Living the Romantic Comedy

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.

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

Clouds in My Coffee #14: Under the Influence of Jim

Jim Harrison has a new book out, and in the midst of working on a memoir-critique this week, I found myself reminiscing about a long-ago meeting with the man.  Like so many of these Clouds pieces, this is much more about me than it is about him, but as it's also romantic-comedic, I submit to you...

[Another installment in the ongoing true life adventures of Periphery Man, who has had myriad peculiar encounters with celebrities, while not being a celebrity himself.]

During the Eighties I was married to woman named Sue, and we were as poor as factory mice (this being the decade when so much American industry began moving overseas).  I churned out a series of romance novels under a female nom de plume to keep us afloat, while Sue, working at the original Dean & DeLuca’s in Soho, filched the occasional gourmet item to augment our austerity diet.  We generally couldn’t afford a dinner out, but we had connoisseur-approved sun-dried tomatoes at home. 

One of her co-workers, soon a close friend and complicit in these minor thefts of imported extra-virgin olive oil and the like, was Jamie Harrison, daughter of Jim, himself as famed a gourmet as he was a master of the literary western novel (Legends of the Fall, et al).  One summer Jamie (then a fledgling, now successful novelist in her own right) invited us to visit her and her family in the wilds of Montana. 

We drove from the airport up to their place in a rent-a-heap so trashed that we expected to lift its rusty hood and discover a caged couple of pedal-pushing squirrels as its motor.  I was wearing too-tight just-bought blue jeans, because I’d suddenly realized I didn’t own a pair, and how could I greet Jim Harrison wearing my usual urban pleated pants over my loafers?  Might as well hang a ‘Wussy NYC intellectual’ sign on my belt. 

I was profoundly uncomfortable, physically and psychically, en route to meeting this mythic cattle-punching poet, whose prose spoke of riding a Percheron through the chaparral on the arroyo (I’m sorry, the what? Through the where, now?), and who would surely see by my outfit that I was no cowboy.  So Sue and I were bickering most of the way, punctuated by our mobile junk-pile’s burps of auto-indigestion.  By the time we’d nearly come to the end of Jamie’s directions, we were in full marital fight mode, which only made me more anxious.  “Are we going to be okay?” I asked my wife.  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “Although it would be even better if I could pretend I’d never met you.”

We pulled into the driveway of the Harrisons’ appropriately isolated, rustic ranch house, and I saw the hulking figure of the great man trundling toward us with a greasy-looking paper bag in his mitts.  No sooner had I climbed out of our heap than he thrust it under my face, grinning, with a cry of “Fish!”  I passed my first test of manliness by not reeling back from the bag’s stench, and made sounds of savvy appreciation.  Intending to make a bouillabaisse for dinner, Harrison had evidently just caught this batch, perhaps by diving into treacherous whitewater and grabbing the trout with his bare hands.

Inside the house the Harrisons tried to put their guests at ease, but for me this was impossible.  Anyone who’s been married is familiar with that frustrating and frightening phenomenon: how it feels to embark on a high-stakes social mission when you’ve lost your most trusted ally and back-up.  The challenge is made more horrible by the necessity of you and your mate having to fake a united front.

For the first hour or so it was touch and go.  But the rapport between Sue and Jamie, the calm exuded by Harrison’s gracious, beautiful wife Linda, the lurching garrulousness of the writer himself, and generous helpings of fine wine from what he gleefully referred to as “the Warner Brothers cellar” (he’d sold some early works to that studio for a small fortune) diffused our tensions, and soon other guests were arriving to fill in the gaps. 

By nightfall, bouillabaisse bubbling and steaming up the kitchen like a benign warlock’s cauldron stew, the house was in full, boisterous dinner party swing.  Somewhere in the midst of the casual revelry, Sue and I came face to face in a quiet corner of the living room, alone for the first time since our rancorous arrival.  The olive branch I proffered came like second nature to the likes of me, as the dedicated romantic comedy-ist male’s go-to question in such circumstances is: What would Cary Grant do?  Remembering Sue’s parting shot, I feigned flirtatious intrigue. “The face is familiar,” I said.  “Have we met?”

