the gods and blazing with it through the pages, and sure, such shit happens.  But waiting around to be struck by lightning is a high risk, sucker's odds game.  No, the true path to being a successful writer, in every sense, is very simple and pedestrian:

Do it every day.

 

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.      -- Thomas Edison

Here's what works.  I have this not only from my own experience but all the writers I've read and known: Commit yourself to a fixed writing time.  One half hour to an hour minimum, if your life is truly so jammed that it's all the time you can steal.  One to three hours first thing in the day is a popular slot.  I'm not alone in finding the just-out-of-dreamland quiet, pre-conversation, pre-world-at-large time especially productive.  You may be a nightbird, by inclination or necessity, and that's fine, too.   But whatever it is, train your psyche to "show up for work" at a designated time (and perhaps even, place) six days a week.

This is the tried-and-tested best way to create a writing practice and its rewards are huge. 

Doesn't even matter what you write -- think of it as going to the gym for your writing muscles.  Would you run a marathon without daily sprints?  Try to play Rachmaninoff's Third without daily scales?  How the hell do you expect to have and sustain the facility to get a writing job done if you're not in shape?

Writing is easy.  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.     -- Gene Fowler

I'm not saying it's a breeze.  A daily practice is acknowledgement that the work is hard.  But the secret within the secret is this:  if you put in that hour-plus, day after day, your brain gets trained and your soul gets goal-oriented, your unconscious gets engaged.  The work you're working on begins to have a life, as it's a part of your life, and you'll find that ideas come to you when you're not in the room, come to you in your sleep... because you have tripped the mechanism and the machine is on.

And what you're writing doesn't have to be "the draft."  It can be thoughts about it, a self-interview, illustrated index cards -- babble.  But whatever it is, when you do it every day, the muse is more apt to drop by, drawn by the energy you're putting into the ether.  And when you do it every day, you're more likely to be able to show her a good time.

Some days will be awful.  Some will be Huh?  Some not bad and it doesn't matter.  Just show up.  The beauty part is, whether your pages suck or soar on a daily basis, when you get into that rhythm and discipline, over time you will become a stronger, better writer, guaranteed.

So give yourself the Sundays -- even the Big Guy (or Girl) took a break.  But as a general motto?

Do it every day.

 

 

Dig It to Dig It

Fifty-two years ago, legendary master pianist-composer Thelonious Monk gave some advice to saxophonist Steve Lacy, and Lacy wrote it down.

As a zen-like guide for writers, artists, and humans of any sort, including, of course, musicians, I don't think it leaves much out.  Though what's missing (always leave them wanting more) is also priceless.

I recommend putting on some Monk and copying it out, as I've done here.  You've got to dig it to dig it.

MONK'S ADVICE (1960)

Just because you're not a drummer, doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, when you play.

Stop playing all that bullshit, those weird notes, play the melody!

Make the drummer sound good.

Discrimination is important.

You've got to dig it to dig it, you dig?

All reet!  Always know...

It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn't need the lights.

Let's lift the bandstand!

I want to avoid the hecklers.

Don't play the piano part, I'm playing that.  Don't listen to me, I'm supposed to be accompanying you!

The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good. 

Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by.  Some music just imagined.  What you don't play can't be more important than what you do play.

 

Always leave them wanting more.

A note can be as small as a pin, or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

Stay in shape!  Sometimes a musician waits for a gig, and when it comes, he's out of shape and can't make it.

When you're swinging, swing some more!  (What should we wear tonight?  Sharp as possible!)

Don't sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.

Those pieces were written so as to have something to play, and to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal.

You've got it!  If you don't want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it!  (To a drummer who didn't want to solo.)

Whatever you think can't be done, somebody will come along and do it.  A genius is the one most like himself.

They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it.

Elemental

A dark-haired woman in a white nightgown - sleepwalking, demented, or simply wearing her inner life inside out - lurches across a cafe floor littered with overturned chairs and throws herself into the arms of a man in shirtsleeves, wrapping herself around him.  Immediately a second man in a suit, with the harried but patient air of an overworked stage manager, accosts this couple and systematically rearranges the woman's body, this arm going here, this hand just so, a series of mysterious but intensely focused gestures climaxing in his lifting the woman up and placing her in the shirtsleeved man's arms.

No sooner is the task completed, the suited man stepping away, than the first man drops the woman's body to the floor.  She springs up, once more clinging to her partner.  And the suited man returns to rearrange her again.  Again she's dropped to the floor, springs, clings - has her limbs reconfigured, is lifted, falls...  This insane ritual repeats with increasing frenzy, and you don't wonder why, so much as identify - Are you the woman, the man who can't hold her, or the man who's trying to impose his own order on this human chaos?  Possibly you've been all three, at one time or another, or seen such a scenario enacted in real life, and felt just as helpless to intercede.

I had the good fortune to experience what may have been the American premiere of Pina Bausch and her Wuppertaler Tanztheater's "Cafe Muller," of which this trio's routine is merely one moment, during the Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984.  It's stayed with me ever since.  See a Bausch dance like "Muller" and it's in you forever, like a benign psychic wound that never heals.  Her company danced Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in that same festival, and the one thing I've never forgotten about that one is how the dancers performed it barefoot on a stage covered with rich brown dirt.  You see this once, and you think, How could it ever be otherwise?

The Rite, that stubbornly modern musical assault on civilization that sounds as contemporary today as it seemed radical when first performed nearly a century ago, is one of the first of Bausch's pieces excerpted in Wim Wenders' Oscar-nominated documentary Pina.  One of the many fascinations in this amazing cinematic celebration is that in terms of Bausch's work, the Rite does seem merely a starting point.  Things get wilder, crazier, more deeply atavistic and intense from there, which says something about the elemental nature of both Pina and Pina.

Earth, water, air, fire - along with pain, rage, joy, and love - were fundamentals of Bausch's vocabulary, articulated on bodies as distinct as her own.  The company dances through cascades of water, crawls upon rock; in one of her most notorious and hilarious riffs, a dancer performs as a woman behind her shovels dirt onto the dancer's body.  And the difficulty of being - a human conflict that's about as basic as it gets - seems to have been one of her primal preoccupations.

To me, the gaunt but beautiful Pina always looked like a haunted Holocaust survivor, or a walking Egon Schiele drawing.  Though she died shortly before shooting was scheduled to begin, another fascination in this film is how, despite her being ostensibly gone in her physical being, she's brought to life so palpably by her dedicated troupe.  You're witnessing a true resurrection in the midst of memorial. 

