Living the Romantic Comedy

Dinosaur, Slapstick & Flaming Cheese

It's what they call a "busman's holiday" -- what does a guy who reads 7-10 screenplays a week do on his vacation? 

Read, of course.  But I read what I want to read, which is books, which is an another thing entirely.  The object of script-reading is to get through it fast, while a book is for lingering; screenplay words on the page are mere instructions for spectacle-making, while a novel can be about the language; a screenplay always has an agenda (or three), while good literature tends to be less a sell, less insistent and impatient.

Generally you tend to see movies in one sitting, but you don't read a book that way.  Maybe that's why, while I do associate certain movies with certain times in my life and can remember, say, who my date was when I saw a certain film (e.g. first Godard flick, Masculin Feminin, seen with the woman I lost my virginity with--like I'd forget that?!), my associative book memories tend to be even more specific and visceral.  You see a movie, but you live with a book.

Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, for example, will forever bring up the greasy fried smell and taste of Chicken McNuggets for me -- because during the most miserable winter of my life, when I briefly held down one of the few office jobs I ever had, I read the bulk of that massive but lovable tome in a MacDonalds down the block from where I worked, those pitiful lunches being all I could afford at the time.

Over the past Thanksgiving holiday, I read three books, and each of these reads, I realized, is already linked in my mind with a specific sense-memory, however incongruous, based on where I happened to be at the time and what I was doing.  Seems my brain can only do the one trick -- whatever sticks, that's it (Nickleby = nuggets: end of story).  So herewith are the oddball associations I'm stuck with.  (It's my mind, and all I can do is live with it, y'know?)

1) Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision and the Dinosaur Reading Light

The rave reviews earned by Kunkel, editor of lit-mag n + 1, made this a required read for the likes of me, and while I was slightly underwhelmed (damn the hype! hype must die!), he does have an engaging voice and spins a pretty good shaggy dog story (LRC blog relevance: it is, ultimately, a romantic comedy).  His hero is afflicted with such chronic indecision that he learns a name for this problem (the disease abulia), not that he can decide whether or not the drugs he's taken to counteract it are really helping.  While protagonist Dwight B. Wilmerding wended his way from NYC to the jungles of Ecuador, I was flying from L.A. to NYC and then joining my folks on a train to Baltimore where my brother lives, and it was on this train that the dinosaur intruded and claimed its Indecision association.

There being no seats in coach, book in hand, I set up camp at a table in the dining car opposite a young woman who was reading a John Irving novel.  We talked novels for a bit, establishing that we were both total reader-addicts, before doing that friendly but clear, respectful eye-avert all dedicated readers do, and dove back into our respective texts.  A little further along, the lights in the car went out for a minute and I saw a mirror-like pained look of literatus interruptus on her face.  "I'm surprised you don't have a reading light," I said.  "Oh, I do," she replied, "but I left it at home."  She looked a little sheepish.  "The round-your-neck kind?" I asked (that's what I'd left at home). "Or the book cover clip-on?"

"Mine's a dinosaur," she admitted.  "You wear it on your head, and when you click the light on, it roars."

Turns out she got hers through the Discovery channel, and I'm currently trying to track one down, my life clearly incomplete without it, but at any rate, there's Indecision, for the rest of my days: Dwight in the Amazon... with dinosaur book light hat.

2) Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress meet the Slapstick

In Baltimore proper, I finished Kunkel and moved onto this delightful little book, which I'd been meaning to get to ever since it came out in paperback (excellent packaging) and (LRC blog relevance) it's a romantic dramedy that was recently made into a movie.  Balzac does that wonderful literary magic feat of transporting you to a milieu you'd otherwise never experience -- in this case, a remote mountain village in the time of China's infamous Cultural Revolution -- and it's beautifully shaped, leading up to a closing line that suddenly makes the entire book snap into resonant place in your head and heart (come to think of it, Indecision has a similarly cool final sentence, if not Balzac's more classic form-and-content integrity).

I was nearly done with this short book when the Merry Mernits (as our small, tight crew is known) visited Baltimore's Dime Museum.  This is a funky Mom'n'Pop establishment that recreates the sometimes bogus, sideshow-freakish fare found in early American museums, which were more Barnum and Bailey than MOMA.  Along with antique medical devices and creepy mummy stuff, there's outrageous (e.g. a stuffed two-headed calf, a framed, fossilized turd supposedly belonging to Abraham Lincoln) and groan-inducing exhibits (e.g. a "Giant Bat!" which was, in fact, a humongous long, wooden... bat).  And there I came upon, to my astonishment, an actual slap stick.

Weirdly enough, a student in my current rom-com class had just raised the question this past week: where does the term "slapstick" come from?  I'd phumphered out a makeshift guess-answer -- vaudevillians maybe batted each other's butts with sticks on stage?  But here was not only the artifact -- a long, thick wooden handle whose far end opened up, via a hinge, creating a kind of rounded, snapping-jaws head -- but the history:

"A blank cartridge inserted between the hinged halves exploded when the slapstick was struck on an offending bottom.  This gizmo is the origin of 'slapstick comedy.'"

There you are and there you have it.  And for me, already immersed in a fable that did in fact use physical comedy to play against its poignancy, it was no major synapse leap to crown Balzac's Chinese violin, its antique leather suitcase filled with old contraband books and its little red seamstress slippers with the Dime Museum's slapstick.

3) Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park and Some Flaming Cheese

You're either with the American Psycho thing or you're not (like Lolita, a severely Guilty Pleasure book) but if you are, this read's inevitable (Note: LRC relevance is absolutely NIL, but hey -- just because I'm into romantic comedy, why do people assume I'm not into dark?  I can dark with the best of you, and this is black, black humor -- mordantly, compulsively entertaining for the first half, and then genuinely disturbing as Ellis goes all Stephen King on his own ass.  Halfway into this vivid nightmare of a novel, as the haunted author realizes the psycho killer he imagined has now materialized in the world, taking cues from Ellis's own Psycho, there's some literal creepy slime to contend with, along with a possessed carnivorous bird doll. I was actually relieved to have to put the book down and join some friends for dinner.

Speciality of Uncle Nick's  NYC Greek eaterie was a cheese dish that the waiters bore into the dining room with arm aloft, the platter ablaze with foot-high flames, everybody clapping, crying "hoopah!" every time.  There was something endearing and cheering about it, this idea that even in the heart of modern Cosmopolitania, the simple spectacle of a cheese pie on fire could wow the crowd.

And this was what came back to me later that night, when reading Lunar Park in bed had me uneasily glancing at the shadows -- it was a little humanity touchstone I rubbed in the midst of his chilly, black-holed world.  People could be monsters, yes, but they were also children.

Kunkel, Sijie, and Ellis?  Dinosaur, slapstick and flaming cheese -- these foolish things  remind me of you.

100 Yucks

There was a lot of it going around, I know, a lot of bloggers coming up with these cute and pithy Things I'm Thankful For lists -- but I wasn't in the mood.  Not that I'm not thankful!  There are many, many aspects of being alive for which I feel supremely grateful -- just not into the list.

I will say that one thing I'm thankful for is the existence of people with a sense of humor.  If only there were more of them!

So to honor humor, what I offer to you over this holiday weekend is 100 Funny Jokes (deemed the "funniest" by some magazine editors, but that's a terrible set-up for any gag -- "Hey!  Here's one of the funniest jokes you've ever heard!!!").  Let's just say there's some yucks in here.

Maybe your quality family time has left you wanting to break things, maybe your having been alone on Turkey Day has you monumentally depressed, maybe everything's been just so freakin' jolly for you this holiday that you want to keep your buzz on, but anyway, here you go -- surely something in this collection will get you to laugh.

And given that it's a long read, hopefully it will keep Living the Romantic Comedy fans happy while I take a brief hiatus -- I'm back East for the holidays and will return to the funny-love blog driver's seat this Wednesday, just before the 1st (Good Lord, how did it get to be December?!). 

In the meantime, my wish for you is that your life be more comedic than tragic.  You now how to define those terms, don't you?  Mel Brooks said it best:  "Tragedy is when I get a paper cut.  Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

Careful with those papers, eh?  Ciao for now.

Welcome to Our Madness

There’s a passage in Memories of My Melancholy Whores , the new book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where the 90 year-old protagonist, a newspaper journalist and longtime whoremonger, falling in love with a 14 year-old virgin without ever actually having spoken to her, fantasizes her being with him in his daily life: “I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed.  I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood…”

It was a little tough identifying with the guy and his Lolita-like proclivities, but when he hit this note of seeming insanity, everything reversed for me, as I encountered what immediately felt like a kindred spirit: of course, I thought, he’s a writer.

“Things our brains do naturally that writers try to do better:

Create order out of the bombardment of sensual data in the world

Combine information in different ways to create diverse meanings

Create narrative wholes from fragments

Dynamically edit past memories

Consolidate numerous voices, images, and stories into one organic whole”

…Be out of your freaking mind, is what I might add to this handy list, part of the introduction to one of the illuminating interviews in the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.  I’m particularly fond of trolling through such collections.  I’ve always liked reading writers talking about writing, for two main reasons: one, you almost always pick up something useful (e.g. a technique you can steal), and two, you might end up feeling just a mite bit better about your own madness.

Because we are, you know: bonkers, nutzoid, loose-screwed weirdos, everyone one of us.  I don’t care how supposedly normal a writer may appear to the outside world.  On the inside, it’s rarely a pretty picture.

“I have a deep inner fear of myself, of something in me, something amorphous and frightening that is always lurking beneath the act of writing.  I have an abiding terror of what’s in there.”

--Siri Hustvedt (The Believer Book of...)

“You don’t meet the writer, when you meet the person, you meet the place where it lives.”

It, The Thing That Writes.  This last quote comes from William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist who ought to know of what he speaks – an interview quote that’s always put me in mind of that wonderful play by Richard Greenburg, The Author’s Voice, in which a girl goes home with a writer guy and, puzzled by his normal, even banal persona, jokes that he must have some twisted gnome of a guy stashed in his closet who comes out at night and does the writing for him.  And later that night of course, the closet door opens, and out comes this little twisted gnome of a guy…

Nice metaphor.  But all too apt. 

We have met the monster and it is us. Writers release demons… and of course warm and fuzzy bunny rabbits, but it is dark in there… At any rate, a central function of the writer’s sensibility is the willed madness of invention.  Light or dark, part of our job is to make up people who aren’t there.  Like Marquez’s character, we mold and remold them, to suit our various purposes. 

And lately, in film and fiction, there’s been a rash of imaginaries – meaning, characters who are clearly figments of characters’ imaginations, stepping into their realities.  The characters seem to be aping, or commenting on, the process of their writers: writer creates character creates imaginary playmate.

Having recently completed a novel about a guy who invents an imaginary lover in the hopes of winning back his estranged wife, I’ve been noticing an awful lot of this “I see unreal people” stuff going on, in movies, TV, theater and fiction.  Six Feet Under had its dead father for live people to talk to, among others, Donnie Darko had that rabbit-headed companion; the recent romantic comedy/dramedy Just Like Heaven featured Reese Witherspoon as the walking-talking spirit of a woman in a coma…

Elizabeth Crane in her wonderful short story collection When the Messenger is Hot has a few “imaginary friends” on the loose, including the ghost of a dead baby who’s a great dancer and conversationalist.  The studio I work for has a project in development about a writer whose fictional creation comes to life.  So I’m beginning to think I’m not alone in my imaginary lover conceit – I might actually be in a crowd.

