Living the Romantic Comedy

Girl Meets Boy, Girl Needs Maureen

 

I had been dreading seeing Elizabethtown, the way you might dread seeing an old friend who's on his way to prison -- whether he's guilty of the crime or innocent, it's just not gonna be as much fun as it was, like, before he was tried and sentenced.   I love Cameron Crowe's work (I'd say that Say Anything is the Great American Teen Romantic Comedy, and there are more memorable, gone-into-the-culture lines of dialogue in Jerry Maguire than most other auteurs have come up with in their entire careers), so I didn't like hearing how awful his new movie is.

Well, actually, Crowe has made a great film here.  Problem is, it's less than fifteen minutes long and it's tucked into the back of a not very good one.  I'm speaking of course (for those of you who've seen it, and for thems that haven't, this is really no big spoiler) of the road trip through the American south that occurs in the movie's third act, which I think is a sequence of poignant heart and beauty that can stand up with the best of Crowe's work. 

As to the rest of it...  Well, there are plenty of good moments -- a satisfying true-to-life behind-the-wheel freakout over missing a road sign, an amusing modern romance cellphone marathon that ends with a sweet tart throwaway line.  But the basic stuff of the story feels secondhand in the wake of Garden State.  And the fundamental way in which Crowe has botched its central love story put me in mind of one basic principle of romantic comedy screenwriting.  While it may be comforting to see that even the best writers can sometimes lose sight of the obvious, here's an observation you might bear in mind if you're a rom-com writer who's in the process of Trying This At Home. Love can't come from nowhere -- you can't do it with one character: it actually takes two.

Romantic comedy is one of only two movie genres that require two fully developed protagonists to work, the other being the buddy movie, which some academics posit is actually a homoerotic rom-com at heart, but anyway... Crowe has written himself into a corner with his movie's hero, by making him so emotionally cut-off that he's like an unusually tall, dark and handsome zombie.  Yes, he looks like Orlando Bloom (because he is Orlando Bloom) but there really is no reason in the world -- at least none demonstrated on screen -- for Claire, the flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst, to fall head-over-heels for protagonist Drew.   

As the movie's set-up has it, Drew's the only passenger on Claire's red-eye flight, and she -- an impossibly chipper, high-spirited young woman (whom Crowe probably envisioned as the modern-day equivalent of screwball heroines played by Jean Arthur or Carole Lombard) -- strikes up a conversation.  Traumatized by a career fiasco and his father's death, Drew's a tired, morose and taciturn (also suicidal, not that she knows this) guy.  Drew shows next-to-no interest in talking with Claire and gives her no encouragement whatsoever.   Yet despite this, and despite the absolute void extant where a male protagonist's personality is supposed to reside, Claire throws herself at him.

Can we talk about cute meets?  The "meet cute" in a good romantic comedy comes out of a kind of combustion.   It's the result of what I call a chemical equation -- a sense that he's like this, and she's like that, and if you put them together, you get something fresh and intriguing, and fun.  Two strong personalities spark and Something takes off. 

Well, it doesn't really work if only one of the two principals is genuinely present.  So the fact that Claire hones in on Drew, ignoring his disinterest (and her own supposed off-screen boyfriend), providing him with an unasked-for phone number and an obsessively friendly goodbye, makes her seem less like a romantic lead and more like a stalker. 

In its erotically charged give-and-take, an effective cute meet gives the audience an idea of why two people could conceivably become a couple, and without that info, a subliminal something's-wrong-with-this-picture torpedos the basic credibility of the romantic plot.  This all-important beat is what makes us suspend disbelief in a romantic comedy.  Given a believable set-up, we'll buy into the idea that say, Tobey Maguire can use his Spidey powers to fly around Manhattan, but Elizabethtown's bungled beat fails to convince us that Bloom's charisma would make this romance fly, nor that Kirsten's powers would impel Bloom to pick up a phone and call her.

One thing Elizabethtown's cute meet does get right is its presaging of what will be the basic dynamic of this couple for the whole of the movie: Claire keeps coming at him, no matter what, virtually propelling the already emotion-blocked, hapless Drew into the outermost regions of passivity.  Not that he wants to have his feelings, let alone activate them, but with Claire always there, Drew's truly a nothing with nada to do.

The real shame of it all is Claire's contemporary courtship cluelessness.  Clearly she should be reading Maureen Dowd, whose incisive analysis of the modern woman's plight in the Sunday NY Times magazine points out the other side of the obvious that Englishtown has stubbed its toe on: its woman-chases-man story goes against our zeitgeist grain just now.   Out here in the off-screen, post failure-of-feminism world, if you do want to land even a good-looking cipher, hon, you're supposed to be playing hard to get.

Clouds in My Coffee #4: Stephen and Diane in the Light of the Moon

[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.]

I've only asked a waitress to go out with me once in my life.  And it's possible that I never tried it again because of what happened on our first date.

For single men, flirting with waitresses is one of life's great guilty pleasures, but I was surprised, after years of indulgence in that idle pursuit, when I actually succeeded in getting the phone number of lovely -- let's call her Kiki -- and having her agree to go to a play with me the following weekend.