It's a testament to her teaching, and Pina is a mini-master class in pedagogy.  Though the choregrapher was always invoking her own physical gesture through the bodies of others, Bausch had the uncanny ability to say just the right thing to a given dancer, the thing each one needed to hear in order to express his or her own essence, to explore further, stretch farther.  To one particularly poised and patrician male dancer she said, a seemingly casual remark tossed off in passing, "Remember, you have to scare me."  Cue epiphany. 

We hear these anecdotes as each of the dancers has a solo moment in front of the camera, sitting silently while quotes from their pre-recorded interviews are played.  With this technique, Wenders appears to be consciously referencing his eavesdropping angels from Wings of Desire, and it's true to his overall methodology here, which is magical and scientific - perfectly attuned to his subject, which is so much about both the physical and metaphysical transport of bodies through space. 

The location shooting is genius, integrating Bausch's choreography with the mundane world - a passing tram car is as much a performer as the dancers on the street below it - in a way that echoes Bausch's aesthetic, her dancers seeming to have one foot in the quotidian and the other in an alternate dimension.  Wenders' camera swoops and glides in and around Bausch's dancers with unerring sympathetic grace.  It may be true that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," but Pina isn't a film about dance.  It's a dance with dance.

As such, its use of 3D is transcendental.  If ever a movie demanded donning the glasses and watching a big screen, it's Pina.  If you're a writer and/or artist, it'll inspire you in the best ways.  Pina Bausch's work is both deeply disturbing and mordantly funny (in this, Bausch, Beckett, and Kafka strike me as a kind of post-modern Three Stooges).  It slips past rationality and the defenses of language to get you where you live.  What Wenders has wrought with this heartfelt tribute is no minor miracle, so you owe it to yourself to go see it.  Now.

How to Write Groundhog Day

Longtime readers of this blog know that today we traditionally celebrate the classic American comedy Groundhog Day, but this year is... different.  Today (cue jazz band and break out the ice sculptures), screenwriter Danny Rubin is publishing his new e-book, How to Write Groundhog Day. 

Yes, that's right: Long-awaited even if you didn't know you were waiting for it, this is the book that tells you everything you've ever wanted to know about how this beloved masterpiece came to be.  The book is full of insightful info, it includes a masssively annotated version of Danny's original draft (differences between his version and the finished film are a fascination in itself), and it is, of course, funny as hell.  Questions about all things Phil are answered, so hie thee to this link and get yourself a copy - especially because February 2nd, it's on discount sale.  Today is The Day.

Ever since writer Rubin, director Harold Ramis, and star Bill Murray created what's now generally acknowledged as one of the great American movies of all time, February 2nd has become synonymous with romance and comedy.  In fact, when people ask me to name a couple of my favorite romantic comedies, this one invariably comes to mind.

What, you've never thought of this cinematic classic as a romantic comedy?  For shame.  I have it on unassailable authority that the film qualifies.  For starters, it says so right on the DVD box's cover ("A romantic comedy fantasy that is Bill Murray's best screen performance" --  Gene Shalit).  But look up the definition of romantic comedy in the definitive text on same, and you'll find (p.12) that "a romantic comedy is a comedy whose central plot is embodied in a romantic relationship" and that (p.13) "the central question posed by a romantic comedy is: 'Will these two individuals become a couple?'"

As you well know, when TV weatherman Phil Connors (Murray) gets inexplicably trapped in the same repeating February 2nd, his sole recourse to getting out of it becomes the object of his affections, producer Rita (Andie MacDowell); his salvation lies in the answer to their coupling question.  (Screenwriting theorist sticklers may point out that the story's central question is really, Will Phil ever get out of February 2nd?  To this I say, also true, because the movie is a rom-com hybrid -- ibid, pp.21-28 -- a romantic comedy/high concept fantasy, and thus the couple/escape conflicts are intertwined.  But let's stop boring our civilian readers, shall we?  Thanks.)

Strange but true, there still exist deprived people who have not seen the movie Groundhog Day.  If you are one of those poor souls, what better opportunity to improve the quality of your life, than to view it on the official Day itself?  And even if you're one of the many enriched individuals who's seen it, this is a movie that you can watch over and over, and over, and over...

Major Groundhog Day fans might even consider journeying to the scene of the crime: the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is having its annual celebration, and it promises to be quite a hoot.  Such a trip was actually enjoyed by Day's writer and star before the movie was made, and therein lies a tale that speaks, I believe, to the true spirit of romance, or as we might say, what love's got to do with it.

Danny Rubin recounts the following in his illuminating interview accompanying an early draft of the screenplay in Scenario (Spring '95 issue, regrettably out of print).  He talks of having been hired, fired and re-hired to work on the script, and when he, his wife Louise and kids were preparing to move from Los Angeles to New Mexico, getting a call from Bill Murray:

He says, "Do you realize that the day after tomorrow is Groundhog Day?"--"Yep."--"And do you realize that between the director, the producer, the star and the writer of this film, nobody has been to the festival at Punxsutawney?  Doesn't that seem wrong to you?"  And I said, "Absolutely.  And I think you should go, I think that will be a great thing."  And he said, "I think we should go."  And I said, "Bill, that's a really nice offer, sounds like fun, but I'm moving, I'm moving my family, we're up to our necks in boxes, I can't just abandon them and go off to Punxsutawney."  And he said, "Well, think about it and call me back.  Here's my number."  When I got off the phone, Louise asked who it was.  "Bill Murray," I said.  "He wants me to go to Punxsutawney tomorrow."  And she said, "Cool."  And I said I'd told him I couldn't do it.  She said, "Are you nuts?"  So I talked to [the studio] and they said, "We'll pay for the move, we'll get someone to help pack, we'll fly out a friend of your wife's to help her move in so you don't have to be there."

This level of support was very nice, and I embarked on the most surreal adventure of my professional life.  All of a sudden I'm flying in a private plane from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with Bill Murray and we're talking about the script.  We landed somewhere near Punxsutawney at 2:00 in the morning.  And there were fans out there waiting for him--it was supposed to be a secret...