What the trend reflects, I believe, is an odd, subtle crossover between “writer consciousness” and general “culture consciousness.”  While writers make up imaginary people (and/or turn real people into imaginary ones, another cerebral sleight of hand that can promote craziness, in both creator and real-life subject), living on a daily basis in alternate realities… 

The thing is, these days, so does everybody else.

That guy talking on his cell-phone while he walks towards you down the sidewalk?  Not here.  He’s living in another dimension (which is why, when he’s behind the wheel of a car, he really shouldn’t be allowed to be on the road, but don’t get me started).  It used to be “crazy homeless people” who talked to themselves on the street – or writers – but now it’s pretty much your average Joe or Jane.

Most people in general have a fairly healthy fantasy life.  And now technology’s helping everyone to make those fantasies manifest.  The kid with his video-game.  Me with my Nano on.  We’re here and there simultaneously, reacting to and more present with voices from other dimensions than the one we’re standing in.  The Sims.  The helpful computer-created “person” you talk to on the telephone (e.g. Amtrak’s female-voiced “Julie”).  The widening disjunct, as cited by the current administration and the media, between “reality-based perception” and um… what is that thing we’re supposedly living in?

The old gag, “You’re never alone with a schizophrenic,” isn’t quite as funny, given the nature of our current unreal reality.  There’s a lot to be explored in the “why” of this situation, for starters.  One thought is that all these invented Others reflect an essential loneliness – again, heretofore native to writers, who tend to be social misfits – that’s now a modern age norm.  Or there’s the thought that with life spinning so wildly out of control, humans feel an ever-stronger need to have at least the illusion of control that imaginary lovers, dead people, friends and helpmates can provide.  But that’s for another post.  For now, I’ll just make this observation:

Used to be only writers who felt the need to hang out with unreal creations.  But these days, writers may be merely reflecting the unreality-hangin’ that everybody else is into.

Intimacy

When it comes to bedroom matters, to what goes on behind closed doors, mainstream American movies are more apt to get it wrong than get it right.  They're much better at the flash of the tease, the gloss of seduction, all the drama and pyrotechnics of foreplay.  But when it comes to the intimate act itself, more often than not, a movie's story stops in its tracks, and what gets slapped over the narrative gap is a montage of cliches: the silhouettes Moving Together As One, the hand clenching the sheets... with a sweeping-swooning piece of soundtrack music to take the place of say, a couple of actors really enacting the emotions involved.

What's usually missing is the real intimacy -- a portrayal of what goes on between two human beings in their most vulnerable, truly exposed moments.  Because it's not just the exposure of bare skin that really makes something memorable happen, between the sheets -- it's what transpires when people have let down their barriers, have let go, when they're actually feeling so close to one another that they can be more nakedly themselves, than merely nude.

A biopic about Johnny Cash is one of the last places I'd have thought to look for a genuinely intimate cinematic bedroom moment, but oddly, pleasingly, it's got a good one.  And it's all about a peanut.

I'll explain.

Over its first half, Walk the Line builds up a good deal of sexual/romantic tension between Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) and June Carter (Reese Witherspoon).  If you're a Cash fan and know something of this couple's history, you know where it's going, and even if you're not, you'd have to be someone who's never seen a movie to mistake the general direction of their arc, even though he's technically a married man and she's pretty much been saying "no" to him, while high wattage erotic sparks have been crackling around the two of them for the better part of an hour on screen.

So I'm not being a spoiler to report that finally, that "no" gives way to a "yes."  And when it does, the door to June's hotel room closes in front of the camera, and we're discreetly left out in the hall.  Cut to the morning after.  Now we find the lovers in bed, just lying around, happy.  Johnny's got some peanuts on hand, and as we stay close in the pillow vicinity, he unshells one and holds it just above June's lips.  She opens her mouth... and he swipes the nut back and eats it himself.

She swats at him, he laughs, says, no, wait a second, and shells another nut.  Holds it above her lips.  She's wary, not sure about this, but he waits for her to come around, and so she gives in -- parts her lips in anticipation again...  Johnny eats the nut.

Now she's pissed.  He's laughing.  There's some tussling.  He insists he's done fooling with her, wants to feed her a nut for real, now, and she says she doesn't trust him and he says, don't say that, and he gets her to put her head back again and he comes up with another nut...  And she waits, smiling at how bad he's being, and he holds the peanut above her lips again... waits for her to part them...  She's still holding out, he smiles, all tender and loving... and finally she opens up...  And he eats the peanut.

He's laughing, she beats at him with her fists, laughing, saying, "You're a mean, mean man--!" and he holds onto her, really cracking up... and the phone rings, and we're into another beat. 

The audience I saw this with was laughing with a particular kind of warmth -- it was a laugh of recognition and enjoyment, and the satisfaction (a result that's all too rare in such bedroom situations) of having seen a couple of lovers fooling around, while being so specifically true to who they are.  Because of course the scene succinctly taps into the subtext of Johnny Cash's selfishness, and his bad boy persona, and June Carter's innocence and good girl faith and attraction to that "badness" in him.  It all feels real.

This is also a movie where, it should be noted, each of the musical numbers also serves to speak to character and/or further the plot or illustrate theme.  That's one of its best aspects.  The movie is good without ever quite transcending the limitations of its subject enough to become truly great.  But James Mangold and Gill Dennis's script is filled with other little grace notes and touches of lyrical realism that make its best scenes more than obligatory.

