Living the Romantic Comedy

The Practice

Stay open for business.
--Gordon Lish

You have never felt more uninspired.  You don't have the energy, you don't have the will, you don't have... it.  The temptation to avoid the blank page is so powerful that anything -- watching reality TV, scraping poop out of parrot cages, even going to the gym -- seems a vastly more meaningful pursuit.  Surely you can skip the hour or two you've set aside to write, just this once.  You'll make up for it tomorrow.  What could you possibly write, right now, that could be worth the effort?  So you close the journal, shut down the laptop, step away from the desk.

You're fucked.

Let me ask you this: Who is the muse most likely to visit?  The writer who's always in her chair at the appointed hour, day after day, or the one who has to be chased down, who shows up when it's most convenient?

Or this: How does LeBron James score 44 points in a single game?

An interview with the illustrious producer/songwriter Nick Lowe (you may know him best for his work with Elvis Costello in the late Seventies) can be found in the current issue of The Believer.  He had this to say about his process:

Sometimes I find that I have this sort of… this sort of other—I have this person or this thing which I call “the Bloke.” The Bloke is, I suppose, a kind of inspirational thing that—I used to say that when I, you know, was writing songs—I have written a couple of songs, but since I’ve had a little boy, it’s very, very difficult to devote time to it, so I haven’t written much for a while. But I always used to talk about how the best songs that I write are written when the Bloke comes ’round. And it’s this sort of person who I never know when they’re gonna come, or how to get in touch with him, or anything like that, but when they come along, it’s almost like they’re not interested in doing any interviews, they’re not interested in being on the TV or doing any tours; they’re this fantastic songwriter to show me their songs and I write, I do their songs, and claim them for my own. And sometimes the Bloke doesn’t come ’round for months, you know, and I don’t know how to get in touch with him, but I’ve seen him work so many times that I can do a very good impersonation of the Bloke, you know. And I know the difference, I know the difference between my songs, the ones I do and I write, and the ones the Bloke writes.

I'm going to go out on an extremely short limb and say that Mr. Lowe's Bloke only came round in the first place because Mr. Lowe had his guitar out and his amp on and a pick in his hand.  In the interview, he  marvels at his friend John Hiatt, who really does go to an office every day to write songs, and Nick Lowe professes to be unable to do such a thing.  But given that he also talks about what it takes, in terms of time and energy, to write a single song, I wouldn't exactly call him a slacker:

It takes me months to write one two-and-a-half-minute song. Months! Not always, but—weeks, it can take me weeks to get it, to go over and over it. But I do it when I’m driving my car or I’m doing my shopping or something, and I just think about it and think about it and hit myself with it, you know, “How’s this?” And you jag on a bit, “Woah, hold on, that’s not good,” and then you smooth it out, maybe employ a clever use of a cliché, you know, just to smooth it out, and then you do a clever bit later. So I work on it like mad...

For me, writing is like breathing.  I'm always writing something...  Writing is like training for an athlete or practice for a musician.  If you stop entirely, it takes a long time to get your pace back.
--Haruki Murakami

Then there are writers who keep writing, rewriting far beyond the point where some sane people would pronounce a work finished.  The method to this madness is actually quite simple:

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible.  Even those  pages you remove somehow remain.  There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages.  The six hundred pages are there.  Only you don't see them.
--Elie Wiesel

Which returns me to my original point.  Until there is a draft, there is nothing.  And a draft is written one page, one sentence, one word at a time.  The only way out is through.

Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in half an hour.  I find that can be done.  I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired.  It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.  There's a marvelous essay that Sinclair Lewis wrote on how to write.  He said most writers don't understand that the process begins by actually sitting down.
--Tom Wolfe

You're going to die, along with the rest of us.  Are you so fundamentally silly in spirit as to pretend that this fact can be ignored?  So, then -- you who are blessed and cursed with the belief that you have something worthwhile to say -- what have you said today?  What starting point have you given yourself that can be moved on from, tomorrow? 

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

--Japanese proverb

 

(photos: Catherine's Room by Bill Viola)

Unpronounceable Masterpieces in the Age of Angst and Nice

 

If ever there was proof that great art is made for the ages but not necessarily for its age, it lies in the fact that you haven't seen Synecdoche, New York. 

By "you" of course I don't mean the few people who actually sought out Charlie Kaufman's unjustly unsung masterpiece when it was briefly in the theaters, or rented it after (the picture has made a paltry $3.08 million since its American release last October), but the general 2009 "you," i.e. the public.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't catch up with the film until just this weekend, despite my love of Kaufman's work (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind being one of the great romantic comedies of the decade and Adaptation one of the greats, period).  I meant to see it last Fall, and then it was gone, and then life got in the way, but it's not as if I wasn't informed.  My friend Manohla Dargis told me to see it, after writing a full-on rave review of the picture in the NY Times that began:

To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.