Rubin goes on to say that he used a lot of what he saw there in the script.  He'd originally spoken to the town's Chamber of Commerce and looked at their literature, but:

After we actually saw it, there was a whole different feel to it than we had imagined.  It was delightful, really delightful--a wonderful civic event.  We incorporated a lot of that into the movie...  Everyone there knew it was a goofy ritual--it was almost sophisticated in its hickyness.  What was so much fun about the festival is, it's the middle of the night, zero degrees, they've got bonfires going--and they're playing Beach Boys music.

Sometimes I read this excerpt to a screenwriting class when I'm talking about the inestimable value of research, to illustrate how really being there can make all the difference in writing a given project.  But I quote it now in this pre-Valentine's Day context to highlight my favorite moment in Rubin's story, which is when Louise says, "Are you nuts?"

I just love that!  Gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling every time, because it seems to me that Danny Rubin's wife is the hidden heroine of the Groundhog Day saga.  Love doesn't mean never having to say you're sorry.  It means having someone be able to say "Are you nuts?!" to you at a crucial moment.  Love is sometimes about saving loved ones from themselves -- which come to think of it, is kind of at the core of what the movie ended up being about, don't you think? 

Go watch it again, again, and see if you agree.

Spending my days believing in impossible things and chasing them towards an inner truth, now that's a pretty good gig.

--Danny Rubin

Rethinking the Happy Ending

An article in this past Sunday's NY Times strikes me as required reading for any screenwriter who has ever attempted to answer the question, "What does the audience want?"

Perfectly Happy Even Without Happy Endings, by Carrie Rickey, explores what Lindsay Doran (who produced  Sense and Sensibility and Stranger Than Fiction, among many other films) has learned from her extensive research on how movies work upon our emotions, and from the teachings of Dr. Martin Seligman, a "catalyst of the positive psychology movement" who has identified the five essential elements of well-being as: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.  Analyzing hits and critical favorites, Doran confirmed what she'd intuitively suspected about what audiences responded to in movies that worked:

She broke down their emotional components, isolated the elements of mood elevation and tested her findings against those of market researchers. She concluded: Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters’ personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments. Ms. Doran had long been drawn to “funny dramas and comedies that make you cry,” she said. Now she knew why.

You really ought to read the whole thing.  But here's the bit that I found most fascinating. Doran talked to a veteran market researcher who startled her by claiming that "audiences don't care about accomplishments" - apparent heresy in the face of standard Hollywood happy endings where girl gets boy, man kills shark, or king conquers stammer.  Said the vet:

“Audiences don’t care about an accomplishment unless it’s shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory but the moment afterwards when the winner shares that victory with someone they love.”

Doran found this to be true of one popular movie after another, and if you test it out, the idea becomes a "Duh!"  Sure, Shawshank Redemption's happy climax comes when Morgan Freeman is finally free, but the joy that earns tears and cheers from men and women alike arrives when Freeman's character reunites with Tim Robbins' and they get to celebrate their freedom together. 

Current hits as diverse as Globe-winners The Artist and The Descendants exhibit this principle in vivid relief; the same is true of Moneyball, The Help, and Bridesmaids.  Many a great movie has ended with relationship as the point, and an accomplishment never achieved (It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey never does get to leave Bedford Falls).  In fact, a great many classic films have "happy" endings where someone beloved has died (Star Wars), and the shared joy carries an acknowledgment of something lost.

Doran's idea also dovetails with one of my own long-held convictions about romantic comedy endings - that the best and most resonant are "joyful defeats" - boy-gets-girl moments leavened with a sense of loss (e.g. Shakespeare in Love, which leaves its lovers separated, though eternally "together").  You can see it at work in one of my favorite rom-com climaxes, that of Lindsay Doran's own Sense and Sensibility (while online restrictions nixed embedding it here, you can view the scene via this Hulu link).  When Elinor (Emma Thompson) learns that Edward (Hugh Grant) is free to marry her (happiness!) she totally loses it, uncontrollably weeping (sad but hilarious); what's lost is her pride and long-practiced composure.

But the best bit follows as we cut to her mother and two sisters, who've hurried outside to give the couple their privacy.  Little Sister climbs a ladder to peek in the window, and excitedly reports to Mom and Big Sis that Edward has gone down on one knee.  It's a shrewd and inventive way to depict an otherwise cliched moment (i.e. the obligatory proposal is off-screen) but it also gives us Doran's emotional catharsis: As the women laugh, cry, and hug, relationship is celebrated.  The couple's happiness is shared - and continues, as we cut to a wedding with a smiling, publicly coupled Elinor and Edward in attendance.

Here's a fun and educational game to play: Check out some of your favorite movies' endings, and see if what Doran and her Dr. Seligman are talking about proves true.  Then you might want to reexamine the last pages of your own project-in-progress.  Happy?  Sad?  Something that's working, evidently, is a combination of the two.

The 7th Annual Asta Awards

The Best in Romantic Comedy 2011

Last year's Asta roster was fairly thin, and sadly, this year's is about as sparse.  For romantic comedy, 2011 was dominated by a mere three popular hits, and two of them weren't even full-fledged rom-coms, but hybrids.  We could find meager solace in the fact that the opposite end of the spectrum was similarly slight (Is this year's New Year's Eve as dismally horrific as last year's Valentine's Day?  You'll have to be the judge, since I refuse to see it), but the overall diminishment by numbers in romantic comedy gives one pause. 

I like to think it's a genre in transition.  If the rom-com Aughts were about boys taking over (from Wedding Crashers to all things Apatow), there are heartening signs that the next decade may very well be about girl power.  Hell, I'd even settle for a Let's Make It Even decade, but if any one movie announced to the world that yes, Females are Funny, and will hopefully presage more funny female flicks to come, it's obviously...

Best Rom-Com Hybrid (That's Really a Female Buddy Coming-of-Age Movie):  Bridesmaids has come to seem not so much a movie as a force of nature.  Logic and taste have little to do with how fervently some people, women and men both, feel about this picture, a triumph of character-driven comedy written by a pair of female first-time screenwriters.  Obviously what drives the movie's appeal is its portrayal of an all-too- human, flawed but nonetheless empathetic protagonist, and the absurd quirkiness of its crackerjack supporting cast continues this theme, which brings us to:

Best Female Support: Melissa McCarthy, already an Emmy-winner and looking surprisingly Oscar-worthy (?!), arrives at 2012 with 2011 tucked in her back pocket.  While Wiig and Rudolph's buddy conflict was the main event of Bridesmaids, it was Melissa, from her first appearance ("I'm glad he's single, because I'm gonna climb that like a tree") to her under-the-closing-credits foodie sex binge, who virtually walked off with the show... and leaves us wanting more.

