Living the Romantic Comedy

Lust For Lists

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5 Reasons Why People Compulsively Come Up With Lists About Movies

1)  In the midst of chaos, the mind craves order

2)  The muse has gone AWOL but the deadline, she is here

3)  You are now master of your domain

4)  It's a welcome distraction from the daily news

5)  Everyone else is doing it!

Maybe it's like that phenomenon remarked upon in drug addiction: the addict is trying with each abuse to recapture the experience of that very first time he or she got high.  Because sure, who hasn't enjoyed, early on in life, some seminal list-making experience? 

Someone asked you (hangin' round the schoolyard, sittin' round the campfire, smokin' in the boys' room -- wait, you were too young to smoke): What are your five favorite movies?  And you got to think them up.  And you felt the delicious tension that comes from so many pressures -- are you leaving one out, which one could you lose, which would make you look cool, which would brand you a dork, etc. -- along with the ticking clock and the awareness that in some essential way, you were being asked to define your personality, nay, your very self.

Heady stuff.  And of course, key to the fun of the game is the primal "I show you mine, you show me yours" of it all; make the list and you are instantly in comparison, no longer a stone alone but tacitly coupled with a fellow human.  Underscoring this is the frisson of illicit excitement that humans, bless our pointed little heads, are so prone to derive from such comparisons, as the subtext is actually: will I get to be right?

People hate to be wrong.  And when one makes a list of the Best, or the Worst, or the Greatest, or the Most Memorable, et al, you vying to be right.  The prize you're after may range from a smiling nod to an appalled dude are you weird! but the "win" in list-making is a sense, however fleeting and ephemeral, of authority: I know what's scariest, funniest, grossest... and okay, buddy: try and top this.   

You could say competition is a vital component, or you could look at it as... communication, in a more positive spin (e.g. I do of course know better than you, but it's entertaining to hear what you think is right).  And built into this kind of intellectual trading is information: strange but true, you might actually learn something (had The Best of Youth not shown up on a number of film critics' "10 Best" lists last year, I would've been deprived of one of the great cinematic experiences of the decade).

All of this is by way of saying, they're at it again.  Well, "they" are never not at it these days (I've been guilty of such list-making, myself) so I'm not exactly delivering news.  But the latest Movie List making internet rounds is this here thinger: The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time.

You gotta love the hyperbole.  What the list oughta be called is The Top 50 Movie Endings Most Beloved by 10 Writers at Filmcritic.com, but that doesn't quite have the same impact now, does it?  ...OF ALL TIME!!!  From since before there were even movies!!!  Can't you just see those giant letters carved out of concrete, like in some old Cecil B. DeMille flick?  I don't know about you, but I am humbled. 

I'm also of course game.  No sooner did I begin reading than I was caught up in the familiar intellectual knee-jerks and oh-mys, as in -- that one?!  You thought that was a great ending?  And the cine-study lit-crit pedant in me (he's in there, a little bearded dwarf in tweeds who resides just left of my liver) immediately started carping over details (they got The Graduate's ending wrong, since the rules of their game cite "the last minute of the movie" as the requirement, not an entire ending sequence, and as my little bearded tweedy dwarf knows, the actual last minute is that inspired long take on the bus [as discussed in the end of this post], so even though I agree that the The Graduate belongs on the Top Movie Endings list, technically... and so on).

C'mon (as if you haven't looked at the link already), you know you want to know what they got wrong (i.e. leaving out your favorite) and what they got right (i.e. smartly agreeing with your taste completely).   And as such lists go, I'll confess to being tickled by one which is entirely made up of spoilers -- you can't agree or disagree unless you've already seen the movie, which of course requires a few quick woa, gotta skip this one click-downs.  That is, if you'll own up to having not seen the entire 50.

Coincidentally, another addition to the Movie List canon cropped up recently that's more apropos to this blog turf.  Take a gander at 14 Truly Sexy Sex Scenes, courtesy of the Onion's A.V. Club.  With a far less pretentious and less controversial list approach (14's a neatly arbitrary number, and they're not bothering with any "Greatest" hype), they had me at #2 (Y Tu Mama Tambien ) and cinched it at #s 4 and 5 (Betty Blue and Don't Look Now).  And hey, now I get to do some, um, research, on account of there's one or two herein that I've never seen...

You can't beat 'em, so you join 'em.  Thus I'm now wondering, naturally, what might be the Top Ten Greatest Romantic Comedy Endings?  The Filmcritic gang list 5 out of their Top 50 that qualify (and I would concur that at least #20 and #10 would definitely make my cut), but something tells me... you might have an opinion?

Dumb Rom-Comic Book Fun

Low expectations is definitely the way to go regarding so many things in life, but certainly re: going to the movies -- and one current moviegoing experience made better by expecting the worst is My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

Sometimes you see a pretentious Hollywood product -- a certain controversially devisive recent Oscar-winner comes to mind -- that's so puffed-up with self-importance while ultimately being silly-simplistic, that it becomes what my old friend Andrew calls a Smart Movie For Stupid People.  On the other hand, occasionally you get the obverse; Super Ex is a Stupid Movie For Smart People.

Because it sure comes on dumb -- if you've seen the trailer, you'll know what I mean -- with a premise so broad one thinks, man, this has gotta suck (though not so broad as Adam Sandler's latest -- there's a movie with such an obvious concept that not only were various specs in play with the same hook half a dozen years ago, but that same friend Andrew and I used to share a joke where if we found ourselves in a boring or uncomfortable situation, we'd look at each other and mime hitting the fast-forward on a remote -- and that was back in the early 1980s).

Then you think (if you're me, at least) of the Uma factor: she had me at hello, Dangerous Liaisons, and I've been able to watch her, happily, in pretty much everything she's made since.  Then there's the fact that the movie was directed by Ivan Reitman, no slouch at comedy he (Ghostbusters, et al) and written by a funny Simpsons writer (Don Payne, now tapped, natch, for the Fantastic Four sequel).  All of this and Eddie Izzard too was what impelled me to float this as my movie of choice on a date this past weekend.

Smartly, I hedged my bet.  "This could be really dumb," I told my date, and she, bless her heart, said she was fine with that.  "But even if it's bad, we can talk about where it went wrong," I added, on account of this woman, as it happened, being in the midst of outlining a romantic comedy script (wait a sec -- rom-com guy dates girl writing a rom-com -- how did that happen?).  Thus fully prepared for the worst (and you know you're in Low Expectationville if you're rationalizing an evening's entertainment as an educational experience), we took our seats, and thus...

Good time!

