Living the Romantic Comedy

Imagine Me and You On the Road

I'm taking Imagine Me and You out for a spin: My Big Fat One-Week National Book Tour has me reading'n'signing in San Francisco on Monday night, New York City on Wednesday-Thursday, and Baltimore on Saturday.  Then Tater and I'll be back home in Los Angeles after that weekend, no doubt dazed and contused, but -- sounds like a party, does it not?

Personally I sometimes find book readings/signings to be a little on the snorish side, so I'm packing bells and whistles: going to screen a few rom-com film clips along with the choice bite-sized book excerpts, since the novel (for better and worse, according to this essentially decent review in the Wall Street Journal) is largely concerned with the moebius strip-like relationship between life, fiction and romantic comedy.  Brother Billy explains it all for you!  Details in the tour guide on the top right.   

Living the RomCom will be on hiatus while we're on the road, but I'll be back here 'fore the Ides of May, I reckon, with something of interest to say.

ExactlyLikeMe.com

When I come upon the latest reports from the frontlines of what's euphemistically called "the dating scene" (Thurber called it The War Between Men and Women) I'm reminded of a moment from When Harry Met Sally: Harry's best friend Jess and Sally's best friend Marie (i.e. Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher), a happily committed couple, get off the phone with their respective traumatized buddies, friends who've just slept together, the idiots, and ruined everything -- and Marie turns to Bruce, saying: "Tell me I'll never have to be out there again."  Bruce puts an arm around her and tells her soberly, "You'll never have to be out there again."

Oh, Lord, yes: the dreaded Out There.  I haven't done the math, but I've probably spent more of my adult life Out There than I have In Here (i.e. in the midst of a relationship), and thus I have nothing but sympathy for those who are in that lonely place.  So I was heartened to read in the NY Times this morning that those looking to hook up and stay hooked are getting more seriously pragmatic about making it happen.  An article entitled Let's Say You Want to Date a Hog Farmer explores a relatively new online dating phenomenon: niche sites.

A growing number of people have found love on dating sites that pair members based on a specific shared interest or background — sites like HorseandCountrySingles.com, Nerdsatheart.com, DateMyPet.com, STDmatch.net (for singles with sexually transmitted diseases), MatureSinglesOnly.com (for people over 50) and Veggielove.com.

“Singles are increasingly eager to narrow the audience and really target their needs,” said Mark Brooks, a dating consultant who keeps his own blog, OnlinePersonalsWatch.com. “It’s the same reason why Procter & Gamble makes so many detergents. We are all drawn to things that cater to our very specific desires.”

According to Times journalist J. Courtney Sullivan, such sites are booming.  FarmersOnly.com, for example (their trademarked slogan is "City folks just don't get it!") has gained 50,000 members in the past year alone.  One satisfied customer who grew up on an Ohio horse farm, the successfully hitched Sarah Edwards, recently told a friend to give up on Match.com:  “I said to him: ‘You’re wasting your time. You’re not going to find girls on there who like hunting and fishing and four-wheeling,’ ” she recalled.

The article concludes with a quote from a Jewish man who found his fiancee on Jdate: "When you’re looking for a lifelong partner, you probably want some winnowing down. You probably want someone who’s a lot like you.”

Sure, I say, and more power to ya.  I'm reminded that my own honey Tater claims she conjured me out of the ether weeks before we met, by compiling a very specific list of what she wanted in a mate.  Instead of generalities, she filled her list with such attributes as "he must be a good driver" and "he must love books and be as well-read or more well-read than I am."  She landed a guy who handles his Mini pretty well, thanks, and reads and writes for a living. 

Her foresight was definitely a factor in our courtship being suffused with moments of delighted "you like that, too?!" discoveries.  Specificity works.  But as a diehard romantic comedy fan, I can't help but ask: Whatever happened to opposites attract?  There must be a rom-com waiting to be written about the boy from DemsForClinton.com who meets the girl who's an Obamacan.

I've argued on occasion that the subtext of "opposites attract" is usually: one sees in the other a quality that one, being deficient in same, might benefit from acquiring (call it the Darwinian theory of evolutionary dating).  But this alternative theory of hook-ups aside, here's what I've come to conclude about romantic affinity: the best relationships are often just a kluge.