Best Set Piece: Kind of a toss-up, since the extended Nightmare in First Class sequence on board the plane that never gets to Vegas is pretty hilarious, but come on - What other comedy set piece this year floored audiences with quite the same mix of "watch it with a hand over your eyes and jaw agape" and belly laughs, as the Bridal Shop Debacle in Bridesmaids?  And after our suffering through a few decades of wedding rom-coms, what could be more satisfying than this set piece's priceless topper: the spectacle of an agonized Maya Rudolph, sinking to the street in her beautiful wedding gown and um, letting go?

Best Bellamy: Meanwhile, on the male side, this year's hands-down winner of Best Mr. Wrong must go to Bridesmaids' wonderfully dumb (and uncredited) Jon Hamm, playing Ted, a sexually challenged horror show whose delirious hamming occasionally forces Kristin Wiig to cease mugging and play it straight.  More Mad Magazine than Mad Men, this and his SNL stints suggest a second career in comedy for Don Draper.

So much for the 'Maids.  Meanwhile, one of the more intriguing competitions in 2011 rom-commery was between two movies with virtually the identical plot.  Having read the script early on, I would've guessed that No Strings Attached would edge out Friends With Benefits in this duel, but the latter did better at the box office, and also delivered...

Best Male Buddy: No, not Benefits' Woody Harrelson as one of the unlikeliest of gay guys, but his co-star, the inestimable Richard Jenkins, heartrending as a father with Alzheimer's, who gets it together long enough to set the wobbly Justin Timberlake straight in a memorable get-out-your-handkerchief third act scene.  Jenkins is always good, but here, the man is priceless.

Best Screenplay: Again, not a straight-up rom-com, it's a hybrid - but whatever you want to call it, Midnight in Paris delivered 2011's most imaginative blend of high concept and romantic comedy.  Not bad for a writer in his 70s, who's been deemed over-and-done too many times to count, by now.  Witty one-liners, visual gags, and conceptual meta high-jinks make this an "actually, I will watch it again on DVD" keeper that can legitimately join the best-of Allen canon. 

And an honorary Asta goes to Owen Wilson as Best Woody Allen: Practically every actor (or actress; see Mia Farrow) who's taken the lead in one of his pictures has ended up channeling the Woodman, in mode of speech and attitude (for Worst Woody, cringe at Kenneth Branaugh's slavish Allen-isms in Celebrity).  But Wilson made Woody his own, delivering an especially amiable amalgam in Paris.

Best Couple: It's one room-splitting issue in this year's room-splitter of a rom-com hit - you either buy them as a couple (a stretch given their small amount of screen time together) or don't, but for my money, watching Emma Stone take the piss out of Ryan Gosling (then casually fall in love with the jerk) was one of the best pleasures in Crazy Stupid Love, a romantic comedy that's a definitively mixed bag, as it also includes...

Worst Couple: No, I say, no, and no-no-no again to the icky, utsy, don't believe it for a second and utterly offensive "romance" between Jonah Bobo and Analeigh Tipton in the same movie, which asks us to find cute and endearing a stalker-like teen's obsession with an older teen who's in no way his match, and don't get me started on this story line's just awful resolution (sexy pic, masturbation invite and all).

Best Falling in Love Scene: The Artist is a romantic dramedy, but regardless - the early sequence where the ingenue bit part player (Berenice Bejo) is supposed to briefly dance with the movie-within-the-movie's dashing star (Jean Dujardin), yet both forget themselves and get giddily caught up in each other is exquisite romantic comedy, ideally conceived and marvelously executed.  And (rom-com screenwriters take note), it's done without a word of dialogue.  Kudos.

A for Efforts Dept: I had mixed feelings about Jumping the Broom, but at least there was a Black Romantic Comedy this year, and while I'm not on the Young Adult bandwagon (it's another kind of black comedy), I did like the idea of its heroine being "unlikable" to the extreme.

Best of the Worst Dept: The year's nadir was the offensive-on-every-level Larry Crowne, of which the less said, the better, and 2011's Jen award (given to the star who's released too many bad movies in one year) goes to Adam Sandler.  Y'know, I actually enjoyed Just Go For It, in a Guilty Pleasure way, but to have also produced Zookeeper, Bucky Larson, and Jack and Jill?!  Get out of here, Sandler.  No, really: get out of here.

Close-to-Sort-of-Best (in an "I Know I'm Settling" Way) Romantic Comedy: Crazy Stupid Love has a lot going for it (a mostly-strong script, though they could've cut the last 15 minutes), some first-rate ensemble work (Gosling and Steve Carrell are great together), and was clearly the year's biggest straight-up rom-com success. 

But I'm going to risk reader ire (Timberlake-haters abound, and the Kunis backlash is ready to pop), by finding the underrated Friends With Benefit more consistently satisfying.  Justin and Mila's repartee (courtesy of Keith Merryman & David A. Newman and Will Gluck's screenplay) - their rhythm, look, and between-the-sheets pizazz, was arguably the most watchable in a slim year of fetching match-ups, and the movie's undertone of surprising poignancy really worked - for me.

That would be all, but for an unusually strong year among the four-leggeds.  A special Asta for The Best Astas Since Asta is split between The Artist's Uggie, and Beginners' Cosmo, two Russell terriers who capably put the comedy into two dramedies in 2011.  Living the RomCom hopes to see a lot more of them in the future.  Bark on, doggies!

Through a Glass Brightly

Living the Rom-Com in Sweden

Why I love the internet: A few months ago, I opened my e-mail, and there was an invitation from a friendly screenwriter and instructor named Arvid Unsgaard -

- asking me if I'd like to teach romantic comedy to the students at a relatively new film school in Sweden.  We could do it by video-cam, or if I preferred, by my coming over there...?

Well, yuh-huh.  Cut to: On a Sunday evening in the dead of winter, I arrived in Visby, a medieval walled city in the countryside on the island of Gotland - here's the wall - 

- had a nice dinner with Arvid, settled into a cozy little room at a family inn, and then early the next morning was driven to the Story Film & TV school (housed in a former military installation), and met nine students who were preparing to write full-length screenplays that were either romantic comedies or had rom-com elements in them. 