My wife knew her cue.  “Sue,” she said, extending her hand.  I shook it and introduced myself.  “A pleasure.  So… how do you know our hosts?”  I was rewarded with a familiar sparkle reappearing in her eyes, and her little snort of a laugh.  “Actually, I’m a friend of Jamie’s from New York,” she said, and before we could continue the charade in earnest, Jamie herself called her away.

In the movie version of this sequence, we’d have played perfect strangers to the hilt all evening, never dropping character.  In real life we soon fell back into our real-life roles – but with a difference.  With a little aside here and playful private exchange there, we kept the conceit alive as a game between us, stoking the pretense that we’d only just become acquainted at this dinner party. 

Harrison had a colorfully diverse and good time-loving group of friends, and the stew was stupendous. Buoyed by my ongoing flirtation with that cute woman named Sue and various combinations of controlled substances, once I got comfortable with his wall-eyed gaze ("My left eye is blind and jogs like/a milky sparrow in its socket") and accepted the fact that he really didn't care about either my literary or agricultural pedigree, I actually shared a few laughs with our host.

The rest of the night is a blur in addled remembrance, but I do clearly recall standing up through the sun roof of Jamie’s car in the moonlight as she drove us to their guest cabin, yelling and nearly getting decapitated by a tree branch as Sue and Jamie shrieked and laughed within.  And then Sue and I enjoyed the most intense and abandoned sex of our married life.

That’s how romantic comedy (and Jim Harrison's fish) saved my first marriage.  For the moment.

Mazursky

It starts with a joke -

MEL BROOKS: You're really writing a book about Paul Mazursky?

SAM WASSON: Yes.

MEL BROOKS: I will do everything in my power to stop you from writing this book.

- and from this "Jewish Foreward" onward, the laughs, along with copious insights on directing, acting, screenwriting and living flow on, virtually non-stop.  Paul on Mazursky by Sam Wasson, a "the director speaks" book modeled on the genre classic On Cukor By Gavin Lambert, is both the next best thing to actually sitting down with Mazursky himself (who can often be found shpritzing on "box office, health - generally bad - and pussy" with his legendary table of old friends at the Farmers Market in L.A.), and something more.

Wasson, a prodigious researcher (his book on Breakfast at Tiffany's, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. suggests not so much a fly-on-the-wall POV, but that of a winged Wikipediac) didn't merely sit down with the estimable writer-director and let his digital recorder roll.  His own knowledge and appreciation of all things Mazursky occasionally raises his subject's eyebrows ("Wow, you know your shit," Mazursky comments, early on) and adds an unusual level of keen comprehension to Mazursky's own admirably self-aware reminiscences and appraisals.  Here's an exchange between the two men on the director's breakthrough debut film, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice:

SW: One of the things that distinguishes Bob & Carol from the comedies of today is that it's not cynical. These people are never criticized or humiliated for the sake of a laugh.

PM: No, no! I love them! I love these people! But I hate to use the word love in a trite way... I guess what I mean is, I can understand them, and I take them seriously... I try to be compassionate. I try to laugh with compassion.

It goes on. And it's telling how hard I found it just to pull a few lines from this conversation, since everything they get into from here - the story of how Mazursky coaxed an apprehensive Natalie Wood into shooting the film's infamous "orgy" scene, the intimate discussion of Mazurksy's use of uninterrupted master shots, key to his entire aesthetic - is fascinating.  An observation of Wasson's leads to the core of what Mazursky is about, as he notes that the director has just repeated a line from the opening of Bob & Carol, "There are no rules."

SW: To a certain extent, that's also at the heart of most of your movies. They are about freedom, the fear of it, the love of it.

PM: You start out thinking there are rules, but as life goes on you find out it doesn't work that way.

SW: That's frightening.

PM: And funny. [Beat] But I do love long scenes because long scenes allow you to see behavior, the strangeness of it, the wonderfulness of it.

And we're only on page 45, which is a mere page away from Mazursky's tale of how he saved director John Ford's life at a George Cukor dinner party.  The true cinefile (c'est moi) doesn't know how to stop reading, and eventually gives in, putting everything else aside for some forty-plus years of raconteur-age.  Which is a considerable accomplishment, given that I've only been a sometimes fan of Mazursky's work.

