Living the Romantic Comedy

Still Yearning

Ain't talkin', just a-walkin'

My mule is sick, my horse is blind

Heart burning, still yearning

Thinkin' 'bout that gal I left behind

-- Ain't Talkin'  (from Modern Times)

The occasion of a new Dylan album (first in five years) can't go unacknowledged here in Living RomCom-land.  It's not because Dylan has much to do with screwball comedy -- though such classic tracks as Leopard-skin Pillbox Hat and the more recent Highlands would certainly qualify (and on screen, there is that scene of Bob's brief but deep love affair with a shelf of canned vegetables he's forced to read at gunpoint in Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid...). 

It's not because (as I've already red-facedly admitted here) for a few formative years in my life I wanted to be Bob Dylan.  No, it's because he's still one of the best we've got and he matters, as a force of art and culture.  He's also one of the last of the diehard Romantics (more on this below), and so his latest opus speaks to the similarly afflicted.

Hearing Modern Times puts me in a sort of oddball fugue state (could be the record's intention, actually).  To be Bob-istic about it, I'll just stream through some 8 random topics that my listening has engendered. 

Bob is Bing?

Confounding expectations has been Dylan's stock-in-trade from early on; his assumption of various roles and poses over nearly 45 years in the limelight have truly run the gamut.  But honestly, I never expected him to turn out to be my generation's Bing Crosby. 

Nevertheless, roughly half the tunes on Modern Times are crooners, the kinds of old-time Texas two-steps that wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Gene Autrey or Arthur Godfrey record.  I've never really cottoned to this Other Side of Bob, not when he first introduced it years ago with some shmaltzy covers on Self Portrait, nor when he indulges himself in such ersatz Der Bingle swing now.  But Dylan sounds sincere as blue-eyed cowboy balladeer, and these tracks are not without their rascal charm, seasoned as they are by droplets of droll wit (I'm wild about you, gal / You oughta be a fool for me goes one typical throwaway).

But Bob is not Woody.

You could see him as a sort of second Woody Guthrie, but he's not Woody Allen, though his professed love for Alicia Keys on this album may initially give one pause.  Girl's a little... young for you, dude, is one PC reaction.

The spectacle of an elder statesmen bent on seducing girls roughly the age of his daughters is what's made a number of the Woodman's last spate of movies tough to sit through, but Dylan is too good-humored about his hard-on here to really outrage any but the prissiest among us.  The crucial difference is a tad of self-awareness. 

The heart has its reasons...

Though the matters of Modern Times are weighty -- and Dylan continues to delight fanatics everywhere by popping a few Biblical turns of phrase into the most unlikely of contexts -- what it so often boils down to is boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.

Dylan the lover has long limned the extremes of passionate romance.  For every prayerful, reverent tribute to womanhood (I Want You, Just Like a Woman), he's spewed the acid vitriol of the spurned male (Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine, She's Your Lover Now).  Apparently such dichotomies do not shift with time.  On Modern Times, he sings at one point, I've got more than a lifetime to live loving you, while at another he sings, This woman's so crazy I swear I ain't gonna touch another one for years.

Same as it ever was, indeed; just as Dylan wears the mantle of a Last Romantic in the sense of the romance poets, the bards who deal in ideals (who, as Ain't Talkin' puts it, practice a faith that's been long abandoned), he also embodies an Old World male's vision of the eternal tug and pull between the sexes.  Ann Powers in her perceptive L.A. Times review notes:

Dylan's view of women is as traditional as his love of analog recording and old-timey songs. This self-proclaimed family man, who felt so little need to distinguish the identities of his ex-wives in his autobiography that he merged them, does seem a bit miffed that young women in particular exert so much pull over him. Yet even if the furious longing he expresses throughout "Modern Times" has one root in a pre-feminist's discontent with modern gender roles, it's also heavier than that. The silly, wretched pounding of Dylan's heart, like the ragged flower Chaplin's Tramp offers his tattered sweetheart, presents romance as the strategy against life's devastating assaults. This heroism, Dylan ruefully intimates, is bound to fail.

Little can I add, except to say that there remains something elemental in Dylan's take on matters of the heart that move we faithful in ways that defy intellectual analysis.

Why, yes, that is a good band, Bob.

Faced with Dylan's claim that he's playing with the best band he's ever had caused interviewer Jonathan Lethem to parenthetically hem and haw, in the Rolling Stone interview now on the stands, and who can blame him (two words: The Band)?  Nonetheless, if you've seen the guys live, you'll allow the claim is justified.

On this album they shine.  They also stumble through the changes and drop their share of clams, as have pretty much all the various groups of musicians faced with Dylan's legendary recording impatience (he's famous for making his players learn the changes on the run with tape rolling in his quest for capturing a given song "in the moment").  But they are clearly in the groove; the album's laidback-but-lively feel is its major strength.  Drummer George G. Receli is indeed the best drummer Dylan's had since the respective heydays of Kenny Buttrey, Howie Wyeth and Levon Helm, and the swinging, rockbed rhythm he lays down with bassist Tony Garnier on such flat-out freight train blues as The Levee's Gonna Break is sheer pleasure.

A band this tight'n'loose enables Dylan to really stretch out as a vocalist.  Some of the peak delights on the record arise from his crafty phrasing.  Listen to the way he steps nimbly in, around and over the beat when singing "You fill me up with... noth!-in' but!... self-doubt" in the second verse of Someday Baby and see if that don't make you smile.

Dylan to musical world: You suck.

One could only read this Reuters dispatch culled from the Stone interview and laugh, given the bald curmudgeonly-crank nature of the pronouncements. 

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine... "You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added...  Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

My first knee-jerk response was that yes, he has a point, and then the other knee jerked, as I considered all the quite excellent music produced over the past decade.  But I also recently sat through a tirade by a young Italian feature sound engineer who claims that MP3s are garbage, and I do still listen to my old analog LPs and find them warmer and more resonant than their CD counterparts.  So is this the irrelevant rant of a egoistic old codger, or...?