Kluge (again, from the Sunday Times, in a review of a book called Kluge), as defined by author Gary Marcus, means “a clumsy or inelegant — yet surprisingly effective — solution to a problem.” 

Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University and director of the N.Y.U. Infant Language Learning Center, borrowed the word from the field of engineering, where it has long been the term of art for a useful but ungainly improvisation.

An engineering example of a useful but ungainly improv is the kluge the astronauts on Apollo 13cobbled together to save their mission.  A romantic kluge is likely to be whatever patch job contraption might keep, say, James Carville and Mary Matalin a functional couple.

The awful truth of most enduring romances, comedic or tragic, is that no matter how much the other person seems to be like you (it's uncanny!  magical!) there inevitably comes a moment when you find yourself gaping at your beloved in deep incomprehension (it's inconceivable!): how is it possible that they could be like... that?!

We're snowflakes, remember? The difference is always going to be there, no matter how alike you look or how close you're able to fine-tune your affinities.  Ultimately, what successful romantic partnerships create is a Rube Goldberg-like assemblage of inspired workarounds.  I've learned to love Vegan food and Tater's learned to tolerate, if not always enjoy, the occasionally aggressive motoring skills that come with the Mini-mastery her list requested.   

The ancients believed that one lover finding another was really one half of a soul finding its other half.  I'm down with that, too, but there'll always be the issue of cole slaw.  Just tonight my sweetheart exclaimed at me in disbelief, "What kind of a person doesn't like cole slaw?!"

Meanwhile, yet another Times article proves that some really do live the romantic comedy: it's about a real life Harry and Sally who shifted from being friends to getting physical (the ensuing high jinks led them to the altar). 

I guess they were already exactly like each other enough to survive the awkwardness of their first kluge.

If You Like Pina Coladas

Frothy and fruity (and raunchy and loopy), Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a sweet vacation chill drink that goes down easy.  It would take a few of these to really give you a knockout movie high, but the buzz is nice -- it's a cheery way to forget your cares for a couple of hours, and America's clearly in the mood.

These Judd Apatow productions are getting to be a dependable trademark, for better and for worse.  The down side?  After the seminal 40 Year-Old Virgin and 2007's Year of Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad), there is a franchise now, which means some of the thrill is gone.  We have seen many an Apatow boy-man do his thing, and such Macho-Chick Flicks (David Denby says "Slacker Striver," Creative Screenwriting calls them raunch-coms) are beginning to feel predictable.

True to its genre, Sarah has no cinematic vision to speak of (every Apatow movie looks like widescreen TV).  It features a guy doing the girl's part (the big joke for the movie's first half is that leading man Jason Segel enacts every rom-com heroine's heartbreak, short of devouring some Hagen Daz from the container).  And the girls are more plot device than fully-developed, credible females (this time Kristen Bell gets to play the malleable blonde).

On the plus side, with an Apatow product you know you'll be getting a fairly consistent stream of good or decent jokes, both verbal and physical, with occasional sustained set pieces and running gags.  And these are not your mother's romantic comedies.  Not just because a typical throway line is cleverly dirty (I liked the bride-fatigued honeymooning groom who left a scene muttering, "I'm off to find the mythical clitoris"). 

No, what keeps these rom-coms fresh is that they're meta. Sarah never spends too much time hitting an obvious beat; it tosses off obligatory exposition and credibility markers with a "we've all seen this scene, so let's cut to the chase" panache.  Segel's writing here is easygoing yet alert, with occasional quirky zingers; the script even includes a droll parody of TV's sexy homicide genre (apparently some affectionate revenge; Segel did a stint on CSI).

In Apatow country, you can also expect to be revisiting ever-hardy members of the Apatow Players stock company -- in this case, male MVP Paul Rudd (of Knocked Up, et al) and Superbad's Jonas Hill.  Star and scribe Segel is of course a charter member of this crew, dating back to Apatow's Freaks and Geeks days.  He acquits himself reasonably enough, though his is a less endearing shlub than the one played by Rogen in Knocked Up and, let's face it, more small than big screen in charisma wattage. 

