Living the Romantic Comedy

From Dark to Dawn

In the third season finale of Mad Men, Don Draper, the walking quintessence of ad-manology, has to pitch his formerly taken-for-granted creative exec Peggy on staying with him, and he tells her why he needs her:

There are people out there who buy things, people like you and me.  And something happened.  Something terrible.  And the way that they saw themselves is gone.  And nobody understands that.  But you do.  And that's very valuable.

The speech is a kind of blank verse reiteration of what the series is about, a neat summation of what its auteur Matthew Weiner has understood about America and embodied in the arc of the show this past year.  

"And the way that they saw themselves is gone," says Don, his eyes glistening with the pain of his own private loss, for the Don that was is no more.  Season 3's end - spoilage is unavoidable here - takes a rich, ghastly gleefulness in ripping apart every relationship the series has so carefully woven together for its characters over the last three years.

But then - at the darkest of dark moments - comes the re-bonding dawn of a new enterprise.  There's a weird sort of Christmas-y, It's a Wonderful Life vibe to the place where our mad crew ultimately ends up this time around.  After every American dream has turned nightmare, each archetypal persona punished (the genius a fool, the wife declared whore), we realize we've been witnessing the birth pangs of a new world order.

And this time we'll all get it right, won't we?

We are ruined, and we need to remake ourselves anew.   This is the story the ad men feed upon, and it's the myth that Weiner and his impeccable company have rendered so rightly in this season's canny arc.  

A great ad makes us believe in that new story about who we, however wounded, can be.  A great series is only as great as the boldness of its over-arching storyline, and in this, Weiner has mined a motherlode: reframing its first three years as essentially prologue to The Real Story, the whole Mad Men shebang has been reborn, or rather, revealed for the creation myth that it was apparently intended to be.  

The theme's right there each week in the credit sequence, a choreographed disintegration from the get: everything falls apart, but that falling body never does hit the ground.  The darkness that's swallowed us turns out to be the slick suit jacket of the same executive, renewed, reborn, set back in his chair.

In this regard what really counts is who we've gotten back on board for the next resurrection.  Throughout every Mad Man fan's long, dark wait till the start of Season Four, it'll be heartening to know that the dawn brings Joan.

  

Man at Work

 

Somehow, Living the RomCom got nearly to the end of this year without once mentioning Michael Jackson - no small feat, given the blitzkrieg of overkill information we've been subjected to since his demise this past June (I know, you're thinking: Wait, wait - Michael Jackson died?!  Why didn't anyone say so?).  The jaded Industry Insider demon that lurks within me, hearing that a documentary of his concert rehearsal footage was being rushed into production, heaved a cynical sigh.

Fie on said demon.  I have seen This is It, and I'm here to merely tell you that I'm glad I did.

Once you get past the tearful testimonials from the show's music and dance crew and some slapdash "putting our icon in historical context" footage, you're suddenly thrust into the rehearsal for the show's first number, and here's the thing: When you watch Michael Jackson singing and moving his way through Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' in the privacy of an audience-free rehearsal hall, all the rest of it - the celebrity lunacy, the sordid child abuse trial, the self-induced disfigurement, the everything baggage that usually comes with this superstar's name - falls away.

All you're seeing is an astoundingly talented artist at home (for clearly, the stage was his second, if not his first native residence), doing what only he could do.  And watching this breathes new life into the word awesome.

Honestly, I would rather see Michael Jackson like this - smudged in focus, rough around the edges, half in and out of actual performance mode - than to have seen the finished live show.  Even the circumstantial stylistic choice, born of utility - Jackson is almost always shot in full, with closeups rare, and a lot of hand-held angles - gives you the sense of "the real thing," as opposed to the unreal polished perfection, inevitably crowned with over-the-top pyrotechnics, that a stage show would deliver.

Credit director Kenny Ortega for pulling it together, and for letting This is It, with its few but telling glimpses of MJ-the-human-being, provide us with some sense of intimacy - at least, as close to intimacy as one could get with such a heavily-guarded phenomenon.  His razor-sharp band-leader's acumen (a brief discussion of feel and tempo in The Way You Make Me Feel is priceless), his high-as-the-sky standards (e.g. the awkward apologies about having to conserve his voice), and above all, his joy at being able to dance so well (there are dancers half his age who'll never come close) - all of this leaves you with a credible portrait of an incredibly gifted man at work.

All the glitz that was meant to go with this - the elaborate videos, the sets, the fireworks - is the least interesting and appealing aspect of the experience.  The documentary's low point is a hokey-shlocky "save the world" themed song, all of its bells and whistles being applied to one of Jackson's least effective efforts.  The only moment to savor here comes at the literal end of the performance, when he makes a technical decision about how the last bit should be blocked and handled, and you think - Right! - because the man's showman instincts are so invariably spot on.

There's also a few moments of fun and generosity - watch, for example, as he urges guitarist Orianthi to hit and sustain her highest possible note on Beat It, saying, "This is your moment to shine!" - and of course, there's always a poignant sadness in the subtext.  Why did it all have to go the way it went, given how incandescently alive this man was?

Questions like this have been much on my mind lately in the wake of my father's passing, and they're not really meant to be answered.  As the singer sang, Why? Why?  Tell them that it's human nature. 

Let the critics and historians try to make their sense of Mr. Jackson.  For anybody else asking, What was the deal with this guy?, this sketchy, incomplete, "Michael Unplugged" of an almost-concert film will be one good place to start.

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]

Time Machine

It's hard to think of a more sure-fire recipe for disaster than to try to portray the life and loves of a famous poet on screen.  Add period and setting (1818, England) and one conjures a certain deadly-dreadful Masterpiece Theatre fare, at its best embarassing (blasted heath, declaimed verse, heaving bosoms) and at its worst the cinematic equivalent of narcolepsy.  Yet Jane Campion, herself capable of creating such disaster (O, but to have the two hours of my life spent watching Portrait of a Lady returned to me!) has gotten away with it in Bright Star, her portrait of John Keats in love. 

*

It's actually Fanny Brawne in love; we see Keats through the peculiarly intimate point of view of his chaste though impassioned lover, played with instant star intensity by Abbie Cornish.  And the movie is not so much about what you'd typically find in a historical biopic, as it is about what's left out.

Bright Star is focused on the interstices between the big stuff - the meaning of art, beauty, poetry and all that - and the hopelessly mundane: how a hem gets sewn, how tea is served, what exactly wind and light can do to a bedroom drape on an English afternoon.

For this reason - that it's a sincere attempt on its filmmaker's part to meet the world of Keats' poetry with a cinematic language of matching intensity - Bright Star is filled with ravishing images.  When Keats takes to the top of a tree to contemplate the sky, you feel nearly just as drunk on sumptuous physicality. 

The movie is essentially a time machine - a vehicle designed by an anthropological film poetess to take you to another time and place, so remote from our own as to seem truly otherworldly.

It is, of course, a movie that could easily inspire hatred.  Though it succeeds in avoiding Biopic Mawk for the most part (you can't have such a movie, unfortunately, without Keat's untimely tubercular cough) it's mostly gossamer - an ephemeral experience that could easily drive even the most dedicated art house/indie buff to seek out say, five minutes of Fast and Furious 4.

If on the other hand, you're interested in contemplating what a new book looked like in 1818 and how it was gift-wrapped, this could be for you.  Fans of perfect casting will also favor it.  Ben Whishaw as Keats is hot; Paul Schneider is an ideal big bearish buffoon of a romantic obstacle, and Edie Martin was born to be little Toots, a chubby fledgling pre-Raphaelite nymph.

It wouldn't hurt to have a deeply romantic streak.  And a taste for fashion.

If you're lucky, you first read Keats when you're young enough to embrace being that unashamedly carried away.  The film brings the music of his words to life again - as you watch Campion's imagery (Greig Fraser's work with Campion here is as exquisite as Coutard with Godard), the famous lines read aloud sing with the shock of the new.  It's oddly Zen, this butterfly wing of a movie: Bright Star takes you to the past and makes it very, very present.

Spirit Willing But Body Not

Apologies: Living the RomCom has been downed by stomach flu, and the one consolation is that it surely hurts me more than it does you.  We return next week at our usual station, and in the meantime, here's a link that nicely sums up this month's historic low in civility.

And congrats to Jon Stewart for his Emmy win!  At least someone's doing something right and some others ones have acknowledged it.