Amazing how enjoyable a film can be if you expect it to suck.  And I'll go out on a critical limb here and say that by any standard, Super Ex provides as many substantive laughs as one could want from a lightweight summer comedy.  You may find it excessive -- how much you buy into it may depend on how funny you think a shark out of water can be (more of that in a moment) -- but on its own wacky terms, it's also a perfectly viable rom-com.

As cinema, it's nothing much. Reitman, though his comedic timing is impeccable, his sense of gag construction brilliant, has never been a particularly interesting auteur; he shows none of say, David Frankel's truly impressive panache in Devil Wears Prada, and his son Jason is actually a much more visually stylish director (see Thank You For Smoking -- no really, do see Thank You For Smoking).

But let's address what's more important: how perfect is Uma as neurotic super-heroine G-Girl?  People forget (and by that I mean people who pay attention to such things) that she's quite good at comedy -- see Audrey Wells' underrated Truth About Cats and Dogs -- and here she has a field day; it's one of those kismet actress-meets-role performances (you may like your Uma tortured and martyred -- e.g. the Kill Bills -- but I prefer her purely empowered, thanks).

Meanwhile, Luke Wilson: romantic comedy leading man?  Eh, might be a natural response, but he's very good here; his reaction shots alone are well worth savoring.  Though both character-actor-of-the-moment Rainn Wilson and comedienne Wanda Sykes do just okay with superficially etched roles,  the fabu Eddie Izzard, though somewhat hamstrung by attempting to master an American accent, has some wonderfully playful moments.   Anna Faris, who's clearly trying to transition from willfully airheaded support-caricatures (you may remember her turn as the Britney-like idiot pop star in Lost in Translation), makes a decent case for herself as leading lady-to-be; the intelligence in her goggle-eyes signals Potential.

Which brings us to the smart/stupid of it all.  Here's what I like most about Super Ex: it makes good on its premise in a sexy-funny way.  The whole conceit of the movie is "vengeful super-heroine as metaphor for The Ex-Girlfriend From Hell" and the story development, albeit over-the-top in a somewhat nutso (yet predictable) third act, gives this basic gag a great workout.  But it also makes the most of what's always been a tacitly, inherently risque subtext in the super-hero genre. 

As expected, you get some sly, extremely satisfying satirical riffs on this comic book/movie turf, but at the same time, you also get a smartly insouciant approach to "blue" material, something the movie shares with recent macho chick flicks like 40 Year-Old Virgin.  There's a frank, adult tone to the sexual humor.

The "male super-hero flies human heroine through the air" routine familiar from all the Supermans here gets a Scene We'd Like To See treatment that makes the metaphor explicit, as Thurman initiates a terrified Wilson into a unique variation on the Mile High Club.  And the bedroom scenes, while not at all too explicit (thus kibboshing any date-movie embarrassment) get good comedic mileage out of that "what would super sex actually be like?" question; they're in character, move the plot forward, and are funny.

Throughout the whole thing, a basic reversal that's always been central to romantic comedy (the feminized male and male-iffic female) is a gift that keeps on giving, right down to its final moments (for those who know Izzard in his transvestite comedian identity, the last image of him being forced to carry his girlfriend's purse carries a double giggle).

Which leaves me finally with a shark on my hands.  I'd cry spoiler alert!  but this scene has already been splayed across your TV screens, in the trailer.  You know how I'm always hawking "set pieces" as an ultra-necessity of contemporary comedy?  Well, there's one real doozy here among many, and I totally get how someone else might simply find it a groaner; in fact, if I read the scene in a spec, it would definitely give me pause, since it's a Python-esque out-of-left-field idea.

Not to give the whole thing away, but -- one of G-Girl's revenge ploys is to heave a Great White shark at her hapless ex-beau at a specifically inopportune moment.  In a neat instance of writer/director/production team collaboration, said shark bears more than a passing resemblance (deliberately, I am sure) to the infamous mechanical shark Bruce, from Jaws.  Maybe not your cup of tea (or salt water), but it's sweet, smart touches like this -- along with the instantly immortal, gobsmacked topper line that Faris addresses to Wilson: "Why did G-Girl throw a shark at us?!" -- that have kept me smiling about the movie since I saw it.

Romantic comedy checklist:  More than the usual straight-up fare?  Check, it's a sci-fi/rom-com hybrid.  Good, believable chemistry between the leads?  Yup.  Witty banter?  Enough.  Good set-pieces, check, decent Buddies and Bellamys, uh-huh.  Legitimately romantic?  Like I said: cheekily erotic, and heartfelt at the core.

Stupid?  Sure.  Funny?  Well, we thought so.  And for a hot summer date night with deliberately dialed-down expectations, you might want to give it a shot.

Writing Down Your Now

Parody of a typical blog post opening: 

Jeez, it's hot.  I know I'm supposed to be writing something interesting but it's been such a boring afternoon and I don't have anything to talk about, but I haven't blogged in awhile so I guess I have to write this anyway, so here's some random blatherings about thoughts I've had over the past few days...

Fascinating, no?  You could say it's an honest, accurate representation of a character and their emotions (blogger as protagonist), but it's not exactly... compelling.  I would note that one weakness is a lack of specificity (both the personality of the writer and the nature of the experience are awfully general), and on further thought, that what the piece of writing suggests is actually an avoidance of the experience the writer is having.

Meaning, what comes across most clearly is a frisson of irritation, distractedness, discomfort.  In fact, I read the subtext of the paragaph as:  I wish I wasn't so bored.

My instant response to the recognition of that subtext is:  how bored are you?  Because that's actually more interesting.  Had the writer in question -- call him Me3 (me, three minutes ago) -- really dug into his boredom, inhabited that emotion fully and wrote from the core of it, instead of simply noting it and trying to get past it, he might have come up with something like...

I'm so bored right now that the idea of counting the number of times my cursor flashes seems as entertaining as watching Pirates of the Caribbean.

I can imagine a litany of Me3's "I'm so bored"s that might eventually lead to a) a more direct experience of what being bored feels like and b) something genuinely funny.  It reminds me of that old Monty Python routine where the gang sits around upping one another about who was more poor -- and hang on (god, I love the internet) -- here it is in all its glory.  Can't resist quoting one section:

Eric Idle:  [We were so poor...] We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.
Graham Chapman:  House?  You were lucky to have a HOUSE!  We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture.  Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
Terry Gilliam:  You were lucky to have a ROOM! We used to have to live in a corridor!
Michael Palin:  Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor!  Woulda' been a palace to us.  We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip...

And et cetera absurdum.  But here's what I'm going on about:

Screenwriters are obsessed with structure, structure, structure.  Outline, get the plot points in a row, make the act breaks pop, achieve the page quota.  So much of the craft and craft focus goes into making that blueprint for an experience-to-be, that too often the less experienced screenwriter forgets to... (please don't be put off by the seeming Californianistic sound of this) be here now.