This was in Manhattan, where people go to plays.  The play was Terence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, then at the peak of its successful first run in an off-Broadway theater.  There was a good crowd milling around outside when we arrived, and I noticed Stephen Sondheim among them, talking to a friend.   This musical icon had once critiqued a musical of mine as part of a Dramatists Guild workshop program, and I couldn't resist telling Kiki this as I pointed him out.  She seemed suitably impressed to hear that he was familiar with my work.

At this point, with the doors not open, Kiki decided to make a phonecall, and this being in the pre-cell era of the '80s, she went off to use a payphone up the block.  So I was alone when they started letting people in.  And since I was waiting for my date, it was only natural that I hang back and say a brief hello to Mr. Sondheim. 

Here he was now, looking like he'd just snuck out of some room where he'd been imprisoned for hours with a score-in-progress, finding new rhymes for "apse."  I re-introduced myself (it had been a couple of years), saying "I just wanted to thank you again for your input on my show," and was flattered to find that Stephen (I can call him Stephen) did remember my musical, once I gave him a specific reference, and had a few kind words about one of its songs.  He wished me the best of luck with it and went on into the theater.

Sondheim was just disappearing through the doors when my date returned, and of course I told her about the conversation I'd had with him while she was gone.  "Really!" she said. 

As we walked inside I had a sense of some subtle skepticism on Kiki's part.  After all, she didn't know me very well.  We were on a first date, which can so often be an exchange of gilded lillies, and outright invention ("There goes my homie, Stevie Spielberg!") might've been my standard m.o.  Anyway, conversation turned to other things, and then we were both absorbed in McNally's first act.

Come intermission, we headed into the lobby, where a few other entertainment luminaries were stretching their high-powered limbs, and in fact...  My moon must have been in Replay.  "Ohmygod," I said, "There's Diane Keaton."  She was across the room, talking to Bob Balaban and some guy who looked like somebody.  As a pleased Kiki maneuvered herself into a good I'm-not-really-staring-at-a-celebrity position, I told her about my days of coaching Diane, and the brief but nice little friendship we'd forged, some nine years previous.  "Why don't you say hello?" asked my date.  I hesitated, knowing that nine in celebrity years could sometimes equal a millennium.  I was worried that it might be awkward, and while I hemmed and hawed, Kiki decided to use the Ladies.

Alone, I drifted to the coffee line.  And then here she was, so close and so Keaton, laughing in that warm and giddy way of hers...  Fuck it, I thought, and strode right up to her.  "Diane?" I said.  She turned and looked at me without recognition, and for an instant (the horror!) I was seeing classic Celebrity Defensive Posture in action -- the face polite but masked, the body subtly verged on flight, as vague apprehension seeped into the expression of her companions.  "Billy Mernit," I announced, and thankfully (the wonder!) Diane's face lit up with relief.

"Oh, hi," she returned, the essence of friendly, and she introduced me to the guys, and asked about what was going on with me (I'm sure I made up something), and we talked about the play and how wonderful Kathy Bates was (in the part that went, with quintessential Hollywood logic, to Michelle Pfeiffer when the movie got made), and then someone else was motioning Diane to come meet a friend.  We said cheery goodbyes and I floated back across the lobby, suffused with that glow of having been, for all of a few minutes, a member of that club no one likes to admit they'd love to belong to.

And here was Kiki, asking where I'd been.  "Oh! I was talking to Diane," I told her, gesturing toward where... well, she'd been there a moment ago.  Kiki peered at the absence of Keaton, then looked warily back to me as I recapped our brief reunion.  "And it was nice," I concluded, "considering we hadn't seen each other in such a long time."

"Really," she said.

There was no second date. 

Possible lesson?  Sometimes it's best for us unknowns to keep the who-we-knows unspoken.

In the movie version of this scene, my date is going on about hating Woody Allen and what a ditz Diane Keaton must be and how she's not an actress but a personality, until I get really steamed and say: "Really?  Well, I just happen to have Ms. Diane Keaton right here," and I pull her out from behind a potted palm in the lobby and she tells my date, "You know nothing of my work."

In real life, I can picture Kiki in bed with her husband-to-be, comparing respective Worst Dates I Ever Endured, and she goes: "Oh, that's nothing -- I once went out with a jerk who said he knew Stephen Sondheim and Diane Keaton, and then pretended he'd had actual conversations with them when I wasn't looking."

Hi, Kiki!

   (c) 2005 B. Mernit (all rights reserved)

The Art of Next to Nothing

Back in the days when Steve Martin was one wild and crazy stand-up comedian, he'd come out on stage in a bright white suit with an arrow sticking through his head and exhort the audience with a crazed grin, "Let's get small!"  It's interesting to see, now that he's a well-respected, gracefully aging urbane art collector and writer of theatre and literary fiction, that he's pitching the same irreverent idea.  Shopgirl, Martin's latest creation, is so small it threatens to barely be there.

Movies are a wonderfully capacious form (sorry--just learned this word today, so I have to use it or I'll forget it), and your average mainstream Hollywood product is so crammed full of... Stuff, that it's intriguing to see how many recent American releases seem to take perverse delight in virtually emptying out the frame.  Shopgirl joins this crop, with Good Night, and Good Luck among them; super-undersized films, bite-sized stories that speak softly and carry -- well, a big stick in the case of Good Night, but in Shopgirl's case, more like a backscratcher.