The genuine big movie star thrill of Sarah Marshall comes with the debut of new talent Russell Brand, instantly beloved by the camera, who nearly walks away with the movie as the benignly assholic British rock star Aldous Snow.  Snow's smartly written and Brand has a field day with the role; I know I'll be re-viewing this on DVD just to re-enjoy his delicious self-absorption.   

Good girl Mila Kunis's appeal is actually a key aspect of the Apatow Aesthetic.  She's beautiful, but not movie star otherwoldly/unapproachable gorgeous -- you'd believe that such a creature really might be found behind the reception desk of a world-class resort hotel.  In this, she embodies what's sneakily most compelling about Apatow's sensibility.  The guy and his colleagues are making movies about them that could be us.

The witty dialogue in an Apatow company pic is irreverent in a welcome way.  It has that certain snarky, casually cruel sound we make when we're making fun of our friends, or in pain and being unintentionally funny at our own expense.  After years of enduring too-stylized theatrical rom-com conversation, we're starved for the sound of us, talking truth the way we talk it -- which is rude and often crudely scatalogical -- and this, I think, is part of the baseline appeal of Apatow's comedy.

The same holds true for the physical comedy.  Director Nicholas Stoller has colluded with Segel in milking maximum embarrassment out of male nudity, where the tacit subtext is: yeah, guys really look like that.  And most of the set piece humor in Sarah is grounded in humiliations that are all too familiar to many of us -- those moments when unlike say, old school heroes in movies, Segel does exactly the thing he shouldn't do, and suffers the ridiculous/mundane consequences.

Meanwhile, tropical drink Sarah, with its bright colors, scenic vistas, hula-dancers and surfing sequences, seems emblematic of USA entertainment here and now: this is getaway fare, pure and simple.  It's not for nothing that in a time when the economy's tanking and a war drags on, we'd like to lose ourselves in sex farce giggles (the studio slates are so bloated with laugh-fests that one of this summer's opening weekend competitions is between blockbuster comedies Love Guru and Get Smart).

Aptly titled, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is largely about both denial and moving on.  Indeed, what the picture's accompanying trailers (and the Sarah audience) told me was: Pineapple Express -- this summer's Apatow franchise stoner movie with Seth Rogen as an uber-pothead -- is going to be HUGE, as is, most probably, Tropic Thunder: the only war movie that could actually make money in America this year, because it's a parody of war movies and it looks and sounds capital-F Funny. 

Escapism, dude, it's what we're all about.  We're willing to laugh at ourselves, sure, but we want to be on vacation with like, one of those drinks that has a little umbrella in it.  And given the state of the world and the mess we've all made of it, can you blame us?

Imagine Me and You: A Novel

Should you happen to be reading or have recently read this just-released book (available wherever books are sold), you might enjoy an illuminating interview with its author at Writer Unboxed.  And you can meet the Mernitman at Small World Books onVenice Beach this Thursday (6:00 pm).

Chick Flicks: Nix or Fix?

Pundits say has got to be one of my least favorite phrases these days, and that's as true for the world of arts and entertainment as it is for politics.  For awhile now, pundits in the show biz press have been pronouncing the "chick flick" dead or at least on life support, and the amount of disinformation they toss around is enough to make a romantic comedy lover (i.e. defender) get a little... testy.

New York Times writer Michael Cieply evidently needed a hook for his puff piece about two female-driven movies currently in production: P.J. Hogan's Confessions of a Shopaholic, starring Isla Fisher, and Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, so he titled his screed, "Wary Hollywood Plans More Chick Flicks (Hoping to Lure the Guys)." 

The thesis Mr. Cieply puts forth here can be summed up as: Hollywood hasn't done well with chick flicks recently, but it's giving them a shot again with these two pics, hoping they'll somehow constitute a "next generation chick flick."

How wrong are the basic assumptions here?  Let us count the ways.  Firstly there is "Hollywood" -- spoken of as if it were a single entity, as opposed to an unwieldy, ever-morphing mass of contradictory impulses whose disparate constituents are often barely on speaking terms with one another.  Hollywood is not wary; Jerry Bruckheimer, one of the producers of Shopaholic, is wary, and who can blame him?  This movie doesn't have big car chases and things blowing up good in it, so he could lose a chunk of change.