I realize that "Sweden" and "Romantic Comedy" don't seem to go together, but as I kept reminding people, even Bergman made a rom-com (Smiles of a Summer Night, which Sondheim turned into A Little Night Music).  These students were a delightful bunch of bright writers who spoke English very well, and thanks to their buoyant, welcoming spirit (here for example is serious-but-mischievous Sebastian, and fun-loving Caroline, who looks uncharacteristically serious in this photo) -

- I felt very much at home talking about cute meets and passionate characters and why so many jokes revolve around the principle of three. After two days of teaching, we all went out to a restaurant, where I ate reindeer for the first time (sorry, Rudolph, but it was delicious) and got wonderfully shnockered.  Despite what you may have heard, the Swedes are not depressed or depressing (that would be the Norwegians).  But the landscape certainly does look Berman-esque.

And on my last afternoon, we took a trip to the island of Faro, where Ingmar Bergman lived.  Being able to spend some time in the realm of Bergman was really quite moving.  Here is me on the beach where a famous tracking shot from Persona was shot:

Here is the little cinema that Bergman built, and watched films in with his family:

In the editing room on the top floor, there are still rolls of footage and editing records:

Here are two views of Bergman's home, deep in a beautiful forest of Faro:

And here is the grave where he is buried with his wife Ingrid:

A local newspaper published an article about my visit, with a teaser shot of me on the front page ("Filmkung larde ut om romantik") next to a photo of a local girl wearing a Santa Lucia crown of candles, above a blurb about a sports star who abused his wife, and a blurb about pigs from a pig farm getting loose.  Is this romantic comedy, or what?

I fell in love with Visby (even though it was only light out between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., so I really only ever saw it in the dark) and all of my students, and Arvid and the School, and I hope to return when the sun is shining and the weather is warm.  Sverige är bäst!

The Surprise of Being Human

I loved The Descendants, but the weird thing is, when I think about the movie, I can't remember a line of dialogue, or even a particular shot.  What I remember are the feelings.

I often think of movies as vehicles we use for having our emotions, and in this regard, Descendants is a certain kind of great ride: small and unassuming, a little slow to get into full gear, but handling so smoothly that you don't even realize how fast you're going, then opening up, going full-throttle, and... get out your handkerchiefs, people - you've arrived at an exquisite devastation-destination.

The studio's trying to pitch it as a comedy, but that's not really the deal.  Not as quirky and hilarious as Sideways, or sharp-barbed like Election, Alexander Payne's latest feels more akin to About Schmidt in this writer-director's oeuvre.  It has some great laughs, sure, but it reaches you in a more somber place, deeper than mere melancholia and as profound as any adult's honest contemplation of mortality. 

Don't let that scare you off.  It's a sneakily accessible movie and it sets off the best kind of depth charges in your consciousness; days later, I still find myself thinking about the characters, and wondering about them the way one wonders about people you know.  Which brings me to a point that's directed at the writers and screenwriters in the room.

We always hear that defining a protagonist, getting specific about his or her goal, back story, and most significant distinctive characteristic is a primary concern, and that's certainly true.  But the best people - the most compelling, moving humans, on the page or off - are fascinating because they surprise us.  They disarm us because their inner lives are at times at odds with their outer appearances and behavior.  They're more complicated than they look.

That's The Decendants' brilliance in a nutshell.  Not a single character in the movie, be they lead, support, or brief cameo, is exactly who they seem to be.  Every prominent character takes a turn that makes us see them in a different light, and a few of them keep turning - revealing more feelings, thoughts, and points of view than we'd have expected.

What this does, in terms of its effect on a viewer, is enforce a suspension of judgment.  And isn't that a beautiful thing?  We can't just write a given person off.  We can't form a fixed opinion of someone and hold onto it for long.  Instead, we're seduced into simply looking at a character, looking really carefully, and listening with special attention.  More often than not, we recognize something specific and true, and we connect.

Payne, here collaborating with Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, has always specialized in adaptation (the source novel is by Kaui Hart Hemmings), which may account for what feels like a novelist's love of nuance in his movies.  And he's come up with a fantastic cast (aided by John Jackson, C.S.A.) that's alive to every bit of dramatic/comedic potential in a given moment. 

Shailene Woodley, who plays the George Clooney character's older daughter, is clearly an actress we'll be seeing more of in the years to come.  Apparently Payne saw hundreds of actors before he found Amara Miller to play her younger sister, and his patience paid off; Nick Krause as Woodley's sort-of boyfriend is another great fresh face to contemplate.  It's wonderful to see Judy Greer do more than play second banana to a rom-com heroine, and Beau Bridges is a joy in a small, pivotal role.  Meanwhile Mr. Clooney does some of his best, most vulnerable work to date.  His awesome good looks get subsumed in a role that makes "the star" disappear, and he's got a scene in the back end that floored me with its quiet, pained simplicity.

The Descendants is an object lesson in how to let your characters and your audience have their feelings.  And it surprises us in articulating a truth we ought to know, but tend to forget - that each of us can't just be one thing.  We're multitudinous, y'know - it's the human way to be.

Archetypes: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Famously identified by film critic Nathan Rabin in his A.V. Club pan of Elizabethtown in 2007, this particular brand of cinematic male wish fulfillment fantasy has been around for ages.  The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a bubbly, sunshiney creature who, in Rabin's words:

... exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

The MPDG is invariably beautiful, while often in a slightly left-of-center way, quirky as hell, girly, and giving; key to her personality in the romantic comedies and other pics that feature her is a level of compassion for the male hero that's awesomely selfless: she exists, at core, to succor and service the movie's man-in-need.

One could make a case for certain silent era heroines as forerunners, and certainly Chaplin's "Girl" - see Paulette Godard in Modern Times, et al - is a progenitor.  The grandmom of MPDGs is the screwball heroine variant played most memorably by Katherine Hepburn and Carole Lombard.  More recently, the MPDG quintessence was delivered by Natalie Portman in Garden State.

Breathes there a red-blooded American male with soul so dead that he could quickly reject the looks (let alone the likes) of her?  Two words might be used as a shield to deflect such a meltingly potent gaze (they would be Black Swan), but let's be honest: looks great, has great taste in music, is smart, funny, available, and for no immediately discernible reason, seems already way into you?  Tough proposition to turn down.