[images from: paddyk.wordpress.com & animals.howstuffworks.com]

...But I Will Read Your @#%&+! Comments

 

You gotta hand it to Josh Olson.  I can't remember the last time having a tantrum in public got a writer (i.e. not a congressman) so much attention.  Screenwriter (A History of Violence) Olson's deliciously mean-spirited, mordantly amusing screed in The Village Voice this past week, entitled I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script, earned him instant notoriety, becoming the online magazine article equivalent of such viral videos as Sarah Silverman's I'm Fucking Matt Damon.

Every reader I know has read it and loved it; every story department in town has chortled over it; pros and pre-pros alike have Facebooked, blog-posted and Twittered this rant into immortality - or what passes for immortality in our ADD culture (one looks forward to the inevitable "Whatever happened to Josh Olson?" posts, say, just after the Christmas holidays).

If you haven't yet read the piece, let's cut to the chase; here are the opening paragraphs:

I will not read your fucking script.

That's simple enough, isn't it? "I will not read your fucking script." What's not clear about that? There's nothing personal about it, nothing loaded, nothing complicated. I simply have no interest in reading your fucking screenplay. None whatsoever.

If that seems unfair, I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living.

You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II.

But I will not read your fucking script.

At this point, you should walk away, firm in your conviction that I'm a dick. But if you're interested in growing as a human being and recognizing that it is, in fact, you who are the dick in this situation, please read on.

And I heartily encourage you to do so (here's the infamous link), since what made Olson's article so popular is not merely the uncomfortable truths at the core of it, but his eminently readable writing style and humor.

As a writer, reader and script consultant, I've often been in the position bemoaned by Olson.  A Facebook friend whom I haven't seen since high school recently saw fit to blithely e-mail me some 200 pages of his friend's novel manuscript to read with a catch-all request: he was considering a consult, thought I could help get the book made into a movie, and wanted my general "participation" in the project ("Maybe a part in the movie.  Who knows?").  When I replied, apologetically demurring with details of my unholy reading load as explanation, he fired back a follow-up query: "So who's the second person we should approach. Also, book publisher if you have a suggestion."

There are too many things wrong with everything about this fellow's methodology to go on about here, and in this, Olson has done many of us a great service: from now on, faced with such requests, we can simply defer: "Have you read Josh Olson on the subject of reading unsolicited material? If not, here's a helpful link for you."

The obvious caveat that must be cited, of course, is that many a fledgling writer has gotten invaluable guidance and mentorship from an established writer who did, for whatever reason, read their fucking script or story (and a few have even lucked into a jump-start for their careers).  But the young and hungry writer who has at least some modicum of sensitivity learns early on what is and what isn't appropriate when faced with such a potential opportunity.  Olson's diatribe is directed at the less-savvy roiling herd.

Was Olson cannily self-aggrandizing in writing it?  (The IMDB hits on this formerly less well-known scribe's page must've been off the charts this week.)  No matter.  The late great Larry Gelbart (there's a good interview with him excerpted here) would've gotten a chuckle out of Olson's rant, and would probably have enjoyed this inevitable response to Olson from an online humorist. 

The Hollywood Roaster has neatly connected the dots in what is, after all, an eternal circle.  Rest assured, ye read-me writers who've suffered the wrath of an Olson: There is undoubtedly someone higher up in the hierarchy who won't read him.

 

[images from: life.com, village voice, esquire.com, peter stackpole, readingwithrover.org]

The Big Move

It seemed like such a good idea at the time - and for a time, it really worked out fine.  When Tater and I were in the early months of our relationship, she had to move out of her apartment, and it so happened that the apartment next door to mine was unoccupied.  It didn't take long for the lightbulb to blink on over my be-smitten head.  How about moving her in next door?

My Venice Beach bungalow is made up of two units, with a converted garage space in between that serves as my office, and a small yard that wraps around the property.  The landlord had recently renovated the other unit, which now boasted beautiful hardwood floors, track lighting, AC, a freshly built outdoor deck and a freakin' rose garden, no less, plus that most valuable of all Venice commodities: a parking space in the back.  The rent was steep, but I offered to chip in for some of it to acquire that parking space; the landlord liked keeping everything in the family, so to speak, and thus, the lease was signed.

What could be more perfect for two writers in love?  Tater is a journalist, who was soon comfortably ensconced at the built-in desk in front of the bay windows - where Flower, one of Tater's two cats, quickly took up her pasha-like residence.  On the other side of the wall, I was typing out my fictions.  When either or both of us needed the space to write, that space was plentiful.  For boundary-respectful communication, we set up walkie-talkies in lieu of an intercom, and life was good.

Truth be told, I'd cherished this particular literary romantic fantasy for years.  I'd heard tales of Samuel Beckett living down the hall from his wife Suzanne, and had vague memories of reading about a similar arrangement at some point in the marriage of playwright Harold Pinter and his biographer wife Antonia Lamb.  Given that despite our spending every night together and being generally inseparable, Tater and I both really did require uninterrupted solitude to do our work, I saw our bohemian together-but-separate existence as ideal.  So did, as you might imagine, many of our married friends.

And it was fun, in its peculiar way, to bounce around from home to home.  Our two dogs were ecstatic with the runaround yard; up until her death last winter, Molly the pitbull was particularly fond of playing around with Tater and Thomas the terrier at her place, then leaving to come scratch at my door and keep me company at mine.  I got to keep my former bachelor digs in pretty much the same fastidious, control-freak condition, and Tater - who is, let's say, less tidy - was free to do what she willed with hers.

Slowly but surely, however, the subtle drawbacks became less subtle.  We were always losing things.  One weekend, every coffee mug we owned turned out to be at her place; one dinner party was such a comedy of dashing back and forth between residences to claim everything from an errant corkscrew to the wine itself that I don't remember having a chance to drink any of it.  Keys went missing, as did articles of clothing, books and papers.  Invariably, the one vital thing one of us needed - say, at one in the morning - would have to be fetched from next door.  And the walkie-talkies kept bursting into loud, static-ridden exchanges between passing truck drivers.

Meanwhile, Tater and I were growing closer, more intertwined in our intimacies.  We were married last November, but we still weren't actually living together, and it was beginning to feel... strange.  Another major event of last year - Tater quitting her nearly two-decades long staff job at a weekly publication - began to put a big strain on my wallet as her freelance life yielded work, thank goodness, but not the same steady weekly paycheck.

Things came to a head this past summer with Tater's tearful meltdown.  She'd been talking about her  unhappiness with living in isolation for awhile now, but neither of us had fully comprehended its fundamentally negative effect.  After a first year of back-and-forth novelty bedding, we'd been sleeping fairly regularly at my place, and Tater yearned to wake up in the morning with her own things, her own books in the shelves to look at, her own underwear in a drawer close at hand. 

She was suffering from cat neglect guilt as well: poor Flower and the Bean, insider cats always at Tater's, didn't see enough of us, and in protest Flower had taken to peeing on everything in sight.  And the basic daily trauma of never being able to locate... whatever, promptly, was making my addled wife feel like she had early Alzheimer's.

Not to get too simplistically gender-stereotypical about it, but truth is, she wanted to nest, while just like a typically thick-headed male, I didn't see anything odd about maintaining my own space, and was in fact feeling like the big provider, in making our two-home arrangement still financially sustainable. 

The funny thing is, the entire conversation that led to our inevitable decision - give up the second apartment and have Tater move in with me - took all of about fifteen minutes.  Despite my fears that my wife would see this as a diminish-ment in status (we were literally and figuratively downsizing), she felt it as a glorious expansion into a fully married life.  She's been happier and happier with each day of the move.  And I gotta admit, so have I.

That's the beauty part of moving when you don't need a truck - though we did rent one to put some things in storage, and get help carrying Tater's piano into my place: We've had the leisure to move in slow-motion - fill a box one day, carry a pile of them over on the next.  The first of the month has come and gone, and due to our landlord's generosity, there's still some unpacked items lingering next door.

Meanwhile, my place - I'm sorry, our place - is a combination of the newly cozy and the utterly chaotic.  My masculine aesthetic has been invaded by stuffed animals; meanwhile, the real ones are adjusting remarkably well for a small household with two dogs (puppy Tabitha now wrestles with Thomas) and two cats (the reign of pee has ceased).   I've enjoyed throwing things out to clear shelf space for my honey, and I don't even mind giving my living room desk up for Tater, given that I've got my garage-office space now as a full-time Mernitman workplace.