When you're given the assignment of writing a given scene, what you're really being asked to do is deliver the emotional truth of a moment-to-moment experience.  What I've found to be most helpful in getting me to that place, is to bring my actual, genuine emotions to bear on whatever beat I need to write.  To create honest emotions on the page, I have to bring my present moment to that moment.

Much in the way, say, that an actor inhabits a character when the camera rolls, as screenwriter Amy Holden Jones points out (in an interview by Joel Engel): 

On some level, all characters are part of your self, if you're good at it; your worst side, your best side, your worst impulses, your best impulses.  They're you when you were thirteen, you at twenty-five.  You can project yourself onto any character, pretty much the way an actor does.

Much in the way a musical performer performs when they're in front of a live audience, as Argentinian singer/songwriter Juana Molina notes in her Believer interview with Josh Kun: 

The difficulty of being onstage is that I'm not performing -- I'm bringing the private into the public... That's the most important barrier I've had to go through.

If you're feeling angry when you're supposed to be writing a moment where a character is sad, you write the sadness angry.  The choice is honest and can lead to honest result; meanwhile, you're getting  instant subtext.  Oh, the character's anger is just a symptom, the reader thinks: she's actually sad, but she's resisting her grief or can't express it directly.

Two factors, it seems to me, come into play during this process.  One is commitment, because you're committing yourself to expressing who you are and where you are, right now.  A certain energy is born of real commitment, as in the famous quote attributed to Goethe:

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.  All sorts of things occur to help one that would not have otherwise occurred.  A whole stream of events issues from that decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would have come his way... 

Yuh-huh.  Which leads me to factor #2: a receptivity to the present moment.

Being present in the writing process not only involves being faithful to who you are and what you're feeling, but being flexible, alert and open to where you are in time and space.  In the same interview Juana Molina talks about how random sounds come into her recordings and affect the outcome of the song.  In one case, the sound of someone feeding their dog occurred while she was recording:

But then, when I listened back, I didn't care.  Because in the song, everything becomes music...  Sometimes I'll play in venues where they'll have coffee machines or milkshake machines--all those noises that I hated maybe five years ago--I love them now.

Surely you've had the experience of integrating what started as a distraction into your draft -- one can't write in the contemporary world without such a happening.  But I'm a believer in the phenomenon of synchronicity.  When you're committed and deeply involved with your work, it stands to reason that your aesthetic and spiritual antennae are attuned to whatever might be relevant to it, no matter how initially unlikely it may seem.

Part of what makes Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest work, what makes it generally lively and entertaining (in spite of the moments when it's not) comes from, I think, a certain receptivity on the part of writers Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot.  There are certain vivid images that sort of float to the surface of the stew of it, which come from their having cast such a wide net (encompassing the sea, ships, England, Tortuga, ghosts, sea creatures, et al): a pirate's dog running down a beach with keys in its mouth, a man with the face of an octopus playing the pipe organ with his tentacles.

These images put me in mind of the wonderful rubber stamps of Leavenworth Jackson, an artist who has specialized for decades in the reproduction of Unlikely Images.  Her stamps tend to feature arcane retro figures and designs, more often than not with a contemporary absurdist bent; many are Dada, Max Ernst collage-like in sensibility.

What one does with rubber stamps is play.  I've used my collection to illustrate the surfaces of letters, mostly (FYI, letters are these paper-enveloped missives, sometimes written in longhand -- i.e. with the aid of an ancient instrument known as a pen, which emits ink -- that are then hand-mailed, as opposed to electronically e-mailed -- oh, never mind). 

The point is, when you have a bunch of rubber stamps, you create designs using them out of a kind of subliminal association; you happen to have one of these -- say, a wooden doll baby's head -- and realize it looks good when stamped atop one of those -- perhaps an antique flying toothbrush to which you've already attached wings.  And from these juxtapositions you improvise a kind of visual story on the page.  But note: the stamps one owns reflect, naturally, one's tastes and interests -- so this is random creation within the context of your own very specific creative sensibility.

Thus I was edified to find, in an interview with Elliot & Rossio in the current issue of Creative Screenwriting, that a good portion of their creative effort, in the early pre-outlining stages, did in fact entail throwing all the elements they had into the mix, with the particulars and specific choices emerging later on.  Interviewer Sean Kennelly is asking about the process by which the two writers brainstorm using 3 x 5 index cards:

Elliot:  Pretty much anything we think might be interesting to have in the movie is on the cards.  It could be anything from description-- 'You know it would be interesting to see a shot that does this'-- to a character's lines of dialogue.  That's the story treatment phase.  How we think of it is, we're creating the story and its dramatization as we go along, but we also like to have way too much.

The index card, then, as cinematic rubber stamp and trigger to story creation: an instance of receptivity (to a vast number of seemingly random elements in the world of the piece) working with commitment, i.e. the "panic, desperation, fear, intimidation, confusion" writer Rossio cites as being dauntingly present in the pressure of their having to write a sequel to Pirates 1... emotions which, come to think of it, are palpably present in the finished film.

This last point brings me to a last observation.  The idea of writing your now is macro as well as micro.  My friend the screenwriter/director Bob Dolman (How To Eat Fried Worms, which is also discussed in that Screenwriting issue) brought this up at a writers group meeting a few weeks ago.  We were discussing why we chose to do the particular projects we were doing, and why certain ones seemed to fizzle and others spark.

Bob noted that he'd put aside some intended writing work to instead write some poems, and that the more he worked on them, the clearer it was that he wanted only on the page what spoke truthfully to what he was going through in his present day-to-day experience.  Obsessed with an honest expression of just that, he often eliminated so many lines that in the end, he even excised a few poems altogether, ending up with "invisible poems" that expressed the very ineffability of expression.

Pretty freakin' Zen.  I reflected that for myself and the screenwriters I've confronted in consults and classes, the heart of the matter boiled down to just this question: What is the now for you?  What is the thing that you have to write now?  Because if you can't identify that, if you can't get in touch with those feelings, the work might as well be confined to invisibility.  Because after all is said and done, now is all we really have.

Craft Is Not Enough: Why Live Will Never Die

Dinner party conversation the other night led us into bemoaning the absence of inspired John Cassavetes-like indie-ness in what’s considered indie film these days – that quality of risk-taking, emotionally naked “caught reality” that one sees, say, in Woman Under the Influence, a movie so raw it seems, despite its cuts and directorial manipulations, as if it were actually unreeling in unedited real time.

Then something showed up in the mail the next day, containing, among other things, a recording that features the sudden unanticipated arrival of an actual freight train smack dab in the middle of a song, and I suddenly grasped something essential about the art of screenwriting.

