Living the Romantic Comedy

A Letter to My Father

Dear Dad,

It's still near-impossible to believe that you were here in the world with us only a week ago, and now you're gone for good.  None of us - Mom, John, no one who knew you, evidently - can get their minds around this.  The word that keeps coming up when people talk about Dick Mernit is vital.  A big presence like yours leaves a palpable hole, and there's been quite a wave of emotion rushing in to fill the absence.  You wouldn't believe the things people have been saying about you.

I am so glad that I had the great good luck to meet your dad.  It makes me smile just to think of him.

Such a sweet, lovely man - so warm and welcoming.

Dick was always so alive and on the mark.

A big person and just a big fucking joy.  And better at tennis than you or I.

So many things I didn't get to tell you.  The love between us is so strong that I do believe you know most of it, anyway, but I guess this is what I would've wanted to lead with, back when I really could have had this conversation with you: You brightened up the world, Dad.  And this is no ordinary thing.

Such a good, kind-hearted uplifter of spirit, your father was.

I found Dick both energizing and inspiring, particularly in his cheer, bounce, curiosity and graciousness.  He really seemed to be living in the here and now - he gave the impression that he was truly living in the thick of things, luxuriating in the richness of life.  His eyes, mind and heart were open.

One little consolation is that you died at a point in your life when you still had hope in your heart: you were regaining your strength, and you yourself didn't believe you'd be leaving us this soon.  A larger consolation is that the four of us - father, mother and both sons - were together when you took your leave.

Still, it's stubborn, this death of yours.  Every hour I come back to it; it's there and will never go away.  Meanwhile there's the ongoing challenge of keeping you alive, around, amidst and among us.  One stopgap measure: I already associate you (you the lover of good drink and people and the infinite variety of life's most colorful details) with pleasure.  So it's natural enough, when I bite into say, a particularly well-cooked, truly rare piece of steak, to think Dad would like this.  Or to see a woman's fine legs and know your reaction ("Great gams") or watch an amazing return in a tennis match that scores a point and hear you cry "Too good!"  So there you'll be.  I can do that.

The harder part is dealing with what can't be tricked out - the ache at the center of my soul when I know I can't share with you something new.  Finally we do have to keep walking forward, into the future, without you.

What a cool, lovely guy!  Thank you for offering us a chance to know Dick Mernit.  I can see him in front of me right now, and life feels so much richer with him in the room.

A man imbued with a great love of life and a fabulous sense of humor.

He and Dee-Ann were real inspirations for how to age gracefully and live life fully!

If someone were to ask me what the deal with you was, I'd tell them my story of that first morning after.  I went out to get coffee for Mom and John and myself, and Peter the doorman asked how you were doing.  I hated having to be the one who told him.  He drew back against the wall like he'd been hit, and his eyes filled with tears, and he took me by the arm and told me what a great man you were. 

Soon after that we went to the physical therapy place across the street to tell the manager, and before he could say a word the receptionist gasped and clapped her hands to her face and said "Oh my God!", her eyes tearing up.  When Ginette at the gym around the corner heard the news, she really started wailing.

Later John went to pick up your watch at the shoe repair shop, and when the Russian woman at the counter heard you were gone, she got on the phone with Simon her husband, who had to be told three times (he didn't believe her).  He had her put John on the phone, so he could praise you to the skies - and make sure his wife gave John back the money for the watch.  And when John thanked him and said the kinds of things we'd been saying to people, Simon said: No, you don't understand - He was the best customer I ever had.

That was Dick Mernit, one great salesman himself, is what I would tell this person who didn't get to meet you: My dad was the man who in his passing left the doorman, the receptionist, the gym lady and the shoe repair man bereft.  So you can only imagine how it is for his wife of 62 years and his two aging sons.

He will be missed by all.  Such a bright spirit.

Your dad was a beautiful spirit.  I feel so delighted and lucky to have gotten to know him just a little.

He was a burning light.

A great soul serves everyone all the time.  A great soul never dies.  It brings us together again and again.