Martin (though director Anand Tucker is ostensibly the auteur of record, this is clearly Steve's show) takes pains to point out his parameters: the screen credit reads "based on his novella."  Well, here's his moviella.  It clocks in at 104 minutes but has the feel of a long short.  Shopgirl is a familiar triangle story, pure and simple, and given such slim pickins, I'm not out on a limb in suggesting that the material required Martin's name to make it to the screen. 

Still, there's splendid seconds of pleasure to be had within its carefully transcribed boundaries.  The film gives the incandescent Claire Danes a chance to really shine (arguably her best work since My So-Called Life), it makes a case for Jason Schwartzman being more than a hairy goofball (he's one talented hairy goofball), and it finesses the difficult hat-trick of making Los Angeles look like a romantic city -- something Martin himself didn't quite pull off in L.A. Story (as blogfriend Kristen points out here, L.A. stubbornly resists romanticizing). 

In mise-en-scene, Shopgirl is an object lesson in making the most of the least.  I lapped up the movie's elegant details.  I like a movie that's willing to slow down and savor, beat by beat, both the acute anxiety of an awkward it's-not-happening first kiss moment, and the bittersweet melancholic suspension of stolen time that occurs as an older man's hand takes reverent possession of a young woman's back.  There's one exquisite piece of set-design: the steps that go up to the apartment above Mirabelle's, then descend to get to her door -- it's a perfect metaphor for where she is in her life.

On the other hand, if less is more, I'm wishing there were more more here.  The Saks-like dressings on the package can't disguise how lightweight it is.  This is a gossamer wish-fulfillment fantasy, one that evaporates if you start to question the essential passivity of its female lead.  And the story resembles Martin's character, in never quite being able to give into its passions.

Passion, I persist, is what we go to romantic comedies to experience.  Underneath all the banter and bawdiness, the beating heart of a good rom-com is it delivery of how it feels to fall in love -- in all its breathless, messy-crazed excitement.  And that's the experience Shopgirl sidesteps.

Maybe in his eagerness to go against the grinning, anything-for-a-gag persona he came in with, Martin has serioused himself into over-shooting his mark.  While colleague Bill Murray was allowed to get into outsized trouble and expose his inner colors in both Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation, Martin here nearly slips away from us in rueful self-effacement.  Kinda made me miss the guy with the crazy feet.  Getting small shouldn't mean you have to disappear.

Still, Shopgirl did get to me.  It's an absorbing job well done, and in the absence of say, a new Eric Rohmer pic, it could serve as an indie couple's date movie.  But as far as screenwriting goes, kids: Don't try this at home.  With romantic comedy as in life, you can't be too stingy with your passion or your story.  'Cause sometimes, less is less. 

Clouds in My Coffee #3: The Lost Diane Keaton Tapes

[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.]

I liked pretty much everything about Daphne Merkin's nicely done profile on Diane Keaton in this Sunday's NY Times, including the photo of Keaton lying on her back in her driveway with one of her trademark hats over her face (which seemed marvelously evocative of her "I'm here but you can't see me" persona), but that isn't surprising, talk about preaching to the choir: I've been in love with this woman since 1973.

To me she will always be a kind of paradigm of the romantic comedy heroine (just as Annie Hall has inarguably been the rosetta stone, the Citizen Kane of modern rom-coms). One of the great pleasures of my checkerboarded life in the worlds of entertainment was the four or five months I worked with her, back when she was beginning Manhattan.  I'd love to say you can find my name on the credits of Diane Keaton's record album from '78... except, true to the spirit of the chronicles of Periphery Man -- the album doesn't exist.

In the ‘70s one of the ways I made a living, among my hodgepodge of musical sideman and songwriter jobs, was as a vocal coach.  Pretty funny, considering I had such a dicey singing voice (Who was it who once said, upon hearing my infamous solo album, “it sounds like you’ve got your nuts in a vice”?).  But hey, I had taken vocal lessons myself, I did know how to put a song over, and I did a decent job with a number of young actresses who’d added “singer” to their new resume and head-shot and suddenly had to back up the claim.

One afternoon in 1978 I got a phonecall from friend Carly Simon’s then-manager, Arlyne Rothberg, who wanted to know if I could work with another client of hers.  I believe “Do you think you might be able to spend a little time coaching Diane Keaton?” was the way she put it.  Might I?  Hmm, let’s see: considering that I’d seen Annie Hall twice, reaffirming the major crush I’d had on this actress for years, it was conceivable that I could find the space in my busy schedule…

 

Keaton was charming self-deprecation incarnate on the phone.  She had these songs, y’know, that she liked to sing, sort of, and well, people had been telling her she ought to, y’know, do something, like a record or something, which was a really dumb idea if you asked her, but anyway…  We arranged to have her come down to my place the following week with a pile of sheet music. 

Thus, to my own disbelief, one day Diane Keaton walked the three flights up to my humble village pad, where I awaited with nice lilies in the vase on the piano, a pot of coffee on the stove, and the songs she'd sung in Annie Hall already committed to my anxious memory. 

It’s hard to imagine anyone not getting along well with Keaton, on account of she’s adorable, period: smart, funny, sexy and above all, refreshingly accessible.  With her there's no pretense, not a whiff of “I’m Important.” And in that period, coming off of Annie (and Goodbar and The Godfather), she was luminous with the glow of someone good-becoming-great, of coming into her own and being able to do things she’d always wanted to do.  Like, sing some of her favorite songs, if she felt like it.  You could feel it was a happy time for her -- there was that Warren guy in the picture, too -- and her giddiness was infectious.  Then again, I was shamelessly ga-ga to begin with (though I like to think I masked it well), and Keaton is simply one of those people who radiates positive energy.  Anyway, we had a good time.