I will explain, but first, let me provide some context.

I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber since my late teens, and I’ve come to realize over the years that one big factor in my fandom is the magazine’s canny embrace of both high and low culture. The New Yorker is considered a paradigm of craft, tasteful style, of intellectual high standards, but many people do read it primarily for its cartoons (and yes, the cartoons are crafty, stylish, often intellectual in bent, but they are, y’know, cartoons).

The only magazine that’s ever come along to rival the old New Yorker in my affections is The Believer, a three years-young monthly as opposed to weekly publication which does not contain cartoons (its illustrations, with the exception of the handsome covers done every month by Charles Burns, are often willfully obtuse and bizarre). It does however regularly feature a similar macro/micro cultural mix: herein, some of the best intellects of our time often apply their erudite attentions to the most seemingly anti-literate subjects imaginable (the current issue spends two small-printed pages on the genesis and effect of the Bow Wow Wow's cover of the Strangelove’s 1960s pop near-hit, I Want Candy, and many more – fascinating – pages explicating the continuing history surrounding that viral video on the web known to us as The Numa Numa Dance).

One of the wonderful things about the New Yorker is how, for every article you’ll never read (you look at the title, photo, blurb and think “oh yes, that’s interesting – to someone” and move on, devouring the cartoons contained within it but none of the text), there’s invariably an article on some subject you never would have thought to explore, which nonetheless soon appears inevitable as a personal point of interest (Did I ever think I would give a flying fart about the life of the chief auctioneer at Sotheby’s? Was I edified – and enlightened – to read all about him, a few months back? Yuh-huh).

The Believer occasionally takes this phenomenon one step further, giving me the uncanny sensation, solipsistic and megalomaniacal, that I am the lead protagonist in my own version of The Truman Show, that the magazine was created by a group of people who sit around all day musing, “What would Billy Mernit like to read?”

The illusion that denizens of the Believer crew had somehow done a quick tour of my lobes before constructing their current issue is confirmed by an article that for me personally constitutes reader’s heroin: journalist Greil Marcus in conversation with novelist Don DeLillo, the subject being Bob Dylan and Scorsese’s No Direction Home. I find the ecstatic intellectual convergence contained herein so absorbing that it nearly supplants the experience of seeing the actual documentary discussed.

But enough about the magazine’s text. What’s got me thinking about Screenwriting Secrets is the CD contained in its 2006 Music Issue (June/July), which is a thing of rough-hewn beauty.

I don’t know what they’re smoking, up there in the San Francisco Believer offices, but they’ve arguably managed to equal their 2005 Music Issue CD (a wonder in itself) with this new collection. Its theme is live recordings, i.e. tracks that in one way or another eschew the usual high technology associated with contemporary music, and deliver – in disparate ways – the experience of music as performed in “real” time and space.

And it truly is all over the map, a wildly eclectic selection that includes such diverse delights as a folksy country-western tune recorded on the porch of Flannery O’Connor’s home in Savannah, Ga. (Jim White’s Fruit of the Vine), world music as represented by Mamadou Diabete’s hypnotic kora (21 stringed African harp) solo, recorded back stage at a concert hall in Massachusetts, to Tiny Hawks’ Born in Twain, in which a Rhode Island band briefly, indelibly reincarnates the Velvet Underground.

Whether it all hangs together will mostly have to do with your tolerance for such musical potpourri-ism. I find that it is, ultimately, all of one piece due to the live through-line of it all, giving new (or at least reaffirmed) meaning to the concept of lo-fi; for example, Marissa Nadler’s Box of Cedar is “recorded in Brandon Stousy’s bathtub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn” via the internal mic on a Macintosh laptop. And kind of sounds like it, in a wonderful way.

One track that will probably lever you right out of your seat to either quickly skip to the next one or to turn up the volume and dance (dependent, I’ll wager, on the amount of alcohol you’ve consumed while listening) is the crazed call-and-response sort of Thai Watusi called Cheer,by Neung Phak, a local bar band from Bangkok. But again, what’s here in spades, like it or hate it, is a spirit of liveness – evidence of something real happening in the moment – which is, I persist, a special kind of energy that typifies the best of “indie,” be it film, music or art of any sort.

In the Feist demo, for example, we’re given a rare opportunity to hear a song as it’s mastered by its writer-performer, complete with what sounds like “I’m going to get all the way through this finally and have it on tape” performance exhaustion that truly makes for a you-are-there experience, along with the usual bad acoustics and minor distortions, e.g. that fabulous, experimental “oh, girl!” high note en route to the end which has subsequently become a trademark hook for the song in its finished, released version (found on Feist’s Let it Die CD).

The actual freight train that literally drives through the middle of Calexico’s recording of Throws Daggers, sounding for all the world as if it was meant to, intended to pass behind the Solar Culture recording studio of Tucson, Arizona at precisely that moment and no other (miraculously blowing in just as the song musically peaks), puts me in mind of a famous cinematic act of God, the sun’s momentary bursting through overcast clouds in the middle of Ben Johnson’s transcendent Last Picture Show soliloquy,
which director Bogdanovich acknowledges as an accident – technically, a “mistake” that came close to “ruining” the take due to overexposure – and which awed Picture Show fans perceive as a rare case of God cinching someone’s Oscar win (Johnson deservedly nabbed one for this performance ).

What I’m looking at here is the crack that lets the light in, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, the crooked stitch in the fabric, the warble in the vocal, that lets us know there’s a human being here, caught up in the act of creation; it’s the mysterious intersection of humanness and godliness laid bare in its holy/unholy misshapen beauty – the place where divine accidents happen, where glimpses of soul can be had, un-tinkered and un-doctored with.

Interestingly, these lightning slashes of Naked Humanity tend to show up to crown the most sublime creations in music and film.
Not for nothing did the Beatles end their entire recording career with a demo tape snippet that abruptly runs out, crowning the act of craft perfection that is Abby Road with a near-random throwaway bit of Paulie singing about wanting to sleep with Her Majesty.

The Graduate famously ends with a long take of Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross sitting on a bus, after the climax wherein Hoffman has busted Ross out of her wedding and claimed her for his own; the priceless expressions of bemused, bewildered “what do we do now?” on both their faces are a product, according to director Mike Nichols, of the actors caught by the camera running way past what was supposed to be the take’s cut-off point. This bit of verite appears, if one doesn’t know better, as an inspired acting/directing statement that speaks to the theme of the movie, while it’s actually… two people stuck in real time waiting to be told what to do.

Okay, fine, you may be saying (among other unimaginables), but this is all about performance, about execution, so what the hell does it have to do with the act of screenwriting?