There's a catch, of course (in Garden State, Portman's character is revealed to be a pathological liar), and some MPDG movies do go so far as to expose the darker sides of this archetype (in a sense Jonathan Demme's Something Wild is a black comedic object lesson in "be careful what Dream Girl you wish for," as its hapless hero is nearly killed by MPDG Melanie Griffith's psychotic ex-boyfriend).

But what I find truly amusing about this fantastical construct is how profoundly counter-intuitive it is, in terms of the kind of Manic Pixies one encounters in non-movie reality.  Reader, I have dated a few (some friends might say I even married the European version of one, once), and here's the thing: such prototypically fun salvos of idiosyncratic femininity actually tend to be fundamentally narcisisstic.  The Manic Pixies one meets in real life, generally speaking, are Damsels in Distress who are trolling for Princes, or to be more accurate, Caretakers.

It's because of this truism that personally, I'm more fond of the rom-com heroines who are Manic Pixie Dream Girl-like... but turn out to be their own, healthily autonomous people in the end.  One such classic variant was immortalized by Diane Keaton in the movie that bears her character's name:

 

Annie starts out MPDG, but once Pygmalion-ed by Alvy Singer, is revealed to be a deeply three-D human with needs that transcend his.  Which seems to be more a real-life phenomenon, if you ask me (an uncharacteristically realistic workout of the "She seems like my Manic Pixie Dream Girl but isn't" notion was enacted by Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer.)

On screen, at any rate, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl continues to delight many men's fantasies (and alienate even more women).  I recently spotted two in Midnight in Paris.  Got any favorites, or love-to-hates, of your own?

Love in 24 Hours (or Less)

Bearing down on it now, this business of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and the ethos and eros of romantic comedy, with the logical query: If Getting to Know You movies believe that true love is only achieved over the course of some serious time (in When Harry Met Sally, it takes more than a decade, and in Groundhog Day, a near-eternity), what are we to make of a rom-com that claims you can have it overnight?

Love Overnight movies, a small but hardy cadre of romantic comedies in which the main action takes place within one extremely compressed and compacted time period - usually a linear span of around a day and a night or so - are founded on the belief that love, whether at first sight or a later second's consideration, has no need of racking up considerable psychic or physical mileage.  In these movies, The Real Thing can be sighted, experienced, and validated in record time. 

The uber-Love Overnight pic, obviously, is Richard Linklater (and co-screenwriter Kim Krizan)'s Before Sunrise (1995),

in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do their meet-lose-get scenario in roughly 18 hours.  That they blow their scheduled post-movie reunion, and don't hook up until about 16 years later in the sequel Before Sunset (filmed 9 years later, 2004)

is moot: that they do get together for good, Ethan impulsively abandoning a wife and child in the bargain, is proof that What Happened One Night was indeed a happening thing.

It Happened One Night (1934), by the way, covers a longer time span than its title promises, but it's an LO movie in spirit.  These stories posit that what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas, but lives on - or, to cite the grandaddy of such "single at lunch, married by breakfast" tales, what happens in the forest near Athens changes you forever, even if you were only literally turned into a donkey for a few hours.  Shakespeare's magical romp of an ensemble rom-com makes the case that one Midsummer Night's Dream (a couple of nights, actually) can hitch a few pairs of lovers, and better them, for good.

In this essential regard, Love Overnight (LO) romantic comedies are the diametric opposite of Getting to Know You (GTKY) movies, yet kissing cousins to the Only One paradigm - rom-coms that believe if you can find your fated soul mate, you'll be good to go.  In the LO universe, if an attraction develops, is tested and endures over the course of one fated night, that's all its faith-and-hope-prone protagonists need in order to make a solid commitment.

2008's unjustly overlooked all-in-one-night rom-com Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - the answer to your future "What was Kat Dennings in before 2 Broke Girls?" trivial pursuit question - delivered the full, passionate goods in this neck of the woods: as in Sunrise, the meet-lose-get between Kat and Michael Cera goes down in one linear fell swoop, and it seems to be for keeps.  It's a credit to screenwriter Lorene Scafaria that we buy into this idea... which may be why there aren't dozens of these LO rom-coms extant.  Your average romantic comedy, even if it spans weeks, can be credibility-challenging enough.

The short list of hybrid Love Overnight classics over the years is topped by the horror/rom-com Shaun of the Dead (2004).  Here the protagonists have met and broken up before the 24-hour story proper gets launched, but one night of bludgeoning, axing, and shooting flesh-hungry zombies together is all it takes to make its two lovers like one, again.  2007's teen/bromantic rom-com hybrid Superbad similarly has a prologue to zip through before its neverending party night brings both boy-and-girl, and boy-buddies together before dawn.

Another seminal LO movie is John Hughes' teen rom-com Sixteen Candles (1984), coupling Molly Ringwald and Justin Henry over the course of a pivotal birthday's non-celebration.  Like the Shakespearian original, Woody Allen's minor Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) is a nocturnal roundelay of hook-ups.  As every genre must have its nadir, we'll dutifully note that the execrable Valentine's Day (2010) follows form, its soul-killing superficial scenarios taking place in 24-hour holiday time.

A memorable variant is 1954's Roman Holiday, in which Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn spend a day and night together, a reporter and a princess on a platonic (but tacitly romantic) spree in Rome: no happily ever after for these two, but it's a time they'll remember all their lives.  One knowing anti-LO classic, Scorsese's black comedy/rom-com After Hours, is like an urban nightmare version of Bringing Up Baby with no Katherine Hepburn in sight (the series of "madcap" women hapless Griffin Dunne meets are crazy in a chillingly unscrewball way).  The movie suggests you not only can't get laid in a New York night, you're liable to get killed and/or turned into a plaster statue for trying to.

Living Rom-Com commenter Judith Duncan astutely noted that the GTKY movie lacks the high-gear energy of shorter-fused rom-coms.  LO pics, by their very "zero to 60 in no time" nature, have well-tuned motors (commenter Cantara Christopher's suggestion - Vincent Minnelli's The Clock, a rom-com/dramedy - is a quintessential example).  And if you ever needed evidence that rom-com lovers are optimists, the Love Overnight sub-genre, with its embrace of Be Here Now encounters and Instant Love Everlasting, clearly provides it.

So what other LO classics am I leaving out? 