Walking the talk, Dylan-as-producer does himself right; there's a sense in Modern Times of hearing a man and his band getting the hang of a bunch of new songs... period (the opening rocker Thunder on the Mountain has the comfy stripped-down sound of a Chuck Berry single from the '60s).  It's an honest, straightforward recording, with nary one recording bell or whistle, which is one of the reasons it somehow sounds so old/new fresh to the 2006 ear. 

Forever young = Forever out of time.

Many of Dylan's peers have adapted disparate strategies to survive in an increasingly bewildering and unkind-to-the-aged marketplace; Paul Simon smartly and quite successfully bonded with Brian Eno, of all unlikelies, on his most recent disc; Neil Young has taken to putting out... Neil Young records, with remarkable consistency (his latest, despite the seemingly brash politics, sounds much like anything he's ever recorded), honoring the gambit of why fix it if it ain't broke?

Dylan's strategy, intuitive or designed, is finally to be true to his school -- which means that he's long abandoned the few attempts he made to move to the drumbeat of his times (e.g. Empire Burlesque) and is now content to present who he is: an older man of older times, carrying a torch of tradition even while ever-blazing his own idiosyncratic trail.  From the Stone interview:

Dylan seems to feel he dwells in a body haunted like a house by his bardlike musical precursors.  "Those songs are just in my genes, and I couldn't stop them comin' out. In a reincarnation way, maybe.  The songs have got some kind of pedigree to them."

Which is why the album's title seems so brilliant.  Whose Modern Times?  What's really modern about these timeless tunes?  Everything and absolutely nothing.

Dylan's stubborn resistance to going with the flow and playing the game has always been one of his most endearing traits, no more so than in the ongoing issue of product v. process.  As he famously wrote, "To live outside the law, you must be honest," and he's honored this principle consistently by refusing to think in terms of What They Want and When They Want It.  Modern Times is merely more of the same.  Although...

Masterpiece?  Why critics are idiots.

They won't retire the word "genius," no matter how bereft of genuine meaning it's become, from critical abuse (e.g. if Christine Aguilera is a genius...), and they won't, dagnabbit, give up on "masterpiece," no matter that such pieces are produced by masters, evidently, on a weekly basis these days ("masterwork" has been applied to Modern Times in three reviews I've read).  Critics, caught in the endless game of having to top their own hyperbole, time after time, can't really be trusted, as a rule, to put things in their proper hierarchical order.

Let's get it in perspective:  Blonde on Blonde is a masterpiece.  Meanwhile, I think there's only one song on this new album that has the spectral, awesome depths of Time Out of Mind's transcendent, one-foot-in-the-grave hymn, Not Dark Yet.  I'll wager that what'll rightfully rank with Bob's best is the eerie, majestically mournful Ain't Talkin', which has the magic of real mystery lurking in its dark corners. 

Let us now praise famous men.

But inevitably one leavens the disappointments with gratitude for a job still being so well done.  Finally, it's the process, the whole of the work and the life that resonates between the tracks.  How many have sustained such a career?  While Modern Times in sum may not be as spooky- powerful as Time Out of Mind or contain a slam-dunk classic like the Wonder Boys soundtrack Oscar-winner Things Have Changed, it's got more substance and stature than most stuff you hear these days. 

The appeal of the new album ultimately lies in its authenticity, a quality that seems harder and harder to come by in these modern times.  Hear it and you hear a link between us and all that's come before us.  And even as I resist its cornier-sounding moments, I keep coming back to it, not out of obligation, but out of love, and I can already hear how it will endure.

Tasty Worms

Clearly not a romantic comedy... not, for that matter, even a film for adults... nonetheless, I'm here to briefly sing praises of How To Eat Fried Worms because (obligatory bias admission), its writer-director Bob Dolman is a friend... and it's actually a good movie.

We're not talking cinema here, folks, nor Oscar-bait (fish bait, perhaps).  But there is something about Worms that's worth noting for screenwriters.  This is a movie that will connect with its target audience (i.e. kids), I believe, because it's a movie that was really written for them -- meaning, not a movie about kids, or a movie that's good for kids in the traditional sense of "educational and morally correct" (although it is that, in a wholly unpretentious, nimble-fingered way). 

No, the impression one gets from viewing How To Eat Fried Worms is that this is the kind of movie a bunch of fifth grade boys might make themselves, given the resources and a parental free pass.  It's full of the yucky, gross stuff such guys get off on, and more significantly, it embodies the sensibility of reality-based, three-dimensional pre-teen human beings.

This is no small achievement, given how Hollywood usually treats small fries.  Such big screen fantasies as Spy Kids and the Harry Potter franchise tend to adult-ize and/or myth-ify their child protagonists, pitting them against super-villains and supernatural forces, when really -- as director Bob himself recently pointed out in talking about this -- your average 10 year-old's biggest challenge might be overcoming the fear of raising one's hand in class.

Even the blog for the movie has a real-world home-grown thing going on. In this interview, Bob talks about the innocence he wanted to evoke in the world of the movie -- a world where kids' problems are appropriate to child hood.  That more mundane level of conflict is where Worms lives.  It captures the feel of pre-teen angst and the goofy, giddy joy that busts out in spite of it.  Wisely, Dolman got his camera in close with a talented group of young actors and so the movie has an intimate feeling, but that feeling of closeness is also on the page in his adaptation of Thomas Rockwell's affectionately-remembered novel.   

Personally, having been on the set I'm just amazed Bob was able to get what he needed out of them, because it was humid Austin summer and 10 kids for chrissake (I do remember him having to go lie down on a lawn at one point -- though to be fair, I think that was more to brainstorm a newly-troublesome story beat).   But I think he managed it because, well, Bob was being a kid.

By this I don't mean he was zipping around on a tricycle.  I mean he was being kid-like: open, vulnerable, kid-intense sensitive to the present moment.  Watching him at work with his mini-Wild Bunch was an object lesson in not letting adult concerns get in the way of the primally scary fun moviemaking can be.  And I think that's true of Bob's writing -- it has the passion and the slightly nutty energy of a guy willing to truly mess with things and mess things up.  It's done in the best meaning of playful.