Well I do believe (I’m a Believer) that one can enter this realm in the writing of something, but to go into that will require a whole other post. So though your temptation to slap me silly may have just increased, I’m going to have to opt for a Part 2, in which I’ll endeavor to connect the dots between the spirit of liveness, good music, the rubber stamps of Leavenworth Jackson, the idea of energy and emotional clarity in screenwriting and oh, the Pirates sequel, just to keep things interesting. In the meantime, 2006 Music Issue: on newsstands now.

In Memoriam

Unfair.  Unfair, unfair...

My friend Peter Trias died the night before last, suddenly and unexpectedly, a man still in his prime and in seeming good health.  While Peter thankfully went quickly in his sleep, he leaves his many friends to suffer the loss, and me inadequate to the task of explaining, to you who may not have known him, just what you have missed.

I suppose the simplest way to get it across would be to say: you would have wanted Peter in your life had you met him, because Peter was fun -- serious fun, an avatar of joy, the most fundamental kind.  He loved being alive, he loved his fellow humans, he was endlessly intrigued, captivated and caught up in the foibles and fascinations of people, be they close friends, chance acquaintances or complete strangers.

Since he was a writer long before he became a realtor, among many other things (he published a volume of poetry, early on), it's not surprising that he numbered many illustrious writers as companions, among them screenwriters Henry Bean and wife Leora Barish, Nick Kazan and Robin Swicord.  Peter possessed that quality so essential to the writing life: he was a born appreciator.

If God is in the details, as it's said, then Peter was a man of God.   He had most excellent taste in so many things, from food to architecture, but when it came to life as we peculiar creatures live it, he was a connoisseur of the great detail.  Acutely observant and bracingly witty in articulating his observations, he was a fantastic storyteller who reveled in the telling.  When I think of Peter, I think of him chuckling in mid-anecdote over the unique absurdity he had witnessed and/or participated in, often some mundane-but-outrageous incident where he, as protagonist, was the very butt of the joke.

For example, there was the scare Peter had, a few years ago in the Hamptons, when he was awakened in the middle of the night by a strange arrhythmia in his chest.  He could tell this was no garden variety anxiety attack; there was something truly off and erratic in his heartbeat, and though he tried to calm himself and will himself back to sleep, it was too alarming.  He was staying with friends, and ever the polite guest, hated the idea of waking his hosts, fearing too that he'd end up seeming foolish for panicking about what might turn out to be inconsequential.

At any rate, early in the morning he did get to the nearest ER -- this trip in itself involving some nutty, black-comedic details I can't recall just now; nor can I remember the specifics of what medication, electric jolt, whatever, that a properly concerned doctor administered to set Peter right again.  What I do remember is that Peter, wheel-chaired into a recovery room, looked up to find Keanu Reeves in medical whites, hovering over him with a solicitous air.  "How are you feeling now?" the movie star asked.

This moment of complete surrealism was subsequently explained by the fact that Keanu, doing prep for his role as a doctor in the movie Something's Gotta Give (which was shooting in that area), was trailing a legitimate doctor and observing patients.

In its way, a typical Peter story.  I guess when you're an appreciator of the absurd, the absurd seeks you out.  When he related this experience, Peter and I shared a laugh over the idea that despite his having been Keanu's patient, Keanu's follow-up was terrible.  "And did he call?  Does he write?  Not a word!"

Peter's good humor was infectious, and logically enough, his circle of friends ever-expansive.  I used to call him the surrogate mayor of Venice, because one was always running into people who knew him here, just as I so often ran into Peter as he cruised the neighborhood in his orange car, sussing out whatever was going on around town.

A somewhat stressed-out neurotic Jewish New Yorker when I first met him, 16 years ago, Peter had appreciably mellowed over time -- largely due, I believe, to the happiness he found in his relationship with his partner Ed Rothfarb.  Yet what was ever-present within him was a ceaselessly restless soul, restless in the best sense; palpably content and pleased with his life, he was nonetheless always seeking the next project, the next involving endeavor, the next something new to do.

The last time I saw him, less than two weeks ago, he was talking about wanting to push himself to try new things, to break old habits, to bust out of his familiar patterns and take the risks he now felt more ready to take.  He'd returned to Venice Beach recently from a trip to Venice, Italy, and was marveling at the notion that he'd hated that city the first time he'd been there, years ago -- but this time, had loved everything about it.

I can't give you Peter, of course, I can't deliver his laugh, the sly wise cast of his face, the theatrical flail of his hands as he mocked his own flair for melodrama.  To say that he loved well and was well-loved in return is to state the obvious, but here's something that will give you an idea of his generosity and genuine spirit of community.  Peter loved to make and mold chocolates, and for years, every Easter he would play The Bunny -- you'd open your front door that Sunday morning and find a little basket filled with Peter's homemade chocolates.  And you knew that he'd delighted in dashing around delivering these baskets as much as we enjoyed devouring their contents.

Wrong.  Wrong and unfair that we're so soon deprived of Peter, of whom the old cliche really does apply: our lives are diminished by his absence.

And it's wrong -- while so infuriatingly human -- that it's only when a thing like this happens that you stop in your tracks, that your bubble breaks, that you're suddenly humbled, forced to take in how precious a friend is, how ephemeral and fleeting life can be.  If we could just hold onto this knowledge in the day-today, learn how to more consciously acknowledge the gold we get from the Good Ones in our lives...!

All I can say is, if you're lucky enough to have a Peter Trias sort of person in your sphere, take a moment to count that blessing, and to give your friend a hug.  Because much as you may assume they'll be there tomorrow, they could be gone in an instant.  We never like to think this, but it's true.

I won't dwell on the thought anymore, because Peter himself would declare such a fuss maudlin and indulgent (while secretly being touched by the sentiment).  I can picture him giving an arch shrug, waving a hand and putting on an Old Country accent.  "Ach!  People," he might say.  "We're ridiculous."

Peter says if you're going to talk about suffering

you have to mention pleasure too.

...the only tattoo I want

is of a fist and rose, together.

Fist, that helps you survive.

Rose, without which

you have no reason to.

(from "Parade" and "The News" by Tony Hoagland)

Training Mates

I've tried to ignore it, but it won't go away, so dutifully, I bring the matter to you: for something like three weeks running, a certain article has topped the Top Ten Most Popular E-mailed Articles list of the NY Times (it's been unseated from the #1 spot a few times, but inexplicably has popped back up again), which is a nearly unheard of phenomenon.  I think you can file this under "Tempests in Teapots," but still -- it is a kind of news.

