Living the Romantic Comedy

What Falls Apart, What Takes Its Place

I came upon this quote in the January issue of The Believer, in an interview with the writer Ann Enright. Because I'm in the midst of writing a novel, and it so beautifully articulated a truth that I have to keep learning on a daily basis, I typed the passage up this morning, and I'm planning to have it framed and hanging by my computer tonight.

Ms. Enright was asked about her process as she works her way into a new book. Her answer is of interest to screenwriters, too, and for that matter, to any writer trying to craft a piece of work:

"What you have to do is not leave the house. You have to not get up and get some exercise and do some yoga and clear your head. It’s the opposite of that. You start writing, and it falls apart very quickly. And then you have to start again.

In the beginning, you have a plan for a book that everyone will love in various ways. And then you start writing and you realize you have a different kind of book on your hands. And so the easy, the conventional novel, the idea of that novel, falls apart, and you must start writing the thing itself. If you resist and you continue to pursue the easy idea, you get a fake novel, written according to a preordained pattern. The world is full of them.

You have to be less controlling. It’s like getting a herd of sheep across a field. If you try to control them too much, they resist. It’s the same with a book. If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day."

Why We Write

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt it didn't matter. 

- Edward Albee

But what about those times when hope fails? When you feel that it really doesn’t matter?

If you’re a writer and you’ve lived a bit, you’ve sunk into this hole of despair, at some point where your supply of hopeful optimism – a vital fuel for the completion of any work – has dried up.

Maybe you’ve had one too many rejections. Maybe you’ve been published or produced, and badly reviewed. Maybe you’ve been read and horribly misinterpreted, or worse, you’ve been ignored. The world has any number of ways to beat you down and defeat you, and sometimes you are your work’s worst enemy. You feel you’ll never master the craft, let alone make a decent living at it; you’re a craft-master who’s lived off it but fear you can’t do it again, or have nothing left to say.

The myriad reasons not to write can be overpowering. After all, we’re living at a time when the ever-increasing amount of extant writing – be it the latest 1,000-page biography or deluge of 140-character tweets – can make the decision to remove your voice from the din seem an act of social generosity.

 

My own answer to the question “Why write?” came to me unbidden, in the form of an e-mail from a screenwriter-director who lives abroad.

A few years ago, Gina, a fan of Writing the Romantic Comedy, had approached me for a consult. We worked together on a draft of her project via Skype, then on a subsequent rewrite, and we’d been sporadically in touch as she tried to get the movie set up. Her e-mail had a newly revised draft attached, but another consult was not her only purpose in contacting me.

Some months previous, I’d posted on this blog a long, serialized piece called “Death and Resurrection: A Rom-Com Memoir of the 2000s” – an attempt to compare and contrast on-screen romance with what I’d gone through in my own romantic life during that decade. In one of the posts, I wrote about the unraveling of my second marriage, due in part to our inability to have children.

In her e-mail, Gina quoted a passage where I wrote of how my Roman-Catholic wife’s conviction that “We will have a child if God wants us to” quashed my hopes of using any more scientific means to that end and ultimately, sadly, helped hasten the end of our marriage. Gina explained that she was in a similar situation.

 

She’d been married for six years to a loving husband, and her happily-ever-after true life rom-com portrait bore only one stain. While both Gina and her husband wished for a child, she was getting more and more impatient as the years went by. Yet her husband wasn’t at all worried, strongly believing that “it will happen when it is supposed to.” He wouldn’t have opposed a medical approach, Gina explained – if he had, she would have insisted – but this unresolved issue was threatening her happiness.

Gina said: What you wrote had such a strong impact on me that I decided to break the psychological pattern of frustration in my head before it would start to harm my marriage. She told me that she had tried some minor hormone treatment, and it had worked immediately. Husband and family were overjoyed about “the miracle,” and in the spring, she announced, she would have a baby boy.

I’ve just had another look at the baby pictures she sent me a few weeks ago. The kid is wide-eyed, properly pudgy, and adorable. And in the shots that feature Gina and husband, both are radiantly beaming.

