Living the Romantic Comedy

En-What?! No, Really: Enchanted

Living RomCom is technically on holiday hiatus -- Tater and I are in NYC after a turkey stint in Baltimore at my brother's -- but I can't resist spreading the holiday cheer with a quick movie tip for rom-com lovers.  Call me kinky, call me crazy, call me a sentimental tool of corporate capitalism, but to me, a Disney movie that's primarily for kids is one of the best romantic comedies of 2007.

I'd like to say that going to Enchanted the day after Thanksgiving was the idea of my10 year-old niece Lucy, but if truth be told, it was none other than our friend Manohla Dargis who, sort of giggling with guilty pleasure glee, insisted that we see the movie ASAP (you can read her NY Times review here).  And I'm glad we did, because:

Amy Adams, as an animated Snow White-like fairyland princess who ends up in live-action New York City, is amazing; the musical numbers by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (including a deliciously straight-faced send-up of all such Disney musical numbers that features, and makes rhymes with, dancing vermin) are fabulous; the lack of nudge-wink overkill in Bill Kelly's witty script is admirable; and the incidental perks -- including a nice wicked witch turn by Susan Sarandon and a sly homage to The Sound of Music plus narration by Julie Andrews herself -- make this the only Disney-for-kids movie I've seen in a decade or two that I just may have to see again.

Should you be embarrassed to pay money for such seeming froth, then as Manohla points out, you can consider yourself politically correct in going, due to the movie's surprisingly overt feminist subtext.  So find a kid to see this movie with if you need an excuse (Lucy did like it as much as we did), or failing that, buy some popcorn for your inner child.  We're not talking Oscars or seriosity for the ages here, gang, but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Thinking in Images

Happily, we can now carve up our turkeys with the assurance that the writers and producers are returning to the table after the holiday to begin their talks again -- not that this means anything beyond the fact that they'll be talking.  But we can always hope.

Some have suggested that one factor in what brought about this turn of events sooner than later is that the writers have done a good job of getting their position across to the general public.  The mainstream audience has always loved an underdog story, and once it becomes clear that by "the producers" one is referring to mega-corporations, the archetypal roles in this particular drama are pretty hard to mistake. 

Not that the mainstream media has been much help.  As Joss Whedon pointed out in an early strike blog post (thank you, Jen), images of what "Hollywood writer" means to some (writers themselves!) are kind of astonishing (somehow, I always forget to don my fancy scarf and arty glasses when I'm dipping my quill into the inkwell for a leisurely morning's work -- and I call myself a writer?!).  But then, speaking of caricatures, this amusing YouTube short gets its "studio head fat cat" image across just as broadly.

No, we writers are not all effete eggheads making a quarter of a mil each year, nor are all the producers literally fat folk with five homes to support.  But images are what stories thrive on. 

Interestingly, words are what get the most attention when people think about what constitutes writing, as this clip illustrates, imagining some famous movie quotes as they might have played without inspired scribes behind them (I'm particularly fond of the "de-written" rewrite given here to Rhett Butler's immortal exit line: "Whatever, Scarlett.").  But some of the most powerful movie moments ever created have been wordless, and yes, Virginia -- writers wrote those, too!

That a good storyteller writes in images was brought home to me by the recent release of what's somewhat akin to a spectacular blockbuster feature produced on a series of paper screens between two covers -- i.e. a book.  Shaun Tan's amazing graphic novel The Arrival is one of the best movies never made that I've ever seen.  And it tells its story without the use of a single word.

What Tan (pictured above) does utilize is the best kind of cinematic storytelling.  Whole pages are made up of a series of fluid storyboard-like images, each one serving as a sentence or paragraph, distinguished by an unusually specific point of view.  One could almost call the resulting story more well-directed than well-written.

The small-imaged pages often climax in large two-page spreads that are the graphic novel equivalent of big screen set-pieces.  They're beautiful, mysterious and at times confounding, in that Tan's mix of the familiar and the wholly imaginary often suspends a reader-viewer between worlds;  we've both been here before... and never before seen the likes of where we are.

Rather then blather on about The Arrival, I'll just urge you to give it a look.  Especially if you're planning to boycott the multiplex and DVD player till the picket lines are down, the next best thing to seeing a really well-written new movie right now may be this book.

The Art of Strategic Omission

This week I got a few e-mails from aspiring screenwriters who wanted to know if it was okay to keep writing even though the WGA writers are on strike.  Though I understand this impulse to show solidarity with our fellow writers by putting down one's pen (or more likely, closing one's laptop), the answer's self evident: A writer writes.  Regardless.

My favorite definition of a writer has always been Thomas Mann's: A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.  So why should it suddenly be easier?  Dude, who let you off the hook?  You think that just because a bunch of screenwriters are starving more systematically than usual, you get to slack off?!  The nerve.  (Then again, maybe it's evidence that you really are a writer: i.e. a person constantly on the lookout for any excuse to procrastinate.)

I don't believe our current down-time means it's time to merely twiddle our opposables.  Whether you're a writer who hasn't yet made the sale that's got your career into gear, or a formerly working writer who's been abruptly sidelined from the game, now is an excellent moment for woodshedding.

Woodshedding is a musician's term for "going off to practice," and to help those of you with writing time on your hands who might feel like keeping in shape and practicing some scales, I offer a brief exercise in craft.   Call it:

The Art of Strategic Omission

"What's the story?" is one of the most oft-heard questions in our field, yet most screenwriters I know have a hell of a time distilling the essence of their stories down to a simple sentence or two.  It's so easy to get caught up in one's details, and it's so hard to stand back and see the whole of one's own story clearly enough to codify its essentials into bite-sized movie meat.