Secondly, there's the idea that "chick flicks haven't been doing well."  Here's the short list of under-performers Cieply refers to, after noting that The Nanny Diaries didn't do as well as Bridget Jones' Diary or The Devil Wears Prada:

A run of recent female-oriented romantic films — “The Holiday” with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet; “Catch and Release” with Jennifer Garner; “27 Dresses” with Katherine Heigl; “Music & Lyrics” with Drew Barrymore; “P.S., I Love You” with Hilary Swank; and “The Jane Austen Book Club,” with an ensemble cast — has stopped far short of the peaks established years before by films like “Sleepless,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Runaway Bride” and “Notting Hill.”

A chick flick is a movie that women respond to, and a hit movie is a thing that people respond to, and the thing is: Nanny Diaries SUCKED.  The half dozen movies cited are uniformly mediocre at best.  Female audiences avoided them not because they were "chick flicks" but because they weren't very good.  And their weaknesses stemmed largely from their sharing a relentlessly old-fashioned sensibility about what "a woman's picture" is supposed to be.

When I read a spec script that follows the hoary chick flick formula, i.e. a movie that's relentlessly focused on its heroine's quest for a Mr. Right, complete with say, a stereotypical female buddy, a scene that has the heroine use a hairbrush as a microphone and a tub of ice cream as consolation for romantic distress, plus a climax that features a race to the airport... do I run into a studio executive's office yelling "I've got a winner!!!"?

Like, not if I want to keep my job.  But if I read a script that has a great part for a female star, that's emotionally involving, that's about something (i.e. some issue that feels contemporary and universal), that keeps me in suspense (dramatic or comedic) and surprises me...  I'm far more likely to give it a Consider. 

A script that hops onto my desk singing, "I'm a chick flick!" -- meaning, a story that subscribes to the most traditional, conservative and fundamentally unimaginative use of, and portrayal of, a female lead and concerns -- is exactly what the studio doesn't need.  Ironically, studios are being somewhat cautious about green-lighting female-driven movies because they're finding out the hard way that the old formulas aren't working.  It's not that they don't want to make movies for women, it's that (calling Dr. Freud) they really don't know what women want.

Meanwhile, recent studies of demographics have shown that a huge young female audience has flocked to such splatter fare as Hostel 2 (counter-intuitive but true: 50% of the audience for that gore-fest was apparently women under-25, see this post).  65% of the audience for video game The Sims is reportedly female.  And what, pray tell, was the biggest hit among female audiences in 2007?  A quirky, edgy, indie-sensibility-ed left-fielder about teenage pregnancy called Juno.

Cieply and co's pronouncement that "the next generation hasn't announced itself" has already been patently disproved.  Diablo Cody's little movie is the next generation's chick flick -- because it speaks to the contemporary young female audience where it lives, in a language that this demographic understands.  That's what makes a chick flick click.

Women -- and humans, period -- went to see Prada because it was a smart, entertaining movie; I didn't go because it was a "chick flick," but in spite of it having been marketed as such.  Shopaholic and Julie will hit or tank based on their either being well-written, well-made movies that speak to a contemporary audience's concerns, or not (Shopaholic, for example, with its "addicted to shopping" humor, had better hope it's not released smack dab in the middle of major recession). 

What do "chicks" like?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggested one kind of paradigm; Juno points to another.  When the studios (and screenwriters and directors and talent, et al) finally abandon aging preconception of what a chick flick is and think outside the pink-hearted box, they're liable to hit a responsive chord.  Maybe if instead of making your mother's (or grandmother's) chick flick, you make a smart, edgy movie featuring a female protagonist that isn't merely about landing Mr. Right... more than just chicks will show up to see it. 

Fix it, don't nix it.

Imagine Me and You: A Novel

What is it about?

A writer's imagination gets the better of him when the lover he invents becomes real... and refuses to disappear.

What are people saying?

"Both utterly charming and vaguely psychotic, Billy Mernit's ode to the buoyancy of the human heart is a thoroughly entertaining ride."

--Theresa Rebeck, author of Three Girls and Their Brother

When does it come out?

Tomorrow.