"Connecting with the kid in you" may sound like the worst kind of hoary writing cliche (stocked next to "have fun with it!"), but that is what seeing Worms left me thinking about.  How often does one get to be that kind of playful in a screenplay? 

The movie is smart enough (without being snarky or po-mo hip) to hang a lot of "kids having fun being kids" scenes on a simple, sturdy story line and withhold judgment.   No SFX or spaceships... just the kind of minimal world you might conjure up for playtime if you were a youngin.  The result feels more genuine than the standard kiddie pic norm.

And no, I haven't been blinded by buddy-ship or lost my mind; none other than the NY Times' formidable Manohla Dargis has weighed in with a near-rave here (and she is tough).  So if you do have an under-ager and want to bring him or her to something you'll be more than happy to sit through... here's How.

Wilder Wisdom

There’s one piece of paper that keeps floating around my workspace, ending up in various folders and temporary resting places, but never disappearing. If you’re a screenwriter – one with any sense of history – you’ve probably seen this before, but if you’re like me, you can always look at it again: Billy Wilder’s “11 Tips on Screenwriting.”

There’s enough witty wisdom packed in here to take the place of any number of textbooks, so forgive me the indulgence of a little commentary, but I couldn’t resist, since I miss having Mr. Wilder in our midst, and to interpolate my thoughts within his edicts gives me the sweet illusion of being in conversation with a Movie God… even if my share of the dialogue amounts to little more than some fervent genuflections and “amen”s.

#1. The audience is fickle.

You think? Just look at what’s passed for this summer’s entertainment – but I think Mr. Wilder is speaking here less about the vagaries of popular taste and more about how quickly you can lose the audience’s attention and/or belief with one simple misstep, which he amplifies in #2:

2. Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go.

The tried and true way to accomplish this technically is expressed in an auxiliary writing maxim: “come in late and leave early” (i.e. hit your beats as succinctly as possible, without throat-clearing before, or dawdling after). The larger issue, equivalent to Mamet’s realtor’s motto (“Always be closing”) is the idea of creating suspense in a story by establishing new conflict as soon as – better yet, even before – a prior conflict has been resolved. Dickens and his ilk were masters at this, as was Wilder himself, and those who do it well also know that it works best when you:

3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.

What’s the first question any actor asks of his role in a given scene? “What’s my motivation?” All too often, pre-pro screenwriters get caught up in the detail work and neglect this all-important principle. What a protagonist is after in a story has got to be the rock-solid spine of his arc, because this is what the audience consciously or unconsciously hangs onto. Over-complicate the primary “action line” of your lead or bury it, and you lose audience involvement. In fact one test of a given scene in a script is to ask: is my protagonist’s need to achieve his/her primary goal addressed here? If it isn’t… find a way to relate the scene to the protagonist’s arc, now, or head for delete.

4. Know where you're going.

First drafts are for exploration and finding out what your story is about. But once you know your ending and you find it sound, you know a lot about what to do next -- within the arc of the entire plot, and within each scene. Often the simplest way to go after articulating a beat is to know its immediate result; in other words, once you’ve drafted a scene and know how it ends, you work backwards from there. Simple principle, seemingly not profound, but an essential one.

5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

This speaks to my favorite harangue – and I’ll rein it in and be brief here – but to my mind, the most sure-fire way to “hide” a plot point is to go to character. If a protagonist is being herself in a given scene, you have all the possibilities to play with, that her character allows.

Your leading man Bob is applying for a job. Confront Bob with the slowest, most inept, most infuriatingly obnoxious interviewer in the universe, who’s overly concerned with why Bob is over-qualified for this gig (i.e. threatened by him) and the audience will meld with your protagonist in exasperation, and perhaps not pay much attention to an all-important detail about the job requirement. Trigger Bob’s awful temper while you’re at it, and they may even forget that the simple beat is “hero gets job with a tricky downside” and get more caught up in “will Bob pull out his gun and blow his cover?” Etc.

6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

This is gold. You have to know this. Time after time, I’ve gone back to rethink a set-up when the pay-off won’t pay, and every writer I know treats this principle as gospel.

7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever.

Also brilliant, and more screenwriters ought to pay attention to the subtext: why will the audience love you? Because they will feel smart. Audiences love to feel like they “know something” (don’t you?) and audiences love to be right (don’t you?). When you have a beat to deal with that’s obvious, the obvious way to go is at an angle.

When everyone can surmise what will happen once the door to a room is closed, why go into the room? There’s something or someone outside the room that can be used to make a wry or poignant comment on what’s going on inside – this is Lubitsch-ian wisdom – and the audience will be very, very happy when you assume, for once, that they get it… and if you give them something extra to chew on that lets them know you know how smart they are.

8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.

This is so self-evident as to seemingly require no comment. But you’d be surprised by how many voice-overs I see in professional, agented screenplays that fumble this rule. If you want to see this principle applied beautifully, watch Kevin Spacey’s opening scene in American Beauty sometime with the sound off... then turn it on and watch again. And while you’re at it, note that the basic idea of this whole sequence was stolen (consciously or un) from the opening of Mr. Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.

9. The event that occurs at the end of the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

Again, you already know this. But for once and for all, let’s put this infamous “point of no return” term to rest. I’ve heard it applied to midpoints, to climaxes, to tweaks, to bad casting… hogwash. The point of no return is the second act turning point, and Mr. Wilder is expressing what the phrase really means: whatever happens at the end of the second act determines how the rest of the movie will play out.

10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then

11. That's it. Don't hang around.

When I considered why Mr. Wilder felt the need to divide this last point into two parts (while observing his usual wry perversity in deciding that since we were expecting ten tips, there must be eleven), I reflected that one sees too many third acts in too many movies that flub this basic rule. By the third act, the audience is impatient to get to the climax and resolution, and if you break the pace en route, you’re taking a fatal risk.