Good enough to keep it going; on and off for nearly half a year, her schedule permitting, we got together for an hour a week.  We worked on a dozen songs or so, our goal the making of a demo tape that could be shopped to some labels.  Keaton’s voice had a sweet, simple, untrained quality.  It could be an unsteady wisp of a thing when she lost focus, but her instincts were good and she was game to push her instrument into new territory.  I think what I did, if anything, was to help build her confidence.  Our songbook became eclectic: there was a Leiber and Stoller tune (Some Cats Know), one Billie Holiday (Don’t Explain), one Nina Simone (Don’t Smoke in Bed) and, my idea, a couple of years before Linda Ronstadt got onto it, Smoky Robinson’s Oooh Baby Baby.

It got time to go to the studio.  At Diane's request, I kept the recording almost absurdly minimal, with only bass player Tony Conniff joining us on a few tunes.  This sat well with Diane, who looked like a rabbit facing a rifle when she first stepped up to the studio microphone.  She might have bolted altogether if she’d had to deal with a band.  But for me, it may have been a missed opportunity.  Maybe a tape more cleverly arranged and well-produced might have actually pushed the project (and my participation in it) forward;  the Mernit-Keaton tape was a kind of Diane Sings, Naked.   It only led to producer Richard Perry taking her into the studio and over-producing, fully orchestrated, his own preferred material… and ultimately, Diane abandoned the idea of putting an album out, altogether.

 

But  I’m left with a handful of fond memories: seeing Keaton leave my living room before flying out to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards, both anxious and wryly dismissive of the whole big deal, and a few nights later, with a group of friends sitting in that same room, cheering as I watched her win the Oscar...  I remember discovering our mutual love of Joseph Cornell, and going to a gallery with her to look at his collages… and one afternoon when neither one of us wanted to work, lolling around my living room playing with the kitten I’d recently inherited, instead. 

I still have a Frank Sinatra LP of hers, and she’s got one of my Willie Nelsons.  We drifted apart, naturally, but traded postcards for awhile.  Years later, I did run into her once, in a typically peculiar way – but that’s for another Coffee.  Meanwhile, somewhere in the depths of the Mernit archives lie the lost Diane Keaton tapes, yet another golden nugget souvenir of my unerringly peripheral career.

We Come in Peace

When you read scripts for a studio, you accept a certain invisibility.  You're not only not seen -- by many execs, by agents, by the writers -- you're barely heard.  At my studio, if two different readers "pass" on a screenplay, that's one thing, but if three readers pass... they buy it for a million dollars.   

I'm used to being a voice  e-mailing in the wilderness.  And on the other hand, it's both a necessity and a relief to be so low-pro anonymous.  Given that my favorite coffee hang is replete with writers, laptops glowing atop half the tables, I'm glad they don't know the enemy's among 'em.  Ask your average L.A. writer about readers and you'll be knee-deep in the River Bile in no time.  Writers hate readers -- hey, sometimes when I think of what me-as-reader might say about a draft I'm writing, I literally hate myself.

So when I first got the invite to be on a panel discussing script reading, coverage, and the way things work in the belly of the industry beast in front of over a hundred writers at the Writers Guild,  I thought I should maybe pack a hockey mask.  But I've returned unscathed from what could've been a Christians in the Coliseum situation and actually, I think our quintet of readers and executives actually helped dispel a couple of misperceptions.  Here's the top myth-busters we covered at the WGA's "Reading Between the Lines" last night:

1) Not all readers are 22 year-old assholes.

Snot-nosed intellectual thugs, seems to be the common Reader stereotype many writers harbor: fresh out of college, crazed or lazy, mean-spirited, mercenary script bashers.  Well, I'm sure they're out there, but anyone fitting that profile wouldn't last two days in the studio system.   My fellow round table-mate Rio Hernandez, who came from theater, worked on films, then read for Julia Roberts, Harvey Keitel and Linda Obst before getting a writing MFA and a steady gig at UTA, is somewhat older and bracingly wiser.  And she's got that certain kind of passion only known to true lovers of the word, i.e....

2) Most readers love writing and would love to find a great script.

Yes, I have thrown a script across a room on occasion.  No, don't get me or any other story analyst started on the thousands of reading horrors we've endured over the years.  But what makes the job worth it are those few times you discover an original voice, a great piece of writing.  The God's honest truth of the matter is, I would love nothing better than to read a from-next-to-nowhere spec script that blew the top of my head off, one that I'd run into an exec's office with, crying "Make this!"  Because -- aside from the good kharma -- if it really is a home run project, don't I look good.   

20th Century Fox's Mary Anderson, Rio and I share that same fantasy (and have had it dashed in real life once or twice).  But it was also nice to hear from the two executives that the myth of readers routinely being discouraged from recommending scripts was generally as bogus as the myth of executives totally relying on reader's reports.  In fact:

3) There is such a thing as a good studio executive. 