Nearly three years after meeting and hooking up, my love and I are finally living together under the same roof.  We did the meet-lose-get in an oddball order (marry first, move in later?) but I feel there's a romantic comedy somewhere in all of this, don't you?

Meryl & Ellie

How do we mortals experience a little glimpse of heaven on Earth?  For some, it's a certain recipe for beef bourguignon, published in 1961, that reputedly transformed the eating habits of America.  For me and many others of my generation, it begins with a unique drum figure first heard in 1963, in two bars of music that announced one of the wonders of the rock'n'roll world: bum-bum-bum-BAP, bum-bum-bum BAP!

This opening salvo (played by legendary studio drummer Hal Blaine) at the top of the Ronettes' Be My Baby has been a part of the genetic code of popular music ever since.  People have been cooking Julia Child's beef perhaps more than ever, with the release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia;  no doubt many have recently dusted off their copies - or purchased their mp3s - of the Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry-penned classic single (produced by Phil Spector) to savor in the wake of Greenwich's death.  I happened to catch up with Julie & Julia only days after Ellie's passing, and was struck by the juxtaposition of master songwriter with a master thespian.

Love her or hate her, Meryl Streep's artistry is undeniable, and hard as it may be to believe, she is the only contemporary actress in America whom studios can currently depend on to open a movie - at the age of 60.  How exceptional is that?  Watching her as Julia Child, lighting up and wiping up the screen with her younger co-star (one feels bad for the delightful Amy Adams, in a thankless role that was even less sympathetic on the page), I found myself thinking of Ellie Greenwich.

With her partner Jeff Barry, Ellie entered a predominately male world in the early '60s, and proceeded to kick major butt, almost single-handedly creating the wildly popular "girl group sound" that dominated American airwaves at the time of the British invasion.  Mike Ragogna's informative Huffington Post tribute quotes some eye-witnesses:

"Ellie was a real pioneer both as a songwriter and producer," Tommy West explained. "She was one of the first women to break through the exclusive men's production club. Sometimes she had to get down to a man's level to get them to listen, and there were times when she would cry after a session because they wouldn't listen to her as readily as they would a man. But her legacy is one that will never be duplicated."

Meryl, when she first came on the scene, was up against similar resistance.  Famously dismissed by Dino DeLaurentis when she auditioned for his King Kong remake ("She's ugly," he commented to his son in  Italian, "Why did you bring me this thing?"), she had an uphill climb in the Hollywood trenches, even after winning her first Oscar (Supporting Actress in The Deer Hunter).  Here's an interesting bit from Wikepidia:

Asked to comment on the script for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in a meeting with the producer Stan Jaffee, director Robert Benton and star Dustin Hoffman, Streep insisted that the female character was not representative of many real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles, and was written as "too evil." Jaffee, Benton and Hoffman agreed with Streep, and the script was revised.

That Streep will inevitably receive yet another Oscar nom for her turn as Julia seems only fitting, given the similarities of gender struggle common to both famous women (the movie chronicles how Child out-cooked the men at her Cordon Bleu classes and overcame male publishing prejudices - with the help of some smart female editors - to get her eventual bestseller published).

So where is Ellie's movie?  You could say that in a sense it's already been made, in the form of Allison Anders's Grace of My Heart, which was loosely based on a fictionalized version of songwriter Carole King's career, Brill Building days and all.  But there are some choice nuggets in Ellie's own saga I'd love to see on the screen, such as the time producer Jerry Wexler asked Ellie to work on the back-up vocals for Aretha Franklin's Chain of Fools (the result is another piece of pop music history).

To contemplate Julia, Meryl and Ellie is to behold power (Put on River Deep, Mountain High today and it's still like... stand back!)  Yet Streep's anecdote about being cast in Deer Hunter ("They needed a girl between the two guys and I was it") sounds like almost any young actress discussing the vagaries of casting, circa 2009.

Same as it ever was and ever will be?  Maybe not for long.  From Beyonce to Imogen Heap, women to be reckoned with are still having at it, in spite of it all.  There may never be another Ellie Greenwich, but her spirit (a-woh-oh-oh) lives on.

 

Cinematic Dementia

Will Quentin Tarantino ever grow up?  I think we can assume by now that the answer is no.  So where does that leave the rest of us?  Fans of Pulp Fiction (or for that matter, Reservoir Dogs) have either long since abandoned the director or doggedly kept up with his oddball output since 'the early good ones.'  I got off the Tarantino train right in the middle of Kill Bill (i.e. was mesmerized but sickened by 1 and never did see 2), but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to check out the reputed "masterpiece" he's taken over a decade to produce.

Here's the weird thing: Though on some levels the movie is a godawful travesty, on others it's downright masterful; I wasn't emotionally affected much by it... yet images from Inglourious Basterds have lodged in my head and refuse to go away.

Almost a textbook definition of guilty pleasure (the movie is utterly indefensible in terms of its infidelity to the world that exists beyond the silver screen, and in terms of its confused, even incomprehensible morality), Basterds is nonetheless a delirious celebration of movies.  Its excesses are indeed wretched, but the film geek in me can't help but be tickled by its harebrained passion for all things cinematic.  Nearly its entire plot revolves around a movie premiere, and this is the only mainstream feature ever made (I think) that designs its entire climax around the literal use of film reels and nitrate film stock.

So what? would be the reaction of naysayers - I'm not saying this filmo-centric focus is a good thing, it's just... How often do you get to sit in a theater and watch a talented filmmaker lose his mind?  It's the cinematic equivalent of a car wreck. 

And a glorious wreck it is.  Despite everything that's wrong with Basterds, there are things in it that are notably right.  Here's three reasons why Tarantino's latest is worth seeing.

1) It's fun to watch a star being born.  If you've read one review or spoken to a single person who's seen the movie, you've heard about Christoph Waltz.  Hitherto unknown in this country, an Austrian actor of some European renown, Waltz is going to work like crazy over here now (should he so choose), because you walk out of Basterds talking about his performance as one of the great villains of all time (inarguably the strongest screen Nazi since Ralph Fiennes in Schindler).  The camera loves Waltz, and whenever he's on screen, you're a happy camper.

Tarantino's own script has done him in, unfortunately, since Waltz can't play any scenes with Brad Pitt for most of the film's two and a half hour length - a shame, in that it's nice to see Pitt play an actual part for a change, instead of merely being a presence, and Tarantino's best dialogue is found in two-hander scenes between well-matched foils (see: Cheeseburger Royale).  A major problem with the movie is that Waltz walks away with it: not exactly the right effect, when a Nazi is the thing you like best in a rabidly anti-Nazi picture.

2) The imagery is ravishing.  Like I said, still seeing the images and colors, particularly red - not the red of bloody violence but the crimson of lipstick, of a fabulous evening gown, of Third Reichian drapery.  I'm still haunted by little gestures writ large - the twitch at the corner of an eye, the splayed fingers of a hand in the air, the whipped cream on top of a piece of strudel.  I keep replaying the most outrageous image of the movie's thoroughly over-the-top climax in my mind: avoiding spoilers, I'll just say it has to do with black and white and smoke.

Tarantino's first features had a funky, slapdash, gritty look to them, but here, with able D.P. Robert Richardson behind the lens and a sumptuous period production design by David Wasco, his work really has entered the pantheon of movie-movie beauty - even if the content behind those images is often absolutely whacko.

3) It's an object lesson in sustaining the moment.  Here's what separates the men from the boys in director-ville: Any schmuck with a camera can construct a scene from a welter of two-second shots, using flashy montage techniques to create at least the illusion of an event (see: the career of Michael Bay).  But it takes real balls to let a scene play - to have your actors sit at a table and talk and not cut away, but instead, to trust in the beat-by-beat tension that happens when actors act and the drama unfolds.

Tarantino's opening scene is perhaps his best here; it's certainly the most grounded, and once we're past the obligatory homages (a shot cribbed from Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the de rigeur hat-tip to Ford's The Searchers), we're able to experience the rare joy of simply hanging out in a scene that knows what it wants to do and does it well.  The movie begins to subtly slip off the rails right after this opening tour de force ends, but while we're in it... Not too many writer/directors can be this kind of brave about letting the seconds tick by, and it's a scene that's apt to stay with you for some time to come.

See the movie, let it pass?  Inglourious Basterds is not for everyone.  The annoying subtext one feels is that it's for Tarantino, period - the perpetual adolescent lost in an incoherent film fever dream.  But here and there, in spite of itself, Basterds transcends being sublimely awful, and approaches the nearly sublime.