I've responded, of course, to his best-known pictures (a handful of really good movies, An Unmarried Woman among them, and one arguable masterpiece, Enemies: A Love Story), but it took reading Paul on Mazursky to send me back to the rest of Mazursky's oeuvre for a deeper look.  I'll be curious to see if the films are actually as great as this book makes them sound, but meanwhile, what's undeniable is the breadth of great performances Mazurksy has gotten out of his casts, on-screen, and on these pages - Lord, what a storyteller the man can be.

Wasson makes his job seem easy, while he cannily shapes this portrait of an aging artist who somehow managed to always do things his way into a narrative that's as unsentimental as it is ultimately moving.  A line from Wasson's critique of Unmarried could serve to sum up the book's approach: "...an anthem to resilience played at the low volume of everydayness."

This year Mazursky, now 81, was honored by the L.A. Film Critics Association with their Lifetime Achievement Award.  That's only right.  I'm a big fan of giving the greats their due while they're still among us, and Paul on Mazursky does this exceedingly well.

 

The Awesomeness of Audrey

Sam Wasson's just-released and delightful book on the making of Breakfast at Tiffany's is so chock-full of great anecdotes that you're sorry when it's over.  For awhile, you are there - a privileged insider-witness to a marvelous bygone moment in moviemaking history - and it's with a feeling of bittersweet regret that you step from its closing pages back into a realm of noisy 3D sequels and superfluous comic book franchises. 

Everything you'd want to know and more is delivered in Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, from the reader's coverage producer Marty Jurow was first handed, re: adapting Capote's book for the screen ("In any event this is more of a character sketch than a story. NOT RECOMMENDED") to the guest list for the post-premiere party (including such unlikely elbow-rubbers as Dennis Hopper, Buster Keaton, Charles Laughton, and Jane Mansfield).

A delicious through-line in the book is how close the movie came to not coming out so well as it did, with such jaw-droppers as everyone's resistance to having Henry Mancini write a song for the thing (eventual collaborator Johnny Mercer's original lyric, we learn, one of three eventually presented to Mancini, was called "Blue River").  An intimate exploration of the myriad personalities in conflict and collusion when a casual classic is being created, the book is cannily adept at detailing the logic of the so many minute decisions that lead to what we now accept as inevitable.  Of course Audrey Hepburn played Holly Golightly, you think, until you hear how hard Capote lobbied for Marilyn Monroe.

Wasson is a formidable researcher.  He doesn't so much know where the bodies are buried as he knows where the hearts and minds are hidden.  The book is written like a good novel, taking you inside the consciousness of its characters with an impressive, insight-laden believability (Fifth Avenue's only recent movie-book rival in this regard is Mark Harris' fascinating Pictures at a Revolution).  And Wasson's notes on how he arrived at, and can justify, his leaps of imagination and empathy are almost as interesting as the text itself.

Of course the book has its thesis and theories as well, positing Breakfast at Tiffany's and Hepburn's stylish, fresh, era-defining performance as a watershed moment in cultural history.  Having made much the same point re: the film's effect on the rom-com genre in my Writing the Romantic Comedy, I was happy to see Wasson really run with it, but that's not the total extent of my personal pleasure here.  Full disclosure: the prodigiously talented Sammy is a friend and neighbor (though if I didn't love the book, I wouldn't be going on like this), and he was good enough to answer a few questions about Breakfast at Tiffany's for Living the RomCom.

Q: What's at least one thing you didn't know about BAT that you learned during the course of your research?

A: A lot.  For one, they shot two separate endings.  Screenwriter George Axelrod's original ending was more in line with the melancholy spirit of the novel.  The cat recovered, Holly and Fred sort of walk into the sunset.  There's no romance, no swelling orchestra, just a feeling of intimate resignation.  When it came down to it, Blake Edwards was dissatisfied with what he had shot and in the final moments, rewrote the ending (much to George's dismay) into the intensely romantic finale that exists today.

Q: In what ways may BAT have influenced today's romantic comedies?