I know, to some it may sound as oxymoronic as "honest attorney." We're way familiar with the kind of steel-balled shark in a suit personified by Tim Robbins in The Player (and I can't get enough of J.T. Walsh's Master of Bullshit exec in cult classic The Big Picture), but Maverick's senior VP Brent Emery is  a mensch.  Both he and Martin Chase Productions' development VP Gaylyn Fraiche clearly enjoy getting in the trenches with readers and writers, and they're like, totally smart. 

For each minor myth swatted (e.g. having three brads, as opposed to two holding your script together doesn't keep it from being read) there was a new one born (e.g. being Vince Vaughn's buddy is all you need to become a screenwriter bi-millionaire).  But instead of getting beat up or wanting to beat someone, I heard writer George Melrod say, "I came here tonight thinking I was meeting the enemy, but I'm leaving thinking a reader could be your best friend."  I ended up feeling (especially thanks to Valerie Horowitz's able moderating and the hosting of Roy Woods) like I'd been in a we're-all-in-this-together fest.  A sickeningly sentimental happy ending, I know, I know -- so Hollywood.  But the darker subtext of it all was tacitly acknowledged by all of us over the course of the two-hour show. 

The elephant in the room was the cumulative totality of just how many disparate factors -- many of them beyond the readers and execs' control -- work against even a good script ever making it to the screen  (e.g. two syllables that strike fear into both sides' hearts:  actors).  Not to bum out anyone's pot trip, but as this well remarked-upon news from the past summer points out, your average spec script's odds are currently looking snowball-in-hell-like.

So.  You can do everything right, you can observe all 500 ways to Beat the Reader, from a killer first 5 pages to a lean 101 page count, deliver a Same Only Different story concept and stuff it with star-friendly parts, but finally, "You wanna know how to get a 'recommend' from a Hollywood reader?" Rio concluded.  "Be a better writer."

Fear of a Gray Planet

Honestly, I was just kidding around, but evidently I was being prescient.  Just before the weekend, I suggested here that if Hollywood was forced to woo an older demographic (under-25 males having recently deserted the multiplex) we'd see some geriatric action pics.

Well, slowly we turn, 'cause Hollywood was ahead of me: a 59 year-old Sly Stallone has called a time out on pushing pudding and is once more pushing Rocky into the ring.  Dunno about you, but  I look forward to watching that bout about as much as I can stomach looking at these "Hollywood in 2037" photos that were all over the web, a week back (caution: it's a kind of Halloween Came Early experience).

On the other hand, I actually do welcome the prospect of a new romantic comedy sub-genre featuring past-their-primers, old-timers on a post-menopausal playing ground.  Call it Rom-Com Gray?  The Golden Oldie Rom-Com?

I'm intrigued by late-in-life romantic comedy just as I've always been partial to Marital romantic comedies, a hardy perennial from 1937's The Awful Truth to this year's Mr. and Mrs.  Smith.  Stories about married and post-married couples tend to be more substantive than the norm.  Where your standard rom-com is all about courtship, about how to win love, marital rom-coms ask "how do you sustain love?"  Which I think is a tougher and more complex subject for a movie, one that appeals to the um, more... mature of us.

Could the aging American mainstream go for mature?  I don't think Mr. Balboa's going to be the turning point.  I mean, do we really want to see a vein-popping 60-something mook in his skivvies on the screen? 

On the other hand, maturity can be fun when you're watching Shirley MacLaine, already Oscar buzzed for her turn in In Her Shoes.  I'd believe love sustaining with Diane Keaton as the lead -- an actress who should be as busy with projects now as she was in her Annie Hall days.  Streep's going strong, Susan Sarandon still a babe, Stone and Lange were hot in Broken Flowers -- actually, Rocky?  Knock yourself out, man, but as the Geezer Rom-Com sub-genre gets into gear, with real, un-photo-shopped wrinkles and all, my attention's going to be on the ladies.

Ecstasy Break

Okay, I’ve found it, my dream gig: the one other job I’d actually do for next to nothing besides being a screenwriter (which I think is currently averaging out to something like 39 cents a page – or is it 0.39?  I can never get this straight).  I want to do what Francis Alys did: ingest a different drug every day for a week while wandering around Copenhagen in the merry month of May… then have the notes I somehow managed to take end up on a museum wall. 

Nice work if you can get it! was the phrase that came to mind a few times as I wandered through Ecstasy, In and About Altered States, MOCA’s current exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary in downtown L.A.  Runner-up job would be the museum attendant who currently lifts up and pulls down the door for individual visitors to Sylvie Fleury’s car-sized gold “spaceship,” briefly encasing them in an egg lined with floor to ceiling illuminated crystals and then ushering them out.  Good workout for the muscles and the kharma!  I don’t mean to unduly romanticize what’s not really an upscale occupation, but dude, you are a pleasure dispenser.

Sometimes a working man's got to have his head cleaned, and this show will do it, with works that “capture metaphysical states in representational form… or induce those experiences in the viewer.”  Anybody who needs a time out will enjoy their time in the sublime Erwin Redl’s Matrix II, which induces a major authentic “woa!” when you walk into it – a giant grid of thousands of tiny green LED lights floating in a dark 40 by 50 foot room -- and truly altered my state by the time I floated out of it. 

Or chill in what’s arguably the most cinematic room in the place, Pierre Huyghe’s L’Expedition scintillante.  You sit on small white floor cushions around a kind of futuristic entertainment center: smoky fog forms bathed in shifting colored light dancing on an open fireplace-like stage while Satie’s Gymnopedies play. It made me feel like we’d stepped into Sleeper, or any one of those sci-fi pics that show future humans, y’know, popping their Soma and partying down.  Yo, don’t bogart the Orgasmatron, bro.