Love and Disability

Story analysts for the studios live in a state of consistent incredulity.  Not a day goes by when we aren't confronted with a piece of material and/or a business decision that defies logic.  Why did this Useless Executive champion a piece of absolute drek?  Why did the studio pass on this killer script we loved?

The true coin of the WTF? realm, however, has to do with choices made by writers in project after project, where the world we live in is routinely discarded in favor of only-in-a-movie un-realities, and nowhere is the "this would never happen" plaint more common than in the romantic comedy genre.

He's a this, and she's a that, and high jinks ensue because of contrivance X, which ultimately causes this unlikeliest of potential couples, after singing karaoke pop tunes from another decade into a hairbrush, to go running to the airport to make declarations of love.  Uh-huh.  And I will now fart tweety-birds out my butt while rocketing into outer space to spray-paint "Obama Wants to Off Your Grandma" on the moon.

What I often find myself wondering - in a spate of stare-at-the-wall procrastination that's obligatory in the midst of covering such specs - is why more writers of romantic comedy don't base their characters and situations on people and circumstances encountered in real life.  That's where one finds stuff, genuinely outrageous and near-unbelievable, that nonetheless has an air of relate-able, comprehensible truth to it.

I've come across some of the most intriguing movie notions, for example, in the New York Times wedding "Vows" column of their Style section, and this Sunday's was a doozy.  The article, written by Francesca Segre, starts out with a great setup:

Before asking Anne Miller out on an official first date, Michael Davoli knew he had to make two major disclosures. “I was terrified how she might react,” he said. “I didn’t think she would break up with me, but it was one of those things. You don’t know. You can’t help but be afraid.”

 Nice teaser.  The cute meet's pretty good, too:

A friend had introduced them at a concert in fall 2005, and they happened to see each other again the following February when he was coincidentally moving into the same Albany apartment building where she lived.  They recognized each other, and she immediately offered to watch his beloved Weimaraner on the stoop while he and his father hauled boxes to the third floor.

Within the week, he locked himself out of his apartment, and because she was the only person he knew in the building, he knocked on the door of her second-floor apartment. She used a credit card to jimmy his door open.  “She’s hot, my dog likes her and she picked my lock,” he thought. “That’s pretty cool.”

The story goes on to its very effective first act turning point: Michael makes the first of his major disclosures, which is that he has Tourette's syndrome, manifesting itself in...  a combination of physical tics including constant eye-blinking, head-nodding and rapid arm movements. “I wanted her to know I may never be able to hold her hand in the way I would want to,” he said. “I needed to know she’d be O.K. with that.”

You really should read the entire article to enjoy, among other things, the nice surprise of Michael's second major disclosure.  The couple's story is poignant, even moving, and while it includes no dashes to the airport, mistaken identities or scenes of a forlorn Anne eating a tub of ice cream by herself, I'd say it's pretty damn good rom-com material.

It reminds me of the not-bad romantic comedy/dramedy Adam, currently in theaters: a boy-meets-girl story where the boy is afflicted by Asperger's, a form of autism.  Adam is the sort of small, indie-flavored picture that some may find delightful and others, deplorable.  I kind of liked it, mostly, though I found the sentimentality too strong (one Hollywood-unreality in this movie is its Hallmark card vision of New York City).

But the thing is, unlike say, Rain Man, the movie manages to deal with the characterization of its disabled protagonist in a largely realistic way; the story is bracingly un-sentimental in its third act crisis and resolution.  And I liked that the central romantic relationship exhibited the kind of detail work you only get from real-life research (apparently organizations associated with Asperger's have generally given writer/director Max Mayer their seal of approval).

I'm not saying that one needs to write about the disabled to find conflicts as dramatic as those trumped up in a contrived rom-com.  An African-American journalist friend of my wife's once went to interview a white teacher who'd been accused of racism, found the accusation to be baseless and that he cooked a great lasagna... and they've been married for fifteen years.

I suppose I'm merely pointing out that there's enough weird-flavored, unexpected reverals and conflict to be found in the romantic lives of neurotypicals (as those afflicted with Asperger's term "normal" folk), if the alert screenwriter is willing to take a look.  Read the paper.  Go for a walk, talk to a friend - you might just come across the kind of material that makes you say, They can't make up this stuff up. 

Aha!  Now you've got my attention.  Keep it real as you write about it, and the story lovers of the world will salute you.

No Success Like Failure

There's a running gag in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories: The comedian, playing a writer/director much like himself named Sandy Bates, attends a festival of his work where he keeps running into fans who tell him they love all his films, "especially the early funny ones."  The joke is ultimately topped late in the movie when a flying saucer lands in the countryside where the festival's being held, and a martian named Og alights.  When Sandy asks him, "If nothing lasts, why am I bothering to make films, or to do anything, for that matter?" Og replies: "We enjoy your films. Particularly the early funny ones."

Consider the plight - if you can stand to - of Judd Apatow.  The backlash against his Funny People began with its release, as many viewers and critics wondered why this wildly successful funnyman filmmaker (comedy in the 2000s will be remembered, for better or worse, as the Apatow era) was trying to be say, James L. Brooks.  This is the age-old no-win paradox of being an artist and/or entertainer: Give the people exactly what they bought the last time, and you're accused of being stuck in a no-growth rut; give them something new, and you're attacked for not giving them that thing they loved the first time.

In Apatow's case the irony is inescapable.  Because when else in your career should you have earned the latitude to try something different, than right after you've had two massive hits in a row?  Yet the schadenfreude surrounding the soft opening of Funny has been loud and shrill, and reporting the movie's poor performance in its second weekend (nearly a 70% drop-off in attendance), the industry and its watchers sound positively gleeful in pronouncing the movie a failure.

We should all fail so successfully.  There's actually a lot of good work in Funny People.  Apatow's sweet spot - exploring the cruel but loving crux of male camaraderie - gets hit with frequent finesse (the terrible trio of Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen is a joy to hang with).  Some of the gags are choice.  And love it or hate it (my sentiments lie squarely in the middle), FP is clearly the movie its director wanted to make - which is, of course, a good part of its problems.  I heart roughly half of this movie, and here's three reasons, I think, why not too many people have gone whole hog for Funny People:

1. It's too freakin' long.  Only a writer-director too confidant in having an audience would be this over-indulgent.  FP is a rambling, meandering shaggy dog tale of a story that could easily have lost 30 minutes of running time, thus coming in at under 2 hours (and if Mr. Allen could bring his serious/funny Crimes and Misdemeanors in at 1 hour and 44...). 

Even if you're not aware that Apatow's own kids play the two kids who are chomping up screen time in the movie's back end, you find yourself reaching for a fast-forward button, thus rendering the phrase kill your babies (aka kill your darlings) unusually apt.  It's this kind of "I do it because I can" sensibility - the director indulging his taste in both musical playlists and celebrity cameos - that makes FP so frequently annoying.  And judicious cuts throughout its first two-thirds would have made it seem less like two different movies (the "funnyman w/ fatal illness" movie and the "funnyman wants his wife back" pic).

2. It wants to have its cake and eat it.  FP takes pot shots at the kind of inane, facile comedy features and sitcoms that make a fortune by appealing to the lowest common denominators of humor and sentimentality.  Yet it sets a new record for the amount of dick jokes in a single picture (I gave up keeping count early on, so take this on faith), while appealing to our sympathies with the all-time basest of base manipulations: it's that story of the lovable jerk who's going to die.

FP can't talk out of one side of its mouth without the other side contradicting it.  Anytime the hapless Seth Rogen character starts to get weepy, his Adam Sandler boss slaps him out of it - yet we're constantly being asked to feel sorry for this Man Who Has Everything and Abuses It All.  Betrayal and treachery are decried, then acknowledged as a necessary evil; Sandler's superstar George Simmons character is clearly a narcissistic monster... but a good guy in his heart.  Even the central plot twist of the movie is a classic Hollywood compromise - going dark, only to suddenly let in the light.

I suspect there is a leaner, meaner, uncomfortably cynical little movie hiding in the shadows of this one.  That pull-no-punches picture would've been tougher and more daring.  But Apatow wants to have it both ways.  Some of the movie's funniest bits come from its shrewdly observed moments of the sort of comedic mean-spiritedness that dwells in the realm of show biz comedy.  Yet it seems that finally, Apatow's warm-and-fuzzy core can't let such mean truths rule the day.  So what we end up with is a meal that's too sweet and sour.

