Living the Romantic Comedy

Clouds in My Coffee Redux

This post has got to signify the smallest tempest in the teensiest teapot I've ever written about, but it's not every day that I get to see my name in a Vanity Fair story -- and see that they've gotten the story wrong.

One of my longtime claims to fame -- i.e. to being a tiny footnote in pop musical history -- is that I'm the guy who gave Carly Simon the line "clouds in my coffee" for her song, You're So Vain. 

Back in the day, Carly was my singer-songwriting mentor.  We were close friends who did a lot of playing and singing together, on her records and on the road. But in years since, it's a bit like I'm being photo-shopped out of an old photo. 

Here's how Carly reports on the origin of that "clouds in my coffee" line in the liner notes of her box set of 1995, entitled... Clouds in My Coffee:

"It came from an airplane flight that I took with Billy Mernit, who was my friend and piano player at the time.  As I got my coffee, there were clouds outside the window of the airplane and you could see the reflection in the cup of coffee.  Billy said to me, 'Look at the clouds in your coffee.  That's like a Truffaut shot!'  I said, 'Hmm, clouds in my coffee?' And I wrote that down in my book."

It was heartening to see this in print 13 years ago, especially since her recollection was fairly close to mine, though she bobbled the movie reference: what I had talked about was a Godard shot, namely the overhead close-up of a coffee cup from 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her -- a shot later homaged by Scorsese in Taxi Driver, using a glass of Alka Seltzer instead of coffee.  (Carly's favorite movie in those days was Truffaut's Jules and Jim, which we'd seen again together, so her mis-remembrance is perfectly understandable.)

At any rate, what happened next has never been reported, and I tell it here to the best of my recollection:  I kept a journal, too, and I wrote the line down in mine, as well.  Carly and I were in the habit of sharing works-in-progress with each other in those days, and we agreed it was an image that should go into a song.  Some weeks later I got a call from Carly.  "Are you doing anything with that 'clouds in my coffee' line?" she asked.  "Because if not, I'd like to use it in this thing I'm working on."

"No, take it," I said.  And, no -- as many people have queried me, with varying degrees of disbelief -- it didn't even occur to me to add "...and I'd like a token percent of the publishing, with songwriting credit."  We were friends, Carly had already been quite generous with me in my own burgeoning musical career, and this was a tacit act of generosity in return.

That "thing" she was working on turned out to be quite the ubiquitous little ditty as time went by.  And there were a number of times years later that Carly's double-tracked chanting of that line made an ironic soundtrack for the hole of a nowhere-doing-nothing spot I was in.  In the movie version, I'd be the guy bussing a counter in a coffee shop as the song played on the radio, telling a waitress "I gave her that line" and having the waitress go, "Yeah, right." 

Such is life.  I've felt pretty much sanguine about the whole thing, up until now.  But here's how Vanity Fair tells the tale, in an excerpt from the forthcoming book Girls Like Us by Sheila Weller.  Weller describes Carly's writing process for You're So Vain:

She'd sketched in her journal the beginning of a song called Bless You, Ben.  Then, on a flight from L.A. to Palm Springs for an Elektra Records convention, she'd added another, totally unrelated line to her journal when her seatmate, musician Billy Mernit, looked into the cup of coffee on his tray and said, "Doesn't that shape look like clouds?"

I know, I know -- I'm probably the only human being on the planet who gives a flying freak, but the characterization is a little galling: I'm the kid at a backseat car window going "Look-- cows!"   What fascinates me is how time seems to be erasing the guy who's already known as Periphery Man from having any substantive role in The Creation of the actual line.  Like a figure in some cosmic Etch-a-Sketch that's about to be shaken out, I fully expect that the next time I hear this anecdote, it'll be Carly passing by "some guy" on the aisle of a plane, telling him, "Hey, there's clouds in your coffee."

I'm so vain, I'm trying to say the song was about me.  But honest, my blog-venting isn't due to Ms. Weller writing elsewhere in her article that my immortal phrase "proved one bad line could be more memorable than a thousand good ones."  No, it's for the sake of history (i.e. pop trivia) that I offer up my version of the origin story, knowing that in cyber-space, occasionally they do hear you scream. 

I offer it also as a cautionary tale.  If Vanity Fair can get this little bit of ephemera wrong...  Just imagine for a moment what the journalists of the world are mis-reporting about like, things that really matter?!