Standing in line outside the museum were a number of men of a certain age – a lot of bearded, fashionably long graying hair and glasses guys – along with the requisite fashionable young Asian beauties who seem to reside in every museum I’ve been to lately.  These seemed to me to represent the two ends of the ecstatic spectrum: thems old enough to have experienced it in their drugged youth, and those who are young enough to be doing Ecstasy now and to whom all such experiences are somehow meta.

My visit was enhanced by photographer friend Karen Anderson and her 9 year-old daughter Raine being along for the ride.  9 year-olds are a fave kid age, for me: they’re these small but fully formed people in a moment of grace, before the hormones kick in and fuck them up.  And Raine was the perfect gauge for a show like this.  The things that worked, she became a part of -- like Carsten Holler's Upside-Down Mushroom Room, which made me feel like I was in a Jamiroquai video and enabled Raine, the smallest human present, to sit upright beneath a hanging shroom, thus enhancing the illusion that our floor was the mushrooms’ ceiling.

So we're talking fun for all ages.  I especially recommend it for writing breaks.  Writers spend too much time in their own living rooms anyway, and as an old friend of mine from Texas used to say, "sometimes you gotta break up the crystals" (never entirely understood that, but it certainly seems applicable here).  Sometimes you got to go dada and wave your freak flag high, as some mysterious pranksters apparently did for the show's opening.  Anyway if you're in town, go, and maybe go prepared (Me, I forgot to get high, and what was I thinking?  That's what years of drug abuse'll do to you).

The nice thing about the show is that hours later, you get an after-buzz.  I saw a sunset from my window on Electric Avenue at the end of my Ecstasy day, and man... the colors...  

Hims In Her Shoes

Men are making trouble again, as they usually do, but this time Hollywood is a little worried. 

It was bad enough this summer when the old same-old did not work for once, and two big action features tanked spectacularly.  That Stealth and The Island bled major money couldn't entirely be blamed on bad scripts (though I gave Island a pass twice, as a reader for Universal), because no one could make a case for say, The Day After Tomorrow (which cleared $500 million-plus the year before) as being a paradigm of screenwriting excellence.  No, the big screen action spectacular genre itself seemed down for the count, which was cause for stress in some studio suites. 

Since even the overall box office slump is an explainable phenomenon (it's cyclical, right? just another cycle) no one's been truly alarmed... until now.  Because apparently it's not only the movies being bad that's to blame.  This year the moviegoers disappeared -- and not just any ticket-buyers, mind you: it's the guys.  In fact, it's not just any guys, but (gasp) the target demographic, the blessed males under 25.

Holy shrinking jockey shorts, Batman -- as the NY Times points out in this entertaining article (I particularly like their sidebar chart, "Dude, Where's My Audience?") -- what we seem to be seeing is the signal of a possible sea change in the very system, a tremor in the Force, so to speak.  'Cause -- the mind boggles -- think for a moment of a Hollywood that's no longer held hostage to the whimsical demands of testosterone-overloaded, beer-swilling a-holes. 

What will moviemakers do when those empty footprints at the box office line have to be filled with like, really nice pumps?  And when the studios start courting older males, let alone females, who knows what kind of movies will get made?  Obviously, in my genre neck of the woods, we'll see Nicholson and Keaton again in Something's REALLY Gotta Give, and then (to complete the trilogy), the geriatric Oops, Something Gave!  But on other fronts, expect Raiders of the Lost Medicare, Memento 2 (Alzheimer's Edition), Pirates of the Caribbean Rest Home... we needn't go on (but we will, we will).

Though we can't expect really big changes.  Because look at what Older Men are up to these days (and I'm not just thinking of those dangerous morons camped out in the West Wing).  Sure, you've got your legitimate great minds with their well-deserved Nobels (congrats, Harold!) but on the other hand, witness the latest winner of the Ig-Nobel, who earned it by creating prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs.  Only a guy would come up with that!

Only a guy would be spending serious federal funds to look into pornography (hey, it's not as if there's anything else the FBI needs to be concerned with these days).  So actually, what was I thinking?  Under 25, over 25... what's the dif?  The movies Hollywood comes up with, trying to hold onto what audience it has left, aren't likely to be smarter or deeper.

Actually, the studios may already be getting onto a way to re-package movie appeal -- there's currently a good chick flick out that any red-blooded American male can enjoy.  Considering it's about two sisters and a grandmother, fer chrissake, you'd think you wouldn't be able to drag your average guy to In Her Shoes.  But since one of the sisters is Cameron Diaz, and she spends a good portion of the film walking around in various states of delectable undress -- honey, you hold the seats and I'll just go get us the popcorn, okay?

Seriously, Shoes is good stuff -- excellent script by Susannah Grant, great performances all around, ably helmed by Curtis Hanson.  It's filled with splendid small, revealing moments (there's a little bit with Toni Colette and the chain on a lamp that gets turned off, on and off again that's the deftest piece of non-dialogue rom-com character-driven business I've seen this year), and it handles sentimental material in a mature funny/poignant, good James Brooks-ian fashion. 