And for the record, while it may be Reese who brings home the Oscar for this one, her part is already a winner on the page.   Check out June Carter's dialogue, as in her little "I've got your number" summary of Johnny, delivered in the breathless pause between two earlier kiss attempts: "You wear black shirts cause 'it's all you got,' you found your sound cause 'you can't play no better,' and you tried to kiss me cause 'it just happened?' You should try taking credit for something once in awhile."

At any rate, they say God's in the details, and that little peanut and the intimate bit of business surrounding it is going to stay with me far longer than any of those thrashing-around-on-the- floor or up-against-the-wall sexual acrobatics that have attempted to turn up the heat in countless other movies.

Speaking of intimacy, I can't resist passing along the video for one of my favorite songs of the year, Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek (click on "i-candy" and select "Solo Videos" in the Video category window).  I've been a Heap fan since her stint in Frou Frou and first fell in love with this song when it was used on an O.C. episode; it's now available on her first solo CD, and is the best thing on it.  That's because, beyond its haunting melody and lyrics, all it consists of is voice -- Imogen's voice, multi-tracked and processed. 

There's something so personal about this performance, where every sibilance and breath is front and center.  The production is daring in its simplicity, presenting a kind of aural nudity -- an intimacy that's simply sublime.

Block Busters

cartoon (c) Linda Causey 

A writer I know who's trying to write a romantic comedy can't get started.  "It feels like everything's been done before," he tells me. "I don't have an original idea in my head.  I'm blocked."

Especially in this genre, where the audience comes in knowing not only the ending (99 times out of 100, the couple will be coupled), but the basic moves of the story (meet, lose, get) -- being original is no easy task, and getting blocked would appear to be a common work hazard.  Except...  I don't really believe in writer's block.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist.  I'm saying I just don't believe it is what it seems to be.  I don't believe it's a legitimate excuse.  "You can always write something," Erskine Caldwell wrote.  "You write limericks.  You write a love letter.  You do something to get you in the habit of writing again, to bring back the desire."

Sure, sometimes it don't come easy.  Writing is hard work.  Anyone who's really gotten down there in the coal mines with a draft and worked at the damn thing for any serious length of time can bitch about what a difficult process it can be.  But when I hear a writer talk about how tough it is, sometimes I feel the same incredulous anger I felt when that guy in the White House was telling people, it's hard, so hard to try to do what he was trying to do: I was like, dude, it's your job!!!

Sometimes in my bleakest moments what I want to tell a writer who says he's got writer's block is, hey, who held a gun to your head and said, go be a writer?  Hey, if you're having such a hard time of it, and you just can't write... 

Stop.  Give it up.  Don't do it anymore.  If it hurts, why bother?  Like, do we need another writer?  In this town?!  Please -- study medicine, join the peace corp, find something useful to do with yourself -- more writing gigs for the rest of us, man, you'll be doing us a favor.

Of course this is nothing I've ever actually said to a fellow writer.  I certainly wouldn't say it to you.

In fact, forget I said that.  I want to be a helpful human.  I do, I honestly do!  Here's another helpful link, by writer/editor Katie Holmes, that addresses the issue of blockage with multiple points of view on overcoming it. And in support of romantic comedy writers everywhere who are looking to bust their blocks, to break on through to the land of fresh, distinctive and original, I'm going to let you in on one of my own trade secrets.

Stuck on a dime?  Knocked by a block?  Try turning to your daily, mundane, quotidian everyday LIFE. 

And you don't have to actually get up and leave the house to do it -- what are you, nuts? 

I go on line.

Looking for rom-com characters?  Come traipse with me cross the infinite currents of cyberspace, to the Wedding Vows pages of the New York Times' Style section, where for example, when Jordin and Kevin got hitched, the bride was serenaded by 200 kazoos, her bridesmaids "like a pack of sexy leopards, wearing their names spelled out in bling necklaces," and guests "were offered costumes from medieval to bondage gear."  And roll camera...

Peruse the annals of Craig's List, where a "Jewish lawyer needs someone to pretend to be my wife" for business purposes, a real-life plot so romantic comedy screenplay-ready that the Craig's folks have had to remove the post after it got floated in the blogosphere (there's prob'ly already competing versions set up at different studios).

For that matter, it's just a flick of the finger to get your research done on the one current celebrity who seems to me the Most Likely to Have a Rom-Com Heroine Based On Her.  Looking to write your revisionist Woman of the Year script?  Have at her, now.

Or spend some time trolling down the amazing roll call of Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, which writer Mil Millington has already turned into a book (screen rights available?).  Read and laugh at the exploits of one extremely entertaining male and female pair, not a couple, whose Kiss & Blog blog is full of I-can't-believe-they-wrote-that items like the answer to the question, "How does pussy feel for a man?" (see October 4th: "Cybersex" -- thank you, Jennifer).

Other blogs centered on gender relations that may offer the alert rom-com writer food for thought include girlspoke and the fledgling wanted babblefish.  And of course, for dialogue inspiration and guaranteed laughs straight from the street, subway and bodega, there's the site that's pretty much this expat New Yorker's favorite blog: Overheard in New York.

Some might say all it takes to get a funny love story started is to be a good listener. 

Sometimes a block is a crock.

Ever tried?  Ever failed?  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.

--Samuel Beckett

Latin proverb:  If there is no wind, row.

Chicks, Meet Dicks

   

As duly noted in the blogosphere and elsewhere, this month Merriam-Webster put chick flick in the dictionary (noun, 1988: a motion picture intended to appeal especially to women).  You can see why the phrase has had such staying power – it’s got the rhyme, the two satisfying “k” sounds – even though, as Carina Chocano’s very insightful, thought-provoking L.A. Times article points out, its usage has become so general and its application so knee-jerk as to render the concept near-meaningless. 