Romantic Comedy Classics #5:

Anthony Minghella Lives

Truly, Madly, Deeply always felt like a romantic comedy to me.  I didn't realize, I suppose, the degree of pain that was also present in the film -- until we started screening it. And then I'd look around me and all these people were overwhelmed, and reduced emotionally by it in a way that I'd never been when we were making it...

--Anthony Minghella

Minghella goes on (in the special feature interview on Truly's DVD that will be required viewing for anyone who loves the late writer-director's work) to talk about the room-splitter nature of this film, which some years ago evidently made the top three of a British survey list of people's favorite films -- and the top three Least Favorite, simultaneously.

The three-minute sequence that he cites as perhaps responsible for this split, as well as being his favorite in the movie, is heroine Juliet Stevenson's breakdown in her psychiatrist's office.  Her performance ("skinless," Minghella calls it) has the kind of harrowing, searing intensity one doesn't tend to associate with romantic comedy, as weeping uncontrollably, she rages at her dead lover: "I'm so angry with him!  I can't forgive him for not being here!"

It's a scene made all the more poignant in re-viewing now that Minghella himself is gone.  Selfishly, as is our wont, we're pissed off at Minghella for dying young, because we're deprived of seeing all the movies he might've made.  Fortunately we do have the exquisite Truly, Madly, Deeply, a blackly comedic exploration of death, grieving, and moving on.  It's one of my favorite romantic comedies for precisely how unlike (and yet quintessentially like) a romantic comedy it is.

Truly had the curious misfortune to be released in the same year as Ghost, the inferior, horribly mawkish blockbuster that superficially explored the same story concept that Truly mines so movingly: the return of a loved one from the dead.  The two make an interesting comparison in terms of their point: while Ghost wholly romanticizes its dead Mr. Right (played by beefy Patrick Swayze) and wallows in the pathos of his being here-again-yet-not, Truly raises the uncomfortable, entirely realistic question, "If your dead lover came back to live with you, would that necessarily be such a lovely thing?"

And its leading man, played by Alan Rickman in perhaps one of his last leading performances as a good guy (as opposed to his last decade's epitomizing of effete evil), has come back not to save his girlfriend from murderous crooks, but to save her from herself.  Therein lies the thematic intrigue of the movie, which -- not to go all SPOILER on the thing, for the sake of those who've yet to see it -- gives Truly the depth and heft that I've come to treasure in a raise-the-bar rom-com.

From a romantic comedy screenwriter's POV, Minghella's writing/directing debut has a number of notable moments.  It contains two superlative cute meets: one that is anything but cute (the hold-your-breath moving scene of Rickman's first reappearance) and a later, unexpected one that is literally magical.  It manages to present us with two absolutely credible leads who we can believe belonged together -- and yet we can totally understand their coming apart.

The chemistry that's so often feigned or faked in a run-of-the-mill rom-com is palpable here -- not just from the performances, but from the writing.  We see it via the couple's affectionate competition in a favorite word game, which yields the film's title ("I love you truly, madly, deeply," says he, "I love you truly, madly, deeply, passionately," says she, and on they go, trying to top each other until he nearly wins the game with "juicily" but ultimately loses it by forgetting to recite "deeply").  And the film contains that old routine, the pop song performed karaoke-style (here it's the Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore"), but with the kind of crazed, giggly conviction that for once feels entirely sincere, perhaps because it's more well-motivated dramatically than most.

I've often noted that some of the most successful romantic comedies are those that wed their romantic plot to a high concept, and Truly eminently proves the rule.  The ghost motif gets a workout that's so satisfying (again, I don't want to give away the best stuff, since one of the points of this post is: if you've never seen it, go watch this, will you?) -- it's a gag that keeps on giving, grounded in a conceit that has a wonderfully wry subtext (video fanaticism, the movie suggests, really is for dead people).  The ghost story at the film's core is what gives it a genre-transcendent universality you don't often find on rom-com turf.

Meanwhile, it was in watching Truly for the third time that I finally comprehended a central theme in Minghella's work: he makes films about community.  As demonstrated in English Patient, Cold Mountain and Breaking and Entering -- his last, flawed but admirable film which recalls Truly in its milieu and concerns -- Minghella loves to study how disparate people form unlikely alliances and groups, whether in the African desert or a renovated London flat.  Despite its economy-sized production, Truly presents a small world teeming with outspoken individuals.  Among its many pleasures are the deftly-etched humans (both living and dead) who fall in love, fight, and even give birth in the corners of its canvas.