And guys, whatever your age, if you get caught going a little teary-eyed here and there?  You can always say that you were really just in it for Cameron's fanny.

More Reasons to Stay Alive

Maybe you remember this scene from towards the end of Manhattan --  Isaac lying on his living room couch in the grips of deep post-romantic trauma, talking into his tape recorder, as is his wont:

"Well, alright, why is life worth living?  That's a very good question.  Um...  Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile.  Uh, like what?  Okay.  Um, for me... Oh, I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... ummm, and Willie Mays, and uh... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and ummm... Louie Armstrong's recording of "Potatohead Blues"... ummm..."

Bringing Up Baby.  A clip from it came up in the midst of my "history of the genre" reel during the first class of my Writing the Romantic Comedy course at UCLA last night: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Asta the dog singing (and howling) "I can't give you anything but love, baby," to coax a leopard named Baby off the roof of a Connecticut home in the middle of the night-- and I was momentarily at a loss as to why, precisely, I felt that 16 students and 1 Out of Town Visitor needed to see this. I'd already established what a "screwball" was, there was no specific lesson in comedy craft to be gleaned from the scene, it's just always been one of my favorite moments in moviedom.

"If you're ever considering ending it all, Bringing Up Baby will snap you out of it, at least temporarily," I offered, by way of quasi-explanation, as if everyone was attending a course in suicide prevention, as opposed to comedy craft.  My Out of Town Visitor (OTV), auditing this class as our last fun salvo before she left town, sat at the back of the long table, looking highly amused.  It's one of her favorite films as well, so she didn't need to be sold on its angst-palliative effects.

My OTV knows from the romantic comedy, and living it, since she was a guest in my world for a couple of weeks.  I credit her for enabling me to enact a reversal on one of my least favorite rom-com cliches, to wit:

OTV's flight plans had changed, and I was a little fuzzy on the arrival time anyway -- those Europeans and their military time system, what's up with that, I mean does anybody over there really say "I'll meet you at a quarter after twenty-two?" -- but in our last phone conversation, I'd swear she'd said something about "getting in towards midnight," so even though it did say "19.55" in the e-mail she'd sent earlier, "five to midnight" was what stuck in my head.

So at around ten to nine on the night in question, I finished wrapping up a couple of gifts I'd gotten for her -- one of them, in fact, being a framed reproduction of the the '30s French poster for Baby (it's got a great caricature illustration of Hepburn with a leopard under one arm and and a butterfly net over Cary Grant's head, above the title "Le Impossible Monsieur Bebe") -- and phoned the airline to see if OTV's midnight flight would be getting in on time.  When the helpful United Air staffer informed me that the plane had landed a little under an hour ago, I had one of those Twilight Zone moments where I briefly questioned the sanity of the world (not my own, of course) and then lurched into hyper-high anxiety.

Someone traveling across the ocean and another continent on a 13 hour flight expects to be met, if not with flowers, at least by the person they're coming to see.  I am nothing if not prompt (ask anyone who knows me -- please -- it's totally, annoyingly true) and the romantic in me was mortified.  I was out of the house, into my Mini and inviting a police escort in record time.  Fortunately I live only fifteen minutes from LAX, but even so, with traffic and the usual demons of fate who love to stick it to you at these junctures (e.g. inexplicable pile-up on the "arrivals" entrance ramp, etc.), I was agonizedly aware that I was showing up close to an hour and a half late.

Would she still be there?  What if she'd taken a cab to my place?  And where exactly was I supposed to find her, since it wasn't likely, knowing my OTV, that she'd sit on her luggage by the curb for over an hour?  I gambled that a quick park in the structure across from United would be better than driving to that curb ("the white zone is for the immediate unloading of passengers only..."), parked and ran, dodging travelers, airline people, cabs and luggage carts, honed in on the door to the baggage area, dashed for it -- and nearly collided with my OTV, who at that precise moment was emerging with her baggage piled in a cart.

If you saw it in a movie, you wouldn't believe it, but that's how it happened.  And it was nearly worth it just for the priceless expression on my visitor's face -- she's got expressive eyebrows, which arch up in an extremely articulate way at moments like these, and bless her heart, she was actually smiling at me, instead rearing back to brain me with her backpack.    

And it was only later, driving home in a more leisurely manner, that she pointed it out to me:  I had just done the infamous "dash to the airport" scene, beloved of so many bad romantic comedy climaxes... only in my case, I'd dashed to meet someone arriving, not departing. 

Regardless, we got a good laugh out of it -- thank goodness.  And the pay-off in the back end of our little living rom-com came after class last night, when we ended up rolling around atop my bed, and that wrapped poster gift which I'd so cleverly hidden underneath the pillows slipped out to bonk her on the head.

At any rate, these are the kinds of absurdities that movies like Bringing Up Baby delight in, and that one in particular, with an astonishingly loopy plot that manages to put Cary Grant into a ladies' silk bathrobe, in passing ("I guess I just went gay all of a sudden!" he snorts in exasperated explanation, a kind of wild line for 1938), is in the top end of my Suicide Prevention short list (along with that smile on my OTV's face).  Anyone else out there got a personal fave "movie that makes you think life might still be worth living?"  We can always use more.