 

So here’s the thing: When I set out to write that “Death and Resurrection” essay, it never would have occurred to me that posting it online would lead to my becoming a cyber-godfather. The piece, which was a bear to write, felt at times to me like an elaborate navel-gaze, and it never achieved its ostensible goal. I’d meant it to become the opening chapter of a non-fiction book about romantic comedy in the 21^st century, and after I’d put some 18 months of labor into that book proposal, it was definitively rejected by my own agent.

I remember bitterly referring to all that work as a huge waste of time. The essay as originally posted online mustered only a few readers’ comments, and I would have gone on thinking about this now-painful writing investment as pure folly, if Gina’s e-mail hadn’t hit me in the heart and head and knocked me into a more profound perspective.

When I think on it, I can recognize many people who’ve had an impact on my life who in many cases haven’t the slightest inkling of their effect. So it shouldn’t be surprising, really, to find myself identified as one more influential human strand in that infinite web of connections. In this sense, worrying about whether or not the work I love to do is worth doing is a useless, foolhardy pursuit.

You never know. You can’t know, and it isn’t even your job to think about it. Our job as writers is to do the work – to try and express what we’re given to express, as honestly as we’re able, with as much skill as we can muster. If we succeed in that, and put what we’ve written out into the world, that is the work that matters, and anything that follows from it is assuredly beyond our ken and our control. 

I’m pretty sure Gina’s son would agree.

 

Fosse

If you’re looking for a holiday gift for someone in The Industry – and by that I mean anyone working in movies, television, theater, even in dance or the music business – the new biography Fosse by Sam Wasson has got you covered. 

Bob Fosse, you may remember, is the only man to have won the show business trifecta: an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy in one year (1972). But did it make him happy? Therein lies the tale, or at least, the core of it.

Fosse is a big, fat book that may look intimidating (the text is nearly 600 pages, pre-notes and acknowledgements), but it’s such an engrossing page-turner of a read that I’m not alone in thinking that it could’ve been longer. Reviews have been raves, and the book’s already an Amazon bestseller.

Author Wasson is a friend, but with this definitive bio out now, and the NY Times bestseller Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (about the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s) behind him, he hardly needs any smoke-blowing promotion from me.  And I would’ve eaten this book up with a spoon, regardless.

What Sam has pulled off here is no small feat. Due to his prodigious research and insights, you feel that you are there, fly-on-the-wall style, for all the events that transpire in Fosse’s life, and you feel like you’re getting the real deal – that you’re in Fosse’s head or, at least, that you’re with the man as he actually was, brought to vivid life in all his neurotic glory.

In a recent NPR interview, well worth a listen, Sam relates one of the many great anecdotes that are in the book, about an encounter between Fosse and his close friend, the formidable screen and TV writer, Paddy Chayefsky (the "Gwen" Fosse refers to is his wife Gwen Verdon, and Nicole, their daughter):

Fosse [is] in the hospital having just had a heart attack, facing open-heart surgery the next morning - bypass surgery - he's sitting there with Paddy. Paddy's going over Fosse's will, which he has just rewritten. And Paddy, of course, reads every single word of every single page of the document, expecting to find himself in there. He realizes Fosse's left him out.

And Paddy looks up from the will and looks to Fosse and says: I'm not in here. I'm your best friend of 10 years; where am I? And Fosse says: Well, Paddy, I don't worry about you. You're going to be fine. I wanted to make sure Gwen was OK, and Nicole was OK... I wanted to provide for my family. I don't worry about you. You know I love you. I got to provide for these other people. And Paddy looks up and says: Fuck you, live.

So that gives you a flavor of what these guys were. And Fosse laughs so hard and… all the tubes are plugged into his nose and the heart machine starts beeping and - I mean, it was a constant party in Fosse's room.

 

Yes, there was a lot of laughter, but Fosse also makes it clear that a deep well of fear, anger, and pain lay behind the singular icon’s great achievements. The book chronicles how this infamously driven workaholic sought to deal with his demons, and it serves as a kind of cautionary tale for all of us creative types who seek to somehow keep our work and our personal lives in balance. In an e-mail exchange with Sam, the biographer had this to say about his subject:

It's a book about the problems of insecurity [and] the vulnerability that comes from being an artist. One of the things I love about Fosse is that he endured an amplified version of the problems we in the creative realm deal with, namely, "How do I make it better? Can I make it better? Why is it never enough? Why am I never enough? What's wrong with me?" The fear of creation. Not fear: the panic. For me it is always there. And so I'm very moved by Fosse's story... I hope people read it as being bigger than Fosse.