But just as important is that last tip. Even POTC: Dead Man’s Chest betrays it, in its need to set up Part 3. (The headlong race to the Kraken’s final revenge? Superb. The clunky aftermath back in the swamps? Literally anti-climactic.) Even the greats have stumbled with this one: does anybody really enjoy sitting through the boring shrink’s rap at the end of Psycho? But let’s leave it to the consummate master to have the final word, since years after Some Like It Hot made it immortal, he found a way to top one of the greatest fast exit lines in all of cinema, at his gravesite:

Romantic Terror Alert

Had a date cancel on me the other night, and in discussing this with my friend Beth, I noted that the behavior of the woman in question was understandable, because said woman suffers from PRTSD (Post-Romantic Traumatic Stress Disorder: a psychiatric disorder that can occur following the experience of heart-threatening events such as divorce, break-up or seeing too many movies like The Lake House). 

Prior discussions with... let's call her Cynthia... had revealed that only this past Spring, Cynthia went through a whirlwind romance that had her headed for the altar, and instead ended in an abrupt plan alteration as the intended groom's feet froze (turns out he'd mistaken a mid-life crisis alarm for wedding bells).  So the fact that Cynthia is somewhat gun-shy when it comes to going out is no big surprise; I give the woman credit for even attempting to date at all.

Even if you haven't been out there on the front lines recently, you might have heard there's a war on, as the reports from refugees, walking wounded and the occasional bullet-dodging got-lucky couples alike keep trickling in.  We have met the enemy and they is us, which is part of the problem.   One simply can't be naive and sentimental about the mating game anymore, because everybody's been burned -- while sometimes having lit and dropped the fatal match themselves.

Given this, friend Beth mused, there really ought to be some kind of easy-to-decipher coded system for dating, which would alert prospective daters to the emotional state of a given datee in advance.  People routinely mispresent themselves on the dating scene (hey, if we were all brutally honest about who we are in specific detail on a first date, would anyone ever get to Date Two?).  Still, some general orientation re: What We Might Be Up Against really would be helpful in terms of assessing one's chances, when one books that nice table for a first night out.

"There ought to be a color code," Beth opined.  "You know, like the Homeland Security's Terror Alert system."  Well!  Was she talking to the right guy?  To paraphrase Albert Brooks in Broadcast News:  She says it there... and it comes out here.

Herewith, my concept -- I'm thinking t-shirts or headbands would be too limiting, fashion-wise, so how about a slim, sleek little wristband?  From now on when you're meeting someone new for a date, instead of wearing your heart on your sleeve, in the interests of basic disclosure and fair representation, why not broadcast the level of romantic risk you embody (and/or your status on the availability chart) with a strip of color around your wrist?

RED -- SEVERE (Extreme Risk of Soul Evisceration):  includes those of the "Vengeance is Mine and I Will Repay" persuasion, the "I eat lovers' hearts for breakfast" people, and the delightful "I will torture you with hope but pigs will fly before you win me" types.

ORANGE -- HIGH (High Risk of Heartbreak & Possible Legal Action): I will court, love, marry... and then unleash the hounds of Hell.

YELLOW -- ELEVATED (Significant Chance of Involvement, w/Baggage): This extremely popular category includes closet commitment-phobes, friends with benefits and couples counselors on tap, the divorced but not quite disenchanted, long-term relationship virgins, bisexuals and well, most single people over 35.

BLUE -- GUARDED (Game For 1-3 Dates But Don't Expect Sex): includes Don't get me started about my last relationship, This thing is called a dating pre-nup and will you sign it?,  Spotted you at my last Sexaholics Anonymous meeting, and I'm separated but still in a relationship so actually just window-shopping, thanks. 

GREEN -- LOW (We're Just Looking For a Good Time Here):  Hello, Mojito!

Now obviously no system is foolproof, and this one could be easily manipulated (you know, like the present administration is apt to do when the poll numbers are truly tanking).  I can envision any number of post-date conversations along the lines of "She was sportin' green but she was like totally orange, dude!" and "Elevate my butt sir, you are Severe to the core!"

Nonetheless I think it's worth a try.  Not a magic bullet for an end to all hostilities, but like that joke, "What've you got when you have a dozen lawyers [no, make that agents] shackled together at the bottom of the ocean?"

A good start.

Send More Love

Just want to share with you a NY Times article sent to me by friend Emily, titled Iran Cinema Booms as People Crave Romantic Comedy.

This summer's top film in the Islamic Republic was Ceasefire, a saccharine comedy in which two sexy newly-weds get so competitive with each other that they have to consult a psychologist to avoid divorce.

"People who spend money and time coming to movies prefer to have fun and leave ... smiling instead of solving philosophical problems in dark theaters,'' said Pouria Vali, a 21-year-old regular filmgoer who has seen Ceasefire twice.

The article, written by Reuters (man, is that guy prolific!), goes on to cite a boom in Iranian cinema box office due to "homegrown" (made in Iran) films:

Romantic comedies fill a vacuum: people want to be amused but Hollywood's offerings often do not fit the bill in Iran, where censorship has been a constant factor since the 1979 revolution and even before.

State-imposed cultural restrictions mean many foreign films are heavily edited to meet the country's strict Islamic codes, or sometimes banned.

And although people can watch blockbuster comedies from the United States and elsewhere on pirated DVDs, many cannot understand them as they are not subtitled or dubbed.

War films had enjoyed a vogue but are no longer in favor, and art-house directors like Kiarostami haven't been popular with the mainstream audience.

"People had got fed up with stupid political games and they showed their lack of interest by turning their backs on movies as symbols of the political trends,'' said [a critic].

I was reminded by this of Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels.  Sullivan, a Hollywood director of comedies played by Joel McCrea who's been obsessed with making a big, meaningful, Important film, is stuck in prison... and he realizes at a movie showing, as his fellow inmates laugh uproariously at some silly slapstick on the screen, that comedy may actually be more important -- as a tonic for stressed humans -- than the pompous Seriosity he's been pursuing.

...So, for now Iranian cinema will continue to grow on the back of innocent romances.

"I have come to watch the cute superstars in Ceasefire and laugh a bit, and I think that is pretty much what everybody wants from a movie,'' said Tina, a 17-year-old student who skipped an afternoon language class to watch the film.