Ironically, it wasn't until this viewing that I realized how much Truly had affected me as a writer, for I saw it was evidently an indirect, unconscious influence on my forthcoming novel, Imagine Me and You (an excerpt of which will be published in this week's issue of the L.A. Weekly, available around town and on-line Thursday March 27th).

You can find a more thorough elegy for Minghella here, and a reprint of the apropos Neruda poem recited in Truly, here.  The man will be missed, but the beauty part, of course, is that he'll always be with us.  His movie is also about that -- what survives, what endures, what each of us can give to each other in leaving, as a true act of love.  So thank you, Anthony, for Truly, Madly, Deeply.

Retreat

There's never enough time to write.  There's always so much... stuff in the way.  Whether it's too many friends getting in your face, or your getting too many friends on Facebook, the cell phone ringing or the strident singing of what everyone else is selling, finding those precious minutes when you can focus on your writing is a major challenge.  Short of magically discovering a 25th hour in the day, what's a 21st century scribe supposed to do?

I say, go away.  Get out of Dodge.  Maybe you could join a 60-day, 1,400 mile dog-sled expedition across the Canadian Arctic -- if you have the strength to write about it during those long wintery nights and the yapping of the dogs doesn't preclude sleep. 

On the other hand, how does hanging out on 2,000 summery acres of American pasture, river, trees and solitude sound to you? 

From June 22nd to June 27th this year, writer Barbara Abercrombie and I will be conducting a writing retreat in Twin Bridges, Montana at Rockpoint Ranch.  I'll be teaching a workshop on "Character and Plot for Film and Fiction," and Barbara will be teaching "Writing Your Life Into Story: Memoir and the Personal Essay." 

Each workshop is limited to eight students and will be held Monday through Friday morning, with afternoons devoted to your writing on your own, and one-on-ones with me or Barbara.  Lunches and dinners are included in the cost of $850.00.  Further details on the courses and the environs can be found in the Montana Writing Retreat link located at the bottom of this blog's right-hand sidebar.

Some years ago, I spent a week at the ranch rewriting my novel that glimmers in my memory as golden -- it was one of most transcendent experiences I've ever had trying to wrestle a recalcitrant draft into submission (and man, those suckers can be fierce). 

I'd wake each morning in Barbara's guest house, get out of bed, pull up the blinds and see dozens of cows grazing on the greenery right outside the window, a few gazing back at me with benign indifference.  Then I'd make a pot of coffee and shuffle out to the porch with last night's pages and a red pen in hand.

As it happened, I was reading Henri Troyat's great biography of Tolstoy at the time.  On breaks from writing, wandering along the river banks with that tome in one hand and a self-whittled walking stick in the other, I felt transported to Count Leo's era.  I half-expected to come upon some Slavic serfs carting hay or a peasant woman doing her laundry by a millstream's waterfall.

The ranch wasn't then wired for internet, cell reception was sporadic at best, and even the idea of watching TV seemed unnecessary and somehow antithetical to my task.  With a caretaker and his family the only other humans in scarce proximity, I had nothing but my imagination and a big expanse of blue heaven above to bask in.  I think I got more work done in a single week than I'd managed to achieve in the preceding three months.

Obviously, this June at the ranch you won't be in such extreme isolation.  And the considered input from a dedicated instructor and some fellow students may be just what you need to help spark inspiration when you're in the midst of such a writer's getaway.  In fact, you'll get the kind of up-close, personal hand's-on help with your current project that a work-of-progress thrives on.  But the basic beauty of the situation is the same: whenever you want, you can be alone with your words and that big sky, providing plenty of room for your spirit and your mind to move.

Further details on the courses and the environs can be found via the link page, and you can e-mail me with any questions.  We're still accepting applications and I've moved the deadline to April 16th, figuring that after the 15th, you'll know if you have the extra funds to invest in your work.  Taxes and other such troubles are exactly what you'll leave behind, should you be able to join us.  Me, I can't wait to be contemplating those Twin Bridges cows again.

Romantic Comedy Classics #4:

Tootsie Turns Twenty-five

We've all got our 10 Best Movies lists, often subconsciously adjusted to include a few impressive titles that we wouldn't actually want to see with any great frequency.  Then there's the short list of what I call Can't Nots: movies which, should you come upon them in progress, cannot be exited.  No matter how many times you've seen the damn thing, you get sucked into it again; you simply Can't Not Watch It.