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage by journalist Amy Sutherland is the hot-button article that's caused such a cybernetic flurry, and I don't entirely get it, but at least I'm not alone.  Many a perplexed columnist has weighed in on this event, like Paige Rockwell over at Salon; even Maureen Dowd devoted a musing "what's the fuss?" column to it (How To Train a Woman).

The basic gist: Sutherland, who's written a book on animal training, has applied what she learned in the wild to the domestic front, using positive reinforcement (as opposed to nagging) to "train" her husband.  You know, just like a pliable baboon.  And it's done wonders for their marriage.

Cannily, Sutherland forestalls some obligatory outrage (though there has of course been plenty of that) by ending her discourse with a description of how her husband used her own techniques on her; evidently a wife can be trained with the same methods: goose, meet gander. 

What's intriguing is that humans of both genders have apparently embraced as well as reviled the writer's report.  Interviewed by Rockwell, Sutherland suggested the source of the article's popularity: "It hit on two universals. People love animals, and everyone wants marital advice."  

Apparently the subtext is that human beings... are bloody ignorant apes.  Given the often head-splitting complexities of the modern romantic relationship, Sutherland notes: "People are hungry for really simple techniques."

Or as Forrest Gump might have said, simple is as simple does (whatever the hell that means).

Thing is, though Jennifer Aniston's character in The Break-Up could have used a Sutherland technique on Vince Vaughn's slacker-ly mate (i.e. reward behavior you like and ignore behavior you don't), would she have managed to get him to not just do the dishes, but to want to do the dishes?  More importantly, would he have been gone faster than a speeding puma once he realized he was being treated like a lowly beast?

I'm already hearing the typhoon-like clickety-clack of a thousand keyboards echoing across the Hollywood hills as any screenwriter with a Times subscription hurries to turn this material into a romantic comedy, but they may be too late.  Watch the trades, 'cause I'll wager that this little sucker of a concept's already been pitched and sold.  Animal Husbandry?  Wifery?  The mind reels, as if seasick.

In the meantime, are people glomming onto this issue because it's  the same old common sense as "you catch more flies with honey" done up in a fresh package (The Dummy's Guide to Relationships),  or is Sutherland truly offering news we can use? While I scratch my head (it's the simian in me), you take a look at this Shamu thing and tell me what you think.

Agents: An Alien Life Form?

They look not like the inhabitants o' the earth / And yet are on it.

-- Macbeth

There's an old Hollywood joke:  An actor returning home from a long day's work is startled to find firetrucks, police cars and an ambulance surrounding the still-smoldering remains of his house.  As he's anxiously pushing his way through the crowd gathered there, he's headed off by a neighbor friend who takes him aside to explain what happened.   "This afternoon your agent came over to your house, and he attacked your wife, assaulted both your children, shot your dog and then set fire to the place." 

The actor, in shock, responds: "Wait, wait -- my agent came to my house?"

So rampant are the traditional stereotypes surrounding the word agent that it would be pointless to once again invoke them.  If life had an index, the section regarding agents in show business would probably read, in part:

loathsomeness of, the

manipulations by

nihilistic morality ascribed to

opportunism of, the

paranoic tendencies

ruthlessness of (see: sharks)

And so on.  So it does need to be pointed out that, just as there probably are in fact prostitutes who have hearts of gold and "good" lawyers in this world, there do exist such things as kind, sincere and helpful agents, as oxymoronic as that may sound.

Whether they are actually human beings is still debatable.

I've been trying to work this out for awhile, because agent behavior so often seems inhumane, if not inhuman: what manner of creature are we dealing with, here?

For example, take the issue of loyalty.  In this regard, your typical entertainment biz agent seems more feline than homo sapien.   

Let's say you're playing with a cat.  You dangle a little toy ball of twine in front of it, and the cat is fascinated, it keeps batting at the ball, it grabs the ball, it won't let go of the ball, the ball is clearly the most important thing in the cat's known universe.   Then something requires you to leave the room for a moment, and when you return, you pick up the twine ball and dangle it front of the cat's face again.

The cat regards the ball with a distracted air of unfamiliarity and indifference, and looks at you with an expression that says: what the hell are you showing me this for?

That's pretty much the way my supposed film agent has been dealing with my novel in the two months since we had a meeting in which this selfsame agent lacked only pom-poms and a pleated skirt, to resemble the head of a cheerleading squad, hollering and huzzah-ing my novel to impassioned victory.

Take the issue of time, as in: perception of.  My literary agent asked for some revisions on the novel before taking it out to publishers, and because his notes were for the most part insightful and do-able, I very quickly did the necessary work, and Fedexed the revised ms. back to him in less than ten days' time.

A week went by, and another, which was no cause for alarm (experience has taught me that two weeks is the conventional given minimum time for response to any submission to any person in the industry).  But after a full six weeks of hearing nothing from this agent (who, like his film counterpart, had initially waxed so enthusiastic about my project that I wondered for a moment if I had actually written The Great American Novel), I asked my producer partner to give the agent a nudge call, to see if we could scare up a reaction to my pages.

"But I just got the thing," was the reported (vaguely perplexed) response.

I liken this inherent difference in perception to the concept of dog years -- you know, how seven years in "dog time" is roughly equivalent to one human year?  To a writer, six weeks is really six weeks (i.e. 42 actual days).  To an agent, 6 weeks ago = yesterday. 

So, given the feline concept of loyalty, the canine time perception difference and the general shark metaphor routinely applied to agents, it might seem that these creatures are more animal than human.  But animals are believed to have feelings (even a hammerhead gets angry), whereas agents...  Hard to tell.

What's prized in an agent, after all, is his or her ability to go after a goal, matters of the heart be damned.  The "good" (i.e. effective) agent is the opposite of emotional in negotiation, the familiar motto being nothing personal, it's just business.

There are really only two kinds of agent stories told in Hollywood.  One in essence boils down to "I can't get my agent on the phone."  The other is "you won't believe the deal my agent got for me."  The subtext of both stories, ultimately, is agent as weapon; the first story says I have no ammunition and the second trumpets my gun is bigger than yours.  So there really is only one story, and it ain't warm and fuzzy.

Let's recap.  Essential agent qualities include an ultimate loyalty only to oneself, the inhabiting of some alternate dimension of time and space, and an amoral ruthlessness that brooks no interference from human emotion. 

Add to this the interesting phenomenon of an agent pack mentality -- up until recently their shared habitat was a strip of Wilshire Boulevard (but note: all of the major agencies are moving out at roughly the same time).  They graze and feed together at a specifically circumscribed circuit of watering holes, despite the fact that cutlery at such establishments may be more often found plunged into one another's backs than used as dining utensils.