When I first read the article, I had a fleeting notion of finding the satirical parody angle for this post, say an American producer's notion of how to crack this market (she's a female UN weapons inspector, he's an Islamic radical, and hijinks ensue when...).  Emily, when she e-mailed the article, suggested that maybe my rom-com book would now get translated into Persian.

Yet in reading the story carefully, what's between the lines actually made me... sad.  These are the people, after all, that our current administration is bent on demonizing (i.e. the Axis of Evil).  But don't they sound, y'know, kind of like -- us?

At the risk of sounding like a total sentimental wussy-man, I'll note again that the basis of a good romantic comedy is a belief in the positive, transformative power of love.  Not having seen Ceasefire, I can't bank on it, but I'll bet it embraces that value, and that love as a powerful force for good is what audiences in Iran are hungry to experience.

Leaders have their own agendas.  The people?

"Most people like comedies because they do not have much to laugh about these days,'' said Navid Etminan, a 25-year-old student queuing up to watch the film.

Something tells me Iran's not the only country over there that could use some laughs and a little love right now.

There's an old joke from the days when the Voyager went into space -- a spacecraft launched into the outer bounds of the galaxy bearing music, text and photos of the best in Earth's culture, in the hopes of contacting life from elsewhere in the universe.   There was quite a range in the selections, expecially the music: Beethoven, folk music, Chuck Berry, gamelan tunes, Italian opera.  The art pictured encompassed everything from cave paintings to Picasso.

And as the story goes, scientists some time later received their historic first contact from extraterrestrials.  The aliens' message?  "Send more Chuck Berry."

I'm thinking now that if our ostensible enemies in the Middle East had a sense of what they've been missing, they might transmit a similar message:  "Send more Cary Grant."  Or Woody Allen, or Buster Keaton, or more Harry and Sally...

Every day I try to remember that they are us.  The same?  Of course not.  But there are common bonds, and maybe it's the job of writers and artists to remind the rest of us of how deep those bonds can be, and to suggest that on some basic, primal level, we are all in this together.  Rom-commers, I'd say we have our work cut out for us.

Writing Space

Nosey as the next guy, I suppose, ever-curious about the habits of my fellow humans in regards to how they do what they do insofar as it relates to how I’m doing what I do, I’ll confess that I read my share of interviews with writers, especially when the writers interviewed are those I admire and wish to steal from.

Not that the nuggets of insight one gains are always self-applicable – while it may be intriguing to learn that Kurt Vonnegut writes in longhand on lined yellow pads with Number 2 pencils only, no matter how many Number 2 pencils one may wear down to nubs or break on same lined yellow pads, you will not write like Kurt Vonnegut, no matter how short be your paragraphs.

Lord knows I’ve tried.

But so it goes.

Nonetheless, you can glean intriguing food for thought from a good At Home with Author So-and-So conversation, especially when it’s one writer interviewing another (The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers is a recent informative example). I find that reading this stuff does help kick-start my creativity, especially when the interrogated writers reveal who they steal from.

It’s also a fabulous way to procrastinate. You get the illusion of productivity (hey, I’m thinking about writing!) with none of the angst and pain of actually putting fingers to keyboard. How cool is that?

There is one trend, however, in this neck of the Rubbernecking Writers woods that gives even a first class procrastinator/technique-stealer like me pause. It comes from the land of How To Fill Up a Magazine Page, and We’ve Run Out of Ideas As a Deadline Approaches. It’s that occasionally asked question: What’s on your desk?

Granted, people do paw through Bob Dylan’s garbage, and some of the more sane among us have traipsed through Emily Dickinson’s digs to stare reverently at the quiet corner where She Did All That. But when one asks a contemporary writer, what’s on your desk? the results can be more about indulgence than entertainment and education.

The Believer magazine itself has done its share of running such pieces, and I’ve noticed that when you invite a bunch of writers to share with readers what’s on their desks, it becomes a weird kind of My Quirks Are Wilder Than Your Quirks competition. It’s as if the invited writers, well aware that they’ll be sharing the page with their peers, are bending over backwards to show off just how erudite, hip or determinedly uncool they can be.

Thus, one writer reveals that the piece de resistance crowning her desk's eclectic collection of intellectual frippery is the complete works of Foucault. In the original French. The next writer counters that he uses not a desk at all, but a chunk of quarry limestone and that his writing implement is a chisel.

Of course as a writing exercise, there’s something to be said for such an exploration. Describing the contents of one’s desktop inevitably reveals one’s character. This is what my dear friend Barbara Abercrombie was up to, in a recent blog post, wherein she invited her readers to answer That Question. Good grist for the creative writing mill.

Though I must say, perusing some of the comments she got, I was taken aback by the magnitude of itemization. Couple of writers have so much on their desks that I don’t know how they find their computers, let alone get any writing done. But far be it for me to cast aspersions on what may float another writer’s scribe-mobile. And alright, I’m game -- in the interests of community spirit and full disclosure, here is What's Been On My Desk, Until Recently:

My journals, 1996-2006 (Canadian Blueline notebooks, series A9)

File folders: Clippings, Plot Ideas, Plots Against America, Agent Jokes, To Blog, Not To Blog, The Great American Blog Post (14th draft)

Jar of Venus Paradise coloring pencils, minus #7 Cerulean

Broken Magic 8 Ball w/message “OUTLOOK NOT PROMISING” stuck in murky little window, post-it attached to side reading “DON’T BELIEVE IT!”

How the Big Guys Do It, Vol. 5

A motorized slinky

The complete works of Jessica Alba

Manscaper eyebrow tweezer

The Good Stuff, in prescription vial labeled “Happy Time”

Chelsea Hotel phone pad from room shared by Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin w/doodles and phone number of Ray’s Pizza, framed

East of the island of lost business cards, by the river of random receipts: one square inch of mud from the Mudd Club (NYC, 1979)

Mensa membership card, revoked

Ooh-la-la, Monsieur! Magazine, 1958-1963, all photos in the original French

Hadley Hemingway’s recipe for hangover

A key to PeeWee’s Playhouse

Complete works of William Burroughs, w/syringe, rubber hose, burnt spoon, plastic bag containing old roaches

Left big toe of Jimmy Hoffa, in formaldehyde jar

Candy corn

My pet ferret, Albert (that’s Al-bare, s’il vous plait)

Andy Warhol (stuffed)

A small Zambian village called Ikkeekki

Spear heads, antelope and goat droppings (removed weekly)

Encased in glass shrine: original nose of Meg Ryan

Fart from Blazing Saddles, bronzed

The thing with feathers, plucked

My blue coffee mug.