Tootsie has long topped my Can't Not list, and it tends to be one of the few American comedies that cinefiles and civilians alike revere (it's second only to Some Like It Hot -- the movie that's clearly its role model -- at the top of the AFI 100  Funniest Movies list).  I've yet to meet the curmudgeon who doesn't acknowledge it as a bonafide masterpiece, and would rather not, thanks. 

Thus it's about time the lady got her props.  The movie's 25th Anniversary Edition has finally given Tootsie the royal treatment; while it's not packed with extras, it delivers an hour-long, immensely satisfying "Making of" documentary (made by Charles Kiselyak), which makes a Tootsie lover's purchase of the new edition mandatory.

Although some may not think of Tootsie as a romantic comedy, it absolutely is one, with its high concept gender-switch story inextricable from its rom-com plot: you could call it a boy-as-girl meets girl story (boy-as-boy gets girl in the end).  So one could make a case for it as one of the most popular romantic comedies ever made, setting unlikely heroine Dorothy Michaels right alongside you know -- that girl with the really toothy smile.   

I've written about the reasons for this extensively in my Writing the Romantic Comedy book, but Tootsie's re-release allows me to amplify a few points, in the light of revelations from that "Making of" doc.

One reason for the movie's stature is its script, a fascinating case of the exception that proves the rule.  "Written by committee" has become the favored pejorative phrase with which critics often deride Hollywood's multi-writered products.  And yet Tootsie -- as the documentary bears out -- is exactly that.  A script by Don McGuire and Bob Kaufman came to the attention of Hoffman and writer Murray Schisgal, who'd been playing with the gender-bend notion for some time.  Comedy ace Larry Gelbart came on when Schisgal was played out, and then Elaine May revised him -- while Pollack and Hoffman continued to shape and reshape what could have easily become a misbegotten mess into cinematic gold.

And now it can be told, in specifics: it was the uncredited May who brought in the entire dizzying daisy-chain of supports and subplots that raised the stakes of the story and the level of its humor to sublime, Feydeau-ian farce.  That Ms. May continues to be one of the more under-appreciated (outside of the industry, that is) screenwriters of our age is a shame that this documentary should help assuage.

Viewing the movie at this late date I was struck by how not smile-inducing amusing, but laugh-out-loud Funny it is.  While the whole conceit is grounded in a comedic reversal (man as woman), the range and tenor of the laughs, scene by scene, is kind of astounding. 

For example, there's the bit where Michael Dorsey minus his Dorothy Michaels get-up tries to seduce Julie (Jessica Lange) at a party by using the very words Julie used when she told Dorothy what she'd like a man to say to her:  "I could lay a whole bunch of lines on you..." he tells Julie, "but the simple truth is, I find you very interesting, and I'd really like to make love to you."  Julie's response is to throw her drink in his face.  Great laugh -- then Michael, embarrassed but ballsy as ever, uses the back of an unsuspecting fellow guest's jacket to wipe off his face.  And we laugh again.

Such laughs-upon-laughs are the common coin in this realm.  In one of the great comedic climaxes of all time, the staircase confessional scene, as Dorothy finally reveals her true Michael identity, note how each and every cutaway from Hoffman's big moment gets its own specific laugh: Terri Garr's scream, a technician's faint, Charles Durning's sandwich drop, to Bill Murray's immortal "That is one nutty hospital."   And in terms of setting up and paying off an extended joke in the most perfectly surprising way, I need only remind Tootsie devotees of one phrase from much earlier in the show: "We call him The Tongue."

The movie also embodies a primal comedy principle: you have to take it seriously.  "We never, ever laughed on that set," Pollack notes in the documentary.  "It's not laugh comedy -- it is for the audience, but not for us -- it's Chekhov."  That's why every character in the movie is a crack-up: their funniness is directly proportionate to how seriously they continue to take themselves.

Another reason the movie has endured is of course its stellar cast.  After Graduate and Cowboy, Dustin Hoffman really IS a better man as a woman than he ever was as a man in Rain Man, etc.  Director?  Sydney Pollack best agent ever.  And part for part -- from Terri Garr's perfectly pitched neurotic hysteria to (famously uncredited) Bill Murray's loopy laid-backness -- there's simply not a less than great performance in the movie (or in some cases, great appearance: red-blooded males in the audience continue to savor the screen debut of young Geena Davis).

Writing, casting, brilliant direction aside (Pollack was in the peak-streak of his career in '82, and unbelievably, had never helmed a comedy before), another fundamental factor in Tootsie's greatness is its ideas.  Memorable gags, riffs and character bits abound in the movie, but what makes all of it hang together is the solid "what it's about" at the core.