It felt that way to me, and I think anyone who delves into this addictively readable book will come away with some big-sized thoughts to ponder, as well as an interest in re-experiencing the handful of great movies that Fosse’s panic, and talent, produced.

[Sam Wasson will be signing copies of Fosse this Friday night (12/6) at the Aero Theater, as well as helming a panel in conjunction with showings of Cabaret and All That Jazz – details in this link.]

 

A Few Things I've Learned

Angela Guess of the useful and inspiring website L.A. Screenwriter has been running a series of posts she calls “the un-rules” (i.e. flexible truisms) that working screenwriters have found most helpful in their careers. And she asked me to do one, bless her heart, I suppose because besides being a writer, I’ve worked in the movie industry as a studio story analyst and private script consultant for some 25 years.

It’s from this latter point of view that I decided to tackle the assignment, asking myself, What didn’t I know when I first started out that I know now, that’s specific to the task of writing a script that will get a movie made?

There’s tons of small-bore info I could share, like how it’s good to put your completed first draft on ice for awhile instead of showing it around, or how it’s important to learn how to take script notes (with a cooperative spirit and an open mind, followed by a good stiff drink). But in terms of fundamental, big picture observations, for me it all boils down to these three.

1. A primary goal of any spec script that’s going to market is to get the reader to identify with its protagonist.

Your story requires a compelling, relatable lead character – meaning, we know what she wants and we believe she may be capable of getting it, the ways in which she overcomes her obstacles make her empathetic, and she’s complex enough to keep us interested. Your job is to get us to be her, even if this means putting what she thinks and how she feels into the narrative on the screenplay page. If we’re not totally emotionally invested in her story and seeing it though her eyes by the end of the first act, your script is dead in the water.

2. No amount of great writing can overcome the folly of a weak story concept.

It’s an awful truth, but it’s undeniable: While I’ve often seen an exquisitely crafted screenplay be rejected by a studio, I’ve never heard of one with a great story idea being turned down due to its poor execution. In this business, story concept rules, so no amount of skillful tap-dancing (e.g. pithy dialogue, cool visuals) can make up for the lack of a killer melody (i.e. a genuinely exciting same-but-different premise). Unless your script’s stripped-naked story idea earns an aroused “And then what?!” response when it’s pitched, you’d be ill-advised to spend the next few years of your writing life working on it.

3. Learning the difference between what a writer likes and what the audience wants is vital in forging a successful career.

Screenwriters may write to express themselves, to capture a personal experience, or to make a philosophical point, but an audience wants to be entertained and moved, and their demands trump yours. You have to develop a keen sense of what appeals to you as a viewer in a story, so that you can step back from your own work with objectivity, and be ruthless about losing whatever’s in the way of holding an audience’s attention or satisfying their expectations. Such hoary mantras as “Come in late, leave early” and “Kill your darlings” speak to the ethos of this rule: a screenplay is a shark that has to move to keep breathing, and lives on conflict. So always keep your ego at the service of feeding that beast.

The Devil We Know

Oh happy day! The miracle-worker has come to Hollywood and solved all our problems. With his help, it’s only hits and blockbusters from now on, according to the New York Times, and the only issue is: Can we afford this guy? Quick, get your hammer and head for your piggy bank!

The article Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data profiles the success of one “chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese,” who is providing “script evaluation for as much as $20,000 per script” to producers in town gullible enough to believe he can analyze their projects into becoming win-win propositions.

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Given that name, that voice, and the other personal details that emerge from the piece by journalist Brooks Barnes, Vinny sounds like a character right out of a movie, i.e. if he didn’t exist, someone would have to make him up (my favorite bit: "He bills himself as a distant relative of Einstein's, a claim that is unverifiable but never fails to impress studio executives"). And come to think of it, the last time I encountered someone with a line of horse manure this well-crafted, he was wearing a straw boater and being played by Robert Preston, in a show called The Music Man.