Additionally, suspiciously, while lunch is the established be-all/end-all of most agent activity, are such lunches really about eating?  Do agents actually consume food at these meetings?  Perhaps incidentally, but it's clearly not the point.  And...!  What successful agent do you know who requires 8 hours of sleep?  Are you kidding?  The uber-killer agent keeps late hours, trolling the necessary bars and clubs for fresh victims, and is up before the crack of dawn, getting the jump on both coasts.

They don't eat, don't sleep... One more factor: the use of humanness as disguise.  The current poster boy for agentry is Ari Gold, the fascinatingly repugnant character portrayed so winningly by Jeremy Piven on HBO's Entourage.  It's precisely the suggestion that he is, after all, a human being with a beating heart that makes the characterization so affecting.  The brilliance of his catch-phrase "let's hug it out, bitch" lies in how it so neatly expresses the central hypocrisy of the agent ethos; both the illusion of fellow-feeling and the sardonic acknowledgment of naked animosity are summed up in its faux-human ring. 

Well, doesn't it make perfect sense that a race of beings who are trying to pass for human as they go about their shockingly inhuman business in broad daylight would cannily find and exploit such a cover guy, to lull the rest of us into believing that they're really just like us at the core?

Tellingly, the only match Ari Gold has met thus far, in Entourage's second season, is an arrogant little prick of a child star named Max, who's been after Ari's daughter.  Who else could be as scarily extraterrestrial-like as a spoiled, precocious pre-teen actor?  The brief, delicious face-offs between these two remind me of scenes from Alien v. Predator -- in these moments you can glimpse the dripping, razor-sharp teeth and other-worldly looks-that-kill behind their human masks.

...In sum, the agent most representative of what's really going on here that I can think of -- frighteningly soulless, super-powerful, bent on world domination -- is Agent Smith from The Matrix.  Computer-generated, He Came From Cyberspace, a lethal artificial intelligence clad in black Armani, with incredibly cool sunglasses.

Now I realize that in posting such an alien exposure I'm taking a pretty big risk.  I mean, what if one of my agents were to visit my blog and read this?  They might drop me as a client, smear me so badly in the biz that I'd never work again, leading to my descent into alcoholism and other substance abuse, bringing on mental illness, a life of crime and misery ending with me trying to kill my loved ones, then taking a crazed stand atop Universal's black tower with an Uzi, to be gunned down or blown up in a blaze of tabloid infamy.

And if I am to survive this nightmare, to come to, straitjacketed inside of a padded cell with a compassionate doctor informing me of the havoc I'd wreaked?  You know what my response will be.

Wait, wait -- I'll say.  My agent visited my blog?

Film Site Fun

Apparently there were some readers who didn't get that my last post was a parody, a piece of fiction, and they actually thought I had lost my mind over Jessica Alba.  To them I say (insert deadpan expression and dry tone of voice here): Yes, every word of it was true...

Except that it was really about Keira Knightley.

(And you know, Keira has denied being anorexic, while in a related story, Keith Richards has confirmed that he will play Johnny Depp's dad in Pirates 3, so of course I'm all like, who are we to believe?!)

Honestly, there's so much going on in celebrity-land (and how about that spotlight-hogging Kim Jong Il, huh? talk about a kidder!) that it hardly seems right to go on about myself.  And there are so many other sites that have been tickling my fancy of late that I'm feeling the altruistic urge to share.  So I'm going to take a cue from a few of my other readers here, and keep it brief but informative  (among the neat responses to my Blogoversary "how'm I doin'?" post was a suggestion from Jamy that I do "shorter ones from time to time," and I am totally down with that!).

So: this is just to steer you towards a couple of film sites that are cracking me up, fascinating or informing me these days, in case you haven't yet discovered them yourself. 

FilmWise is a fabulous fun place that's chock full of amusing quizzes, contests and forums.  The ones I really like are their visual quizzes, which use frames from movies and are built around idiosyncratic themes, like identify this movie by its closing shot, or (rom-com alert) name the movie this kiss is from, or (one for the boys) identify which movie this cleavage is from.  Some of the entries are easy, some will tantalize you like a name that's on the tip of your tongue but remains elusive.  One of their quirkier ideas is the Invisibles, where protagonist faces have been photo-shopped out of the frame.  Can you guess this one below (I found it easy, but the other frames hard), or name the film at the top of this post, from FilmWise's Say What? quiz?

Also perversely humorous is this craven parody site called Editing Room.  Essentially the creation of one curmudgeonly guy who delights in eviscerating films that can stand to be ripped apart, its ostensible purpose is to present "abridged" versions of screenplays (i.e. a couple of pages long), like this wonderfully cruel send-up of Crash (warning: do not read if you're a fan) and this more recent parody of Click, which I found chuckle-worthy even though I haven't seen the movie (miss an Adam Sandler pic?  how did that happen?!).

Worthy of note as another time-waster is Screenplay, a somewhat less exciting and inspiring version of FilmWise, but nonetheless featuring a few quizzes that are maddeningly seductive in that "bet you can't do just one" sort of way.

For screenwriting resources -- i.e. as a portal to all kinds of other screenwriting and film-related sites -- I'm fairly impressed with the Red Inkworks resource page, and not just because they list me.  It seems more inclusive and thorough than many others I've seen, though of course, of course they've undoubtedly left out a cool site you know about (so here's your opportunity to turn us all onto that one: de-lurk and comment, below).

For quirky fun, Japander makes a good filmic companion to the deliriously poetic humor site, Engrish.com: here's where you'll find all the commercials that American movie stars who are too cool to be seen in American commercials make money on in Japan.  If you enjoyed Bill Murray's Suntory spot in Lost in Translation, this site's for you.

Finally, it has come to my attention that there are, oddly enough, some cyber-savvy folks who do not avail themselves of my favorite arts-and-entertainment information-fest.  Want to get the critical consensus on that latest movie, DVD, TV, music, book or game release?  Hie thee to Metacritic.com already, and what took you so long?

I'll leave you to your happy web-trolling, or as I like to think of it, the Art of Advanced Procrastination.  I'm busy trying to understand the alien culture of agents, which may well occasion Living RomCom's next -- longer and more personal (i.e. wittily narcissistic) post.

Meanwhile, for extra points, name the agent who wears these sunglasses...

    

The Candidate

Back in the Nineties it seemed like every young girl was named Jessica, but really, there was only the one.  The one that mattered.

Shortly after the Millennium she was on TV.  And when I saw her, I just knew.  It was obvious, at least to me.  Nobody else came close, nobody had that... force to her.  I remember getting my best friend T. to watch an episode, and T. went, "Well, yeah, she's hot."  And I was... "Hot?!"  Inadequate word.   I love T. but I have to say: maybe a little bit superficial.