Doesn't it seem like only yesterday that readers of Living the RomCom were treated to the sound of me freaking out -- in a good way -- over the news that Random House/Shaye Areheart Books had bought my first novel?

Remember when my editor requested that I change its title (then called Making Up) and I held a contest here to rename it, and sharp cookie Anna Hailey from Alaska picked the winner?  (As promised, she gets a thanks in the acknowledgements, with an autographed first edition on its way to her this week.)

And maybe you recall my various pukings and mewlings over the difficulties of revising what I'd foolishly thought was a finished work, and rants re: the writing process that birthed the book and all that.  Well, we've finally moved from the realm of hopes and dreams into the province of real time and space... which is where you come in.

It's pretty simple, obviously -- if you've enjoyed my disparate ruminations and ramblings here over the last nearly-three years (free! and free of advertising! every week!), here is your golden opportunity to say thanks with a show of support: this Tuesday April 8th and after, go to your bookstore, be it real or virtual, and buy my book!!!

Over the next six weeks, I'll be posting dates and details for My Littlest Book Tour at the top of the right-hand column.  You can meet me and my imaginary friend in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore and New York City, reading and signing and occasionally showing film clips (the S.F. appearance will be a full-blown romantic comedy seminar), so by all means come by and say hi if I'm in your vicinity.

Reviews are not yet in, but for a snarky not-so-good-one from industry rag Publishers Weekly that currently sits atop my Amazon.com page, thanks, betraying what from my wholly subjective POV seems to be an age-old East Coast literary bias (i.e. who's this screenwriting guy who thinks he can write a novel?!).  I'm glad it's followed by the accolades from Ms. Rebeck, Elizabeth Crane and Danny Rubin (the guy who wrote Groundhog Day).  And if you enjoy your read of the book, please feel free to write your own online review.  Every bit of goodwill helps.

Meanwhile, the experience of finally seeing this little sucker in print totally trumps all such issues, and the perks are killer.  Every writer friend I spoke to, prior to publication, told me I would hate my cover, but nuh-uh: not only do I like it fine, the generous and inventive folks at Shaye Areheart saw fit to add gold embossing to the background pattern, and man, I gotta say the j-peg doesn't even vaguely do it justice.  I lurve my beautiful cover.

And the beauty part is, no matter what may or may not come of this book joining the legions of books that are presently piling into bookstores all over the world... there it is: a done deal, manifest and real.  They can't take that away from me.

Imagine Me and You: a testament to the idea that dreams can come true.

Clouds in My Coffee Redux

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

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

Back in the day, Carly was my singer-songwriting mentor.  We were close friends who did a lot of playing and singing together, on her records and on the road, but over time we grew apart.  We haven't spoken in years, and that may be mostly what's led to my feeling a bit like I'm being photo-shopped out of an old photo. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romantic Comedy Classics #5:

Anthony Minghella Lives

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

--Anthony Minghella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retreat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romantic Comedy Classics #4:

Tootsie Turns Twenty-five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mom died, Dad screwed us over.
- Lesley Kysely

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

Painful nerd kid, happy nerd adult.
- Linda Williamson

Well, I thought it was funny.
- Stephen Colbert

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

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

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

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

Movie Book Heaven

While half the blogs in the known universe are posting reactions to the 2008 Oscars telecast (Javier Bardem actually won for No Country?!  OhmyGod!!!  But seriously, best speech: Tilda Swinton), Living RomCom would like to talk about the Oscars show from 1968 -- as relived in one absolutely scrumptious book. 

By this time in 2009, you'll prob'ly have a hard time even remembering who won what this year (this oft-experienced Oscar amnesia is a clear indicator of how fundamentally trivial our modern era's Academy Awards can be), but I'll wager that the movie book-reading public won't forget Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.  It's the best book written about the movies and what they mean to us to come down the pike in a long while, and its subject matter is particularly intriguing in terms of its contrast to the times we live in.

Harris's basic story concept is brilliant.  Pictures uses the Best Picture nominations of 1967 to explore that seminal moment in film history when the old guard of Hollywood was pushed, wheezing and whelping, into confrontation with the New.  On the left was Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate; on the right was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Dr. Doolittle (yes, really); occupying the conflicted middle-ground was In the Heat of the Night.