If you’re the age of the average movie executive, you’re probably too young to have seen or even heard of The Music Man (recently a fellow reader giving notes to a studio exec on a sci-fi project realized that the exec had never seen Star Wars: true story). So this may account for Mr. Bruzzese’s success. What was that quote again – people who skip history class are doomed to keep taking make-up classes? – something like that.

The Onion’s version of the Times article would likely be titled, Hollywood Still Largely Populated by Idiots. But you really must read it. If it makes you laugh, as opposed to making your head explode (literally!), that’s a good sign. It shows that you’ve been around the block at least once or twice. If you’re reaching for the phone to get hold of Vinny, however, you deserve the resulting hole you’ll soon find in your pocket.

I’ve always thought that the famous William Goldman dictum about the industry – “Nobody knows anything” – while a great quote and a good argument-ender, isn’t entirely accurate. In my experience, Nobody knows everything. There are some people in Hollywood (many of them deservedly at the top of the heap) who do know some things. The savvy chairman of a major studio was recently heard to say, “People like to see dogs in movies.”

Well, yes. This is inarguable, and I’ve got the data to back it up (in my desk drawer with the paperclips and bong-filters). But what I’m saying is: There are some knowns about storytelling and movie audiences that can be known. So chances are, Mr. Bruzzese’s “20-30 page reports” do contain insights that aren’t 100 % bullshit, or – I’m sorry – focus group-informed conjecture. So the hapless rube who’s paid through his nose for the report figures hey, it’s all good!... and Vinny departs with another suitcase full of moolah. Nice work if you can get it, bro.

It’s too bad, however, that those poor misguided amateurs Spielberg and Lucas didn’t have Vinny on hand when they were making Raiders of the Lost Arc – you know, the movie that featured the climactic scene (“Don’t open that ark!”) with all the summoned demons who spectacularly melted the Nazi villains into goo? Not a targeting demon in sight, yet the scene stayed in the picture, which probably accounts for that little project’s ignominious failure.

And we could continue in this vein, but why bother? The con-men and their latest gizmos have been with us since Biblical times, and will surely be there in centuries to come. As one Hollywood writer once said (he’s got a movie opening this week, years after his untimely death):

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Only Safe Thing

Believing as I do that it's more fun to celebrate people when they're with us than to eulogize them after they're gone, I'm wishing the legendary Elaine May a happy birthday (4-21).

If you're familiar with May - and any sincerely dedicated comedy writer should be - you know all about the trailblazing work that Nichols and May did, back in the day. This post from Dangerous Minds provides a goodly selection of that unique comedy team's video clips, and this more recent print interview from Vanity Fair gives you an insightful look back from the reunited duo.

Since her best work as a screenwriter and director exists back in the mists of time (i.e. pre-Tina Fey), you may have never had the pleasure of enjoying her classic black comedy/rom-com A New Leaf, which Elaine May wrote, directed, and co-starred in with Walter Matthau. Remedy that, will you? Also worth a look (or second, third, etc.) is the original Heartbreak Kid, written by Neil Simon, in which Ms. May directed her (subsequently Oscar-nommed) daughter.

Because much of May's screenwriting work has been co-credited (Heaven Can Wait, The Birdcage) or uncredited (she famously supplied some of the best laughs in The Great American Comedy, Tootsie), she's tended to be described of late as "mysterious" and "elusive." Her historic industry debacle Ishtar is probably largely responsible (though I think its first act - i.e. before Beatty and Hoffman go to Ishtar - is pretty damn funny).

This post from Jonathan Rosenbaum nonetheless makes a good case for May as a Hiding in Plain Sight auteur. As an actual sighting, this clip of her appearance on the AFI Tribute to Mike Nichols should give you a fine idea of her comedic sensibility.

 

May can enliven an interview with other comedians and even a questionnaire; she'd probably get laughs out of reading a train schedule aloud.

Above all, the takeaway from Elaine May's formidably fearless career, one that subtly but irrevocably helped to redefine the role of women in comedy, can perhaps be best summarized in her most famous quote:

Henry's Questions

Really, I just wanted to post the picture. Henry Bromell died nearly a week ago, and this is what he was like, as a writer and a guy: you can kind of get it, in the photo. I was friendly with him for many years, though I wouldn't presume to say we were close, but he made you feel close to him - it was part of his charm. He didn't have a barrier, was the way a mutual friend of ours put it.

