Living the Romantic Comedy

Elemental

A dark-haired woman in a white nightgown - sleepwalking, demented, or simply wearing her inner life inside out - lurches across a cafe floor littered with overturned chairs and throws herself into the arms of a man in shirtsleeves, wrapping herself around him.  Immediately a second man in a suit, with the harried but patient air of an overworked stage manager, accosts this couple and systematically rearranges the woman's body, this arm going here, this hand just so, a series of mysterious but intensely focused gestures climaxing in his lifting the woman up and placing her in the shirtsleeved man's arms.

No sooner is the task completed, the suited man stepping away, than the first man drops the woman's body to the floor.  She springs up, once more clinging to her partner.  And the suited man returns to rearrange her again.  Again she's dropped to the floor, springs, clings - has her limbs reconfigured, is lifted, falls...  This insane ritual repeats with increasing frenzy, and you don't wonder why, so much as identify - Are you the woman, the man who can't hold her, or the man who's trying to impose his own order on this human chaos?  Possibly you've been all three, at one time or another, or seen such a scenario enacted in real life, and felt just as helpless to intercede.

I had the good fortune to experience what may have been the American premiere of Pina Bausch and her Wuppertaler Tanztheater's "Cafe Muller," of which this trio's routine is merely one moment, during the Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984.  It's stayed with me ever since.  See a Bausch dance like "Muller" and it's in you forever, like a benign psychic wound that never heals.  Her company danced Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in that same festival, and the one thing I've never forgotten about that one is how the dancers performed it barefoot on a stage covered with rich brown dirt.  You see this once, and you think, How could it ever be otherwise?

The Rite, that stubbornly modern musical assault on civilization that sounds as contemporary today as it seemed radical when first performed nearly a century ago, is one of the first of Bausch's pieces excerpted in Wim Wenders' Oscar-nominated documentary Pina.  One of the many fascinations in this amazing cinematic celebration is that in terms of Bausch's work, the Rite does seem merely a starting point.  Things get wilder, crazier, more deeply atavistic and intense from there, which says something about the elemental nature of both Pina and Pina.

Earth, water, air, fire - along with pain, rage, joy, and love - were fundamentals of Bausch's vocabulary, articulated on bodies as distinct as her own.  The company dances through cascades of water, crawls upon rock; in one of her most notorious and hilarious riffs, a dancer performs as a woman behind her shovels dirt onto the dancer's body.  And the difficulty of being - a human conflict that's about as basic as it gets - seems to have been one of her primal preoccupations.

To me, the gaunt but beautiful Pina always looked like a haunted Holocaust survivor, or a walking Egon Schiele drawing.  Though she died shortly before shooting was scheduled to begin, another fascination in this film is how, despite her being ostensibly gone in her physical being, she's brought to life so palpably by her dedicated troupe.  You're witnessing a true resurrection in the midst of memorial. 

It's a testament to her teaching, and Pina is a mini-master class in pedagogy.  Though the choregrapher was always invoking her own physical gesture through the bodies of others, Bausch had the uncanny ability to say just the right thing to a given dancer, the thing each one needed to hear in order to express his or her own essence, to explore further, stretch farther.  To one particularly poised and patrician male dancer she said, a seemingly casual remark tossed off in passing, "Remember, you have to scare me."  Cue epiphany. 

We hear these anecdotes as each of the dancers has a solo moment in front of the camera, sitting silently while quotes from their pre-recorded interviews are played.  With this technique, Wenders appears to be consciously referencing his eavesdropping angels from Wings of Desire, and it's true to his overall methodology here, which is magical and scientific - perfectly attuned to his subject, which is so much about both the physical and metaphysical transport of bodies through space. 

The location shooting is genius, integrating Bausch's choreography with the mundane world - a passing tram car is as much a performer as the dancers on the street below it - in a way that echoes Bausch's aesthetic, her dancers seeming to have one foot in the quotidian and the other in an alternate dimension.  Wenders' camera swoops and glides in and around Bausch's dancers with unerring sympathetic grace.  It may be true that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," but Pina isn't a film about dance.  It's a dance with dance.

As such, its use of 3D is transcendental.  If ever a movie demanded donning the glasses and watching a big screen, it's Pina.  If you're a writer and/or artist, it'll inspire you in the best ways.  Pina Bausch's work is both deeply disturbing and mordantly funny (in this, Bausch, Beckett, and Kafka strike me as a kind of post-modern Three Stooges).  It slips past rationality and the defenses of language to get you where you live.  What Wenders has wrought with this heartfelt tribute is no minor miracle, so you owe it to yourself to go see it.  Now.

How to Write Groundhog Day

Longtime readers of this blog know that today we traditionally celebrate the classic American comedy Groundhog Day, but this year is... different.  Today (cue jazz band and break out the ice sculptures), screenwriter Danny Rubin is publishing his new e-book, How to Write Groundhog Day. 

Yes, that's right: Long-awaited even if you didn't know you were waiting for it, this is the book that tells you everything you've ever wanted to know about how this beloved masterpiece came to be.  The book is full of insightful info, it includes a masssively annotated version of Danny's original draft (differences between his version and the finished film are a fascination in itself), and it is, of course, funny as hell.  Questions about all things Phil are answered, so hie thee to this link and get yourself a copy - especially because February 2nd, it's on discount sale.  Today is The Day.

Ever since writer Rubin, director Harold Ramis, and star Bill Murray created what's now generally acknowledged as one of the great American movies of all time, February 2nd has become synonymous with romance and comedy.  In fact, when people ask me to name a couple of my favorite romantic comedies, this one invariably comes to mind.

What, you've never thought of this cinematic classic as a romantic comedy?  For shame.  I have it on unassailable authority that the film qualifies.  For starters, it says so right on the DVD box's cover ("A romantic comedy fantasy that is Bill Murray's best screen performance" --  Gene Shalit).  But look up the definition of romantic comedy in the definitive text on same, and you'll find (p.12) that "a romantic comedy is a comedy whose central plot is embodied in a romantic relationship" and that (p.13) "the central question posed by a romantic comedy is: 'Will these two individuals become a couple?'"

As you well know, when TV weatherman Phil Connors (Murray) gets inexplicably trapped in the same repeating February 2nd, his sole recourse to getting out of it becomes the object of his affections, producer Rita (Andie MacDowell); his salvation lies in the answer to their coupling question.  (Screenwriting theorist sticklers may point out that the story's central question is really, Will Phil ever get out of February 2nd?  To this I say, also true, because the movie is a rom-com hybrid -- ibid, pp.21-28 -- a romantic comedy/high concept fantasy, and thus the couple/escape conflicts are intertwined.  But let's stop boring our civilian readers, shall we?  Thanks.)

Strange but true, there still exist deprived people who have not seen the movie Groundhog Day.  If you are one of those poor souls, what better opportunity to improve the quality of your life, than to view it on the official Day itself?  And even if you're one of the many enriched individuals who's seen it, this is a movie that you can watch over and over, and over, and over...

Major Groundhog Day fans might even consider journeying to the scene of the crime: the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is having its annual celebration, and it promises to be quite a hoot.  Such a trip was actually enjoyed by Day's writer and star before the movie was made, and therein lies a tale that speaks, I believe, to the true spirit of romance, or as we might say, what love's got to do with it.