Manohla wasn't entirely a stone alone in her rapture, with colleague Roger Ebert starting his review:

I think you have to see [Synecdoche] twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely.

He was right about the confused audiences.  I'm concerned about the "indefinitely."  Having been moved to laughter and tears by this brave, sprawling howl of a movie, one of the most impressive first features by a director in recent memory, I'm confounded.  How is it possible that such a major work came and went with barely a ripple of recognition in its wake?

The ad campaign didn't help (the poster suggests it's a movie about skyscrapers).  My friend and fellow story analyst Doug, a Synecdoche believer, blames part of the film's dim reception on its title.  What would possess people to go see something they couldn't pronounce (it's syn-EK-duh-kee) and didn't know the meaning of? (Synecdoche: using part of something to refer to the whole thing, e.g. all hands on deck.) 

Doug also observed that the film "demands participation" on the part of its audience.  Right.  Synecdoche, New York isn't so much a spectacle you watch as an experience that takes over your consciousness.  Kaufman has always been primarily concerned with the workings of the mind, and in the mid-section of this movie, as you enter the mind of its protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman),the very fabric of time and space seems to expand and evaporate, the question of what's "real" and what isn't becomes largely irrelevant, and you're left contemplating... well, the meaning of life and death, essentially.

Not what's considered popcorn fare -- which may account for the level of hostility that greeted the film in many critical quarters.  Those who didn't get the movie trashed it with a particular passion, the indignation of a confused viewer who's been forced, against his/her will, to think.  Explain this! reviewers cried, as if every movie is supposed to be abundantly clear, linear and immediately comprehensible.  The outrage was inevitably coupled with accusations of elitist arty pretentiousness, as if there were something inherently despicable in Kaufman's attempt to go after something unabashedly left of center.

The film follows the attempt of a theater director, convinced that he's dying of an unidentified disease, to understand his life story by creating a theatricalized version of it -- a gargantuan work that ultimately overtakes and subsumes his life.  I won't pretend to claim that I "understand" Synecdoche, just as I wouldn't make the same claim when standing in front of a Rothko painting, watching Pina Bausch dance or listening to Thelonius Monk.  I can say I feel the movie, and that it speaks to me, even if I can't articulate exactly what I'm hearing.  But isn't that the way art is supposed to work?

Though it recalls Fellini's 8 1/2 , Woody Allen, and bears traces of Kaufman's collaborator Spike Jonze, Synecdoche is unique: sui generis.  And I can totally understand someone disliking the film for its difficulty, for its decay-obsessed, existential bummer bent.  It viscerally evokes a psychedelic trip, the aura of a nightmare, and how it might feel to lose one's mind.  What, that doesn't sound like date movie fare to you?

Musing on Synecdoche's failure to find its audience, I found one answer on the front page of this past Sunday New York Times' "Style" section.  Alex Williams' article cites a cultural shift, in which nice has returned as a newly popular attitude:

That amiable guys and uncomplicated sweethearts could be today’s pop heroes is one sign of an outbreak of niceness across the cultural landscape — an attitude bubbling up in commercials, movies and even, to a degree, the normally not-nice blogosphere.

“We are now in an age of nice,” said Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, who... sees no end of smiley faces. He cites as avatars of a new niceness the Obama administration, which has been criticized for being too friendly to some repressive world leaders; advocates of political correctness who still hold sway in many public forums; and the director-writer-producer Mr. Apatow, whose era-defining comedies feature “nice guys who finish first — a great hope for non-threatening puerile males,” Mr. Wilson said.

Makes sense, doesn't it, after a scary economic collapse, in the midst of ongoing terrorist paranoia, two endless wars overseas and general domestic angst, that we might be in the mood for a little bit of  kindliness?  Well, Kaufman's vision in Synecdoche, albeit deeply compassionate, is many things, among them dark, despairing, anxious, bitter, pained, fearful, and absurd (as in, mordantly hilarious), but one thing it assuredly is not is nice.

Synecdoche was released in a cultural moment of reigning upbeat escapism (that Times page features an article on People Magazine, citing "20- and 30-something [celebrities] falling in and out of love, aging boomers growing out of and into their clothes" as the subject of this past year's most popular covers).  Given that aging and death looms large in the movie, it's safe to say that when it came out, it wasn't exactly... in synch.