He did, of course, have barriers. There was a palpable darkness at the core of his writing, and this wasn't a side of Henry that surfaced in social encounters. No, and what you saw - in the outpourings of love and appreciation that came on Facebook, in tweets, and in the press after his death - was a mirror of the generosity, the kindness, the good-humored openness of spirit in Henry. He was the quintessence of mensch.

He's most well known these days for his work on Homeland, but before that, there was Homicide, and further back, Northern Exposure, a unique show that was very Henry in its bemused and loving take on the peculiarities of human interaction. His darker side was evidenced in the novel he wrote, Little America, and his quite good, unjustly overlooked feature, Panic.

My favorite work of Henry's has yet to be produced: Fellini Black & White, a marvelous evocation of the great Italian director's 1957 visit to America with his lovelorn wife. There are images and poignant, funny moments in that screenplay that have stayed with me for years: an inopportune attempt to put the top down on a speeding vintage convertible, and the wind ripping the top loose, the canvas flapping and tumbling backwards into the night; Fellini watching the bobbing dark shapes of California surfers in the rising sun. Thank you, Henry, for putting these moments in my head and my heart.

When I talked about Henry with my friend the editor Cindy Mollo, she characterized her months working on Panic as a kind of private film school graduate course. Henry was a natural teacher. I brought him to one of my classes as a guest speaker, and he regaled the students with stories and insights that kept them rapt for an hour and a half. When his alloted time was up, I couldn't resist one more query: Hey, Henry - What makes a good scene? 

Henry seemed briefly stymied, as if no one had put this question to him before. Then on the spot, he came up with what he called his "Big Five" questions regarding a scene. I scrawled them on the back of a postcard (Union City Drive-In, 1993, Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto), and I've been using them in classes ever since. This is not due to their unique profundity - this is 101 stuff, for sure - but because they're so simple and useful. And really, over time, I haven't come up with a sixth. 

Henry Bromell's "Big 5" Questions to Ask of a Scene:

Have we seen this scene before?

Is there a conflict?

Is there a subtext?

Does it go from A to B (have a shape)?

Is the language and tone interesting?

I've found that asking these questions of any scene one writes is a tonic, especially when something isn't working, or when one senses that the scene could be stronger. There's clear thinking in the Big Five, and they've proven to be an effective gateway to other explorations and discoveries. The first, for example, instantly causes the writer to step back from the page and think wider, deeper, for implied in the question is a provocative subtext, i.e. If we have seen this scene, what are you doing to make your version of it memorable?

I pass Henry's questions along to you as another tool for your toolbox, and in homage to a man whose job it was to create good and great scenes, and who did it so, so well, over a rich and vibrant career. I'm happy that I got to know the guy, and I'm happy to think that those of you who didn't, can get to know him though his work. It's already living on.

Be Wrong Fast

As a post-resolutions Happy 2013 greeting, I pass along this neat piece by Hugo Lindgren, which espouses a writing (and for that matter, living) lesson that Pixar's John Lasseter has often articulated: "Be wrong as fast as you can." I'll certainly be pursuing this goal in the new year, and what I wish for you is that you get to "right" with all due haste, as well.

(More great art by Grant Snider can be found here.)

The Tweet Master of 1906

They twisted my arm, honest: a friend talked me into getting on Twitter, and while I've been having great fun there (Where else can you eavesdrop on Steve Martin trading quips with Albert Brooks, or read Chris Hedges thinking out loud?) it is a total time suck.  

When it comes to doing your own tweets, the pressure to be pithy in 140 characters can be overwhelming.  And the "has it come to this?!" feel of writing for your fellow tweeters' inherent attention deficit disorders (I skim tweets, and often abandon one after a few words) can seem like the end of the literary world as we know it.

So it's comforting, in a way, to remember that over a hundred years ago, someone had already perfected a form of this form, and moved on.  And somehow the "long form" survived.  

Felix Fénéon, 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 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 Fénéon tend towards 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 he applies a 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 20th century tweets, 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 culturalbricoleur, 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. 