Danny Rubin recounts the following in his illuminating interview accompanying an early draft of the screenplay in Scenario (Spring '95 issue, regrettably out of print).  He talks of having been hired, fired and re-hired to work on the script, and when he, his wife Louise and kids were preparing to move from Los Angeles to New Mexico, getting a call from Bill Murray:

He says, "Do you realize that the day after tomorrow is Groundhog Day?"--"Yep."--"And do you realize that between the director, the producer, the star and the writer of this film, nobody has been to the festival at Punxsutawney?  Doesn't that seem wrong to you?"  And I said, "Absolutely.  And I think you should go, I think that will be a great thing."  And he said, "I think we should go."  And I said, "Bill, that's a really nice offer, sounds like fun, but I'm moving, I'm moving my family, we're up to our necks in boxes, I can't just abandon them and go off to Punxsutawney."  And he said, "Well, think about it and call me back.  Here's my number."  When I got off the phone, Louise asked who it was.  "Bill Murray," I said.  "He wants me to go to Punxsutawney tomorrow."  And she said, "Cool."  And I said I'd told him I couldn't do it.  She said, "Are you nuts?"  So I talked to [the studio] and they said, "We'll pay for the move, we'll get someone to help pack, we'll fly out a friend of your wife's to help her move in so you don't have to be there."

This level of support was very nice, and I embarked on the most surreal adventure of my professional life.  All of a sudden I'm flying in a private plane from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with Bill Murray and we're talking about the script.  We landed somewhere near Punxsutawney at 2:00 in the morning.  And there were fans out there waiting for him--it was supposed to be a secret...

Rubin goes on to say that he used a lot of what he saw there in the script.  He'd originally spoken to the town's Chamber of Commerce and looked at their literature, but:

After we actually saw it, there was a whole different feel to it than we had imagined.  It was delightful, really delightful--a wonderful civic event.  We incorporated a lot of that into the movie...  Everyone there knew it was a goofy ritual--it was almost sophisticated in its hickyness.  What was so much fun about the festival is, it's the middle of the night, zero degrees, they've got bonfires going--and they're playing Beach Boys music.

Sometimes I read this excerpt to a screenwriting class when I'm talking about the inestimable value of research, to illustrate how really being there can make all the difference in writing a given project.  But I quote it now in this pre-Valentine's Day context to highlight my favorite moment in Rubin's story, which is when Louise says, "Are you nuts?"

I just love that!  Gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling every time, because it seems to me that Danny Rubin's wife is the hidden heroine of the Groundhog Day saga.  Love doesn't mean never having to say you're sorry.  It means having someone be able to say "Are you nuts?!" to you at a crucial moment.  Love is sometimes about saving loved ones from themselves -- which come to think of it, is kind of at the core of what the movie ended up being about, don't you think? 

Go watch it again, again, and see if you agree.

Spending my days believing in impossible things and chasing them towards an inner truth, now that's a pretty good gig.

--Danny Rubin

Rethinking the Happy Ending

An article in this past Sunday's NY Times strikes me as required reading for any screenwriter who has ever attempted to answer the question, "What does the audience want?"

Perfectly Happy Even Without Happy Endings, by Carrie Rickey, explores what Lindsay Doran (who produced  Sense and Sensibility and Stranger Than Fiction, among many other films) has learned from her extensive research on how movies work upon our emotions, and from the teachings of Dr. Martin Seligman, a "catalyst of the positive psychology movement" who has identified the five essential elements of well-being as: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.  Analyzing hits and critical favorites, Doran confirmed what she'd intuitively suspected about what audiences responded to in movies that worked:

She broke down their emotional components, isolated the elements of mood elevation and tested her findings against those of market researchers. She concluded: Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters’ personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments. Ms. Doran had long been drawn to “funny dramas and comedies that make you cry,” she said. Now she knew why.

You really ought to read the whole thing.  But here's the bit that I found most fascinating. Doran talked to a veteran market researcher who startled her by claiming that "audiences don't care about accomplishments" - apparent heresy in the face of standard Hollywood happy endings where girl gets boy, man kills shark, or king conquers stammer.  Said the vet:

“Audiences don’t care about an accomplishment unless it’s shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory but the moment afterwards when the winner shares that victory with someone they love.”

Doran found this to be true of one popular movie after another, and if you test it out, the idea becomes a "Duh!"  Sure, Shawshank Redemption's happy climax comes when Morgan Freeman is finally free, but the joy that earns tears and cheers from men and women alike arrives when Freeman's character reunites with Tim Robbins' and they get to celebrate their freedom together. 

Current hits as diverse as Globe-winners The Artist and The Descendants exhibit this principle in vivid relief; the same is true of Moneyball, The Help, and Bridesmaids.  Many a great movie has ended with relationship as the point, and an accomplishment never achieved (It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey never does get to leave Bedford Falls).  In fact, a great many classic films have "happy" endings where someone beloved has died (Star Wars), and the shared joy carries an acknowledgment of something lost.

Doran's idea also dovetails with one of my own long-held convictions about romantic comedy endings - that the best and most resonant are "joyful defeats" - boy-gets-girl moments leavened with a sense of loss (e.g. Shakespeare in Love, which leaves its lovers separated, though eternally "together").  You can see it at work in one of my favorite rom-com climaxes, that of Lindsay Doran's own Sense and Sensibility (while online restrictions nixed embedding it here, you can view the scene via this Hulu link).  When Elinor (Emma Thompson) learns that Edward (Hugh Grant) is free to marry her (happiness!) she totally loses it, uncontrollably weeping (sad but hilarious); what's lost is her pride and long-practiced composure.

But the best bit follows as we cut to her mother and two sisters, who've hurried outside to give the couple their privacy.  Little Sister climbs a ladder to peek in the window, and excitedly reports to Mom and Big Sis that Edward has gone down on one knee.  It's a shrewd and inventive way to depict an otherwise cliched moment (i.e. the obligatory proposal is off-screen) but it also gives us Doran's emotional catharsis: As the women laugh, cry, and hug, relationship is celebrated.  The couple's happiness is shared - and continues, as we cut to a wedding with a smiling, publicly coupled Elinor and Edward in attendance.

Here's a fun and educational game to play: Check out some of your favorite movies' endings, and see if what Doran and her Dr. Seligman are talking about proves true.  Then you might want to reexamine the last pages of your own project-in-progress.  Happy?  Sad?  Something that's working, evidently, is a combination of the two.

The 7th Annual Asta Awards

The Best in Romantic Comedy 2011

Last year's Asta roster was fairly thin, and sadly, this year's is about as sparse.  For romantic comedy, 2011 was dominated by a mere three popular hits, and two of them weren't even full-fledged rom-coms, but hybrids.  We could find meager solace in the fact that the opposite end of the spectrum was similarly slight (Is this year's New Year's Eve as dismally horrific as last year's Valentine's Day?  You'll have to be the judge, since I refuse to see it), but the overall diminishment by numbers in romantic comedy gives one pause. 

I like to think it's a genre in transition.  If the rom-com Aughts were about boys taking over (from Wedding Crashers to all things Apatow), there are heartening signs that the next decade may very well be about girl power.  Hell, I'd even settle for a Let's Make It Even decade, but if any one movie announced to the world that yes, Females are Funny, and will hopefully presage more funny female flicks to come, it's obviously...