And that was merely the left side of the desk, mind you.

Then, a little while ago, I had an epiphany about needing room for my mind to move, and thus everything listed was excised from my work space.

Today it’s currently stripped down to journal, computer and three colored pens in holder (and the blue coffee mug), because actually, I don’t believe in writing amidst such clutter. I can say with considerable pride that there is nothing on my desk presently that isn’t absolutely utilitarian – except, hang on, underneath the blue mug is a coaster, not just any coaster – it’s from The Grasshopper coffee shop in Amsterdam, and thus a keepsake and talisman of one very inspirational encounter…

Evidently I am not immune, after all, to the collecting of mementos as psychic keystones of my writing arena. So alright, might as well throw my lot in, here’s my version of that hoary query for the readers of Living the Rom-Com: if one were to hold a gun to your desk, what is the one object (of totemic, sentimental, spiritually charged and/or practical significance) you keep in your writing space, which you absolutely could not bear to have blown away?

The Love of My Life

Apparently we don't have a new Cary Grant because, according to a few of my astute readers, we're no longer living in a Cary Grant world. You may have noticed that sophisticated romance of the Grant-ian ilk is a thing of the past? For that matter, according to the NY Times even the seemingly venerable institution of marriage is going by the boards: this recent article notes that the percentage of people who have never been married (and don't intend to be) has risen sharply over the past few decades.

Well, tell it to my folks. The Merry Mernits, as Dick and DeeAnn are known (this nickname I gave them long ago has stuck, for good reason) will be celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary next year, and unlike many couples who are together simply because... they're together, my mom and dad are like, still young and in love.

I know! How bizarre is that?! And boy, did it deeply warp my perspective, growing up -- if you're wondering what turned a healthy heterosexual male into such a rom-com maven, there's your smoking gun.

The Merry Mernits were just out here for a vacation. We did what we usually do together: eat, talk, eat, go to movies, eat, troll museums and eat at the beach (I am happier for their visit and four pounds heavier). Through it all they continued to treat each other, whether lovingly or crankily -- they are human -- as the prized center of each other's universe. As per my increased dedication to honor the ones we love while they're still around to enjoy the honoring, I'd like to share with you a flash fiction piece I wrote some years ago about my parents and the effect their romantic bent has had on my own, entitled The Love of My Life.

So as the story goes, Dad was never supposed to be there that night. He was just picking his friend Tony Lipkin up from the party, picking him up from one Christmas party on the way to another. It had been arranged before, the way a couple guys arrange these things, like: I'll pick you up over there 'round nine o'clock, listen for the horn around nine, I'll be outside--and then we can go to the other party, the big bash, the where we're gonna get really loaded or lucky or both party, so— nine o'clock, right?

As the story goes, Dad was out there like they'd planned, nine o'clock, toot-toot and he had the motor running, but no Tony. Jeez, Tony, come on! and he waited, hit the horn again maybe, but of course--maybe on account of it was cold? I never got more details on what could have been a snowy night (it would definitely be snowing in the movie version) or maybe it was impatience because he knew who was going to be at this other party -- but we certainly never heard about that detail, on account of he went in.

Dad went inside to fetch Tony Lipkin, into this house where he hardly knew anybody, he was just going in there to get Tony out of there, when it happened. You know how it goes, you know: across a crowded room? There she was. The eyes, the beat, the silent meeting, the accidental instant that meant everything--I mean, that's why I'm here telling you this, because Dad went to pick up Tony Lipkin on the way to somewhere else--so okay, maybe you can understand this thing about me and invitations, about me and parties and social events in general, it's said I'll go anywhere, "He'll go to the opening of an envelope" someone said about me once.

But can you blame me? Over fifty years of happy married life, while couples crashed and burned around them with the frequency of car wrecks, fifty-plus years still young and in love to this day. I actually caught them making out, giggling and rolling around fully clothed on their bed in the middle of the afternoon, and this was the week of Dad's seventy-sixth birthday.

Parties? I go.

...Of course, there's always the anxiety over whether this is the party I'm supposed to be at, or whether it was the one I just stopped by on the way to this one. It can really get confusing, which accounts for the odd scenes, like:

"What's with that guy?"

"What guy?"

"The guy who's standing outside in the driveway, why doesn't he come in?"

"I dunno. Yo, guy! The party's in here!"

"Weird, he's just standing out there, he must be waiting for someone--oh, here he comes, yo guy, have a beer!"

And then, like five minutes later, it's: "What's with that guy?"

"What guy?"

"The guy who was standing outside in the driveway until he finally came in."

"Oh, that guy, yeah, so?"

"He just left."

"He left?"

"Yeah, looked around the room and boom--he was outta here, dude, what's up with that?"

Across so many crowded rooms I have cast my fevered gaze. It's the hope, the hope, the hope that burns eternal, despite all the gazes that have met with glazed indifference, the looks that went nowhere or worse, some place truly awful: the affairs that were really like one long morning after, hungover, thinking what was I thinking?

The dances with the hats on, the landing in heaps, the things that got broken, the stains that never came out, the lingering smell of smoke in the air, the damn song that was ours (and ours, and ours) that I can't hear again without grinding my teeth. The cars I've gone through, speeding from one gathering to another, with hope the bright headlights... The disappointments I can deal with, it's the hope that drives me crazy.