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 Fénéon 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 Fénéon to seed at least a hundred movies, which is one reason I occasionally pore over these faits divers at leisure.  That, and when I run out of original tweet material of my own.  

Yup, I'm not proud - just  last night, I was down the Twitter rabbit hole without an idea, and I felt like being funny and relevant, and topical.  So I tweeted a novel of Fénéon's.

Little Screen, Big Characters

By now you've heard the news, if you haven't already articulated the meme yourself.  War's over: The movies lost, and TV won.  For both the writers and the fans of good storytelling, the action used to be at the multiplex on Friday and Saturday night, and now it's in your living room on Sundays.

I mean, really: If you're over 25 years old, can you think of a single feature release in the past couple of years that has galvanized your attention and made you care, fiercely and consistently (in an OMG, I can't wait for the next episode way) as a season of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad?  Sub in your own recent small screen addiction of choice, be it The Walking Dead or Downton Abbey, et al (I'm in the "Killing, you cheated on me last year, and you're dead to me now" camp, but you may be more forgiving), and now quick: Name me the movie that excited your passions that intensely.

The Artist?  AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

The industry/cultural reasons for this have been chewed over in print and online so extensively that I won't waste your shortened attention span with the details, except to highlight one that doesn't always get its due emphasis: It's the characters, stupid.

Yes, cultural juggernaut The Hunger Games does have over-25 appeal, and despite its absymal direction and meh screenwriting, has finally delivered unto us if not the, at least a 21st Century Heroine We've Been Waiting For.  But in its characterization work, as in its storytelling craft, Games is a plastic Sears Roebuck guitar next to Game of Throne's Stradivarius.  And need we invoke the obvious two word argument ender, The Wire?

Of course it's a function of time and space.  It's exceedingly difficult to approach the level of depth and complexity of character in a feature's two hours that you can achieve in a whole season of hour-long episodes.  But there's a basic difference in sensibility at stake.  The big screen has become our culture's colisseum, where nuances of personality aren't exactly the main event.  The little screen has exuberantly taken on just such nuance, and succeeded in capturing the culture's hearts and minds.

[Note: SPOILAGE ahead.] Mad Men has been careening all over the place this season, which only makes it all the more watchable.  Last week's Gothic weirdness had Don Draper's murder victim under his bed (When they cut to daughter Sally under Grandma's couch, my wife said, "God, everyone's under the bed," and I said, "Yeah, including the shark!" but fortunately, said murder was only a dream sequence, so no actual sharks were jumped).  Last night was slapstick comedy.

When Laine rolled up his sleeves and prepared to duke it out with Pete Campbell in the Sterling Cooper Pryce conference room, Roger said, "I know cooler heads should prevail, but am I the only one who wants to see this?"  To which most of us fans undoubtedly replied, "Are you f--king kidding me? Get in line!"  By the way, good season setup misdirect, Mr. Weiner, since we were fully expecting Pete to come to figurative blows with Roger, not Laine.

Pete Campbell is a supporting character in this ensemble, yet in an episode that deepened the story line of even lesser supporting player Ken Cosgrove, we experienced the equivalent of a John Cheever novella in the depiction of Pete's rise and fall.  We don't "like" but we certainly understand Pete by now, in all his many layers; as a quietly tragic shadow Don who will never be Don, he's a more fully realized character than the protagonists of most major studio releases in recent memory. 

Kudos to actor Vincent Kartheiser, who's brought all kinds of shading to snivelly Pete over the years, but it's the writing, obviously, that has kept us so thoroughly absorbed in the machinations of such people who - had we met them briefly in real life - we probably wouldn't even want to know.

Putting us in the shoes of the Other has always been a primary pursuit and profound pleasure of good writing.  This past Sunday night, whether you were with Mad, Games, the new (and extremely promising) Girls, and/or all of the above, you got to revel in that pleasure.  And here's the thing.  I had to go to Imdb to double-check the writing credit of that Mad Men episode afterwards, but yes, it was that Frank Pierson - the guy who wrote the big screen movie classic Dog Day Afternoon.

Where else would a writer that good be working today?  It's not even really a question.