Chocano’s points well-taken, my only caveat to her discourse is to note that she’s kind of throwing the label out with the linguistic bathwater.  Despite its misapplication and ill-usage, yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a chick flick, which I’d define as any movie that no straight male in his right mind would ever watch purely for his own entertainment.  Even Steel Magnolias has something in it for the hardcore heterosexual Julia Roberts fan, but Beaches is a chick flick, period, and not even Camille Paglia could talk a guy into thinking otherwise (‘cause, honey, we’re not listening).

At any rate, like it or hate it, we’re now officially stuck with chick flick in the lexicon, so trying to un-use it is one of those hopeless, “when did you stop beating your wife?” tautological conundrums (sounds like the name of an indie band from Seattle, but it’s actually a phrase I’ve never used before in my entire writing life and will prob’ly never use again—it just crawled into my hand, honest). 

No, I think the only way to fight back is to start using a counter-term.  I’ve already tangled with the issue in this blog, in an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” way, by positing the existence of the Macho-Chick Flick: a movie which, though ostensibly aimed at a male audience/sensibility, is really a get-out-your-hankies chick flick at the core.  But I think the best weapon to offset the ubiquity of “chick flick” usage in the current culture is the creation of a new descriptive term, so here you go, newly minted by me: 

Dick Flick (noun, 2005): a motion picture intended to appeal especially to men. 

Now, in aping the very generality that Chocano criticized in her article, I realize that I risk casting way too wide a net; the entire billion-dollar oeuvre of porno flicks, of course, would come under such a definition (so to speak).  So in the interest of further clarification, and the edification of cine-scholars, let me break it down for ya.  To explicate the subtler significances of the term, herewith are ten Dick Flick sub-genres:

1) Hick Dick Flick: a movie generally featuring rednecked males involved in activities (e.g. bar brawls, car chases over country roads, etc.) that would make most females roll their eyes -- The Dukes of Hazard, Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance would qualify.

2) Slick Dick Flick: handsome alpha guys being sauvely, coolly, slickly up to no good, as in pretty much anything starring George Clooney (Ocean's 11, Out of Sight) and girl-getter playa pics like Alfie and Hitch.

3) Macho Dick Flick: an unfortunately large and common category, ranging from the Bond franchise to anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, distinguished by brawny dudes brandishing big, bigger and biggest surrogate phalluses, often to deadly ends, be they guns (Bad Boys), cars (The Fast and the Furious), or asteroids (Armaggedon), raising the question, Could it be that these guys are lacking -- or have -- a little something?

4) Big Dick Flick: wherein the phallus is no symbol, but the thing itself, see Boogie Nights, Austin Powers in Goldmember, etc.

5) Thick Dick Flick: featuring males who are clearly not the sharpest tools in the shed, dumb as a box of rocks, or simply, well, thick, be it in context comedic (Dumb and Dumber) or criminal (Fargo), e.g. Dude, Where's My Car, The Jerk, et al.

6) Sick Dick Flick: predatory males, often with very dicey if not downright psychotic agendas , from corrupt lawmaking (Bad Lieutenant) to serial killing (the Hannibal Lecter franchise) to violence for the sheer fun of it (Fight Club).

7) Flipped Dick Flick: boys-will-be-girls gender-bends where manly men don skirts and keep their zippers zipped (usually with babe-unzipping agendas), e.g. Tootsie, Some Like It Hot.  Not to be confused with actual literal transsexual Clipped Dick Pics such as the new Felicity Huffman transsexual movie Transamerica (which is like so totally chick flick that I can't believe manly me  even thought of it).

8) Stiff Dick Flick: movies that are supposedly about guys and guns and blowing things up, but are actually softcore, Maxim movies, see Into the Blue (ostensibly about stolen gold, sharks and carnage, but really all about Jessica Alba's bikini), Swordfish (men renting same will quickly fast-forward through all the gangsta headbutting to get to Halle Berry's tits).

9) Limp Dick Flick: in which a protagonist's inability to get the Little Man up and at 'em serves as pretext for pimping and conning (Midnight Cowboy), all kinds of murderous wreaking havoc (Bonnie and Clyde), or mere voyeurism and seduction (sex, lies & videotape).

1o) Prick Flick: again, an all too ubiquitous variation, in which the protagonist is one mean and lethal mutha, giving new and often bloody meaning to the concept of "anti-hero," the uber-Prick Flick being Al Pacino's gloriously ugly turn as Scarface.  See also: Scorsese's badfellas in Casino, evil Tom Cruse in Collateral.  There's also the sub-sub genre of Sensitive Prick Flick, e.g. The Sopranos.

And as a blog-insider add-on, there’s Neil’s Dick Flicks (in honor of Neil Kramer), wherein a male protagonist can’t resist talking about, or in the case of Me and Him, to his dick.

I’m sure there are other sub-genres to analyze, like Mick Dick Flicks (e.g. Gangs of New York); you could say that Kill Bill and the upcoming Aeon Flux are Chicks-as-Dicks Flicks.  Oh, and what about A-Dick-Is-A-Dick Flicks -- admittedly a small category (i.e. the Richard Nixon comedy, Dick)?

But I’m just trying to get the ball(s) rolling, here.  I hope that in laying this out, I’ve given cine-crits and academics everywhere some juicy fodder to maw on.  I can hear one discoursing now: “Russ Meyer?  Why, he’s the uber-auteur of Stiff Dick/Hick Dick Flicks, doncha know.” 

Rolls trippingly off the tongue, doesn’t it?  Feel free to spread the term around – you know, just so women won’t be the only gender to be so casually disparaged.