Best Rom-Com Hybrid (That's Really a Female Buddy Coming-of-Age Movie):  Bridesmaids has come to seem not so much a movie as a force of nature.  Logic and taste have little to do with how fervently some people, women and men both, feel about this picture, a triumph of character-driven comedy written by a pair of female first-time screenwriters.  Obviously what drives the movie's appeal is its portrayal of an all-too- human, flawed but nonetheless empathetic protagonist, and the absurd quirkiness of its crackerjack supporting cast continues this theme, which brings us to:

Best Female Support: Melissa McCarthy, already an Emmy-winner and looking surprisingly Oscar-worthy (?!), arrives at 2012 with 2011 tucked in her back pocket.  While Wiig and Rudolph's buddy conflict was the main event of Bridesmaids, it was Melissa, from her first appearance ("I'm glad he's single, because I'm gonna climb that like a tree") to her under-the-closing-credits foodie sex binge, who virtually walked off with the show... and leaves us wanting more.

Best Set Piece: Kind of a toss-up, since the extended Nightmare in First Class sequence on board the plane that never gets to Vegas is pretty hilarious, but come on - What other comedy set piece this year floored audiences with quite the same mix of "watch it with a hand over your eyes and jaw agape" and belly laughs, as the Bridal Shop Debacle in Bridesmaids?  And after our suffering through a few decades of wedding rom-coms, what could be more satisfying than this set piece's priceless topper: the spectacle of an agonized Maya Rudolph, sinking to the street in her beautiful wedding gown and um, letting go?

Best Bellamy: Meanwhile, on the male side, this year's hands-down winner of Best Mr. Wrong must go to Bridesmaids' wonderfully dumb (and uncredited) Jon Hamm, playing Ted, a sexually challenged horror show whose delirious hamming occasionally forces Kristin Wiig to cease mugging and play it straight.  More Mad Magazine than Mad Men, this and his SNL stints suggest a second career in comedy for Don Draper.

So much for the 'Maids.  Meanwhile, one of the more intriguing competitions in 2011 rom-commery was between two movies with virtually the identical plot.  Having read the script early on, I would've guessed that No Strings Attached would edge out Friends With Benefits in this duel, but the latter did better at the box office, and also delivered...

Best Male Buddy: No, not Benefits' Woody Harrelson as one of the unlikeliest of gay guys, but his co-star, the inestimable Richard Jenkins, heartrending as a father with Alzheimer's, who gets it together long enough to set the wobbly Justin Timberlake straight in a memorable get-out-your-handkerchief third act scene.  Jenkins is always good, but here, the man is priceless.

Best Screenplay: Again, not a straight-up rom-com, it's a hybrid - but whatever you want to call it, Midnight in Paris delivered 2011's most imaginative blend of high concept and romantic comedy.  Not bad for a writer in his 70s, who's been deemed over-and-done too many times to count, by now.  Witty one-liners, visual gags, and conceptual meta high-jinks make this an "actually, I will watch it again on DVD" keeper that can legitimately join the best-of Allen canon. 

And an honorary Asta goes to Owen Wilson as Best Woody Allen: Practically every actor (or actress; see Mia Farrow) who's taken the lead in one of his pictures has ended up channeling the Woodman, in mode of speech and attitude (for Worst Woody, cringe at Kenneth Branaugh's slavish Allen-isms in Celebrity).  But Wilson made Woody his own, delivering an especially amiable amalgam in Paris.

Best Couple: It's one room-splitting issue in this year's room-splitter of a rom-com hit - you either buy them as a couple (a stretch given their small amount of screen time together) or don't, but for my money, watching Emma Stone take the piss out of Ryan Gosling (then casually fall in love with the jerk) was one of the best pleasures in Crazy Stupid Love, a romantic comedy that's a definitively mixed bag, as it also includes...

Worst Couple: No, I say, no, and no-no-no again to the icky, utsy, don't believe it for a second and utterly offensive "romance" between Jonah Bobo and Analeigh Tipton in the same movie, which asks us to find cute and endearing a stalker-like teen's obsession with an older teen who's in no way his match, and don't get me started on this story line's just awful resolution (sexy pic, masturbation invite and all).

Best Falling in Love Scene: The Artist is a romantic dramedy, but regardless - the early sequence where the ingenue bit part player (Berenice Bejo) is supposed to briefly dance with the movie-within-the-movie's dashing star (Jean Dujardin), yet both forget themselves and get giddily caught up in each other is exquisite romantic comedy, ideally conceived and marvelously executed.  And (rom-com screenwriters take note), it's done without a word of dialogue.  Kudos.

A for Efforts Dept: I had mixed feelings about Jumping the Broom, but at least there was a Black Romantic Comedy this year, and while I'm not on the Young Adult bandwagon (it's another kind of black comedy), I did like the idea of its heroine being "unlikable" to the extreme.

Best of the Worst Dept: The year's nadir was the offensive-on-every-level Larry Crowne, of which the less said, the better, and 2011's Jen award (given to the star who's released too many bad movies in one year) goes to Adam Sandler.  Y'know, I actually enjoyed Just Go For It, in a Guilty Pleasure way, but to have also produced Zookeeper, Bucky Larson, and Jack and Jill?!  Get out of here, Sandler.  No, really: get out of here.

Close-to-Sort-of-Best (in an "I Know I'm Settling" Way) Romantic Comedy: Crazy Stupid Love has a lot going for it (a mostly-strong script, though they could've cut the last 15 minutes), some first-rate ensemble work (Gosling and Steve Carrell are great together), and was clearly the year's biggest straight-up rom-com success. 

But I'm going to risk reader ire (Timberlake-haters abound, and the Kunis backlash is ready to pop), by finding the underrated Friends With Benefit more consistently satisfying.  Justin and Mila's repartee (courtesy of Keith Merryman & David A. Newman and Will Gluck's screenplay) - their rhythm, look, and between-the-sheets pizazz, was arguably the most watchable in a slim year of fetching match-ups, and the movie's undertone of surprising poignancy really worked - for me.

That would be all, but for an unusually strong year among the four-leggeds.  A special Asta for The Best Astas Since Asta is split between The Artist's Uggie, and Beginners' Cosmo, two Russell terriers who capably put the comedy into two dramedies in 2011.  Living the RomCom hopes to see a lot more of them in the future.  Bark on, doggies!

Through a Glass Brightly

Living the Rom-Com in Sweden

Why I love the internet: A few months ago, I opened my e-mail, and there was an invitation from a friendly screenwriter and instructor named Arvid Unsgaard -

- asking me if I'd like to teach romantic comedy to the students at a relatively new film school in Sweden.  We could do it by video-cam, or if I preferred, by my coming over there...?

Well, yuh-huh.  Cut to: On a Sunday evening in the dead of winter, I arrived in Visby, a medieval walled city in the countryside on the island of Gotland - here's the wall - 

- had a nice dinner with Arvid, settled into a cozy little room at a family inn, and then early the next morning was driven to the Story Film & TV school (housed in a former military installation), and met nine students who were preparing to write full-length screenplays that were either romantic comedies or had rom-com elements in them. 

I realize that "Sweden" and "Romantic Comedy" don't seem to go together, but as I kept reminding people, even Bergman made a rom-com (Smiles of a Summer Night, which Sondheim turned into A Little Night Music).  These students were a delightful bunch of bright writers who spoke English very well, and thanks to their buoyant, welcoming spirit (here for example is serious-but-mischievous Sebastian, and fun-loving Caroline, who looks uncharacteristically serious in this photo) -

- I felt very much at home talking about cute meets and passionate characters and why so many jokes revolve around the principle of three. After two days of teaching, we all went out to a restaurant, where I ate reindeer for the first time (sorry, Rudolph, but it was delicious) and got wonderfully shnockered.  Despite what you may have heard, the Swedes are not depressed or depressing (that would be the Norwegians).  But the landscape certainly does look Berman-esque.