3. It's telling us things we don't want to hear.  There's an expression that a friend of mine and I use to describe someone who's bitching and moaning about some supposedly horrific problem that isn't actually so serious in the larger scheme of things.  That actor who thinks it's the end of the world when he can't make the movie he wants to make during a hiatus from his hit TV show?  We call this crying in your swimming pool.

FP is about a guy who's rich and famous and miserable.  Is this, in the summer of 2009, what America wants to get emotionally invested in?  Apatow is at his smartest, funniest and most incisive here when he's portraying the bitchiness, the cutthroat competition, and the nasty egotism that's coin of the realm in this business of show, and my laughter during FP was often the harsh laughter of recognition.  But folks in Kansas aren't as liable to be in on the joke, and they especially aren't likely to cotton to being blamed for the rich, famous miserable guy's unhappiness.  One of the tacit tropes of the movie is that Sandler's character has dumbed himself down to make money off the dumb.  Can you make fun of the very audience you're hoping will make you a hit?  Evidently, nuh-uh.

Meanwhile, I must say there's a perverse pleasure in watching Adam Sandler finally play a smart, mature, non-pandering adult, in a role that feels ominously close to his not-so-funny bone.  Though it isn't his truly inspired Punch Drunk Love turn, it's probably as close as we'll ever get to getting the real Sandler deal (whether we want to get it is another issue).  One only wishes the writer had truly let his star go as dark and as cruel as he's clearly capable of being.

As for Apatow, bravo: He's gotten it out of his system, and he's given us some truly funny scenes to relish.  He hasn't yet solved the problem of how to write a credible female (Leslie Mann's character is perhaps the least convincing contrivance of the movie).  But maybe after he pulls his camera out of his own swimming pool, he'll be ready to hit another one out of the park.

Big Screen Shrews v. Small Screen Truths

I had an e-mail the other day from my good friend Bob Dolman, enclosing this link to an L.A. Times article by Mary McNamara, which represents a prevalent state of perplexity in both the critical and moviegoing public community:

Watching Katherine Heigl attempt to inject life into yet another cardboard cut-out of a controlling, manic working woman in "The Ugly Truth," you have to wonder: For this she wants to leave television?...

There are more and better roles for women on one season of "Brothers and Sisters" and "Big Love" or "Damages" and "Desperate Housewives" than there will be in an entire year of Hollywood films. Roles that require depth and wisdom and boundless energy, that demand of their performers the dramatic flexibility and exploration of character. Roles that don't seem to punish them simply for being women.

Unfortunately, an actress who wants to be a movie star doesn't have that kind of choice, especially now that bromance has replaced romance and so many comedies seem happy to dispense with women altogether.

Bob's e-mail went on to query: "What is it I wonder that makes so many movies so bland in the romcom department?  It’s as if the TV execs are saying 'more like movies' and the movie execs are saying 'more like TV' ...But then there’s a TV crowd who want their TV lives to be spicier." 



How I see it is that studios sell "situations" when they pitch and develop movies - then they try to write characters into them.  On the other hand TV series, particularly on cable, tend to write and develop character-driven material, precisely because such concepts have to feature substantive characters to sustain a series.  You tune in to see what happened to Jane/John (i.e. What terrible fix have they gotten into now?), not because there's a new "event," necessarily, but because you want to see how this character responds to a given situation. 

Note that when a long-running TV series is feeling low on character-driven developments, they a) introduce new characters or b) go for the event, e.g. ER having a chopper crash into the hospital, or a criminal take hostages, etc.  By contrast it's usually not characters that pull people into a multiplex to see a movie, unless it's an "event-driven character" (Spiderman, Batman, etc.) who wouldn't be of any interest unless they were, in fact, facing some major world-threatening crisis.

The problem with women in cinema and to a lesser degree TV strikes me as analogous to the current Obama/Gates/police flare-up, i.e. We pretend that Obama being elected means we've dealt with/ transcended race, only to find that of course we haven't.  McNamara criticizes "Heigl playing a woman like this in 2009?!" as if our society had somehow dealt with/ transcended sexism, when obviously it hasn't (We're shocked, shocked, to see gambling in Casablanca).

Here's the disjunct that confounds me: With both The Ugly Truth and The Proposal doing so well at the box office this summer (i.e. trad-stereotypical, formulaic rom-com chick flicks) and women being the target demographic (btw, three women wrote Truth and a woman directed Proposal), apparently women are just fine, thanks, with everything that McNamara (and Bob and me) are decrying.  I don't really believe that, mind you, but the evidence is there in box office ducats.

These days it seems a challenge to find a reasonably recognizable human being, female or male, in American romantic comedies - you know, just like it is when you go looking for any in Congress.  I'm actually in the midst of musing on the stereotypical representation of men on the big screen (meet me here next week for a look at Funny People), but this Woman Thing - the terribly dated, stereotypical portrayals of them v. the seeming widescale acceptance of same - is a head-scratcher, so I turn it over to you.  Tell me, dear readers: What's up with that?  Living the RomCom wants to know.

Fragile

Tater, my friend Gilbert and I were out at Joe's, eating at the bar, deciding to have that second drink and settle into a fun Saturday night, when Tater got a call on her cell.  Familiar number but an odd time to hear from this friend, so she stepped outside to call him back and see what was up.  Moments later, when I looked through the front window to check on her, I instantly saw that something was terribly wrong.  I hurried outside to join my wife.  She blurted it out as she cried in my arms: Lily was dead - the teenaged daughter of our friends Debbie and Greg had been abducted and murdered.

There is nothing worse we can imagine, no pain more terrible for a parent to bear than this kind of tragedy.  Seventeen years old and gone.  The light of their lives - lives now forever altered.  Whatever tears we shed and shock we suffered could only be one-millionth of the horror Deb and Greg are going through.  But you do feel it - this sense of an infinite wrong having been done to all of us.  These things aren't supposed to happen.  And when they do, the very fabric of our lives seems to have been defiled.  The foundations of everything shift.

A friend of Lily's posted on her Facebook status update: I hate this world.  And what can you say in response?

There's no silver lining in this, no spin to put on it.  And certainly no blame - Lily was a mature young woman who'd earned her independence, and the awful luck that befell her was just that: she was in town running a routine errand, and there is nothing anyone could ever write in any manual of parenting that would forestall such happenstance; as Tater put it, the chances were about equal to those of a meteor colliding with the earth.

This morning I went to the newstand to get the Sunday paper.  "How's it going?" I asked the woman behind the counter.  "Good!" she said, "I'm alive." I looked at her and nodded dumbly.  Right.  At least this was something she knew and appreciated.  Which is the only takeaway I can think of: a notion that if there's anyone you want to know better, anyone you want to let know how much you care about them, do it now.  Right now.  We're here for an instant, and so much gets in the way.

Tater's been haunted by the last encounter she had with this magnificent girl, someone who embodied that old cliché: she lit up a room.  She was talking to Lily about how grown up she was, how she'd become as easy to talk to as any adult.  And Lily had said something witty and true about the things people talk about.  What's driving Tater crazy is that she can't remember exactly what it was that Lily said.  "Why didn't I pay more attention?" she asks me.  "I thought she was someone who'd be there, someone I could talk to later!"

But we never know, do we, and we get as distracted as anybody does, in the day-to-day.  Short of becoming Zen monks or ingesting psychedelics on a daily basis, can any of us really learn how to be here now?  Maybe all you can do is try to pay a little more attention, to actually believe that this moment - pfft, gone - is the only one we've got.

Here's what Lily's parents said in the statement they released to the press: “Lily was looking forward to going to college, to being a writer, to what was ahead.  She had a really bright future and it was cut short. If there is anything that people can take away from this horrible tragedy, it’s that life is fragile and that they should live every minute of it fully.”

 

Answered Prayers

One thing that's galling about being a lover of romantic comedy, given how bad they've generally been of late, is that you always feel defensive about recommending one.  But here's the great exception we've been waiting for: (500) Days of Summer is a romantic comedy that doesn't require any apologies.

Perfect?  No.  Instant classic?  Debatable.  An enjoyable entertainment that's got enough substance to more than hold its own with any other movie released this year?  Absolutely. 