American Beauty

 

"There is something magical about a woman who is both sexy and a goofball at the same time."   --James Mangold and Gill Dennis

I came upon this line in the narrative of Walk the Line, the screenplay for the upcoming Johnny Cash bio-pic, where it's used to describe young June Carter, but it certainly applies to Sarah Silverman, whose comedy concert movie Jesus Is Magic I just saw.  Of course "magic" is an odd word to use in talking about a comedian who would only employ that adjective sarcastically.  But I did emerge from her movie musing on the... well, you could call it bewitching quality of her craft.

Silverman is a singular self-creation, of a kind that could only exist at this particular odd cultural moment.  Though she comes from a line of humorists that goes back at least as far as Lenny Bruce, I'm not entirely sure we've seen anything quite like her before: a pretty, innocent-faced, seemingly nice Jewish girl who says the kind of things that could make a pornographer blanch. 

"I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend's penis," she muses, "and all of a sudden I'm thinking, oh my God, I'm turning into my mother."

The gag is typical of Silverman's approach, which is dependent on a certain amount of preaching-to-the-choir knowingness on her audience's part.  The reversal at the core of her comedic persona (i.e. the shock of that coming out of this girl's mouth), though it harkens back to say, the basic reversal of screwball comedy (woman chasing man, a shocking notion in its day), is doubled by Silverman's deliberately provocative use of taboo subjects, racism more often than not, in ways that can rattle a contemporary liberal crowd.  When she sings, "I love you more than black people don't tip," for example, you have to be both in on one joke (the outrageous nice girl) and able to appreciate another (the humorless-ness of being politically correct).

Silverman's big subject, aside from the shock-humor stuff, is narcissism.  I find her at her funniest when she's skewering the horrifically self-absorbed nature of not just celebrities but, well, any of us at our it's-all-about-me worst.  One of the movie's best visual gags is a bit where she literally makes love to herself with a mirror.  "I don't care if you think I'm racist," she says in the film, "I just want you to think I'm thin."

This New Yorker profile and this NPR interview will give you a sense of what you're in for, if you've yet to be exposed to Silverman's unique charms and want to see if the concert film is up your alley, or if you're already a convert and would like to know how her off-stage/screen persona contradicts or jibes with her act.  And this recent New York Times piece presents her in current, my-moment's-here mode.

What I was left thinking about, after the movie, is how only someone this cute, someone so sunnily deadpan in her delivery, could really get away with the barbed ironies she's flinging in the face of her culture -- something Silverman, of course, is well aware of, as her employment of an unattractive, pasty-faced understudy with braces on demonstrates in the movie's coda.  Sexy Sarah is, after all, the covergirl for last month's issue of Heeb (truly a marriage made in semitic comedy heaven).  But as Sam Anderson's insightful Slate piece on Silverman points out, you don't actually have to see her to get her -- it just makes the experience more, um, magical.

What's really fantastical is that despite the inevitable controversy (she's already pissed off two ethnic groups who ought to know better), Sarah Silverman is free to be who she be.  Kind of makes me feel good -- for a change -- about being an American.     

Of Chemistry and Numbers

   

Uma.  Uma.  Uma, Uma, Uma-uma-uma-uma ooooooooooooooooma! UUUMAH!!!

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system, can we talk about Meryl?

Because though Uma is a star, an incandescence, a camera-adores-her phenonemona, she's really not the greatest actress, whereas obviously, Meryl is -- let's face it, come on, if you want to get the job done, who you gonna call?  Cate Blanchett?  Nicole?  Can we be serious?  I know, I know, there's two camps, those who love her and those who always say they see the acting, and what's with the accents, and it's just too much of a muchness, but I say yo, get over it.  Meryl Streep is a once-in-a-generation kind of greatness, and I'll watch her do anything, if she wants to play a rabbi, mazel tov, I'm there. 

The thing is, her instrument, it's a freakin' Stradivarius -- this woman can give you more of what's going on behind a character's eyes in a moment than most entire casts manage to convey in the length of a feature, her face an amazingly transparent, translucent thing, so alertly attuned is it to communicating inner lives, the shifting nuanced subtleties of complex emotions a person can feel within an instant -- she's a novel, is what Streep is at her best.

Which is what makes the meeting of Uma and The Actress ultimately such a disappointment in this mess of a what-movie-am-I?, Prime.  They've got about two, three scenes tops together where the best of what you want the movie to be really wakes up the screen, and for those, I guess Prime is worth the price of admission.  But cheesh, the rest of it!

The rest of it can only be laid at the feet of its writer-director Ben Younger.  I think the first of him shoulda fired the second, since he fails to even find a rhythm from the get and never really does get one going.  But finally the writing is the culprit here, since the film is terminally afflicted with trying to be two movies at once: one is that wacky upbeat "his mom is her therapist!" laugher you saw in the trailer, and the other is an attempted Way We Were soaper about a martyred older woman and the earnest young lover who tries to love her. 

They never quite mesh.  And the comedy one, despite its one inspired running gag (any time nice Jewish Bryan Greenberg truly transgresses, he envisions his bubushka-ed Yiddish grandma hitting herself in the head with a frying pan) is kind of a thin, one-trick pony, though it was a better idea to begin with.  The soapy one, ironically, never gets to credible on account of the casting.  I mean, Uma Thurman would be too much for many an older man, let alone a younger.  And somehow the spectacle of her playing The Older Woman seems too much of a Hollywood gag ("If she has to be 37," I can hear the Useless Exec say, "can she at least be Uma?") to make the conceit convincing. 