A: After BAT, love, not marriage, became the goal.  look back on some of those Rock Hudson and Doris Day pictures and you'll see they all end with a sense of husband and wife, if not actual marriage itself.  Because it allowed for a promiscuous heroine - one who's looking for belonging, not a partner - BAT freed up screenwriters to invent other impediments to love, challenges beyond simply getting to the altar.  Sadly, I think today's romantic comedies have gone back to the Doris Day/Rock Hudson model.  The Weddingness is all.

Q: How do you think the film holds up today?

A: Well, everyone has their own take on this, but - don't shoot me for saying this - I happen to think Mickey Rooney's offensive performance, which is probably the most out of touch aspect of the film, deserves a little reconsideration.  As cringe-worthy as it is, it's also a carefully realized comic invention.  Remove the political incorrectness, and what you have is a full-bodied, fully-committed, full-throttle expression of bombast - and precision.  It's a bit of Blake Edwards' invention that I wish could be appreciated as much as it deserves to be reviled.

Q: What do you think a contemporary rom-com writer might learn and put to good use from seeing BAT?

A: George Axelrod found a new conflict, a new reason why these two people couldn't be together right away.  Simply put, he broke the mold.  Today's rom-com writers might think to experiment with what at first seems not to work, as opposed to leaping into what has worked many, many times before.  Also, in BAT, I think you see these two people fall in love.  You can actually see it on screen!  Too many of today's rom-coms are satisfied merely to show two hot people, with no sense of emotional or intellectual communion, fight, reconcile, and kiss - as if that could stand in for the real thing.  BAT is a reminder that rom-coms are not merely about would-be lovers overcoming obstacles, but about two people deeply enthralled with one another.  After all, if they aren't enthralled, they're hardly motivated to go through fire - and if they don't go through fire, well, how in love can they be?  Part of what has made BAT such an enduring classic is that, like It Happened One Night and Annie Hall (and all the other greats), the romance - the feelings - are on the screen.

What he said, is all I can add, and what she did is really the final word.  If you're a fan of Audrey Hepburn, the book is a must-have, because Sammy's astute take on what she was about, what she was up against, and how she delivered the goods strikes me as definitive.  Her spritely, near-angelic spirit comes alive in the pages of this eminently devour-able book, which is kind of an awesome dividend.  It's in stores this week.

Us

Now and then people ask me, "What is the biggest mistake writers make when they're writing a romantic comedy?"

My answer is: They put too much emphasis on the obstacles—the things that keep their protagonists apart.  Because actually what's more important, and in my view, the primary job of a rom-com writer, is to convince the audience that these two people must become a couple.  What's going to make us root for the leads in a romantic comedy, what's going to make us care about whether or not they hook up in the end, is a keen sense that they really do belong together.

Which brings us to an age-old query:  Why do two people fall for each other?  What makes a relationship work?  What is this thing we call love?

Curiosity about this subject has impelled John Bowe (editor, journalist, and co-screenwriter of Basquiat) to publish Us: Americans Talk About Love.  This treasure trove of a book, a follow up to Bowe's Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, offers up a myriad of takes on the  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love issue.  Relevant auteur Judd Apatow has graced its jacket with a That's what I was thinking! quote:  "Every story is a small movie I wish someone would make."

Right.  Because another mistake that aspiring rom-com writers make is that they try to write Movie Love, as opposed to love as it's found in real life.  The real-life stories told here easily trump half the cinematic love hooey I've seen in recent years.

The key to Bowe's success is diversity.  In his preface to this collection of "oral reports from across the United States," Bowe acknowledges the effort he and his collaborators made to find a representative sampling of this country's panoply of people - young, old, black, white, et al (a Salon interview with Bowe elaborates on their methodology).  One of the big kicks in reading it comes from the jaw-dropping contrast between one person's experience of love and another's.

For example, here's a moment from the tale of Colorado's Jeremy Vanhaitsma, age 30, who staged an elaborate proposal for his beloved that included bringing her into a small rural church, where he'd prepared a basin of water and a towel:

I asked her if I could wash her feet.  It's just a symbol, an example of the love the Lord gave to show the full extent of His love.  This was completely new.  She had never had anybody wash her feet.  I shared my heart about why I wanted to do it: so that our relationship would be sealed, so we could serve one another, and so that we could go out and do that to others.