I'd been having nightmares for years, horrifically grim ones about the end of civilization -- it might've been seeing that scary news footage of the nighttime bombing of Baghdad in the first Gulf War -- but after the Twin Towers it got worse.  I'd wake up in the middle of the night, terrified, and... it was Jessica who consoled me: thoughts of her, images of her that calmed me, giving reason back to the world.

And it wasn't what you think.  I couldn't picture her that way, I couldn't imagine doing with her, you know, those things men really want to do with a woman.  Hers isn't a body to be naked, anyway, it's meant to be almost.  It has to be the promise of nudity, ever unfulfilled, so that she's still... pure, I suppose.  You don't really want to see, for example, an actual bared nipple -- it's too naked, too vulnerable, too human, finally.

Anyway, by the time the movies came out I began to understand I wasn't alone in this.  Her fans were already legion, not just men, but women (and where could they find a better role model?) and I had to make that adjustment, where you realize Jessica isn't just yours.  I mean, yes, I was there first, in the vanguard, but when someone's that powerful and charismatic, the culture catches up -- as it should!  It only makes sense.

Even after the big ones, the awesome triumvirate of Sin City, Fantastic Four and Into the Blue, T. continued to be slow on the uptake.  "Why don't you obsess about a real woman, a grown woman, a woman of substance, like... Meryl Streep?" T. asked.  Well, Meryl Streep is wonderful, I allowed, but she's...  "What?" demanded T.  "Brilliant?  Sophisticated?  Emotionally nuanced, deep, talented beyond measure?"

"She's not..."

"Young?  A sex object?"

"She's not Jessica," I explained.

And speaking of her movies I should explain how they had a profound effect on my life and livelihood.  I work for a studio, reading scripts, and as fate would have it, I read a draft of Into the Blue when it was just a project looking for a home, hadn't yet been cast.  And because it was godawful, contrived, badly written derivative genre swill, I "passed" on the script; some other studio ended up making it.

Then I saw the movie and the resulting epiphany was life-changing.  I suddenly understood that the movie wasn't about two-dimensional genre stereotypes diving, treasure-hunting, cocaine smuggling, etc.   Hello?  It was about Jessica in that turquoise blue bikini top and little grey-blue striped bikini bottom, specifically in those breathtaking underwater this-is-my-butt and these-are-my-ribs-when-my-belly-undulates shots.

(Not to deny the appeal of Jessica in her blue wetsuit, the beige tank top and cut-off jean shorts, the designer wife-beater undershirt, the yellow longsleeve top, the silver and black hooded wet suit w/blue flippers and red flowered bathing suit bottom, the disco gold halter and jeans, the blue tank top and itsy-bitsy light blue panties, the grey black and white striped top, and the white bikini with black stripes.)

Seeing Into the Blue the first half dozen times completely altered my perspective on the business I was in.  What's "bad" anyway, when a movie makes money?  So thereafter, no matter how terrible the script was, if I could see Jessica in it, especially in a bathing suit, I'd give it good marks in my coverage and just write in the Comments summary box: Great part for Jessica.

Then one day my Story Editor called me into her office and asked me a lot of weird questions and kept talking about what she termed "my fixation."  And I got it, suddenly, it was like I'd stepped onto the set of a horror movie, and I said, "Wait a second" -- I really was incredulous -- "Are you actually telling me that you don't want to make a movie with Jessica?" 

Then the Story Editor asked me how long I'd been reading for the studio and I told her and she nodded and looked at her assistant and then -- the two of them were very nice about it, really -- that's how I got to be on this leave of absence.

It's funny how with a little extra time on your hands, you can begin to see things in a new perspective.  Because not being at work is what led me to my brilliant idea.

It was the night of the MTV Movie Awards, with Jessica hosting.  T. didn't come over to watch with me because we'd had a kind of falling out.  Recently T., having see the Al Gore movie, was talking about global warming all the time, which had led to a new kind of nightmare for me, in which all of Los Angeles was underwater but people were still talking on cellphones in their cars and making too-wide turns.  And when I woke up I had to watch my Sin City DVD a lot.

The last time we'd been together, T. picked up my copy of Entertainment Weekly that had Jessica on the cover as their "Must List" cover girl, and said, "But I don't understand -- she doesn't even have a new movie out!"  And I snatched it out of T.'s hand and said "No, clearly you don't understand, do you."

So it was just me and my popcorn and the TV and...  The glory: all Jessica, right from the first minute, with a wonderful movie parody (annihilating the idiot critics who question her acting ability) and then more Jessica, hostessing us and born to it, making fun of herself with that joke about being the most searched celeb on Google (although actually, is 10,000 hits a day so unusual or excessive?) and then more Jessica.  Until the peak of the evening, Jessica winning Sexiest Performance for Sin City (well, duh!).

She was so sweetly self-deprecating in her acceptance speech -- how many actresses would say "I'm going to keep this brief because you're already seeing so much of me tonight"?  And then the most extraordinary thing: almost an after-thought, just as she was leaving the podium, she called out, "Practice safe sex!  And buy hybrid cars!"

The audience went crazy cheering, and that's when it hit me.  You know how they say more people voted for the American Idol winner this year than voted in the last Presidential election?  Not surprising when you think about it, if I wanted another nightmare, I'd picture John Kerry singing karaoke.  But Jessica...!

After all, Angelina and Brad are doing so well with that place in Africa with the starving kids, the genocide -- people listen to them!  Well, imagine what Jessica could do, if she was a presidential candidate. 

Forget Hillary.  Please, who wants to...  Jessica, if she was in office, she'd be unstoppable.  Let alone the fact that she can really kick butt if she's crossed, who would deny her anything she wanted?  Tanned and vivacious, put her up against the head of any nation who's giving us a hard time, and -- with a smile, a shrug, especially if she wore that turquoise bikini -- look, even crazy Kim Jong Il from North Korea: nuclear missiles, shmissiles, all that crap would fly right out of his head if he was facing Jessica as the leader of the free world, he would chill, believe me.

   

And in terms of ending the war and getting everyone to put the guns down, she could walk right into the desert, right onto that battlefield, and do you think any terrorist would shoot at her?  Would any of those rockets or those bombs harm a lustrous hair on her beautifully coiffed head?  Are you joking?!

But then I think, no, it's wrong.  Why get her involved in all of that? 

Because after all, she's already doing her job.  She's what we want to see, she's all we need to know, such a comfort to watch, so arousing and soothing at the same time -- and I don't mind sharing her with the rest of you anymore, when I look at it this way, when I understand how good she is at what she's doing now, how vast a need she fulfills so well.  She's already there for us, she's already so important, so vital to our national security, in every sense of that word, to our national... everything.

Jessica, our Jessica.  Jessica.

She's the one.