Especially when she's playing it with a character who's barely there.  The woefully underwritten Greenburg role is the movie's real Achilles heel, and it was waiting for Greenburg to give us what's needed -- a fully realized expression of a specific, unique individual's experience of what it would be like to be in his fraught situation -- that got me to comprehend, finally, just what it is that sinks the majority of romantic comedies these days.

You got to have two of them -- two real, three-dimensional recognizably human humans.  We want to experience the chemical equation of two distinctive personalities, a he's-this and she's-that combustion which convincingly provides the core pleasure that's at the root of good rom-coms: the experience of two people discovering each other, challenging, besting and ultimately winning each other -- you know: falling in love.

Because Ben's a generic younger guy, and Uma's... well, Uma, there's not enough there there for these two numbers to truly add up.  You believe that Uma and Ben want to jump into bed -- that much is no stretch.  But the grand passion we're asked to believe justifies the movie's mawkish "here's our greatest moments" montage in the end is never built, beat by beat, in front of us.  We don't really feel the connection they're supposedly feeling, beyond mere sexual tension.

Hey, it's hard!  It's such an interior experience to get across, it's a genuinely difficult writing challenge, to create that chemistry on the page.  I think that's why so many recent entries in the genre haven't delivered these goods.  Somehow even an ace like Cameron Crowe couldn't quite get us to see what Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst were supposed to be seeing in each other, in Elizabethtown.  Even the match-up of Will Smith and Eva Mendes wasn't entirely real in the more successful Hitch -- that was more Will Smith tapdancing with Will Smith.

Turn to the masters, though, and the evidence ignites every frame.  Pick your favorite Tracy and Hepburn (probably a Gordon-Kanin script or the Ring Lardner, Jr.), check out Alvy Singer and Annie Hall, Harry and Sally, and what you'll see is two vividly etched, larger-than-life, capital-C Characters whose inners and outers are really wrestling, via deeply felt, fully-explored and well-executed stories.

You could go, for example, to the just-released on DVD, recently restored pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney in Stanley Donen's Two For the Road, a slightly flawed but mostly inspiring romantic dramedy classic.  This is the kind of movie that makes you feel fine to be older, be you a woman or man, and I'll bet that in spite of its occasional too-arch '60s moments, it gets you in the gut -- because its just-right-but-not-right combo of Him and Her is just so poignantly believable.

Of course, some of it's due to Audrey.  Audrey, oh Audrey oh don't get me started.

But What Is It About?

Every working screenwriter I know has had an experience something like this, in pitching a story to an executive:  You set it up perfectly, hooking them at the top, you swiftly power through to the second act midpoint, with plenty of vivid you-can-see-it movie moments along the way, you pay off all your set-ups beautifully, then slide home for the big climax -- you've made the best case conceivable for your star-attractive, mainstream audience-friendly, same-but-different winner of a movie.  And the exec, who's been rapt throughout, looks genuinely excited as you catch your breath.  "Fabulous!" he says.  Pause.  "But what is it about?"

A reaction like this may seem to make a good argument for gun control.  But over the years, I've come to really respect that question.  It's certainly more valid than the other two most common questions they all learn at Studio Executive School.  One is "What are the set-pieces?" (which I can elaborate on in another blog post) and the other is the old "Does it have to be a... ?" which I can illustrate with the following joke.  Q: How do you know which is the development executive in a meeting?  A: He's the one who, when you're pitching a remake of Moby Dick, says, "Great!  But does it have to be a dick?"

No, what the guy is really asking when he asks "what is it about?" -- rude or reductive as it may sound --  is "what's the reason we should invest in this story?", meaning, invest in emotionally as well as invest financially.  What universal issue is the story speaking to?  What will the audience relate to?  What about it is going to speak to us, as personally as it speaks to the writer?

As a writer, when faced with this question, I have one voice in my head (and oh, reader, there are many) that reacts like one of those Old Hollywood screenwriters stuck in a back room on the studio lot with an Underwood at his fingertips and a stogie in his mouth: "Whaddya mean, what's it about?  It's about a girl and a gun!"  But I've learned the hard way that the question really does have to be answered.  And in terms of the romantic comedy genre, I've come to think it's vital.  A romantic comedy that doesn't know what it's about isn't likely to get made, or if it does, isn't likely to endure.

It's a common misconception that rom-coms, oft thought of as light, frothy fare, are just about "high jinks ensue."  Truth is, all the great ones really do have a strong thematic thread, from Tootsie (which is about a self-absorbed guy who through posing as a woman becomes a more selfless man) to When Harry Met Sally (which is about the key to romantic relationships being a learned appreciation of the differences between men and women).  Even an over-the-top farce like There's Something About Mary, which seems to be about using semen as hair gel, and setting dogs on fire, nonetheless presents a clear and coherent theme: its protagonist learns that true love means putting someone else's happiness before your own.

All romantic comedies ask the question, "Will these two people become a couple?"  The great and enduring rom-coms also ask, "What does their becoming a couple mean?"

We don't necessarily think about theme when we react to movies, but their presence (or lack) can make a huge difference.  I reckon that one of the problems with Elizabethtown is that "what it's about" seems simultaneously too much and too little, and that what keeps Shopgirl seeming good but small is that its love-means-being-vulnerable theme is a bit self-evident and obvious.  The success of Sex and the City had a lot to do with the fact that every episode asked a thematic question.  While some were more strained than others, it was always clear that Carrie was looking for the meaning in what was happening around her.

From the ones I read at the studio and the ones I wrestle with in consults, I'd say too many aspiring funny love stories forget to really examine their raison d'etre.  If you don't know why you've written this script --  if you didn't really need to find out something important about love and humans in the writing of it -- the absence of that investment will be felt.  And Mr. Exec will end up wondering why people will want to see it.