But maybe the worst was that party I had: martinis in the fall, colored lights in the trees. It was late in the evening and we were down to the party core, sitting on the front steps in the woozy dregs, when a car pulled up and this woman got out--sweet pale face swathed in tender blonde hair--peering at us there, uncertain by the gate, "Is this Pete's party?" and no, amidst laughter, some confusion about addresses, oh it must be down the block (one of my guests had noticed the cars parked at someone else's gathering) and with a smile at me, our eyes meeting for a moment, she backed away even as a drink was offered, then she was in her car and pulling off. Because I'd been too slow to get it.

And I've been looking for her everywhere, for years and years since. That woman! She was the love of my life.

(c) 2006 Billy Mernit (all rights reserved)

Calling Cary Grant

What does a woman want? 

I always figured that a pretty good guess at the answer would be "Cary Grant," and according to Belinda Luscombe from Time magazine, this is still generally the case, now more than ever.  In her article (brought to us courtesy of Chris Soth) Where Have All the Cary Grants Gone? she makes a very convincing case for the current crop of romantic comedy heroes falling woefully short of the long established Cary Grant standard:

They are, all of them, spectacular weenies... The men are about as useful as a pitcher of spit, while the women have careers and well-furnished apartments and vast freighters of wisdom.

She goes on to posit various theories for why the on-screen love interests for Uma Thurman, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jennifer Aniston, et al, tend to be unsuccessful slackers.

Is it because guys with real jobs and some sense of purpose, let alone captains of industry, simply aren't funny? 

I'm gonna go with... no.  Because there's actually a longstanding tradition of successful males being funny in rom-coms (Grant himself most often played powerful men; Wall Street hot-shot Harrison Ford in Working Girl comes to mind, and more recently, the service rom-com Hitch presented Will Smith as a very successful go-to guy).

Most of the men in these movies are under 40. Could it be that a generation raised by women who worked at paying jobs before pulling a second shift as homemakers simply find any situation in which women are not heroically gifted and energetic to be too much of a suspension of disbelief?

Again, I'm thinking... nuh-uh, because 40 Year Old Virgin, Wedding Crashers, 50 First Dates and any number of contemporary rom-coms have featured heroines who were not dynamos in the workplace.

What Luscombe is overlooking, I think, is a basic given of the genre: it was founded on a reversal (i.e. the screwball comedy's at-the-time novel and amusing notion of woman chasing man) and has always thrived on reversal variations to stay fresh.  Thus, My Super Ex-Girlfriend's gag of the feminized male (Luke Wilson and Eddie Izzard left holding the handbags while their girlfriends fly off to save the world) and Failure To Launch's joke of "grown man as perpetual live-at-home adolescent," et al.

In other words, whatever the current norm seems to be in terms of gender role tendency, the romantic comedy will turn it on its head for a laugh... with the punch line, more often than not, an assessment of "how things really are." Mr. and Mrs. Smith, for example, while having fun with the reversal of "seemingly dull suburbanite couple as James Bond-like assassins" mirrors a familiar truism about contemporary marriages, where dual-income coupledom can lead to spouses living entirely separate (secret) lives.

Luscombe asks a more interesting question when she notes that the current crop of loser leading men brings movie fantasy way too close to reality:

But who... wants to be reminded of real men? Why do we have to keep seeing in movies the people we sneaked out of the house to get away from?

Well, again, most contemporary rom-coms are attempting to say hello to their demographic.  Why shouldn't a current comedy reflect the cultural moment, where in fact the sexes are more polarized and confused than ever, as traditional gender roles are losing ground and the institution of marriage itself is embattled?

Yet I do get what Luscombe is missing.  In a time where what a man is, or is supposed to be feels far less easily definable than it used to be, it's only natural that women (and men in the audience looking for role models) would seek refuge in a comforting romantic fantasy.  The search for another Cary feels legitimate.

I think, however, that Luscombe is mixing up role with persona.  Any actor can play a pirate (role) but only Johnny Depp can do it fey (persona).  So it seems she's asking for the men in today's movies to be inhabiting different occupations, or places in the power hierarchy, when she really wants them to be... Cary Grant.  Which is what, exactly?

Cary Grant, while always playing Cary Grant, actually had considerable range in terms of roles.  He played weenie on occasion (e.g. his delightfully clueless academic in Bringing Up Baby) and could go dark and morally ambiguous (e.g. his tough, cynical government agent in Notorious).   But implicit in his appeal, especially when he played successful men, was a uniquely confident quality of remove and independence.  The reason so many women chased him in film after film was that he rarely chased.  The quintessential Grant stance could be expressed as "come to me if you'd like, but it'll have to be on my terms."

Here's how I characterized the Cary Grant paradigm in Writing the Romantic Comedy:

Never too sophisticated to get slapstick silly, he was as calculatedly smart as he was capable of spontaneous lunacy; no matter how feminized he was forced to be, he remained fundamentally, admirably male to the core; and as involved as he may have gotten in the action, he maintained a certain ironic detachment, a cool self-awareness that made him an ideal audience surrogate.

And hey, if you can be All That and be convincing, then you can play a slacker, drifter, or bozo and still convincingly get the girl.  I think the real question, in terms of whether or not current romantic comedies are fulfilling the needs of its audience, is not about the characters, the kinds of roles being written, but about the actors.  I see the "where are the Cary Grants" question as literal, i.e. Who's on tap right now who can really fill those shoes?

Hugh Grant had a pretty good run as the Brit variation; Tom Hanks has done, but is perhaps done with, his all-American version.  Is the bewildered, beleagured, perennially uncool Ben Stiller really the best we can do, as today's viable, believable romantic comedy lead?

In posts past, I've posited Rachel McAdams as a possible Next Julia.  So who do you think might serve as the next Cary?  Clearly we'll never have the original again, but who's around who can at least take a shot at the crown?  Living the Rom-Com wants to know.

Dog Day Opportune

The star Sirius is rising and setting with the sun, and the planet's at a deep-fry tilt.  But you knew that, right?

Riiiiight.  Dog Days.  Dude, when that dog star gets into this particular whacked conjunction, you might as well... hug a fan, take three showers a day, go into the movie theater early just for the extra AC time... and forget about doing just about anything else.