Jeremy's story is directly followed by that of Dominic Sclafani, age 30, from Arizona, which begins:

I like people who play.  People who are fun and who punch me at random moments and who do weird shit.  The first time I met Chyna, we were at a rave.  She bit me.  I was totally into it.  I'm like, "Fucking bite me harder!"  And she got all excited and I got all excited, because I like being bitten and scratched up.  That was orgasmic.

Diversity, dude.  It's typical of this shrewdly organized collection, which moves from stories told by people who've been in love a relatively short time to people who've loved for a lifetime.  And some of this stuff is harrowing - brutal, scary, painful material, smarting with truths that are worlds apart from your typical rose-colored gift card homilies.

There's something about people telling their stories out loud - people who aren't writers - that pierces the fabric between storyteller and audient in a uniquely compelling way.  Like Celia Menendez, 17, of San Antonio, who starts with: "This is the first time I've ever been in love and I'm still feeling miserable."  Later on, she unloads an observation topped with a casual throwaway line that would turn any novelist or screenwriter I know green with envy:

I would never have stayed up on the phone until one in the morning, just talking about nothing, with anyone else - even my best, best friends.  But him, even if I couldn't physically be with him, I could sit on the phone with him for hours.  I think it's part of the reason I failed calculus.

These oral reports are like short stories, like movies, only more incredible, in that they really happened.  Ultimately, that's a big part of what you're left with: the wonder.  There are reasons upon reasons here for "why I fell in love" and "what love means to me" - if you're writing a romantic comedy, dramedy, or tragedy, I can't think of a better contemporary source book for such thoughts - yet in the end, the fundamental mystery remains.  As one Shawn Whitworth of New York, New York concludes:

I would like to choose to believe that I have loved or that I can and am capable of love.  I'm almost sure that it exists.  But if it slapped me in the face, I couldn't tell you what it was.

Us can be as bracing as a kick in the head, and it tells us a lot about what love is.

[Photos from: lovescape.org, 101lovetips.com, timpaphotography.files.wordpress.com, piratesandfireflies.wordpress.com]

Auteur, Auteur!

The way he chooses his language and his descriptive phrases is amazingly perceptive and helpful.  And if you don't listen very carefully, you might miss it.  Bob directs using active verbs.  You can play an active verb.  You can't play an inactive one.  I don't remember what the specifics of the scene were, but Altman beckoned me over.  He thought for a minute - I was playing a scene with another actor - and he said, "Crowd him."  It was so clear and so defined and so unmistakable what he wanted from that scene and from that character that he made it easy to play.  -- Paul Newman

I'm in love again, and it's Mitchell Zuckoff's fault.  His Robert Altman: The Oral Biography is so compulsively readable, such a great marriage of substance and style, that I'm upset - coming into the home stretch of over 500 pages - to know it'll soon be over.  I can't think of the last time I so hungrily devoured a book on the movies (no, wait, I can, but at any rate...).

How else to do the definitive book on this great American auteur than to have his story told by a vast chorus of voices, including the director's own?  It's the perfect complement to Altman's style - he, the king of  multi-character ensemble pieces, often distinguished by overlapping dialogue and a restless camera that seemed to shrewdly rove in and around a given scene like a vastly perceptive invisible guest at an amazing party.  The book is like having the congenial what-was-that? soundtrack muddle in the first reel of McCabe and Mrs. Miller suddenly rendered crystalline: Altman himself as a classic newly restored.

This approach, perhaps best popularized in the literary bio field by Jean Stein's Edie a few decades ago, has long been utilized in fictional films (it was the guiding strategy in a little pic called Citizen Kane) and documentaries (e.g. This is Spinal Tap).  Here, the use of it is freakin' perfect.  Zuckoff, a finalist for the Pulitzer when he was a journalist, has so masterfully organized his material that the book reads like a great story about a great character - told, Rashomon-style, by all the key players who worked and/or lived with him, from wife Kathryn to actors, writers and cinematographers, et al. 

What emerges is a cubist portrait of contradiction and collusion.  It's the story of an indomitable individualist of outsize talent, terribly flawed but endearingly human, who rendered Fitzgerald's old saw ("There are no second acts in American history") ridiculous.  The media pronounced Altman's career dead innumerable times after M.A.S.H. (1970) and after Nashville (1975); then came The Player (1992), after which he was supposedly finished again; then came the Oscar-winning Gosford Park (2001).  Altman hung in there - working, no matter what - and in the end, he won the game, by doing it his way and nobody else's.