And on my last afternoon, we took a trip to the island of Faro, where Ingmar Bergman lived.  Being able to spend some time in the realm of Bergman was really quite moving.  Here is me on the beach where a famous tracking shot from Persona was shot:

Here is the little cinema that Bergman built, and watched films in with his family:

In the editing room on the top floor, there are still rolls of footage and editing records:

Here are two views of Bergman's home, deep in a beautiful forest of Faro:

And here is the grave where he is buried with his wife Ingrid:

A local newspaper published an article about my visit, with a teaser shot of me on the front page ("Filmkung larde ut om romantik") next to a photo of a local girl wearing a Santa Lucia crown of candles, above a blurb about a sports star who abused his wife, and a blurb about pigs from a pig farm getting loose.  Is this romantic comedy, or what?

I fell in love with Visby (even though it was only light out between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., so I really only ever saw it in the dark) and all of my students, and Arvid and the School, and I hope to return when the sun is shining and the weather is warm.  Sverige är bäst!

The Surprise of Being Human

I loved The Descendants, but the weird thing is, when I think about the movie, I can't remember a line of dialogue, or even a particular shot.  What I remember are the feelings.

I often think of movies as vehicles we use for having our emotions, and in this regard, Descendants is a certain kind of great ride: small and unassuming, a little slow to get into full gear, but handling so smoothly that you don't even realize how fast you're going, then opening up, going full-throttle, and... get out your handkerchiefs, people - you've arrived at an exquisite devastation-destination.

The studio's trying to pitch it as a comedy, but that's not really the deal.  Not as quirky and hilarious as Sideways, or sharp-barbed like Election, Alexander Payne's latest feels more akin to About Schmidt in this writer-director's oeuvre.  It has some great laughs, sure, but it reaches you in a more somber place, deeper than mere melancholia and as profound as any adult's honest contemplation of mortality. 

Don't let that scare you off.  It's a sneakily accessible movie and it sets off the best kind of depth charges in your consciousness; days later, I still find myself thinking about the characters, and wondering about them the way one wonders about people you know.  Which brings me to a point that's directed at the writers and screenwriters in the room.

We always hear that defining a protagonist, getting specific about his or her goal, back story, and most significant distinctive characteristic is a primary concern, and that's certainly true.  But the best people - the most compelling, moving humans, on the page or off - are fascinating because they surprise us.  They disarm us because their inner lives are at times at odds with their outer appearances and behavior.  They're more complicated than they look.

That's The Decendants' brilliance in a nutshell.  Not a single character in the movie, be they lead, support, or brief cameo, is exactly who they seem to be.  Every prominent character takes a turn that makes us see them in a different light, and a few of them keep turning - revealing more feelings, thoughts, and points of view than we'd have expected.

What this does, in terms of its effect on a viewer, is enforce a suspension of judgment.  And isn't that a beautiful thing?  We can't just write a given person off.  We can't form a fixed opinion of someone and hold onto it for long.  Instead, we're seduced into simply looking at a character, looking really carefully, and listening with special attention.  More often than not, we recognize something specific and true, and we connect.

Payne, here collaborating with Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, has always specialized in adaptation (the source novel is by Kaui Hart Hemmings), which may account for what feels like a novelist's love of nuance in his movies.  And he's come up with a fantastic cast (aided by John Jackson, C.S.A.) that's alive to every bit of dramatic/comedic potential in a given moment. 

Shailene Woodley, who plays the George Clooney character's older daughter, is clearly an actress we'll be seeing more of in the years to come.  Apparently Payne saw hundreds of actors before he found Amara Miller to play her younger sister, and his patience paid off; Nick Krause as Woodley's sort-of boyfriend is another great fresh face to contemplate.  It's wonderful to see Judy Greer do more than play second banana to a rom-com heroine, and Beau Bridges is a joy in a small, pivotal role.  Meanwhile Mr. Clooney does some of his best, most vulnerable work to date.  His awesome good looks get subsumed in a role that makes "the star" disappear, and he's got a scene in the back end that floored me with its quiet, pained simplicity.

The Descendants is an object lesson in how to let your characters and your audience have their feelings.  And it surprises us in articulating a truth we ought to know, but tend to forget - that each of us can't just be one thing.  We're multitudinous, y'know - it's the human way to be.

Archetypes: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Famously identified by film critic Nathan Rabin in his A.V. Club pan of Elizabethtown in 2007, this particular brand of cinematic male wish fulfillment fantasy has been around for ages.  The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a bubbly, sunshiney creature who, in Rabin's words:

... exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

The MPDG is invariably beautiful, while often in a slightly left-of-center way, quirky as hell, girly, and giving; key to her personality in the romantic comedies and other pics that feature her is a level of compassion for the male hero that's awesomely selfless: she exists, at core, to succor and service the movie's man-in-need.

One could make a case for certain silent era heroines as forerunners, and certainly Chaplin's "Girl" - see Paulette Godard in Modern Times, et al - is a progenitor.  The grandmom of MPDGs is the screwball heroine variant played most memorably by Katherine Hepburn and Carole Lombard.  More recently, the MPDG quintessence was delivered by Natalie Portman in Garden State.

Breathes there a red-blooded American male with soul so dead that he could quickly reject the looks (let alone the likes) of her?  Two words might be used as a shield to deflect such a meltingly potent gaze (they would be Black Swan), but let's be honest: looks great, has great taste in music, is smart, funny, available, and for no immediately discernible reason, seems already way into you?  Tough proposition to turn down.

There's a catch, of course (in Garden State, Portman's character is revealed to be a pathological liar), and some MPDG movies do go so far as to expose the darker sides of this archetype (in a sense Jonathan Demme's Something Wild is a black comedic object lesson in "be careful what Dream Girl you wish for," as its hapless hero is nearly killed by MPDG Melanie Griffith's psychotic ex-boyfriend).

But what I find truly amusing about this fantastical construct is how profoundly counter-intuitive it is, in terms of the kind of Manic Pixies one encounters in non-movie reality.  Reader, I have dated a few (some friends might say I even married the European version of one, once), and here's the thing: such prototypically fun salvos of idiosyncratic femininity actually tend to be fundamentally narcisisstic.  The Manic Pixies one meets in real life, generally speaking, are Damsels in Distress who are trolling for Princes, or to be more accurate, Caretakers.

It's because of this truism that personally, I'm more fond of the rom-com heroines who are Manic Pixie Dream Girl-like... but turn out to be their own, healthily autonomous people in the end.  One such classic variant was immortalized by Diane Keaton in the movie that bears her character's name:

 

Annie starts out MPDG, but once Pygmalion-ed by Alvy Singer, is revealed to be a deeply three-D human with needs that transcend his.  Which seems to be more a real-life phenomenon, if you ask me (an uncharacteristically realistic workout of the "She seems like my Manic Pixie Dream Girl but isn't" notion was enacted by Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer.)

On screen, at any rate, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl continues to delight many men's fantasies (and alienate even more women).  I recently spotted two in Midnight in Paris.  Got any favorites, or love-to-hates, of your own?

Love in 24 Hours (or Less)

Bearing down on it now, this business of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and the ethos and eros of romantic comedy, with the logical query: If Getting to Know You movies believe that true love is only achieved over the course of some serious time (in When Harry Met Sally, it takes more than a decade, and in Groundhog Day, a near-eternity), what are we to make of a rom-com that claims you can have it overnight?