Once August gets underway, most of Europe hangs up a "gone fishing" sign and a good deal of America does the same.  And anybody who's in The Business understands that to try and get something done (i.e. anything career-furthering) is just silly.

At least, that's the perceived wisdom.  But just to be persnickety (there's nothing like record heat and the prospect of nothing doing to make a curmudgeon like myself be obstreperously persnickety) I'll note that there are some gigs that do not follow the standard calendar.  Creative types in general aren't known for confining themselves to the trajectory of the big hand and the small, and if there is one job that truly transcends the usual mundane strictures of time and space, it belongs to... oh, you're way ahead of me, I know...

Freakin' writers.   

Not exactly 9 to 5, is it?  Or within the school-day sphere, with holidays, or -- do writers even take vacations?  I think that's what we supposedly do when we're seriously unemployed, but face it, scribes: isn't every vacation really just an excuse to gather new material while ye may?

It's conceivable, especially this summer, that the Dog Days will find even an industrious writer floored, in a pool of sweat, incapable of even picking up the remote control, let alone a pen.  But for the genuinely dedicated among us (read: compulsive, neurotic, unhinged, etc.), this dead highway stretch of August can suggest not inertia, but a pro-active opportunity.

Oh, shoot me now, you may say (or perhaps you'd like to turn the barrel in my direction), but I say: here are three things a writer could do with this inglorious four weeks of what's commonly thought of as a big fat nada.

The first will sound completely counter-intuitive.

1)  Take a meeting.

Am I nuts?  What am I saying?  Well, put the gun down, cowboy, as I first lasso a prevalent myth and bring it to ground.  The myth says that everyone in the business leaves town in August and no deals get made.  While that's true in a general sense, I ask you this: when is everybody in town?

This funny/sad, all too true and thus fairly brilliant article from the L.A. Weekly, written by Nikki Finke, entitled Slacker Town: Why Hollywood Gets No Work Done, should be required reading for anyone who wants to (translation: has to) work here.  It lays out the real working schedule of The Biz, from the time off round the Fourth of July to the "real" August vacation, to the brief back-to-the-office moment that precedes the Jewish Holidays, quickly segueing into Turkey Time, the Christmas-New Years marathon and the -- oh, hold those calls we're off to Sundance moment in January. 

Read it and do the math, and you'll see that the actual total of real human beings sitting behind desks and working days in Hollywood each year comes out to something like six weeks.

Okay, so now that we're clear on that, here's what I heard from a working writer in town.  He's got a movie coming out and wanted to look into the possibility of a sequel, should the Cinegods so bless him with success.  Know what he found out when he tried to round up his usual suspects to have a meeting?

Easy.  Because many people who are in town, who haven't yet hit the Hamptons, etc., are showing up in their suites every day with nothing to do.  My writer friend not only got his meeting, it was lengthy.  The execs didn't want it to end!

So, crazy as it may sound, August could be the time to follow up on that agent who said he'd like to hear a pitch, the studio exec who's been sitting on a dormant project, the producer who was looking for a cheap genre programmer.  You might just find yourself in the company of someone with time on their hands, in a relatively relaxed state of mind, no less.

It's worth a shot.  In the Dog Days, you could luck into a meeting with someone who'll actually listen to you -- precisely because they're relieved of the usual call list and pressure-cooker stress of the actual few weeks a year when they're working like a dog.

2)  Find out what your story's about.

I've often commented on the rash of Draftitis that afflicts many screenwriters -- a disease that causes them, ostrich-like, to stick their heads into the thicket of a draft-in-progress and rarely lift it up to get a larger perspective on their work.  All too often, writers are so obsessed with getting their draft "done" that they don't take the time to really understand what, in fact, they're doing.

Here's my radical suggestion for writers who are in the midst of writing things this summer: put the draft down.

That's right, miss -- step away from the computer keyboard, move back from that desk -- I need for you to leave the pages over there, please.  Can you do that for me?  Thank you.  Now...  Instead of micro-managing the inner workings of the plot point on p.57 (why is p.57 always such a bitch? because you need to get to the other side), instead of reworking that line of dialogue into fine-tuned paper shreddings... leave it all alone, and... think about it.

But-but-but --ssssh!  What the Dog Days can be good for is a good walk.  A nice swim, a ride on your bike -- anyplace away from the draft on the desk, so that your subconscious has a chance to breathe and so that your -- I dunno, call it Larger Mind, or perhaps Fred -- that ineffable Other You in you can process the work, and maybe tell you something you need to know about it.

Some believe that any story worth telling can be boiled down to one basic conflict between two protagonists; many believe that any story asks one essential question that gets answered in its telling.  I believe that all too often what trips us up in the writing process is that we get lost in the wilderness of story detail... when what we need to be doing is defining the basic what of what it's all about.

Can you do that yet?  What's your story's essential conflict between two primary characters?  What's the one core question it's asking?  Can you articulate the story's most vital and specific subject? 

If you can't, you may be merely tap-dancing in the dark, no matter how high your page count.  So my thought is, take advantage of this August down-time to take a mini-vacation from the draft itself and do what's ultimately an even more important job.  You can do it anywhere, anytime, but if you put these kind of "what is the story I'm writing?" questions in the foreground of your writing thought (as opposed to where the comma goes in one line of narrative), what you learn can be invaluable.

And speaking of getting out of the house, in your Dog Days, you might also want to forget about writing altogether.

3)  Live a little.

Finally, what every writer needs to do, once in awhile, is to have a life.  You know, that thing you do when you're not actually in front of the journal or keyboard?

It's a wild and wacky notion, but here and there you might want to actually join the human race at large and get away from it all.  This August, consider using some Dog Days as an opportunity to have a new experience.  Take that swing-dance class, learn how to surf -- mow a lawn, for chrissake, but whatever it may be, maybe try for once to leave the brain at home. 

Get physical, get loose, get lost -- have a good time, odd an idea as that may seem.  Find out what they mean when they say, Every dog must have its day. 

'Cause otherwise, after the summer has finally simmered down to a less pant and whine-ful heat, damn, dog -- what are you going to have lived through to write about?