Don't want to over-hype a movie that's already creating a healthy buzz (since low expectations are the best expectations, I should just say "it's awful, but go see it"), yet I can't help adding my voice to Summer's well-deserved chorus of praise.  I also can't help venting a personal "I told you so" re: why the movie is as good as it is, since its appealing attributes speak to issues I've been going on about, here and elsewhere, for years.

In Entertainment Weekly's current issue, the film's leading man Joseph Gordon Levitt nails one of them succinctly: "The relationship between the two characters in our movie felt like something that would happen in the world we live in, as opposed to some propaganda fantasy of Hollywood's to sell tickets."  Exactly.  And the unusually savvy screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber is a testament to the power of utilizing the most crucial factor in this character-driven genre:

It's the characters, stupid.

The problem with your average studio-developed romantic comedy project is that it comes up with what's perceived as a hook-y comedic/dramatic situation... and then the studio tries to write characters into it.

Summer, like many a memorable character-named rom-com before it (Annie Hall, Tootsie, Arthur) takes the opposite tack: it starts with two credible characters - an idealistic romantic named Tom and a somewhat cynical free spirit, Summer (the incandescent Zooey Deschanel), who work at the same greeting card company - and shows how, because they are who they are, their not-quite-a-love-story is doomed to fail.

This is no spoiler - the romance's end is announced within the opening minutes of the movie and is implicit in the title.  My point is that the collision between Tom's issue (he's perhaps more in love with the idea that there is a perfect One for him, than he ultimately is in love) and Summer's issue (she hasn't yet experienced the kind of romantic love that convinces her such a thing really exists) is what drives the story. 

There's only a story here because of the unique people who pilot it.  This is not, say, a wild-and-wacky mistaken identity farce, but a rom-com where the very real and distinct identities of its protagonists are the actual subject and dramatic fulcrum of the plot.  Sure, plenty of funny high jinks ensue, but the movie's focus is on its lovers' inner lives, which illustrates another of my oft-blathered principles:

The good ones are about something.

You know what When Harry Met Sally... is about.  Groundhog Day makes its theme abundantly clear.  What's equally refreshing about Summer is that in a delightfully un-dogmatic way, it examines our contemporary culture's point of view on what love might be, and what commitment is or isn't.  In that same EW article (sorry, the link's unavailable), director Marc Webb speaks to theme:

"Growing up in the post-divorce-boom era, we're more skeptical of marriage.  Most romantic comedies sacrifice honesty for the sake of wish-fulfillment.  The theme of (500) Days is that happiness lies within, not in the big blue eyes in the cubicle down the hall."

This subtext, termiting its way below the frothy, funny surface of the film, is what makes the whole thing meaningful.  And meanwhile, Webb's directorial contribution should be acknowledged, as it illustrates another of my ever-pushed buttons about this genre:

Romantic comedies can be films, too.

One constant criticism I've made about even the better romantic comedies of the past few years is how bereft of visual style and distinctive cinematic storytelling they are (Judd Apatow, network television called: it wants its pedestrian camerawork back).  Webb, a graduate of music videos, has finally given us a contemporary rom-com that snaps, crackles and pops with innovative and inherently filmic visual ideas.

He's done his homework, obviously - the film unabashedly borrows from both the French New Wave of the late '60s and its American imitators (e.g. The Graduate and the Woodman's oeuvre).  But the film's energetic invention represents a compendium of the best contemporary techniques that videos (and cinema) have to offer, and they aren't arbitrarily applied.

They're evident in the movie's one musical number, two minutes of exuberant enchantment.  Another gem, late in the film, is a neat split-screen sequence where on the left side, we see "Expectations" of a scene enacted, as on the right, "Reality" plays.  It's an ideal marriage of technique and intent: we viscerally experience the contrast between hapless Tom's hopes and dreams and the way his real life unfolds.

Such stylishness enlivens the material in ways that only good filmmaking can, and finally, the collaboration between Webb and his writers illustrates how observing one more principle separates the garden-variety rom-com from the great:

Tweaking execution is the smart way to go.

Like a number of successful device-driven rom-coms before it, such as Bridget Jones's Diary (device: the diary) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (device: see title), Summer demands that its audience consciously participate in a game.  There are 500 days to be dealt with, as an on-screen graphic consistently reminds us, and a good deal of the fun in the viewing stems from our seeing where we are in this near year-and-a-half period, as we hopscotch back and forth in time.

One of my favorite moments comes from inspired use of the device.  At the end of that blissful musical sequence celebrating his seduction of Summer - which has been introduced by a low two-digit number - Tom bounds into his office elevator, looking radiantly happy.  The doors close, and we flip to a three-digit number from the back end of our 500 days.  The doors open, and there's Tom: infinitely miserable as he gets off the elevator to face a Summer-less office workday.

Here, in a matter of seconds, is a brilliant encapsulation of one of the movie's central themes: the ephemerality of romance - how everything that one loves about being in love can be everything one hates about it.  And the moment comes out of having a concept about how the story's being told.

I'm going to stop my told-you-so-ing right here, since it's in danger of overloading with academic pomposity what's actually just a really fun ride.  There's things to carp about in (500) Days of Summer (for one thing, Summer's character seems to take an uncharacteristic turn in Act 3), but far be it for me to snipe at the first non-guilty-pleasure romantic comedy to come down the pike in a while.  I've been asking and asking for somebody in Hollywood to please make a non-formulaic, deeply felt, Real Thing rom-com that would transcend all the Old School hackwork, and this little movie amounts to answered prayers.

A Tale of Two Producers

I relate this true story, with only the names changed to protect the guilty, to illustrate that the current status of the screenwriter in America is like the state of race relations: we like to think we've entered a new era, and then someone kicks us out of the country club swimming pool.

Back story: In 2005, a pair of independent producers - let's name them Mick and Nick, collectively known as the Power Couple - optioned an old screenplay of mine, a blackly comedic horror-thriller we'll call Funny Slasher.  The idea was to get it made cheap, and given that the Power Couple had no money, I optioned it to them for a dollar, with the understanding that I intended to direct it myself.

A number of rewrites ensued, written on spec.  The idea of me directing went the way of all winged pigs, given the difficulties of getting a left-of-center genre pic set up these days with a newbie at the helm.  The option was renewed, with me now receiving co-producer credit.  As casting and financing possibilities came and went, more rewrites ensued, the ostensible final draft receiving only the highest praise from the Power Couple, with the glowing accolades of their colleagues duly reported to me.

This past February, good news: I received a casting breakdown from Mick and Nick, with talk of setting up a table read for a casting director and some interested actors.  Readers of this blog may remember that I had a personal 9/11 on the 11th of that month, with both parents hospitalized after a car crash.  I informed the Power Couple that I was in family crisis mode and that they should proceed without me.

Some six weeks ago, crisis dealt with, I got back in touch via e-mail, eager to learn how the production was shaping up.  Oddly, it took them three weeks to reply.  Warning Sign #1: In this biz, good news travels fast and bad news sometimes has to be chased down and cornered; a three-week gap most likely meant that Something Was Up.  The reply, a phone message from Mick, contained Warning Sign #2: The Power Couple was eager to get together and talk, because "the script has been getting bad responses."

Perhaps you're familiar with the old cliché that it's a poor workman who blames his tools.  Why, one wonders, after my having done multiple rewrites under the Couple's own supervision, working in seeming accord with them for four years, would we now be hearing that there was a problem with the screenplay?

Thus, when the three of us sat down together last week "to talk about ideas," I opened the discussion with a query.  "I'm curious to hear," I told Mick and Nick, "how we got from casting breakdowns and a table read to 'bad responses to the script.'  I feel like I've missed a beat.  Can you connect those dots?"

What followed was a hefty dose of revisionist history (Warning Sign #3).  Apparently the whole process had been a steep uphill climb for the Power Couple, with the script getting bad responses all the way along.  Some people actively "hated it."  This was news to the writer (who had been wholly dependent on the Power Couple for such reportage), but being a game writer - who critiques scripts for a living - I asked, "So what's the specific obstacle here that we need to address?"

The problem, according to Mick and Nick, was the mix of genres.  Comedy people didn't like the horror, horror people didn't get the humor.  I noted (a little defensive?), that it was precisely this mix that had attracted the Couple to the project, and that comedy/horror was not without precedent, citing a little franchise-starter called Scream.  But okay, okay: Let's hear the notes.