Love Overnight movies, a small but hardy cadre of romantic comedies in which the main action takes place within one extremely compressed and compacted time period - usually a linear span of around a day and a night or so - are founded on the belief that love, whether at first sight or a later second's consideration, has no need of racking up considerable psychic or physical mileage.  In these movies, The Real Thing can be sighted, experienced, and validated in record time. 

The uber-Love Overnight pic, obviously, is Richard Linklater (and co-screenwriter Kim Krizan)'s Before Sunrise (1995),

in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do their meet-lose-get scenario in roughly 18 hours.  That they blow their scheduled post-movie reunion, and don't hook up until about 16 years later in the sequel Before Sunset (filmed 9 years later, 2004)

is moot: that they do get together for good, Ethan impulsively abandoning a wife and child in the bargain, is proof that What Happened One Night was indeed a happening thing.

It Happened One Night (1934), by the way, covers a longer time span than its title promises, but it's an LO movie in spirit.  These stories posit that what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas, but lives on - or, to cite the grandaddy of such "single at lunch, married by breakfast" tales, what happens in the forest near Athens changes you forever, even if you were only literally turned into a donkey for a few hours.  Shakespeare's magical romp of an ensemble rom-com makes the case that one Midsummer Night's Dream (a couple of nights, actually) can hitch a few pairs of lovers, and better them, for good.

In this essential regard, Love Overnight (LO) romantic comedies are the diametric opposite of Getting to Know You (GTKY) movies, yet kissing cousins to the Only One paradigm - rom-coms that believe if you can find your fated soul mate, you'll be good to go.  In the LO universe, if an attraction develops, is tested and endures over the course of one fated night, that's all its faith-and-hope-prone protagonists need in order to make a solid commitment.

2008's unjustly overlooked all-in-one-night rom-com Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - the answer to your future "What was Kat Dennings in before 2 Broke Girls?" trivial pursuit question - delivered the full, passionate goods in this neck of the woods: as in Sunrise, the meet-lose-get between Kat and Michael Cera goes down in one linear fell swoop, and it seems to be for keeps.  It's a credit to screenwriter Lorene Scafaria that we buy into this idea... which may be why there aren't dozens of these LO rom-coms extant.  Your average romantic comedy, even if it spans weeks, can be credibility-challenging enough.

The short list of hybrid Love Overnight classics over the years is topped by the horror/rom-com Shaun of the Dead (2004).  Here the protagonists have met and broken up before the 24-hour story proper gets launched, but one night of bludgeoning, axing, and shooting flesh-hungry zombies together is all it takes to make its two lovers like one, again.  2007's teen/bromantic rom-com hybrid Superbad similarly has a prologue to zip through before its neverending party night brings both boy-and-girl, and boy-buddies together before dawn.

Another seminal LO movie is John Hughes' teen rom-com Sixteen Candles (1984), coupling Molly Ringwald and Justin Henry over the course of a pivotal birthday's non-celebration.  Like the Shakespearian original, Woody Allen's minor Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) is a nocturnal roundelay of hook-ups.  As every genre must have its nadir, we'll dutifully note that the execrable Valentine's Day (2010) follows form, its soul-killing superficial scenarios taking place in 24-hour holiday time.

A memorable variant is 1954's Roman Holiday, in which Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn spend a day and night together, a reporter and a princess on a platonic (but tacitly romantic) spree in Rome: no happily ever after for these two, but it's a time they'll remember all their lives.  One knowing anti-LO classic, Scorsese's black comedy/rom-com After Hours, is like an urban nightmare version of Bringing Up Baby with no Katherine Hepburn in sight (the series of "madcap" women hapless Griffin Dunne meets are crazy in a chillingly unscrewball way).  The movie suggests you not only can't get laid in a New York night, you're liable to get killed and/or turned into a plaster statue for trying to.

Living Rom-Com commenter Judith Duncan astutely noted that the GTKY movie lacks the high-gear energy of shorter-fused rom-coms.  LO pics, by their very "zero to 60 in no time" nature, have well-tuned motors (commenter Cantara Christopher's suggestion - Vincent Minnelli's The Clock, a rom-com/dramedy - is a quintessential example).  And if you ever needed evidence that rom-com lovers are optimists, the Love Overnight sub-genre, with its embrace of Be Here Now encounters and Instant Love Everlasting, clearly provides it.

So what other LO classics am I leaving out? 

A Third Way to Love

Romantic comedy believes in the transformative power of love, but its sub-genres reveal more specific belief systems.  Not long ago, my post Is There Only One? questioned movies that say, "Every soul has only one mate, chosen by fate" (Sleepless in Seattle, Serendipity, Only You).  Conversely, Second Chances looked at rom-coms that tell us, "Everyone is capable of finding more than one great love in one's lifetime" (Truly Madly Deeply, Love Actually, Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

The Only One movies, all about the chase, sometimes barely acquaint their protagonists with each other, banking on a this-was-meant-to-be philosophy to justify the match-up.  "The One After The One" movies are less about the One After's identity or compatibility then they are about the new mate's message: Get over it and move on.

Being predominately about courtship, romantic comedies don't usually go into the mundane nuts and bolts of how a longlasting union is formed.  The main event here is "how they met and how they got hitched," and it tends to play out in a short span of time.  Meanwhile there exists a small canon of romantic comedies that do focus on the bigger how - not how these two got together, but how their being together gradually blossomed into true love.  These rom-coms, I think, try to get at a more realistic assessment of what actually makes a romantic relationship work.

A Getting to Know You romantic comedy follows two people through a good chunk of their lives, examining the incremental process by which two people become truly intimate.  While most rom-coms enact some version of this in tightly-motored microcosm (e.g. the whirlwind adventure of Romancing the Stone forces its lovers to get closely acquainted, pronto), the Getting to Know You picture takes the longer view, suggesting that a slow-fused romance played out over time may in fact be the best route to a love that can last.

The uber-GTKY rom-com is of course When Harry Met Sally, in which it takes years (more than a decade) for Harry and Sally to get that they've already got what they need and want.  And the ethos of this mini-sub-genre is expressed in its famous climactic declaration by Harry, a detailed list of what he's learned to love in Sally ("I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich..."): True love is found by getting to know, accept, and appreciate the other, over time.

Getting to Know You rom-coms are similar to, but set apart from, the more garden variety "The One Who Was Always There" movies, in which a current romance with a Bellamy (Mr. Wrong) reveals that a best friend, co-worker, or otherwise long-on-the-scene character is actually the protagonist's true love (The Proposal, et al) - or not, as in My Best Friend's Wedding.  GTKY sticks with its two central characters over time to showcase how "the little things" in each add up to what only in the end seems inevitable.  He and she, by genuinely comprehending the beautiful and the bad in each other, make an eyes-wide-open commitment based more on empirical evidence than on ephemeral attraction.

Perhaps the earliest example of a GTKO movie, more romantic dramedy than rom-com, is Penny Serenade (1941, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne), featuring a married couple whose love deepens through the years.  In our modern era, When Harry... is bracketed by two darker hybrids (dramedy/rom-coms): 1967's Two for the Road (Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney) and 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey).  Road studies a marriage that seems to be driving toward the rocks, intermingling flashbacks with present-day turmoil, while Eternal, using similar (and wilder) techniques, replays, rethinks, and reboots a long-term relationship.