Yours forever,

Bill-Brian

The Silence of God and Other Great Gags

Oh, those Coen Bros.  Love 'em or hate 'em, there's no denying they make technically stunning films (as opposed to movies) with a distinct auteurist voice, and they keep churning them out, gaining Oscars or being ignored, producing a body of work that seems to exist in its own private cinematic universe, about as free from matters of market and popular taste as the oeuvre of Woody Allen.

I've had a conflicted relationship with their work from the get, exalting in some (count me in as a happy member of the cult of Lebowski), reviling a few (I'm of the minority underwhelmed by No Country, which struck me as a particularly mean-spirited formal exercise) and being merely puzzled by others (a decade from now, will anyone want to take a second look at Intolerable Cruelty?).

The thing that's been consistently disturbing in their films, from Blood Simple onward, is their attitude.  More often than not, in watching even one of the great ones, say Fargo, you're left wondering: Do Joel and Ethan even like these people?  In some cases, an aura of not-so-thinly-veiled contempt seems to hover around protagonists and walk-on characters alike.  You identify with their hapless heroes and anti-heroes at your own peril, because in the Coen-ian universe, naive hope will assuredly be trumped by random disaster, and there's always a sense that the joke is deservedly on us.  A working title for their collected works might be Stupid Human Tricks: A Celebration.

However: Finally, at this late date, the Brothers Coen have pulled away the curtain of their dispassion, and made a movie that explains a whole lot.  A Serious Man offers, among its many pleasures, a reasonable explanation for their peculiar sensibility: the Coens are a couple of middle-class Reformed Jews who grew up in a small Minnesotan suburb in the '60s, and their dad was an academic.

Inarguably their most personal work, Serious Man provides us with a context for their black-humored point of view; it fills in the background on the existential shrugs that have been the hallmark of their filmmaking for years.  Leave it to these guys to take on what was once the province of European heavyweights like Ingmar Bergman, and frame the same question - What is God trying to tell us, if anything, and why do we have such terrible reception? - in the province of Jolly Roger Inns, the Columbia Record Club and Manischewitz Wine.

 

Though they're quick to point out the differences between fiction and autobiography in this brief interview (which also offers tantalizing sequel talk re: Barton Fink), the Coens have provided us with a portrait of their seminal coming-of-age years - caught on the cusp of cool, listening to Jefferson Airplane stoned during Torah class, in a community filled with naturally caricature-like neighbors and family members fraught with all manner of dilemmas.  It was a place where acquaintances might drop dead and Wizard of Oz-like tornadoes appear at equally inopportune times.

Full disclosure: I was a Hebrew School dropout, and my wife grew up in a town within bicycling distance of the one the Coens depict here, so our mutual delight in this movie is admittedly subjective.  A contemporary take on the story of Job, it features no stars, has a plot constructed of perversely arbitrary twists, and refuses to answer the fundamental queries posed by its poor protagonist's ever-escalating tsuris.  It's nonetheless one of the most visually arresting, darkly funny and philosophically intriguing films you'll see this year.

Like Bright Star - another movie I've blogged about recently that will probably make all of about ninety dollars at the American box office - A Serious Man may also provide an antidote to this week's soul-crushing studio fare (don't get me started on Couples Retreat).  To see it on the big screen, it wouldn't hurt.

 

The Fat and the Thin

Small children and babies ought to be plump.

So wrote Sei Shonagon in her Pillow Book over a thousand years ago, and her intimation was that everyone else ought to be not. 

Those of us currently living in Fat America salute her prescience. 

Shonagon also said, Nothing can be worse than allowing the driver of one's ox-carriage to be poorly dressed, so I don't consider her to be an infallible sage.  But I thought of her while doing two days of studio notes on a comedy project that had last come in at 144 pages and was now weighing in at 124.

110 pages is okay, just over 100 is good.  Why?  Ask a stand-up comic about going in late and getting out early.  Disturb, delight and depart before they can think about what hit 'em.

Life is short.  Comedies should be shorter.