Nick told me that they'd done something they thought would help me.  They'd shown my draft of Funny Slasher to another writer they'd been working with (call him Jack), wanting his feedback.  And Jack had done a set of revisions.  And they very much liked the new direction he'd taken, though they felt he'd gone off the rails in the third act.  So, here was Jack's draft (along with, thoughtfully, a CD-Rom of the Final Draft document for me to work with), and given that they liked what Jack had done but thought perhaps I could do better...

Reader, please forgive me, as I've tried to forgive myself, for my own bad behavior.  Though I try to be Mr. Cool, Calm & Collected in all business endeavors, due to the fact that my head was exploding, I lost it.  I remember drawing a big circle with a slash through it in the air, as I explained (a little emphatically?) that one simply doesn't deal with writers like this, let alone one who was supposedly a partner (on legal paper, a co-producer) who had been writing for them on spec for four years.

Mick got contrite ("I'm a lousy producer," is what he actually said) and Nick got compassionate.  "Billy, I understand," he told me, "because I've been in your position before.  I've been rewritten, and - "

I think we can stop the tape right here, can't we?  I don't have to explain to you, as I did to Nick, that in my job doing project notes for a studio, I'm often the one crying "fire this writer!" and dealing with drafts of major features that are cluster-sucks involving 17 writers, that perhaps their having gone behind my back and given the project to another writer while I was at the hospital awaiting my father's surgery just might give me pause, that being rewritten was not the issue. 

"You did it wrong," is what I told them, and this is what got reiterated in our final conversation a few days later, a conference call in which Nick was at their office and Mick was in his car, about to drive through Monument Valley.  

Since the Power Couple had already decided to renew the last year of their option and I had no out clause (I know, I know) and I had read half of the awful, incoherent, piss-on-it-to-make-it-mine draft by Jack the Hack, I informed them that I was out of there, merely demanding that they insert a "Revisions by..." on subsequent title pages and that they let me know if there was ever a check to cash.

Things got a little heated again when they asked if they could show me the drafts to come, to get my feedback.  Somewhere toward the end of my there'll-be-a-cold-day-in-hell diatribe, Nick and I suddenly heard a "The number you have reached is currently out of service; if you would like to leave a message - "
recording, and Nick said, "I think we've lost Mick."

Indeed.  Though I feel bad for Nick, who was left holding the bag and had to endure, after his sincere apology, hearing me channel a bad genre movie and snapping, "Well, actions have consequences, dude, so deal with it!" - a line I'd never delivered before and assuredly will never repeat - it's Mick that I keep thinking about.

I picture him behind the wheel of his car, coasting down the long, beautiful straightaway into Monument Valley, that technicolor desert vista of a thousand Westerns, home to cowboys and Indians and gunslinging varmints of every kind and creed.  The sky is blue, the clouds are splendid, the giant buttes are casting their majestic purple shadows in the distance... and there's an angry screenwriter rasping in his ear, going on about how he can't support Mick's version of this movie and how this inept draft isn't going to solve Mick and Nick's problems, and -

I see him cut the phone call off with a jab of his finger as he drives into the late afternoon sun, shaking his head.  "Fucking writers," he says to himself.  "They spoil everything."

The Future of the Written Word?

I'm still on writing retreat hiatus, but so as not to leave your Living RomCom appetite entirely unslaked, I offer you this news item from Japan that is its own comment, in an amusingly perverse fashion, on the contemporary state of writing and publishing. 

Momentary oddity or wave of the future?  You decide. 

Happy Post-Independence Day!

Blogoversary # 4

Four years on and self-re-elected for another term, apparently -- think of it as the benign island dictatorship of romantic comedy -- Living the RomCom refuses to die.

Threat or menace?  You be the judge.  Meanwhile, to benefit both suckers for punishment and curious virgin visitors, here in convenient categorized form is our Best of the 2008-09 July-to-June season (w/links to Blogoversaries #1, #2, and #3).

WRITING

Structure

The Genius of Bad Writing

Half the Rules You Know Are Wrong

Writing Characters That Don't Suck

The Practice

Writing When You're Not

You and Your Shitty Draft 

Re: Vision

ROMANTIC COMEDY

The 4th Annual Asta Awards

The Pixie and the Snidekick

Black Americans in Love

Boy Meets Boy

What Romantic Comedy Means

Chick Flicks For Which Chicks?

 

CULTURE

Politics Ruins Couple's Love Life

Screwball Comedy: A New Golden Age

A Story We Can Believe In

Now What?

Explain to Me Matthew MacConaughey

Ry Cooder Eating Peas

The Magic of Simone White

 

PERSONAL STUFF

Billy & Tater's Excellent French Adventure

So Long, Molly

Gifts

The Survival of the Mernits

REVIEWS

Wall-E

Vicki Christina Barcelona

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Happy Go-Lucky

Mad Men Season 2

Last Chance Harvey

Man on Wire

He's Just Not That Into You

Duplicity

I Love You, Man

Observe and Protect

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Adventureland

Synecdoche

Given that 36 posts represents more than enough for a sane reader to chew on,  I'm off on a retreat to write my shitty first draft of an adaptation of my novel (condolences welcome).  See ya back here come the 5th of July.

Re: Vision

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
--Joseph Joubert

Having previously pontificated on the necessity of plowing through a first draft, no matter how awful it may be, it seems only fair to look at how a good draft gets written, as opposed to a shitty one.  Here's a few thoughts born of personal experience.

1) Put it away first.

I don't know if you go through this, but I almost always encounter Last Night's Me.  Last Night's Me wrote something and went to bed thinking it was great.  This Morning's Me reads it over and can't believe that other guy was so deluded.  Given this natural evolution of ever-bettering me's, I find that the principle applies to draft completion.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a completely objective, marvelously shrewd and insightful version of you to go over the finished first draft and identify what needs to be fixed?  Well, that person can't possibly be the you who's just finished writing it.  You're way too close to the experience.  The smartest thing to do with a first draft is to bury it, literally or figuratively; put it away and don't look at it, for as long as you can possibly stand it.  A week is too short, so I recommend two weeks minimum, and really, a month is far better.  The longer you don't see it, the easier it will be for you to really see it.  The Future You, believe me, will be far less attached and more effectively tough than The You That Just Got Done.

2) Give it to readers you trust.

Hopefully you have friends or significant others who are willing to tell you the truth, without being mean-spirited about it.  I recommend giving it to an odd number, so you can get a consensus, since merely having one friend who loves it and one who hates it will only leave you stumped. Screenwriter Richard Curtis is fortunate enough to live with a woman who's really his collaborator in this regard, Emma Freud:

I give her this script... and she has a big red pen... and she marks it all up.  "CDB" is her favorite thing, which stands for "could do better" -- "CDB" and big crosses-out and "you must be joking."  We go through that process ten, fifteen, twenty times.  I'm very lucky like that.  I think that's an amazing thing, to have someone take that care with you even before it gets to other people.

"Even before it gets to other people" in Curtis's case is interesting, as he's famously spoken of having completed 17 entire drafts of Four Weddings and a Funeral (that's post-Emma drafts), for his director, various producers, actors, et al; Notting Hill he estimates took 20 -- and this was in order to realize an idea that he'd been carrying around and casually poking at, for years.

Anyway, in terms of that very first read -- I've written elsewhere on the art of receiving and comprehending notes, but I'll reiterate one suggestion here: Give your readers a specific task.  Let them know the kind of feedback you're most interested in.  "I want to know which parts felt slow" and "I'm curious to hear what you think of my villain" are statements more apt to yield helpful responses, and forestall your receiving a list of typos.  You'll get to the typos -- 17 rewrites and more to come.  Right?

3)  Prioritize your tasks.

The real work, and the real joy in rewriting -- generally I find it more exhilarating than torturous, though it can be that -- comes from knowing what you're after.  After you've collated your own responses and those of your trusted readers, make a list.  What's the most important thing that needs to be addressed?  Personally, I always start with character empathy.  Until I feel sure that the reader can identify with the protagonist, feel their feelings and track their logic, none of the other smaller matters really matter to me.  You may prefer to start with structure.  But whatever your main priority, it has to trump all others. Go after that first, and that alone. 

I've found there's nothing worse than trying to fix say, characterization and structure simultaneously.  You're bound to get bogged down and lost in the maze of possibilities.  There's something freeing about leaving a lot of the mess alone and simply grappling with a single issue that you've got a handle on.  In rewriting my novel, when I did one entire pass on one protagonist's dialogue, the clarity of focus really helped. 