These two Getting to Know You movies root their stories in the seeming inevitability of a break-up, and work their way, comedically and poignantly, toward a reaffirmation of what was good about this coupling in the first place - tempered by a painful acknowledgement that what's flawed (as well as what's fun) in a mate is here to stay.  While that's not a theme which necessarily suggests the most upbeat date movie experience, such films have more to say to the experienced, real-world romantic than say, Valentine's Day.

An even smaller subset of these films employs a formal device to build up its intimacies: 1978's Same Time Next Year, in which Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn get to know each other via annual hotel trysts, and this year's tanker One Day (we revisit Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, whether they're together or not, on the succeeding anniversaries of their first meeting).  Another, more fantastical variant is found in Groundhog Day (Bill Murray gets to know Andie MacDowell via an eternity of February 2nds), and less profoundly, in 50 First Dates (Adam Sandler goes to school on Drew Barrymore, whose peculiar brand of amnesia makes every date their first one).

Are Getting to Know You rom-coms less ubiquitous because their tacit theme is more pragmatic than  romantic?  It may be why they tend towards drama more than comedy.  And what significant members of this small but resonant roster may I have left out? 

Your Mind on Music

Caffeine.  Alcohol.  A toke, a toot.  Everyone's got their favorite stimulant, but when it comes to working on a draft, the overwhelming drug of choice for most writers I know is music.

Four screenwriters interviewed in Karl Iglesias’s fine and useful book, The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters talk of their dependence on music as muse: Ron Bass likes to write to jazz; Steven DeSouza uses soundtracks from movies similar to the genre he’s writing in; Scott Rosenberg goes for rock’n’roll; Nicholas Kazan prefers Gregorian chant ("I need something constant and neutral.  I find it’s a wonderful aid that sort of massages the right hemisphere of my brain").

References to writer-as-listener abound in the realm of screenwriting interviews.  My own habit coincides with that of Mr. Bass, who notes: "I like to play the same CDs over and over because I like the music to disappear."

True that.  When I find a piece of music that evokes the sensibility of what I’m writing, I put it on Repeat and play it for hours.  (This method’s only drawback is that when you wear out a piece this way, you really do wear it out; certain songs I used to love are dead to me now, sadly.)  Lately, I've been stuck on a song called Diamond Heart by the group Active Child (fans of Roxy Music's Avalon may enjoy, but if Neo-80s synth and romantic langeurs give you the hives, steer clear, plus this is the only song from the album I've gotten so attached to, so the real hook may be something subjectively idiosyncratic, i.e. the sound of a C# alternating against a C with a D# above it just says HELLO to my heart). 

Diamond Heart is an exception that proves the rule, in that it has vocals, something usually to be avoided, but the lead vocal is so aurally tweaked that it took me a dozen listenings to realize that the words "diamond heart" are used in the lyrics.  Generally non-vocal music serves the task best, and my perennial search for instrumental music that’ll work often unearths great stuff that defies categorization (what exactly do you call Four Tet's Smile Around the Face, which sounds like the union of a benignly berserk robot drummer and the Lollipop Kids on helium in a toy factory?). 

My default fall-back is a pair of hardy perennials that never fail to get the fingers moving: the music of Steve Reich and Johann Sebastian Bach.  The perpetual motion and ethereality of Reich (particulary the more minimal early works) eases my right brain into gear, while Glen Gould playing Bach's keyboard music stokes the left side into more active alertness.  There's just enough muted and/or ambiguous emotionality in both composers' work to keep it engaging, and it abounds in that "constant and neutral" quality that Kazan spoke of.

I did a similar post on this writing methodology some five years ago, and got a lot of good suggestions for Music To Write By, but I've since exhausted those sources (played into its grave are The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid's two hours of beautifully spooky, languid otherworldliness, and my first novel thanks you).  Once again, I’m on the lookout for writing-stimulation. 

What music have you found that gets your blood moving and keeps your creative juices flowing, when you're working on a draft?  Living Rom-Com wants to hear.

Rom-Com Truisms #9

The less said, the more felt.

An ongoing issue with the romantic comedy spec scripts I read is that they talk too much. 

By "they" I mean the characters (i.e. the writers), which is surprising.  Given that we're living in the reign of Twitter, seeing as how we all have less time to take in information, why is that screenwriters still seem to think that romantic comedy = two people sitting or standing around talking, for page after page?

It's axiomatic that in comedy, fast is funny.  And brevity being the soul of wit, the alert rom-com writer ought to be able to cut to the gag, pronto.  In this regard, I've often cited the opening of Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral as a model, a paradigm of great romantic comedy dialogue.

The movie begins with a wordless montage of various characters getting ready to go to a wedding.  We find protagonist Charles (Hugh Grant) still in bed, sleepily picking up his alarm clock and reacting, eyes widened, with the movie's first dialogue:

Oh, fuck. Fuck!

Charles runs into housemate Scarlett's room and thrusts her clock at her sleepy face.  Scarlett reacts: Fuck!

Cut to Charles getting dressed in a hurry.  He bends to tie his shoes and his suspenders pop off the back of his trousers.  Charles: Fuck.

Cut to Charles and Scarlett in the front of his Volvo.  The engine won't start.  Charles: Fuck!!!

Now that's great dialogue.  I'm not being facetious here -- it's truly impressive how much the sequence accomplishes, in terms of story set-up, character and tone, using one four-letter word.  But Curtis is also a master of the long speech, which he demonstrates in the closing scene (which also includes one godawful clunker of a line, Andie MacDowell-as-Carrie's "Is it raining?  I hadn't noticed" as she and Charles stand drenched to the skin in a downpour), but at any rate - boy has met, lost, and is getting girl, romantically in the rain, and his pitch is true to Charles' twistedly conflicted anti-marriage persona:

Do you think... after we've dried off, after we've spent lots of time together, you might agree... NOT to marry me?  And do you think... not being married to me... might maybe be something you could consider doing for the rest of your life?  Do you?

Girl uses two irony-laden syllables in reply:

I do.

One of the most moving uses of a commonplace word that I've ever heard, in the closing lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is made up of two syllables repeated by two devastated lovers (He: Okay?  She: Okay) which pack so much emotional resonance - they've been through relationship hell together, but they're still willing to believe they've got a chance to make it work - that the scene tears me up every time.

You may remember how effective the wordless first act of Wall-E was (yes, it's a romantic comedy, as well as being a sci-fi animation), and speaking of sci-fi, one of the best cinematic responses ever given to the phrase "I love you" was provided by Han Solo, who replied, true to character: "I know." (Harrison Ford, reportedly bettering Leigh Brackett's script for The Empire Strikes Back.)

The best romantic comedies don't over-explain or over-sell themselves.  I've noticed that many people who enjoyed Crazy, Stupid, Love got big laughs out of early scenes like this - Cal and his wife Emily trying to decide what to order at a restaurant...

Cal: How about we see what we want on three?  One, two...

Emily: I want a divorce.

Cal (simultaneously): Creme Brulee.

...but cited Cal's big, long, over-sentimental speech at his son's graduation at the picture's end as one of its missteps.  Not to belabor the point (i.e. why go on and on?), but movies are a visual medium, and when the talk is brief, there's room for a scene's emotional subtext to be felt.  If your characters say more with less words, you're giving the audience a chance to feel what lies between the lines.  And isn't that the smarter, funnier, more moving way to go?

'Nuff said.