The need for addressing the "what is it about?" question in romantic comedies shouldn't be a secret.  So in the interest of full disclosure, it's one of among some half a dozen Romantic Comedy Screenwriting Secrets I'll be blabbing on about at the Screenwriting Expo 4 this weekend, November 11-13 at the L.A. Convention Center. 

You can come see me (and a bunch of fun rom-com clips) Saturday morning at 10, but that's just one 325th of it (there's that many seminars), with William Goldman, Susannah Grant and Joss Whedon merely the tip of the star-speaker iceberg.  No one asked me to shill for it, but honestly, this fest is freakin' full of useful screenwriting info.  I'll be around signing books (and/or body parts) at noon, too, so if you're in the house, stop by and say hi.

In the meantime, I might as well completely contradict myself and admit I'm headed out to see a rom-com named Prime, which for me, doesn't need to be about anything other than Uma.

What Lies Beneath

I don't know where you go for inspiration when you're working on something new (or thinking about working on it, see below) but I tend to be a multi-discipline inspiration-seeker.  Meaning, while it may seem counter-intuitive to avoid reading screenplays when you're writing a screenplay, I often first turn to music, poetry, fiction, even painting to jump-start my filmic engines.  So, since I'm supposedly prepping to begin a new novel, I decided to read a play.  [For the edification of my L.A. readers: a play is a piece of dramatic/comedic writing that's performed by live actors in front of a live audience -- kind of like this "live TV" stunt they just pulled on The West Wing, only without the cameras.  I know, nutty, huh?  But plays are done a lot in New York, where some people consider them foreplay.]

Anyway, it's not often I read something that blows the top of my head off  (literally! I'm writing this with only half a brain and my place is a mess!), not often that I read a play, on my own time, as a break from reading screenplays, nor often that I entirely agree with the Pulitzer committee (see how many on these lists of Drama and Fiction that you think have truly stood the test of time).  But I'd heard so much about John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (A Parable) that I chucked the title into a recent amazon.com order, mainly so I could make up the $25 balance that earns you free shipping.   God, I'm brilliant -- or rather, I wish all my whims should be so fortuitous.  Because speaking of brilliance, here is a piece of dramatic writing that is... well... perfect.

"Perfect" is not a word I throw around loosely.  There's a little grid on the cover of a reader's standard screenplay coverage sheet, where you put X's in the little boxes to grade story concept, characterization, etc. from Poor, to Fair, to Good, to Excellent.  The last time I remember putting a couple of X's in the Excellent box (for Character and Dialogue) was when I covered Wes Anderson's Rushmore,  and that wasn't like, last week.  So when I say this play is perfect, I'm not being hyperbolic.  I mean it truly is without fault or defect (Pocket Merriam-Webster).

Simple set, four characters (one of whom only appears in one scene), simple story -- only it's not, of course, which is where the brilliance comes in.  Aristotle (even David Mamet) would be happy: this is thesis versus antithesis, naked, a primal conflict motored by inexorable logic that powers its way, with maximum tension and excitement, from an opening line of dialogue that sets up the whole thematic subtext, to a killer of a closing line which encapsulates what the whole thing is about in like, four words (that was when my head exploded).  And I defy you to find a line in there that could've been cut.  This is one lean, mean, clean machine.  Which is what got me thinking about the old iceberg theory.

Ernie Hemingway's the guy who put it out there, first in his book Death in the Afternoon, and some decades later, reiterated in a famous Paris Review interview:

"If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg.  There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.  Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.  It is the part that doesn't show.  If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story."

How this applies to movies is obvious.  In this bizarre form I once heard a screenwriter liken to writing 120 pages of Haiku, all the audience can see and hear is what appears within a frame -- the tip of the iceberg.  But for the audience to lose themselves within the world of that frame, the whole of the thing has to be lying underneath.  This is clearly what Shanley's done here: you can feel everything that's been left out, vibrating under everyone's feet.

While pitting two people against each other whose livelihoods and lives hang in the balance, Doubt takes on the Catholic church, among other issues: sexual abuse, race, motherhood, marriage, sexism, education, morality, why the song Frosty the Snowman should be banned from the radio.   Yet its pages are a triumph of white space.

The pleasure of experiencing a work that's built on the iceberg principle lies in watching all its hot minimal littles go such a long way.  Shanley, who until now has been known for poetic excess (seen at its best in his Oscar-win, Moonstruck) here slips one protagonist's whole domestic backstory into a single seemingly casual line, packs a genuinely mountainous amount of subtext into a swift 90 minutes.  With so much going on, he's able to put nothing in front of us that doesn't need to be there, and what's there, for all its brevity, speaks volumes.  This is because underneath the sparse, hyper-charged conversations, he's constructed a rock-solid story foundation.  At a slim 58 pages in paperback, all that shows up in the play's dialogue is the enriched essentials, and the action has the compressed intensity of a good action movie. 

I was trying to think if I'd ever seen this level of sharp-tipped iceberg craft in a romantic comedy, and so far have only come up with one.  This may sound a little Brittany-meets-Beckett at first, but I'd put Nora Ephron on the dais with Shanley: When Harry Met Sally is the first rom-com that comes to mind with an analogous heat-seeking missile focus, each of its scenes aimed and fired at the same thematic target with a similar accuracy and panache.  Funnier than Doubt, if not as hefty, but it is, despite all the shtick, marvelously stripped-down and About Something.  Again, check out the pages: look at the white space!  It's an iceberg movie, all the way.

Personally, I'd like to run into more of them.  Too many specs you see are overloaded with quirky detail, as if to make up for their hollow cores.  A less-is-more rom-com with Doubt's kind of iceberg substance and clarity would really make my reading day.  In the meantime, if you want a bracing blast of what "well-made" means, you might want to check out this play.