Fortunately, someone has written a kind of primer on this process, a book that serves up over a thousand demonstrations of how to best get a story summarized.  Felix Feneon wasn't a screenwriter, and his book was written over a hundred years ago, but so what?  It's a work of rarefied genius.

Feneon -- a mysterious critic, Dadaist dandy and possible anarchist, wrote for the French newspaper Le Matin anonymously in 1906, providing the paper with daily news items remarkable in their wit and economy.  They've recently been collected, with an introduction by Luc Sante, in a volume entitled Novels in Three Lines. 

Since his brief reportage appeared as part of the daily news, the events covered by Feneon constitute the usual, its elements as darkly predictable then as they are now: murder, suicide, sexual crimes and general mayhem.   Death is a constant, be it natural or not.  What's most impressive is how the whole of a story is neatly folded into a few declarative statements (here the lines may, due to the vagaries of the blog format, not always come out in three):

M. Colombe, of Rouen, killed himself with a bullet yesterday.  His wife had shot three of them at him in March, and their divorce was imminent.

Feneon applies the same deadpan delivery to the tragi-comedy of an accidental demise:

Catherine Rosello of Toulon, mother of four, got out of the way of a freight train.  She was then run over by a passenger train.

He's a sardonic parodist of romantic comedy:

M.O. Calestroupat met, in Parliament, a lady without airs.  After a passionate night, a sodden awakening: she took him for 11,250 francs.

In Onynnax, Mlle. Cotet, 18, threw acid in the face of M. Besnard, 25.  Love, obviously.

Impressive is his witheringly ironic understatement in the face of what a modern-day tabloid would likely turn into screaming headlines and an outraged full-page spread:

Three is the age of Odette Hautoy, of Roissy.  Nevertheless, L. Marc, who is 30, did not consider her too young.

These "novels" are mordant little beauties of compressed text, reflective of their author's bracingly modern sensibility.  In a NY Times book review, writer Marilyn Johnson (she of an inestimable book on the art of the obituary, The Dead Beat) refers to the three-liners as "Haiku Journalism" and asks:

Who was Fénéon? Part of the first modernist wave and a cultural bricoleur, he worked on the backstage of literature. He translated, published and even discovered many of the enduring names from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Proust, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Seurat, Gide, Joyce — but rarely affixed his own to any work. As Sante puts it, “he kept himself to himself.” During an employment lull, Fénéon took a newspaper job for the Paris daily Le Matin. It lasted barely half a year, but proved an absorbing playground for an anarchist who was also a Symbolist with a sense of humor and a very sharp pen. Fortunately, Fénéon’s mistress clipped the anonymously published miniatures and saved them in a scrapbook. Sante tells this story and others in his high-toned introduction (and also makes the case that Fénéon was something of a terrorist when he wasn’t making literary mischief).

Bomb-builder perhaps, he was certainly a unique brand of short story writer.  Witness the neatly telescoped saga, a kind of pre-Raymond Carver minimalism-francaise, contained here:

Eugenie Perichot, of Pailles, neat Saint-Maixent, entertained at his home Mme Lemartrier.  Eugenie Dupuis came to fetch her.  They killed him.  Love.

His social commentary gets slipped in as a low-key gag:

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

The cinema of Feneon is character-driven:

Swimming teacher Renard, whose pupils porpoised in the Marne at Charenton, got into the water himself; he drowned.

And the imagery can be positively Hitchcockian:

The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned.  The chandelier fell, and the laurels of three among them were spotted with a little blood.

On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. Andre, 75, of Levallois.  While his ball was still rolling he was no more.

There are enough stories in the universe of Feneon to seed at least a hundred movies, which is one reason I've been poring over these faits divers at leisure.  Their structure rewards study, in that it's most often the elegance of what's been left out that creates the perfect bon mot-ness of his prose.  Identify the crucial essence of a tale and in addressing nothing but that, deftly nail it in your own unique voice -- that's a job writers are often asked to do but rarely pull off.

You might want to try out his techniques in an item of your own.  Determine: What's the compacted lead that will encapsulate the true major event of your story?  There's some woodshedding practice that'll fill up time between stints on the picket line.

Or you could just enjoy Feneon's Novels, period.  That's perhaps the one silver-lining in these dark no-scribing days: if you really can't write, for once you've got plenty of time to read.

Who Needs Writers?

Tater and I celebrated our first year anniversary tonight with many marvelous friends and libations, so this is going to be a short one.  Given that as I write this, my colleagues and I are going on strike, I'm tempted to simply print a blank column.  But I do have a thought.

Beyond all the negotiations, the precentages and the politics, lies a simple mistake, a kind of a basic mis-evaluation.  We've always, since the dawn of the industry, been belittled. 

Everyone thinks they can do it (and do it better).  Yet people who make a living as writers prove on a daily basis how exceptional a gift real storytelling talent can be. 

To me, trying to assess the worth of writers is like trying to quantify love.  How?  And why? But for those who seek to diminish us with numbers, I say...

Imagine no Han Solo, and no Annie Hall. 

No Gatsby, Soprano, no Scarlett O'Hara. 

There never was Seinfeld.  There's no Jon Stewart tomorrow.  No Seagull, or Spring Awakening -- there's no morning paper.  No Rumi and Hafiz poems to transcend time, nor a single blog you can use for procrastination.   

The last time the writers struck, Letterman came out to do his Top Ten and could only offer a Top Two -- every now and then, credit is given where credit is due.  But generally we're as taken for granted as any of the world's great resources.

Maybe the only way to value the writers who changed us, the many words on page or screen that have become a part of who we are, is to imagine life without all that.

Contemplate the breadth of the contribution and the depth of its loss, then consider: How much is writing worth to you?