Living the Romantic Comedy

Little Screen, Big Characters

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

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

The Artist?  AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Practice

   

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

Eighty percent of success is showing up.   

-- Woody Allen

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

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

Do it every day.

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

Do it every day.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do it every day.

 

 

Dig It to Dig It

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

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

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

MONK'S ADVICE (1960)

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

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

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

Make the drummer sound good.

Discrimination is important.

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

All reet!  Always know...

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

Let's lift the bandstand!

I want to avoid the hecklers.

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

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

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

 

Always leave them wanting more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love in 24 Hours (or Less)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what other LO classics am I leaving out? 

Your Mind on Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rom-Com Truisms #9

The less said, the more felt.

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

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

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

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

Oh, fuck. Fuck!

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

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

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

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

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

Girl uses two irony-laden syllables in reply:

I do.

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

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

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

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

Emily: I want a divorce.

Cal (simultaneously): Creme Brulee.

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

'Nuff said.

The Wisdom of Ira

I came upon this quote from This American Life's Ira Glass on a blog I've been frequenting - in sweet delight - so I don't know anything of the context for it, but what does it matter?  As so many of us go back to school (i.e. to work, to our projects, to our ongoing struggle), I can't think of a better piece of advice that can serve as prod and inspiration.  Here's the quote, unadorned:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners -

I wish someone told me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

But there is this gap.

For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good.  It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. 

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.  And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.  Most people I know who do interesting, creative work, went through years of this.

We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. 

We all go through this.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work - put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will fashion one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap - and your work will be as good as your ambitions - and I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met.

It's gonna take awhile.  It's normal to take awhile.

You've just gotta fight your way through.

The Writing Life #51

We are forever telling the world the same two stories about ourselves. One is about the person we want to believe we are–wise, compassionate, upstanding. The other is about the person we know ourselves to be – petty, cruel, sexually destructive. The best of our literary art arises from the collision of these two stories.

-- Steve Almond

Life Begins at 75

As a longtime lover of this auteur's work - and unhappy defender of the Allen oeuvre during his near-indefensible periods (the nadir is a string of duds in the early 2000s) - I have to admit to some "I told you so" schadenfreude (aimed at those who had written him off) and greater unconflicted joy at news that with Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen has his biggest hit in 25 years: $23 mil and still going strong, on track to surpass Hannah and become his biggest hit, period.

Allen is unique in his career path, with 41 features directed in 45 years; only perhaps the Coen Brothers approach Allen's record as the hardest-working American writer-director in post-WWII history.  And as I've often been at pains to point out, his number of tankers, as opposed to hits, is thus accordingly high.  But consider this: How many artists do you know of, in the modern era, who are poised to out-perform their own career peak performances at an age when most of his peers are already out to pasture (or pushing up daisies)?

Nay-sayers may still neigh, but as I always say, "Writing well is the best revenge," and Midnight looks like 2011's first shoo-in for a screenwriting Oscar nom. Woody's next film, The Bop Decameron, will be shot in Rome with Alec Baldwin, Penélope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, plus a host of Italian stars led by Roberto Benigni.  That's a pretty good gig the Woodman's got.

And unlike so many of his Hollywood counterparts (Rome-Shmome, Allen will always be a congenital New Yorker), this success isn't likely to go to his head.  What I find particularly interesting about the commentary in this entertaining article, Woody Allen Looks Back at 12 of His Films, is his refreshing lack of pretension and self-importance.  Here's Allen on Manhattan:

I was so disappointed when I saw my final cut, I thought, If this is as good as I can do at this point, I shouldn't be making films. I went to United Artists and said, ''Look, don't put this out. I'll make another film, no charge.'' They thought I was nuts. And it was a very, very big hit. Audiences don't have the same criteria I do. They say, Okay, you had some grandiose idea and maybe you failed, but we like this film. So once again, I shut up and just felt I got away with it. I got off with my life.

Indeed he did. And long may he live.