Romantic Comedy Classics #7:

Top 5 Favorite Clips From High Fidelity

1) The movie begins with a fourth wall-breaking monologue from Rob Gordon (John Cusack) that speaks to an essential issue at the heart of rock music-worship, posing questions that could, come to think of it, be addressed to lovers of romantic comedy as well.  He (and co-screenwriters D.V. DeVicentus, Steve Pink and Scott Rosenberg) is channeling Nick Hornby, author of the source material novel, and you know within the first minute that they - guided by director Stephen Frears - are going to do this right:

 

2) For romantic comedy, the first decade of the 2000s was Revenge of the Guys, with such pics as Hitch, Wedding Crashers, and Apatow's 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up trying to kick the chick out of chick flicks.  But High Fidelity was the real kick-off, in 2000, where the male point of view on relationships gets an intimate, honest expression - as does the peculiarly male obsession with what makes up the ultimate know-it-all's record collection: the "I am what I listen to" syndrome (and what does it mean that I bought the Beta Band EPs after seeing this movie?).

 

3) A penchant for wish-fulfillment fantasy is certainly not the sole provence of the male imagination, but rarely has a movie gotten its inner workings quite this hilariously right, as Rob faces his romantic rival (the uber-obnoxious Tim Robbins, brilliantly cast) in person for the first time, and male id unleashed high jinks ensue:

 

4) True to its school even at its most poignant moments, High Fidelity features one of the greatest marriage proposal scenes in the history of the genre, its genius lying in precisely how stupid-guy perfect its seeming anti-romanticism is:

 

5) It's the movie that made Jack Black a star, and arguably still contains his best work.  This last clip loses a bit in translation, since it's predicated on having convinced you that Black's character (a lovable jerk with hipster-ad absurdum musical taste) is the last person in the world to deliver the performance he delivers here; we're expecting something closer to the Dead Kennedys, which will end in bloody eardrums and party buzzkill - and yet...

  

High Fidelity seems to me to be a high watermark in rom-commery due to its unflinching against-the-grain-ness.  Never has a romantic comedy emphasized such resistance to the very ethos of its genre - its hero is dragged, kicking and screaming into what he perceives as the horror of commitment - and yet in part for that very reason, when the movie finally submits to the transformative power of love as a positive force, we believe that it's only right and inevitable. Women are the means by which we men come to know beauty, after all.  And where would pop music - or movies - be without them?

Clouds in My Coffee #14: Under the Influence of Jim

Jim Harrison has a new book out, and in the midst of working on a memoir-critique this week, I found myself reminiscing about a long-ago meeting with the man.  Like so many of these Clouds pieces, this is much more about me than it is about him, but as it's also romantic-comedic, I submit to you...

[Another installment in the ongoing true life adventures of Periphery Man, who has had myriad peculiar encounters with celebrities, while not being a celebrity himself.]

During the Eighties I was married to woman named Sue, and we were as poor as factory mice (this being the decade when so much American industry began moving overseas).  I churned out a series of romance novels under a female nom de plume to keep us afloat, while Sue, working at the original Dean & DeLuca’s in Soho, filched the occasional gourmet item to augment our austerity diet.  We generally couldn’t afford a dinner out, but we had connoisseur-approved sun-dried tomatoes at home. 

One of her co-workers, soon a close friend and complicit in these minor thefts of imported extra-virgin olive oil and the like, was Jamie Harrison, daughter of Jim, himself as famed a gourmet as he was a master of the literary western novel (Legends of the Fall, et al).  One summer Jamie (then a fledgling, now successful novelist in her own right) invited us to visit her and her family in the wilds of Montana. 

We drove from the airport up to their place in a rent-a-heap so trashed that we expected to lift its rusty hood and discover a caged couple of pedal-pushing squirrels as its motor.  I was wearing too-tight just-bought blue jeans, because I’d suddenly realized I didn’t own a pair, and how could I greet Jim Harrison wearing my usual urban pleated pants over my loafers?  Might as well hang a ‘Wussy NYC intellectual’ sign on my belt. 

I was profoundly uncomfortable, physically and psychically, en route to meeting this mythic cattle-punching poet, whose prose spoke of riding a Percheron through the chaparral on the arroyo (I’m sorry, the what? Through the where, now?), and who would surely see by my outfit that I was no cowboy.  So Sue and I were bickering most of the way, punctuated by our mobile junk-pile’s burps of auto-indigestion.  By the time we’d nearly come to the end of Jamie’s directions, we were in full marital fight mode, which only made me more anxious.  “Are we going to be okay?” I asked my wife.  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “Although it would be even better if I could pretend I’d never met you.”

We pulled into the driveway of the Harrisons’ appropriately isolated, rustic ranch house, and I saw the hulking figure of the great man trundling toward us with a greasy-looking paper bag in his mitts.  No sooner had I climbed out of our heap than he thrust it under my face, grinning, with a cry of “Fish!”  I passed my first test of manliness by not reeling back from the bag’s stench, and made sounds of savvy appreciation.  Intending to make a bouillabaisse for dinner, Harrison had evidently just caught this batch, perhaps by diving into treacherous whitewater and grabbing the trout with his bare hands.

Inside the house the Harrisons tried to put their guests at ease, but for me this was impossible.  Anyone who’s been married is familiar with that frustrating and frightening phenomenon: how it feels to embark on a high-stakes social mission when you’ve lost your most trusted ally and back-up.  The challenge is made more horrible by the necessity of you and your mate having to fake a united front.

For the first hour or so it was touch and go.  But the rapport between Sue and Jamie, the calm exuded by Harrison’s gracious, beautiful wife Linda, the lurching garrulousness of the writer himself, and generous helpings of fine wine from what he gleefully referred to as “the Warner Brothers cellar” (he’d sold some early works to that studio for a small fortune) diffused our tensions, and soon other guests were arriving to fill in the gaps. 

By nightfall, bouillabaisse bubbling and steaming up the kitchen like a benign warlock’s cauldron stew, the house was in full, boisterous dinner party swing.  Somewhere in the midst of the casual revelry, Sue and I came face to face in a quiet corner of the living room, alone for the first time since our rancorous arrival.  The olive branch I proffered came like second nature to the likes of me, as the dedicated romantic comedy-ist male’s go-to question in such circumstances is: What would Cary Grant do?  Remembering Sue’s parting shot, I feigned flirtatious intrigue. “The face is familiar,” I said.  “Have we met?”

My wife knew her cue.  “Sue,” she said, extending her hand.  I shook it and introduced myself.  “A pleasure.  So… how do you know our hosts?”  I was rewarded with a familiar sparkle reappearing in her eyes, and her little snort of a laugh.  “Actually, I’m a friend of Jamie’s from New York,” she said, and before we could continue the charade in earnest, Jamie herself called her away.

In the movie version of this sequence, we’d have played perfect strangers to the hilt all evening, never dropping character.  In real life we soon fell back into our real-life roles – but with a difference.  With a little aside here and playful private exchange there, we kept the conceit alive as a game between us, stoking the pretense that we’d only just become acquainted at this dinner party. 

Harrison had a colorfully diverse and good time-loving group of friends, and the stew was stupendous. Buoyed by my ongoing flirtation with that cute woman named Sue and various combinations of controlled substances, once I got comfortable with his wall-eyed gaze ("My left eye is blind and jogs like/a milky sparrow in its socket") and accepted the fact that he really didn't care about either my literary or agricultural pedigree, I actually shared a few laughs with our host.