Movies in general are too freakin' long.  Here's Ryan D'Agostino at the Daily Endorsement, in a compressed version that makes a leaner read:

Normally in life, getting more for your money is a good thing. But movies aren’t Pringles, and 20 percent more free isn’t necessarily what you want. Even 10 minutes of unnecessary screen time can cause a good, tight story to fray. “I Love You, Man” was funny at 104 minutes, but it would have been precisely as funny at 95. ... And was it me, or did the fifth hour of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” start to drag?

You’ve probably never walked out of a movie and said, “It was about 20 minutes too short.” ... The original Rambo is an economical 91 minutes. “Annie Hall” is 94. So is “The Road Warrior.”  “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” needs only 92 minutes to convey the entire high school experience. Every frame matters. Some stories are better longer, of course. Even at three hours, “The Godfather” doesn’t waste a millisecond. But lately too many directors are indulging themselves at the expense of your time.

Consider Judd Apatow.  The 40 Year-Old Virgin: 114 minutes.  Knocked Up:  126 minutes.  Funny People: 146 minutes.  Given that his first is his best, what are we watching as these times engorge?  The sight of one man's ego becoming obese.

Here's a quote for those of you in the world of pre-pro spec-writing, overheard in a studio story department: 

"It's 104 pages?  Thank God!"

The best movie I saw this week is under five minutes long.  Courtesy of fellow blogger Scott Myers, here it is.

 

[images: showhistory.com, images.smh.com, pzrservices.typepad.com, fesfilms.com]

The Draft Withdrawal Shakes

On the first night of every new writing class I teach, I have the students introduce themselves and be greeted in the manner of an AA meeting ("Hi, my name is Melvin..." "Hi, Melvin!!!").   This is not an arbitrary ritual.

The writing junkie: No matter how many times we quit it, we go back.  No matter how sick the process makes us, we keep at it; no matter how we endeavor to reduce the dosage ("One little blog post - how could that hurt?"), soon enough we need more and more of it ("This novel ought to only take me a few years"). 

Reams have been written (this in itself a testament to the awesome power of the disease) about the wonders and attendant angst of the writing process.  Yet despite the terrible reputation of this pursuit (no one's scientifically determined the ratio of joy to horror, but my money's on higher figures for the latter), we obsessively pursue it.

Everybody has their reasons.  I suspect that for me it's about control: It's only by having a self-created alternate reality continuously unfolding in my head that I can cope with the general hopelessness of trying to affect, you know, reality.  So without my daily writing fix I'm prone to copelessness. 

Not that getting one's fix is fun.  The terror of facing the blank page has been plentifully chronicled.  I consider myself a curator of procrastination methods, and I can't count how many times over the past three months spent writing the first draft of a screenplay, I used up almost all of my allotted writing time in trying to avoid writing.  Yet here I am, barely four days past completion, fingers shaking, stomach quaking, psyche unsettled, brain nettled - itching to have that empty screen in front of me again, and bitching about its absence.  It's like that Woody Allen joke from the beginning of Annie Hall:

Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ‘em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’

For Alvy Singer, this is a metaphor about life; I'm applying it to the writing life.  Why would I want to be back in that particular saddle, after having been bucked and thrown from it on a near-daily basis?  If you're a writer, you know why, of course - there's something inarguably divine about the experience when it happens to go right - but still...

Still, it helps to be mindful that such is the junkie's life.  I was complaining in an e-mail to a writer friend yesterday that I was in a funk, had become a slug, didn't want to go anywhere nor do any thing, that I felt worthless, in despair over having wasted the best years of my life, etc.  His succinct reply: It's called finishing a script. 

Right.  So as I dutifully practice my own preaching (i.e. I always put away and lock up a draft for a minimum of two weeks after completing it), I'm trying to come up with ways to cope.  Bicycling is generally helpful.  An Allagash can be pretty effective.  But boy, am I open to suggestion.

What do you do for your writing withdrawals?  Living the RomCom wants to know.

[images: alternativereel.com, wtnrradio.com & pharmacy-and-drugs.com]