What's especially neat about the Oral Biography is that it steps past the trite and true - everyone knows "Altman was great with actors" - to deliver the detailed goods, as that Paul Newman quote above demonstrates, so you can learn why and how he was an actor's director, among other things.  The facts, sometimes emerging between the lines, make sense of what had been mysterious in his oeuvre (you'll understand why certain of his films felt unfinished, and comprehend the logic - whether you liked a given film or not - behind the choices he made).  And finally, the elusive mystery that's at the heart of any great human remains, unapologetic, to be savored.

I'd recommend dipping in at any chapter that intrigues you (I started with The Player, which had revelations so intriguing and quotes so funny that I nearly plotzed), and I'd suggest the same approach for another recently released book on an American auteur: Sammy Wasson's charmingly erudite A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards.

Splurch is a movie lover's book of another kind.  Though Wasson extensively interviewed Edwards and peppers his text with quotes, this is a traditional cine-academic's approach to filmography.  The book explores a long, uneven career through the prism of one unusually astute and enthusiastic cineaste's point of view.  Here pleasures come from the writer's perception.  The chapter on The Pink Panther (the first) is a primer on film comedy craft that's likely to send you Netflix-ing to re-view it, armed with Wasson's keen, droll observations:

The very moment Jacques Clouseau is introduced, the clash between Edwards' rigid formalism and [Peter] Sellers' silliness takes hold of the film's comic mechanism.  Rising from his desk (authority), he crosses to a globe (knowledge), spins it purposelessly (pretension) and, leaning upon it, loses his balance and crashes to the floor.  One might expect the camera to pan down with his fall or to cut in for his reaction, but Edwards does neither.  Instead, the lens remains constant, frozen stiff like a stubborn mother waiting on her child.

Great writing, period.  The text's academic bent does sometimes veer into excess, but it's 20-something Wasson's first book (his next is on Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's) so we'll blame it on his youth.  When  not stuck having to make something of A Fine Mess and free to fly with Blake at his best (e.g. the 10 and S.O.B. chapters), the book sings.

Edwards in his own idiosyncratic way represents a tale of perseverance, having created iconic images early on (Tiffany's, The Days of Wine and Roses) and late (Switch).  The guy kept working and left a distinctive imprint; his unevenness, in contrast to Altman's, stems from his willingness to sell out (e.g. those countless, pointless late Panther sequels).

Altman, his voice quietly weaving its way through Zuckoff's narrative, sounds wryly self-aware and impressively accepting of what ills he may have brought upon himself professionally.  He uses a telling defense in speaking of his work: "I resent in art the definitive explanation for people's behavior--there isn't any."

Maybe not.  But what fascinating behavior can be read of here, in both real life and the reels.

The Invisible Audience

Anytime someone refers to something they've been through as a "learning experience," I assume this means there was pain involved, so I don't want to give you the wrong impression when I speak of Things I Learned On My Book Tour: it was mostly a whole lot of (exhausting) fun.  Nonetheless, there was some stuff I found out about the whole Being the Author of a Book That's Now in Print business that was like, news to me.

As the series of Adrian Tomine images posted here mordantly explicate, man, there are a lot of books being published out there.  Which may account for the benignly indifferent look on the face of the Barnes and Noble employee at a NYC store when I told him I was the author of a new hardcover they had in stock and I was here to sign the copies. 

Not that I was expecting the guy to fall over in awe ("Really?  You wrote a book we're carrying?!"), but it's humbling, once you realize how little one's bouncing baby book really means in the larger scheme of Bookdom, let alone current events in general.  Sure, they'll put the little "Autographed Copy" sticker on your tome, once you've signed it, and some of the bookstore folks I chatted with when I did these drop-ins were friendly and upbeat about the task.  But they tended to be the ones who were writing books themselves.  Because everyone's writing one by now.  Aren't you?