Same as it ever was, when you consider how the history of the arts is littered with the corpses of creators who didn't live to see their enduring works get their due.  But Charlie Kaufman is alive and well, thank goodness, so see Synecdoche, New York if you'd like to support art that isn't aimed at the cover of People.

Given that the film's protagonist is a writer/director, it's left me mulling over questions like: How do you know when you're writing for yourself so much that you're not speaking to anyone else?  Does a work have to achieve commercial success to be validated as "good?"  When is "working through a personal issue" a viable basis for creating a project and when does that approach defeat you?  If a screenplay falls in a forest and nobody shoots it, was it a vision worth having?

It's the kind of stuff that keeps a scribe up at night, and I'll wager that Synecdoche, New York -- the stuff that fever dreams are made of -- will be fueling such creative insomnia for many, many years to come.

This is My Brain on Words

Too many scripts spoils the mind.  For my past week and a half''s work at Universal, I had four (4) back-to-back projects, meaning -- four drafts of movies Uni has in development for which I am the note-taker (note-giver?) of choice came in, one on top of the next.  So I've spent the past eight days analyzing what's working and not working in four movies-to-be.  They were each of them comedies and/or romantic comedies, and weirdly, they were each new drafts that were more dramedy than comedy, thus sharing as a group the predominate note of: make this funnier!

Apparently America wants to laugh (Can you blame it?) and evidently America's screenwriters are taking everything too seriously.  

I got this e-mailed note from the executive in charge of one of these projects:

This desperately needs to be a comedy and stop thinking it's some kind of deep meditation on relationships, b/c it just isn't!

Right?!

In the midst of these 8 days of writing some 50+ pages of notes on said screenplays, comparing in each case an older draft to its rewritten new draft, I taught a 2-day class that involved in part listening to 16 students pitch ideas for romantic comedy scripts and giving them feedback.  And I read two completed screenplays from two students in my screenwriting master class (did notes), along with a spec script by a writer friend (stick figures, at least, word-like scrawls on the hard copy).  I've been as immersed in the parsing of words as, oh, say, Matthew McConaughey on a bongo bender.

Does the term brain-leak mean anything to you?

[But you don't understand how entirely insane a reading creature I am until you know that whenever I was on a break from this incessant screenplay perusal, while eating, before bed, taking a dump, I continued to voraciously devour the late Roberto Bolano's 900-page novel 2666, which is living up to its reputation as a masterpiece, and perhaps giving me nightmares.  This is how my reading mind repairs itself, a brain-cleansing or rejuvenating, though the reading time you lose to industry is brain hours you never have again --]

All by way of explaining that for once, Living the RomCom must belie its own reputation for publishing mindfully written posts with a point. 

I have no mind, I cannot write, and I am pointless.

In lieu of The Usual, I offer you a laugh, courtesy of friend Jen Winn over at Law of Sympathy: this beautifully rendered 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists by Harvet Ismuth, which you can click on or link to, to study in its actual-sized glory. 

Until next time, that is, if I can grow the requisite brain cells.

Explain to Me Matthew McConaughey

Every now and then you just have to give it up.  A fellow writer has written a piece that I could not have written better myself, expressing exactly the sentiments I've long felt about this particular subject.  So allow me to turn Living the RomCom over to Richard Corliss, whose witheringly witty Time Magazine article definitively addresses the Mystery of McConaughey:

The obligatory Matthew McConaughey scene — as crucial to his fans as a Miley Cyrus song or a Seth Rogen penis joke is to theirs — is the ritual removing of his shirt, to reveal a torso that could have been sculpted, or certainly caressed, by Michelangelo. The gesture is not so much an act of narcissism as a votive offering to his core constituency. A showman as much as an actor, McConaughey is ready to give the people what they want; and abs make their hearts grow fonder...

Why is McConaughey a movie star? Because he gets a significant number of people to pay to see him in dreck. And Ghost of Girlfriends Past is down there with the worst...

[His] fluffy films earn no awards, no critics' raves — nothing but healthy box-office numbers; How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days broke $100 million domestic. So somebody must love McConaughey. In Ghosts, one woman says of him, "He's all surface," and another observes, "But a really hot surface."...

You really ought to read the whole of Corliss's diatribe for yourself, but let me just add this about that.  For me, the "hot surface" isn't entirely the issue; I can comprehend beefcake just as I can cheesecake (it's not always easy, for example, to defend Scarlett Johansson).

No, what confounds me is how so smarmy and smug a hot surface as McConaughey's is continues to command such a sizable audience.  It's the bewilderment felt by men the world over since the dawn of time, who've watched otherwise intelligent and discerning women lose it over a "bad boy" who we can clearly see is... well, full of steaming manure.