And at some point in this process, you'll have to kill your proverbial darlings.  One of my all time favorite quotes on this matter comes from Samuel Johnson:

Read over your compositions, and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Paddy Chayefsky came at it from a more specific angle:

[Somerset Maugham] said, "If it should occur to you to cut, do so." If you're reading through and stop, something is wrong.  Cut it.  If something bothers you, then it's bad...  It's purifying.  It's refining.  Making it precise...  My own rules are very simple.  First, cut out all the wisdom; then cut out all the adjectives.

4) Be fearless and be flexible.

Musing on Johnson and Chayefsky's ruthlessness, I realized that the subtext corresponds to that "write a shitty draft" idea.  A few readers who commented on the last post decried this methodology, noting that a detailed outline or a rewrite-as-you-go approach worked better for them.  Fine!  My point, in that post and this one, is that judgment, second-guessing, and perfectionism, et al, are just the many masks of fear.

It's a process.  You'll get it wrong, have to write it better, again, differently.  You may, like Philip Roth did with one novel, write nearly 200 pages and then throw the whole thing away, having discovered what he really wanted to write. From working on movies at Universal, I can tell you that the ones that die in Development Hell are most often the ones where the writers are stubbornly unwilling to let their projects evolve.

Hand in hand with a certain kind of bravery -- the courage to do it, do it, do it until you're satisfied -- comes a willingness to accept change.  You have to allow the possibility that "what the story is about" may, and most probably will, shift.  The further you go, the more you find out about your characters and their conflicts, the more likely you are to reassess, re-conceive, re-vision your movie.

You start with a vision.  And as you try to realize it, if you're learning from your labors (as I hope you are), that vision will expand, deepen, become more strange and distinctly... yours.  You need to allow your story its room to grow.

When it's fully grown, of course, there'll be plenty of time to sweat the smaller stuff.  And then you'll really be in trouble.

Paris Review:  How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway:  It depends.  I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Paris Review:  Was there some technical problem there?  What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway:  Getting the words right.

You and Your Shitty Draft

The first draft of anything is shit.
--Ernest Hemingway

...Shitty first drafts.  All good writers write them.  This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts...  I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them... writes elegant first drafts.  All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.
--Anne Lamott

In my nine-month master class in screenwriting at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, eight students wrote drafts of features.  I learned a lot from working with them, and one thing I found out was just how much resistance your average pre-pro screenwriter has to doing just that: writing a draft.

Talk about it, sure: endless discussions, as well there should be, about the why of the story, the who is in it and where they go and what it means and whether the projected movie might be a viable commercial commodity.  But as to actually beginning to write the draft and continuing to press on, with diligence, toward completion? Try keeping cats on skateboards.

It was a continual perplexity to me, how many obstacles got put in the way of writing a first draft.  Outlining was a tooth-pulling process in itself; some not only wanted their ducks in a row, they wanted to count the feathers on each duck.  Don't get me wrong: I believe in outlining, to a point, and doing character bios and all the rest of it.  It's just that, at a certain point, you have to take your toes out of the water and freakin' dive.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain—where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
--Bernard Malamud

The ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.  Oh great gods in heaven above, the wisdom, the zen and the art of creativity inherent in Malamud's phrase.  I'm reminded of the top of Reinhold Niebuhr's "Serenity Prayer" -- God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

In a first draft there are indeed the things you cannot change, during this first time out, and what is sorely needed is an ability to accept the imperfect.  When you're writing a first draft, perfection is not just the enemy of the good, it's Darth Vader and the Death Star.  It will zap you and your big ideas into oblivion before you can get a single passable page out of your printer. 

No, you have to have the courage to write badly, to write it awful, to get it wrong, wrong, wrong.  You need the courage to write a really shitty draft, the sooner, the faster the better.  Make your mistakes as quickly as possible, is the way one writer friend of mine puts it. 

About halfway through our nine month screenwriting class process, I finally understood that what we'd had here was a failure to communicate.  These writers were laboring under an all too common misunderstanding about what a draft is.

A draft is just something to change.

Fear of a first draft represents a specific kind of ignorance.  You can only be apprehensive about writing the first draft of a screenplay if you mistakenly believe that what you're going to write is the movie.

Silly writer.  You don't know what the movie is.  The movie won't even know what the movie is until it's been shot.  No, your first draft represents your first idea of what the movie might possibly be, and while you may, with some luck and pluck, get some of it right, you can consider it a job well done if you come out of the process with a clear notion of what not to write, when you start the next round.

So go for godawful.  If you truly, sincerely, consciously embrace the premise that your first draft will suck, just think how liberating it will be.  You won't have to compare it to all those paradigms of good writing you've studied, you won't have to worry about what anyone will think of it, you won't have to beat yourself up for any of your multitudinous easily available beat-yourself-up options.  Because it sucks!  It's supposed to.  That's its job.

If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
--St. Thomas Aquinas

Stop thinking about writing as art.  Think of it as work.  If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art.  If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work.
--Paddy Chayefsky

 

Writing When You're Not

Always surprised on those days when the mind makes her shotgun, metaphoric leaps for reasons I've never been able to trace.  Remembered that Wang Wei said a thousand years ago, "Who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door?"

--Jim Harrison

There's a story told about James Thurber at a dinner party, caught by his daughter staring into space while the rest of the guests were in the midst of conversation.  "What's the matter with Daddy?" she asked, and her mother assured her, "Don't worry, honey, he's just writing."

You're still writing, you just aren't aware of it.  Somewhere in your brain, in the "not-top-of-mind" part, you're arranging, rearranging, connecting, disconnecting and more or less figuring out what needs to be done.  Inspiration is when the guys in the R&D area of your brain knock on the door and say, "Here it is."

-- Bill at WriteLife

Bill's quote came in a comment on my last post, in which I was kickin' some writer butt, saying that now, now is the time to get your writing done, as in: get your ass in the chair and your hands on the keyboard, whether you feel inspired or not, because waiting around for inspiration is a loser's game.

This time out I feel obliged to offer a corollary, as suggested by my subsequent musings and Bill's comment: When you are writing regularly, really working and working it, immersing yourself in the writing on a daily basis, it is equally imperative that you stop.

Take a break.  Leave it alone.

Because it is when you are deeply steeped in the work, writing as much as your hands can stand to keep up with your brain, that the other less conscious parts of you are freed to take over the reins when your hands give out.

When you're out in the world, you listen to dialogue and think about other things while your subconscious is working on whatever the problems are in the script.  Once, when I really got stuck on something, I took a weekend off and went to Santa Barbara.  I wasn't thinking about it and woke up in the middle of the night suddenly understanding where I had gone wrong and what I had to change.  Sometimes, your mind has to be released in order to get past things, like a muscle that knots up so tight, there isn't enough blood going through it.  It has to relax in order for the blood to flow again.

-- Amy Holden Jones

So many Eureka! moments for writers occur in the car, in the shower, at the dinner party.  But I do believe they occur because the writer has been down in the mines every day, shoveling away.  Naturally enough, many writers integrate away-from-the-desk time into their schedule.

Walking is best.  Any physical activity helps.  For instance, I'm often full of ideas the day after my wife and I go dancing.

--Tom Schulman

If a man who writes feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo.  He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns.  It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it.

-- E.B. White

Whatever your chosen alternate mode of activity, it's useful not only for letting that other side of the brain take over, but for holding onto your mind, as well.

The solitude of writing is quite frightening.  It's quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.  The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do.  It brings one back, so to speak.  It also brings the world back.

-- Nadine Gordimer

So peculiar, this pursuit of ours, that feeds on the world yet needs to hide away from it, to create another world all our own.  Is it any wonder -- Write!  Don't write! -- that a writer often lives from one confusion to another?

There was a period last fall when every time I began to write, I went into a perfect blank-minded euphoria, where I stared out the window and felt a love for and oneness with everything.  I sat in this state, sometimes for the whole time I had planned to write.  I thought to myself, "Lo and behold, I am becoming enlightened!  This is much more important than writing, and besides this is where all writing leads."  After this had gone on for quite a while, I asked Katagiri Roshi about it.  He said, "Oh, it's just laziness.  Get to work."

-- Natalie Goldberg

But seriously --

Flogo photo by Mark Humphrey

Amy Holden Jones and Tom Schulman quotes from: The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters by Karl Iglesias, a useful tome for all screenwriters to own.

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.