Meanwhile the readings themselves, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Baltimore, were really well-attended, which is no mean feat.  (My honey Tater tells of being one of exactly seven people attending a David Sedaris reading in L.A. half a dozen years ago; the well-known humorist spent most of his reading time ripping philistine Los Angelenos, and who can blame him?)  But my big numbers -- 40 people at 3 out of my 7 appearances, with 25 the smallest gathering -- is more a testament to the strength of my mailing list, and the fact that I waited until this publication event to call in such a social favor from my friends and acquaintances.  (I had over 70 peeps at the rom-com seminar/book signing in S.F., but that was on account of my being at a university, and showing a bunch of groovy movie clips, as advertised.)

The biggest fun of these gatherings was the odd juxtaposition of people from all the many times and places in my life.  In NYC, for example, I saw one of my oldest friends, an artist in his 50s, deep in conversation with a blog-friend I'd just met in person for the first time, a filmmaking student at NYU (Hi Tuna!); a girl I went to elementary school with had shown up the night before, at the same reading attended by a girlfriend from college days, a bass player I'd worked with in the '70s and his wife (Hi Bonnie!), and my mom's 80-something cousin.  It felt, as I informed that crowd at KGB Bar, a bit like attending my own wake.

Here's the odd thing, though: despite the enthusiastic response from all these people who were generous enough to devote half an evening in support of yet another debut novelist, one is occasionally conscious of who's not there -- an entity I've come to think of as The Invisible Audience.  That would be the ever-elusive "they": the public one  hopes will ultimately embrace  (and hopefully buy) your  work.  Apart from a relatively small percentage of strangers who came to these readings out of curiosity, I was mostly preaching to  a personal choir.  So when a tree falls in that particular forest, you start to wonder, is it really being heard anywhere else?

There are the Amazon numbers to troll, compulsively, but for other indicators you have to read reviews.  Mine have been "mixed," thank goodness, but it's still a scary experience.  Imagine Me and You has now been publicly eviscerated in a perplexingly mean-spirited L.A. Times review (a friend phoned to ask me if I'd ever given its writer a "D" in one of my screenwriting courses) and gotten thoughtful, considered criticism from Cleveland.  But the most bewildering responses have been found on-line.

You begin to realize that a surprising minority of readers read the book you wrote -- that is, the book as you intended it to be understood.  Quel irony: one of my novel's primary themes is "projection" (its protagonist is constantly trying to be the people other people perceive him to be, and his imaginary lover is, in one sense, a projection of a part of him), so it makes a perfect perverse sense that the book has become a screen for the sometimes wildly subjective projections of disparate people.

Someone will say, "I get that the story is really about bleu cheese," and you're left over here, helplessly sputtering "But there is no bleu cheese in my book!  I hate bleu cheese (especially how it's spelled)!"  Welcome to the writer's side of the reading world, where no one will hear you scream (unless you're fond of writing letters to the editor, etc., which makes me fear you've either got too much time on your hands or too little perspective). 

This makes the occasional heartfelt praise you receive from people you trust all the more valuable.  Because I guess the one thing I learned, while out there on the road with my first novel, is how little the presence of that Invisible (though at times disturbingly audible) Audience really matters.  If you love writing, as I do, at its core writing a novel is really a giving of love to the people you care about.  I feel like I got a bunch of it back, as I went out among 'em for a couple of weeks, and what could possibly be the downside of that?

Imagine Me and You On the Road

I'm taking Imagine Me and You out for a spin: My Big Fat One-Week National Book Tour has me reading'n'signing in San Francisco on Monday night, New York City on Wednesday-Thursday, and Baltimore on Saturday.  Then Tater and I'll be back home in Los Angeles after that weekend, no doubt dazed and contused, but -- sounds like a party, does it not?

Personally I sometimes find book readings/signings to be a little on the snorish side, so I'm packing bells and whistles: going to screen a few rom-com film clips along with the choice bite-sized book excerpts, since the novel (for better and worse, according to this essentially decent review in the Wall Street Journal) is largely concerned with the moebius strip-like relationship between life, fiction and romantic comedy.  Brother Billy explains it all for you!  Details in the tour guide on the top right.   

Living the RomCom will be on hiatus while we're on the road, but I'll be back here 'fore the Ides of May, I reckon, with something of interest to say.