I guess I wouldn't begrudge the guy his success if it wasn't giving my favorite genre such a bad name.  But since I do want to understand this phenomenon, I really do -- I open it up to you.  How come the guy isn't over yet?  How's he managed to get as far as he's gotten?  And is there, dear merciful powers of Heaven, any way to make him go away?

Adventures in Innocence

We know these people.  You don't have to have been 18 in 1987, or have spent that perilous summer between high school and college working in a tacky, run-down amusement park, to get Adventureland.

Every guy went to school with a Frigo (that obnoxious little a-hole who delighted in humiliating you when you were trying to act like you'd outgrown him), and every girl has known a Connell (that dreamboat  stud-muffin you knew was full of shit, but was nonetheless irresistible).  In the annals of geekdom, Joel, clutching his worn copy of Gogol, has occupied a place in any young intellectual's life, google-eyed glasses, pale skin, frog lips and all.

All of the above (peerlessly portrayed by Matt Bush, Ryan Reynolds and Martin Starr, respectively) represent no reinvention of the character wheel.  But funnily enough, it's precisely because they are so familiar that the characters in Greg Mottola's lovely little coming-of-ager are so engrossing to watch.  Not because they're stereotypical, but due to their being credible, painfully amusing variations on universal "types" who, in this movie, are probably thinly fictionalized versions of people whom writer/director Mottola actually grew up with.

He's helped by pitch-perfect casting.  Jesse Eisenberg, whom you may remember from The Squid and the Whale, has become the Jewish Michael Cera (Mottola's last protagonist-surrogate, in Superbad) and brings a heart-wrenching, gangly sincerity to his part of put-upon James, the boy-man stuck in a job from hell while he dreams of an Ivy League glory that's just out of reach at the summer's end.  And though she may've gotten some flack for the superficiality of her role in Twilight, here Kristen Stewart is ideal as Em, the bruised beauty, neurotic but alluring, that he pines for, thinks is out of his league, and then can't quite believe he's really gotten to make out with.

The I've been there! (even I wasn't... there) factor in Adventureland exerts such a powerful pull that critics usually not so inclined to personally reminisce have waxed nostalgic in their reviews. Here's Roger Ebert:

I worked two summers at Crystal Lake Pool in Urbana. I was technically a lifeguard and got free Cokes, but I rarely got to sit in the lifeguard chair. As the junior member of the staff, I was assigned to Poop Patrol, which involved plunging deep into the depths with a fly swatter and a bucket. Not a lot of status when you were applauded while carrying the bucket to the men’s room. (“No spilling!” my boss Oscar Adams warned me.) But there was another lifeguard named Toni and — oh, never mind. I don’t think she ever knew.

As a romantic comedy, Adventureland is a breath of fresh air, a welcome antidote to the broad, lewd and crude slapstick we've come to expect from a teen movie.  Mottola, despite having demonstrated his facility with raunch-com in the farcical excesses of Superbad, has delivered a kind of Anti-Apatow picture.  It's a movie of small pleasures, of little gestures and quiet moments that speak volumes.  And when it does turn up the volume -- Em's brief attack on an Anti-Semitic hypocrite and James' crazed dash to get away from an angry thug bent on beating him up are two bits that come to mind -- the results are immensely satisfying, in part because they never pop the bubble of the movie's deftly, sneakily romanticized reality.

Mottola's rendering of period is so low-key and seemingly off-the-cuff that the 1987 of it all never becomes in-your-face parody.  Its characters inhabit their world with the casual enthusiasm of that time -- local hottie Lisa P. doing her Madonna moves, the trying-too-hard cover band in the bar aping Foreigner  -- and the soundtrack is a hipster's guide to the more subversive music of its era, since that's what James and co. were listening to; it's no accident that Brooklyn alt-gods Yo La Tengo did the honors, with the Replacements and Big Star (extra musical cool points) rocking out under the plot points.

Under is the idea here: under the surface, under the mainstream culture, literally under a bridge when James and Em's romance goes dark and messy.  Adventureland has also been under the radar, in terms of box office and media attention, but its underdog story -- predictable, sure, but just quirky and personal enough to make all the difference -- is well worth seeking out before it disappears from the mall. 

Without being mawkishly sentimental or cartoonish about it, the movie is a celebration of innocence: how it survives the indignities of having to hawk rigged carny games for peanuts, and the pain of having feelings too big and complicated to bear with adult grace.  If you're lucky, you'll get to see it with someone you love.  And if you can't do that, it should help to affirm your hope that love can be found, even in the unlikeliest, seemingly dead end-iest of places.