Night won the night, but the ultimate champion was a new breed of filmmakers that was to nearly destroy the old studio system, dragging it under protest across a just-solidified generational dividing line, and therein lies the fascinating core of Harris's tale.  The book is at its shrewdest and most revealing when it explicates the particulars of a rather Oedipal story, showing how a motley crew of European-inspired sons (among them, Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols) slew the already staggering Hollywood dragon-dads (e.g. Jack Warner), creating a passel of more modern myths even as they enacted an ancient one.

Harris's cinematic narrative strategy is to cross-cut the creation stories of all five future Best Pic noms; we follow each movie from conception, through production, to release, spanning a four year period.  It's an involving and suspenseful gambit, due to the cliff-hanging nature of its subplots (a crash course in how miraculous a feat it is to actually get a movie made), and the colorfully diverse cast of characters involved.  Being a fly on the wall in a legend-filled room is one of the great pleasures in movie-book reading, and Pictures puts you in many such stellar suites.

I loved, for example, discovering that screenwriting team David Newman and Robert Benton, while trying to sell Francois Truffaut on helming Bonnie and Clyde, sat through a screening of Gun Crazy he'd set up for them along with Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.  Godard briefly considered directing Bonnie himself -- and as Picture reports, after it later lost Best Picture, sent a telegram to Newman saying "Now, let's make it all over again!"

The book cuts from Gene Hackman agonizing over having been fired from Bonnie, to Stanley Kramer wondering if Spencer Tracy will live long enough to finish Dinner.  You get first-timer Dustin Hoffman's totally traumatic experience of working on The Graduate while everyone else in show biz considers him miscast, juxtaposed with Sidney Poitier's refusal to film in the deep South for Night because there was no guarantee he'd get out of there alive.

The era's portrait snapshots are priceless.  Here's Sidney Lumet remembering vulgarian producer Joseph E. Levine "sitting in the Polo Lounge, so happy, a hooker on each arm, each hand on a different tit."  There's young Peter Fonda (with then-unknown chums Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper) cheering on the Byrds while they play his mom and Roger Vadim's Malibu beach party -- with "Daryl Zanuck and George Cukor both staring dumbstruck as a barefoot young hippie began to nurse her baby in front of them." 

Next to the passionately innovative serious-ities of Arthur Penn and Nichols, the disastrous saga of Dr. Doolittle serves as black comedic counterpoint.  That it was clearly a movie that didn't want to have been made is borne out by a telegram sent, after typhoons and animal seizures jeopardized its bloated, ill-advised production, from a crew member on location in St. Lucia to Anthony Newley and wife Joan Collins: "Insect terrible from very wet summer STOP everyone covered in welts and sores two people bad infections from bites STOP six people ill last week from dysentery."

Meanwhile, it's the life-and-death issues of that era -- when the Civil Rights movement was peaking and the Vietnam War was beginning to divide the country -- that give this movie race its gravitas.  The book explores how The Graduate came to embody youth culture before the term existed, how Bonnie seemed to react to the war and the violence in the heart of America, how Night's success (and Dinner's datedness) were informed by events that culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- a tragedy that caused the Academy to postpone its show for the first time in nearly 40 years.

Harris's well-written and prodigiously researched work (even the footnotes are intriguing) has an aptly-timed resonance.  As I devoured the book, I couldn't help occasionally humming Dylan's Things Have Changed.  This year's picture race?  There Will Be Blood does speak to the tyranny of oil-lust that underlies our current administration's downfall, No Country can be seen as an indictment of the nihilistic violence we live with now, and Juno certainly has its finger on the pulse of kids-these-days.  But no one could sanely make a claim that this crop of pictures signifies a revolution of any kind -- or that they've even connected with America with anything like the force that 1967's wildly popular bunch did (many critics have pointed out that prior to the Awards, Juno has been the only major moneymaking hit among this year's nominees).

In its tacitly elegiac way, Pictures takes a picture of a now long-gone moment when movies were still at the uncontested epicenter of popular culture, and a clear embodiment of what "we" were all thinking and feeling.  Micro-trended into a vast collection of disparate cultural tribes, we (or, all t