A Third Way to Love

Romantic comedy believes in the transformative power of love, but its sub-genres reveal more specific belief systems.  Not long ago, my post Is There Only One? questioned movies that say, "Every soul has only one mate, chosen by fate" (Sleepless in Seattle, Serendipity, Only You).  Conversely, Second Chances looked at rom-coms that tell us, "Everyone is capable of finding more than one great love in one's lifetime" (Truly Madly Deeply, Love Actually, Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

The Only One movies, all about the chase, sometimes barely acquaint their protagonists with each other, banking on a this-was-meant-to-be philosophy to justify the match-up.  "The One After The One" movies are less about the One After's identity or compatibility then they are about the new mate's message: Get over it and move on.

Being predominately about courtship, romantic comedies don't usually go into the mundane nuts and bolts of how a longlasting union is formed.  The main event here is "how they met and how they got hitched," and it tends to play out in a short span of time.  Meanwhile there exists a small canon of romantic comedies that do focus on the bigger how - not how these two got together, but how their being together gradually blossomed into true love.  These rom-coms, I think, try to get at a more realistic assessment of what actually makes a romantic relationship work.

A Getting to Know You romantic comedy follows two people through a good chunk of their lives, examining the incremental process by which two people become truly intimate.  While most rom-coms enact some version of this in tightly-motored microcosm (e.g. the whirlwind adventure of Romancing the Stone forces its lovers to get closely acquainted, pronto), the Getting to Know You picture takes the longer view, suggesting that a slow-fused romance played out over time may in fact be the best route to a love that can last.

The uber-GTKY rom-com is of course When Harry Met Sally, in which it takes years (more than a decade) for Harry and Sally to get that they've already got what they need and want.  And the ethos of this mini-sub-genre is expressed in its famous climactic declaration by Harry, a detailed list of what he's learned to love in Sally ("I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich..."): True love is found by getting to know, accept, and appreciate the other, over time.

Getting to Know You rom-coms are similar to, but set apart from, the more garden variety "The One Who Was Always There" movies, in which a current romance with a Bellamy (Mr. Wrong) reveals that a best friend, co-worker, or otherwise long-on-the-scene character is actually the protagonist's true love (The Proposal, et al) - or not, as in My Best Friend's Wedding.  GTKY sticks with its two central characters over time to showcase how "the little things" in each add up to what only in the end seems inevitable.  He and she, by genuinely comprehending the beautiful and the bad in each other, make an eyes-wide-open commitment based more on empirical evidence than on ephemeral attraction.

Perhaps the earliest example of a GTKO movie, more romantic dramedy than rom-com, is Penny Serenade (1941, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne), featuring a married couple whose love deepens through the years.  In our modern era, When Harry... is bracketed by two darker hybrids (dramedy/rom-coms): 1967's Two for the Road (Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney) and 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey).  Road studies a marriage that seems to be driving toward the rocks, intermingling flashbacks with present-day turmoil, while Eternal, using similar (and wilder) techniques, replays, rethinks, and reboots a long-term relationship.

These two Getting to Know You movies root their stories in the seeming inevitability of a break-up, and work their way, comedically and poignantly, toward a reaffirmation of what was good about this coupling in the first place - tempered by a painful acknowledgement that what's flawed (as well as what's fun) in a mate is here to stay.  While that's not a theme which necessarily suggests the most upbeat date movie experience, such films have more to say to the experienced, real-world romantic than say, Valentine's Day.

An even smaller subset of these films employs a formal device to build up its intimacies: 1978's Same Time Next Year, in which Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn get to know each other via annual hotel trysts, and this year's tanker One Day (we revisit Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, whether they're together or not, on the succeeding anniversaries of their first meeting).  Another, more fantastical variant is found in Groundhog Day (Bill Murray gets to know Andie MacDowell via an eternity of February 2nds), and less profoundly, in 50 First Dates (Adam Sandler goes to school on Drew Barrymore, whose peculiar brand of amnesia makes every date their first one).

Are Getting to Know You rom-coms less ubiquitous because their tacit theme is more pragmatic than  romantic?  It may be why they tend towards drama more than comedy.  And what significant members of this small but resonant roster may I have left out? 

Your Mind on Music

Caffeine.  Alcohol.  A toke, a toot.  Everyone's got their favorite stimulant, but when it comes to working on a draft, the overwhelming drug of choice for most writers I know is music.

Four screenwriters interviewed in Karl Iglesias’s fine and useful book, The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters talk of their dependence on music as muse: Ron Bass likes to write to jazz; Steven DeSouza uses soundtracks from movies similar to the genre he’s writing in; Scott Rosenberg goes for rock’n’roll; Nicholas Kazan prefers Gregorian chant ("I need something constant and neutral.  I find it’s a wonderful aid that sort of massages the right hemisphere of my brain").

References to writer-as-listener abound in the realm of screenwriting interviews.  My own habit coincides with that of Mr. Bass, who notes: "I like to play the same CDs over and over because I like the music to disappear."

True that.  When I find a piece of music that evokes the sensibility of what I’m writing, I put it on Repeat and play it for hours.  (This method’s only drawback is that when you wear out a piece this way, you really do wear it out; certain songs I used to love are dead to me now, sadly.)  Lately, I've been stuck on a song called Diamond Heart by the group Active Child (fans of Roxy Music's Avalon may enjoy, but if Neo-80s synth and romantic langeurs give you the hives, steer clear, plus this is the only song from the album I've gotten so attached to, so the real hook may be something subjectively idiosyncratic, i.e. the sound of a C# alternating against a C with a D# above it just says HELLO to my heart). 

Diamond Heart is an exception that proves the rule, in that it has vocals, something usually to be avoided, but the lead vocal is so aurally tweaked that it took me a dozen listenings to realize that the words "diamond heart" are used in the lyrics.  Generally non-vocal music serves the task best, and my perennial search for instrumental music that’ll work often unearths great stuff that defies categorization (what exactly do you call Four Tet's Smile Around the Face, which sounds like the union of a benignly berserk robot drummer and the Lollipop Kids on helium in a toy factory?). 

My default fall-back is a pair of hardy perennials that never fail to get the fingers moving: the music of Steve Reich and Johann Sebastian Bach.  The perpetual motion and ethereality of Reich (particulary the more minimal early works) eases my right brain into gear, while Glen Gould playing Bach's keyboard music stokes the left side into more active alertness.  There's just enough muted and/or ambiguous emotionality in both composers' work to keep it engaging, and it abounds in that "constant and neutral" quality that Kazan spoke of.