Clouds in My Coffee #2: Kurt Vonnegut's Dry Cleaning

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

According to Kurt Vonnegut, in his new book of essays (essays, BTW, are what people used as blather-platforms before there were blogs), the first rule in creative writing is, Do not use semi-colons.  I'm abashed to admit I'm secretly fond of them, though I do go back and get rid of two out of every three ones I put in; now I suppose I'll have to go over my entire oeuvre with a fine-toothed colon comb and flush each last one of them out.  I'd do that for Kurt, because I love the man.

How can you not love a writer who says he's suing the manufacturers of his cigarettes for a billion bucks because they've promised to kill him (see the small print on a package of Pall Malls) and he's still very much alive?

To me Vonnegut seems one of the last contemporary writer guys to fulfill the romantic figure of what a writer is supposed to be -- original, audacious, inspiring.  That he is on the bestseller lists, at 82 (after having semi-officially retired from writing books some years ago, no less),  is a cause for celebration and a renewal of hope: if he's selling that many books at this moment in America, maybe we're not as stupid as we've seemed to be.

One of the neat things about reading a Kurt Vonnegut book is that he tends to use a lot of very short paragraphs.

Look at all this white space!  Isn't it nice?

He writes fiction that looks as sparse as good screenwriting (though the screen has not been as good to his works as it should).  In his work, he seems particularly attuned to how what seems to be junk can actually be significant, and vice versa, and to how the most seemingly mundane, momentary interactions can turn human beings into the playthings of enormous forces.

I can relate to that.

Despite all of my run-ins with celebrities, I would never have dreamed of going up to a famous person in a public place (i.e. a non-performance environment) and asking for an autograph.  The concept has no appeal.  But when my dear friend Darcy Hawes (wife of esteemed painter-bassist Jimi Hawes and mother of Dexter Hawes -- recipient of one of the best names ever given to a non-fiction character) found out that Kurt Vonnegut lived across the street from my parents and got all excited, saying that he was her favorite writer, and if she could have his autograph she'd be ecstatic, I told her I would see what I could do.

It was one of those things one says that's just an expression of good intentions, because although Vonnegut's townhouse is indeed located diagonally across from my parent's apartment building in Manhattan, I'd never encountered the man in person, not in all the years they'd lived there, and didn't expect to, anytime soon.

A month or so later I flew back to New York on business and stayed with my folks for a few days, and get this: one morning as my dad and I left his block and turned north on Second Avenue, here came Kurt Vonnegut, headed home.

Kurt looked more like a writer than any other writer I've ever seen.  He was wearing a worn cardigan and corduroys, his hair was disheveled and mustache droopy, his eyes behind silver-framed spectacles seemed fixed on something miles away, and there was a cigarette hanging from his lower lip that looked glued there, defying gravity.  If one can imagine New York City as a kind of giant industrial farm, then he looked like one over-worked farm animal.  Slightly stooped, with his hands shoved deep in his cardigan pockets, he didn't so much walk as galumph, with a distracted and slightly pained expression, as if he'd recently been smacked in the face with a large wet salmon but expected as much: "so it goes."

I was so startled to see him that he'd already passed by us before I stopped my dad, saying "Wait a second, I have to do something," and ran after the unsuspecting author.  My "Excuse me, Mr. Vonnegut" slowed and turned him round.  "I'm sorry to interrupt your day," I said, seeing the baleful look in his watery eyes, and hurriedly asked him if I could get his autograph for a friend of mine.  Even as I said it I realized this was the quintessential stock cliche for autograph- seekers -- it's always for someone else -- so  I quickly explained that Darcy was a writer who lived in L.A. and that he was her favorite author.  This sounded odd to me, too, as if the subtext was "me, I couldn't care less," so although I wasn't about to add, "I love you, too, though my favorite writer is Julio Cortazar," I did blurt something about my being a huge fan of his work as well.

Vonnegut had a deadpan that would've done Buster Keaton proud.  He considered the request with some gravity for a moment and then nodded.  "Got a pen?"

Of course.  I always carry a pen (you can see by my pen that I am a writer) and I immediately produced it.  But it was soon apparent that what neither of us had was anything to write on.  I was journal-free, as was he, book and magazine-bare.  A quick perusal of my pockets produced nothing but a lone dollar bill.  I held it up for consideration, but both of us shook our heads (in a later re-read of Breakfast of Champions, I found his sardonic dismissal of this American currency, with its flying eye-topped pyramid and pretentious Latin he interpreted to mean "In nonsense is strength").

"Hold on," said Kurt, reaching into his wallet, and came out with a dry cleaning slip.  He studied it briefly, murmured, "They won't need it," and took my pen.  Using a nearby concrete railing for backing, he inscribed 'For Dear Darcy' at the top, and autographed it with a literal flourish -- a sort of sparkling star-like figure adorning the signature.  I thanked him profusely, and we parted ways.

An ecstatic Darcy Hawes framed the document.  And now it can be told:  on September 5th, 1995, Kurt Vonnegut had 1 jacket, green ($5.50) and 1 pants, tan ($4.00) at the Turtle Bay Cleaners.

They will be ready on Wednesday after 5 P.M.

In a Vonnegut novel, the lack of that slip, at the cleaner's on Wednesday, might instigate a chain of events that would end in some darkly funny catastrophe.  Or such a slip might serve as the last recorded information about a man subsequently kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.

No such luck! in my rom-com story.  But life's possibilities -- and bless you, Mr. Vonnegut, for demonstrating this -- remain endless.