The question of "what makes it personal?" often comes up in screenwriting classes.  One of the most affecting moments in the documentary comes when today's Dustin Hoffman, recounting how, when he'd settled into his makeup as Dorothy and comprehended that he was not a good-looking woman, he understood for the first time what it must be like to be a woman trying to be appreciated in an appearance-obsessed, sexist world.  Hoffman tears up as he talks about this, and he seems entirely sincere: years after the fact, his visceral experience of "womanhood" is still getting to him.

This is, finally, what makes Tootsie a can't-stop-watching-it classic: by examining -- often in the midst of the most farcical high jinks -- what is masculinity, what is femininity, "what it means for a man to see himself through the eyes of a woman," as Pollack says... the movie gets us where we live.

And now that we've got a neat new edition Tootsie to live with, you can just dip into it one brief clip at a time.  Like, I'd like to watch the Russian Tea Room scene again where Pollack first sees Hoffman in drag and says, "Michael, I begged you to get therapy!"  And then...  Oh, who am I kidding?  There goes the next couple of hours.

Power Stories

There was a moment last year when I first had the feeling that the news media had, in a manner of speaking, jumped the shark -- that some heretofore invisible dividing line between the world of fiction and the world of so-called real life had finally vanished altogether.

That was when I heard an NPR journalist, referring to a statement made by a White House spokesperson, say of the administration, "That's their story line" -- as if what was being put forth by the powers-that-be was not fact, as we used to naively term it, but simply a fictional simulacrum.  The assumption being made was that we, the public, should be in on the gag.

Well, we are by now, things moving as fast as they tend to here in the 2000s.  When Hillary Clinton appears on Saturday Night Live as a willful participant in some writer's satire, is she having a bit of fun, campaigning, making news, or all-of-the-above and who knows what the "story" is?  What's real and for that matter does it matter?

The idea of story as a chosen instrument of influence is certainly nothing new.  The entire legal system's effectiveness is predicated on storytelling; when a jury listens to the arguments put forth by a defense attorney and a prosecutor, they're essentially deciding which story they like better, and thus choose to believe.

Similarly, we as voters are doing pretty much the same thing in the current primary.  Not to go all political on you all of a sudden, but I did want to share with you Paul Waldman's recent article about the current presidential primary campaign from The American Prospect, to make a larger point about the art of storytelling.

In the article, Waldman takes an intriguing look at the "stories" each candidate embodies, and just how important to campaigning the right narrative construct can be.  He makes the point that Obama's popularity is due his having "told far and away the best story... a story perfectly keyed to the current moment in history."

Whether or not you agree with Waldman's politics, his thesis has the ring of truth.  When someone is telling a clear, coherent, easily summarize-able story, one that resonates with your beliefs and values, it makes sense that you'd be moved to identify with them. 

This process puts me in mind of a recent book release, concurrent with an on-line magazine, in which various people, a number of celebrities among them, have compressed the essence of their life stories into six words.  These "six word memoirs" have been collected in the book Not Quite What I Was Planning.  Asked to write the story of their lives in a single six-word sentence, writers famous and obscure came up with gems like these:

Mom died, Dad screwed us over.
- Lesley Kysely

The psychic said I'd be richer.
- Elizabeth Bernstein

Painful nerd kid, happy nerd adult.
- Linda Williamson

Well, I thought it was funny.
- Stephen Colbert

Hey, do try this at home -- it's an amazing exercise.  For my own first shot at a bio, I came up with: Stopped performing, started writing, felt better.   Not definitive, but it'll do. 

Here (under the influence of brevity) is my point: writers, know thy story essence -- and be able to tell it succinctly.  In my most recent workshop, students had a hell of time compressing their screenplay concepts into a simple sentence or two.  It's always a challenge, but suck it up: This is one of the most effective ways there is to define what you're really writing about.

And it's also a great way to get a grip on your characters.  I don't entirely agree with Paul Waldman's take on McCain (i.e. that his campaign lacks a story line), since I think I can sum up his story in a sixer: Old warrior will make you safer.  What sentence would sum up the protagonist in your movie, eh?  And each of the supports?

Have you got your peoples' stories straight?  Think of your meditation on this as the storytelling equivalent of a power nap.  Tried power storytelling, nailed my movie -- that would be one happy story to tell your friends.