I did a similar post on this writing methodology some five years ago, and got a lot of good suggestions for Music To Write By, but I've since exhausted those sources (played into its grave are The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid's two hours of beautifully spooky, languid otherworldliness, and my first novel thanks you).  Once again, I’m on the lookout for writing-stimulation. 

What music have you found that gets your blood moving and keeps your creative juices flowing, when you're working on a draft?  Living Rom-Com wants to hear.

Rom-Com Truisms #9

The less said, the more felt.

An ongoing issue with the romantic comedy spec scripts I read is that they talk too much. 

By "they" I mean the characters (i.e. the writers), which is surprising.  Given that we're living in the reign of Twitter, seeing as how we all have less time to take in information, why is that screenwriters still seem to think that romantic comedy = two people sitting or standing around talking, for page after page?

It's axiomatic that in comedy, fast is funny.  And brevity being the soul of wit, the alert rom-com writer ought to be able to cut to the gag, pronto.  In this regard, I've often cited the opening of Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral as a model, a paradigm of great romantic comedy dialogue.

The movie begins with a wordless montage of various characters getting ready to go to a wedding.  We find protagonist Charles (Hugh Grant) still in bed, sleepily picking up his alarm clock and reacting, eyes widened, with the movie's first dialogue:

Oh, fuck. Fuck!

Charles runs into housemate Scarlett's room and thrusts her clock at her sleepy face.  Scarlett reacts: Fuck!

Cut to Charles getting dressed in a hurry.  He bends to tie his shoes and his suspenders pop off the back of his trousers.  Charles: Fuck.

Cut to Charles and Scarlett in the front of his Volvo.  The engine won't start.  Charles: Fuck!!!

Now that's great dialogue.  I'm not being facetious here -- it's truly impressive how much the sequence accomplishes, in terms of story set-up, character and tone, using one four-letter word.  But Curtis is also a master of the long speech, which he demonstrates in the closing scene (which also includes one godawful clunker of a line, Andie MacDowell-as-Carrie's "Is it raining?  I hadn't noticed" as she and Charles stand drenched to the skin in a downpour), but at any rate - boy has met, lost, and is getting girl, romantically in the rain, and his pitch is true to Charles' twistedly conflicted anti-marriage persona:

Do you think... after we've dried off, after we've spent lots of time together, you might agree... NOT to marry me?  And do you think... not being married to me... might maybe be something you could consider doing for the rest of your life?  Do you?

Girl uses two irony-laden syllables in reply:

I do.

One of the most moving uses of a commonplace word that I've ever heard, in the closing lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is made up of two syllables repeated by two devastated lovers (He: Okay?  She: Okay) which pack so much emotional resonance - they've been through relationship hell together, but they're still willing to believe they've got a chance to make it work - that the scene tears me up every time.

You may remember how effective the wordless first act of Wall-E was (yes, it's a romantic comedy, as well as being a sci-fi animation), and speaking of sci-fi, one of the best cinematic responses ever given to the phrase "I love you" was provided by Han Solo, who replied, true to character: "I know." (Harrison Ford, reportedly bettering Leigh Brackett's script for The Empire Strikes Back.)

The best romantic comedies don't over-explain or over-sell themselves.  I've noticed that many people who enjoyed Crazy, Stupid, Love got big laughs out of early scenes like this - Cal and his wife Emily trying to decide what to order at a restaurant...

Cal: How about we see what we want on three?  One, two...

Emily: I want a divorce.

Cal (simultaneously): Creme Brulee.

...but cited Cal's big, long, over-sentimental speech at his son's graduation at the picture's end as one of its missteps.  Not to belabor the point (i.e. why go on and on?), but movies are a visual medium, and when the talk is brief, there's room for a scene's emotional subtext to be felt.  If your characters say more with less words, you're giving the audience a chance to feel what lies between the lines.  And isn't that the smarter, funnier, more moving way to go?

'Nuff said.

Romantic Comedy Classics #7:

Top 5 Favorite Clips From High Fidelity

1) The movie begins with a fourth wall-breaking monologue from Rob Gordon (John Cusack) that speaks to an essential issue at the heart of rock music-worship, posing questions that could, come to think of it, be addressed to lovers of romantic comedy as well.  He (and co-screenwriters D.V. DeVicentus, Steve Pink and Scott Rosenberg) is channeling Nick Hornby, author of the source material novel, and you know within the first minute that they - guided by director Stephen Frears - are going to do this right:

 

2) For romantic comedy, the first decade of the 2000s was Revenge of the Guys, with such pics as Hitch, Wedding Crashers, and Apatow's 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up trying to kick the chick out of chick flicks.  But High Fidelity was the real kick-off, in 2000, where the male point of view on relationships gets an intimate, honest expression - as does the peculiarly male obsession with what makes up the ultimate know-it-all's record collection: the "I am what I listen to" syndrome (and what does it mean that I bought the Beta Band EPs after seeing this movie?).

 

3) A penchant for wish-fulfillment fantasy is certainly not the sole provence of the male imagination, but rarely has a movie gotten its inner workings quite this hilariously right, as Rob faces his romantic rival (the uber-obnoxious Tim Robbins, brilliantly cast) in person for the first time, and male id unleashed high jinks ensue:

 

4) True to its school even at its most poignant moments, High Fidelity features one of the greatest marriage proposal scenes in the history of the genre, its genius lying in precisely how stupid-guy perfect its seeming anti-romanticism is:

 

5) It's the movie that made Jack Black a star, and arguably still contains his best work.  This last clip loses a bit in translation, since it's predicated on having convinced you that Black's character (a lovable jerk with hipster-ad absurdum musical taste) is the last person in the world to deliver the performance he delivers here; we're expecting something closer to the Dead Kennedys, which will end in bloody eardrums and party buzzkill - and yet...

  

High Fidelity seems to me to be a high watermark in rom-commery due to its unflinching against-the-grain-ness.  Never has a romantic comedy emphasized such resistance to the very ethos of its genre - its hero is dragged, kicking and screaming into what he perceives as the horror of commitment - and yet in part for that very reason, when the movie finally submits to the transformative power of love as a positive force, we believe that it's only right and inevitable. Women are the means by which we men come to know beauty, after all.  And where would pop music - or movies - be without them?