The rest of the night is a blur in addled remembrance, but I do clearly recall standing up through the sun roof of Jamie’s car in the moonlight as she drove us to their guest cabin, yelling and nearly getting decapitated by a tree branch as Sue and Jamie shrieked and laughed within.  And then Sue and I enjoyed the most intense and abandoned sex of our married life.

That’s how romantic comedy (and Jim Harrison's fish) saved my first marriage.  For the moment.

The New Realism?

One of the great pleasures of moviegoing is to see genre subversion in action: a western that re-examines familiar western tropes and puts them to other uses (Unforgiven), a war movie that turns predictable war stereotypes on their heads (The Hurt Locker), a romantic comedy that slides past expected rom-com beats to sneak up on poignancy and loss in lieu of a happy ending (Lost in Translation).

The strategy of a smart, subversive genre movie is a bit like Madonna's fashion culture-shifting choice to wear underwear as outer-wear: there's a special little thrill in seeing the same old things being put to provocatively new uses.  Two recent releases that I happened to see in quick succession have a like-minded approach.  Both Moneyball and Contagion go this route - being simultaneously true to their genres and mischievously not.

Moneyball doesn't feel like "a baseball movie" for most of its duration - we don't come upon The Big Game until we're nearly in Act 3 - and screenwriters Sorkin and Zaillian seem perversely bent on being more talk than action to its bittersweet end.  Scott Z. Burns' Contagion, despite being baldly a "medical thriller," takes such a rigorously quirky approach to the unfolding of its cubist-like narrative that you forget we've been ostensibly focused on solving the origin mystery of a plague until its final scenes surprise us with that mystery's solution.

While neither film can claim to be a traditional mainstream entertainment (they're too heady and clever for that), they're both major studio releases, and while Moneyball is obviously much more of a feel-good experience, they both deliver the emotional goods - that is, to a point. What I find fascinating in both movies is that at times, on one level of traditional mainstream storytelling, they really are subversive: they consciously deny us the emotional pay-offs we expect.

Generally speaking, mainstream movies fulfill our emotional expectations of story: if a character we identify with is victimized by unearned suffering, we expect to see that wrong righted; injustice meets with justice, and we feel satisfied.  Good is rewarded, evil is punished; the heroic pursuer gets his man, and a love-worthy girl gets her guy.  Traditionally, this is one reason we go to movies - they're far more satisfying in this regard than say, life as we actually live it.  Yet two small but telling set-ups and pay-offs in Moneyball and Contagion stubbornly resist this time-honored construct. 

I'll risk minor SPOILER-age to explain.  In Moneyball, the subversive team of Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill go up against Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as a team manager who doesn't believe in their newfangled approach to the game one whit.  He does his best to oppose and thwart them at every turn, to the point that when Pitt and Hill's strategy starts to work, big-time, we're really eager to see Hoffman eat his hat.

You know, that scene where Hoffman has to grudgingly but gratefully agree that Pitt and Hill had got it right, after all, and maybe, in a lovably cantankerous way, offers something like an apology?  Never happens.  Instead, Pitt and Hill have to suffer the indignity of hearing the sports media fawn all over Hoffman, mistakenly thinking that their winning strategy was his.  The two real, unsung heroes exchange a wordless glance that amounts to a shrug.  And we move on.

In Contagion, Kate Winslett plays a CDC representative with a truly scary, thankless gig - she's the unlucky woman who has to inform a community that they have a full-scale epidemic on their hands.  While running against the grim reaper's clock, Kate must quickly school the town's leaders in how to handle a major crisis, while she tries, against all odds, to figure out where it's started, and how to contain it. 

One of the officials she has to deal with is - no other way to put it - a hostile bitch.  Far from being cooperative with Kate, she seems to take this global life-threatening disaster as a personal affront, and by the time we've encountered her twice (she's even more an angrily obnoxious narcissicist the second time around), we're dying to see her get her comeuppance - hopefully delivered by put-upon, heroic Kate.  But nuh-uh.  Things go a different way, and this grievous wrong never is set right.

These are small beats in the larger scheme of things, and they're in tune with the greater genre-subverting approaches embodied in both films.  But I was struck, days after seeing Moneyball and Contagion, by how these unfulfilled emotional experiences reminded me of something: my daily life.

How's it going for you guys, these days?  Good triumphing over evil on a daily basis?  Seeing little mundane villains get their just rewards, are ya?  Experiencing that wonderful feeling of everything turning out as it's supposed to, in this best of all possible worlds?

Well, of course not.  We're living in an age of frustration.  These days, you not only can't always get what you want, you rarely get what you need, and it's no surprise that public discourse seems more and more like the venting of cumulative impotent rage (witness Occupation Wall Street).

I'm not going to go out on a shaky limb and make a case for Moneyball and Contagion as symbols of a sea-change in the mechanism of popular entertainment.  There will always be, God help us, a Transformers 3.  But I don't think it's entirely coincidental that both movies tap into what feels like a new realism: a gut understanding in the zeitgeist that the old-fashioned pay-offs in storytelling construction don't necessarily cut it - that it's more satisfying, in the Two-Thousand-Teens, to see our emotional experience of Things Not Fulfilling Expectations mirrored on the silver screen.

Small screens, too: Good people die, even heroes (witness Game of Thrones), good people go evil and get rich (hi there, Breaking Bad).  But I find it especially intriguing to see evidence of this more realistic approach in the realm of mainstream movies, where wish fulfillment fantasy reigns supreme.  Am I making too much of a moot matter (Mmmm?)  Projecting a pointlessly myopic point of view?  Or is this an actual trend that you may have noticed, too?

 

Weepers of the World Unite (Redux)

Some years ago I wrote a post here on the phenomenon of men crying at movies - not an activity most of us will admit to - and I started with a wince-worthy reminiscence:

West Side Story was the first movie I ever went to without adult supervision, a Saturday matinee elementary school date with Judy Gale, and by its end (Tony dead and Maria wailing “Come and get me Chico!”) the whole theater was knee-deep in wet Kleenex.  Judy was crying and so was I, but this was long before I had any idea that a guy weeping might be okay, so my big challenge was to be super-quiet and sneaky about it. 

The object was to surreptitiously wipe my face totally clean and look cool when the lights came up.  Somehow I succeeded in pulling this off, and though shaky in the knees, I awaited earning points for my faux-stoic maturity.  Judy, meanwhile, was completely soggy and still going at it as we made our way up the aisle.  And she turned on me suddenly.  “I can’t believe it!”  She was weepily enraged.  “I can’t believe you didn’t cry!”

I’ve never forgotten Judy bawling me out for my faked insensitivity.  And I thought of her again when I read an article in a British GQ magazine (unfortunately unavailable on-line) called The Crying Game: 50 Films That Make Men Cry.  A compilation of quotes from fifty “men of the world” (i.e. contemporary Brits admired by GQ’s James Mullinger and John Naughton), it makes a case that:

Perhaps because we bottle it up so much on a daily basis and perhaps because no one is looking (we hope) and perhaps because, occasionally, movies can be moving without manipulating, the cinema is where the majority of masculine tears are shed.

They also note “bad news for those who fear the weeper would seem to be that advancing years make us ever more likely to cry.”  Oh, thanks for that, chums: more wussiness to look forward to.  The film selections are wildly diverse, from The Wild Bunch (see: stoicism in the face of death, taking bullets for your buddy, etc.) to Jaws (“I was very sad when they blew up that poor fish,” says Boris Johnson, an MP. “Why did they kill such a beautiful creature?  It was only trying to eat people.”).

A mere two out of this group of former stiff upper-lippers cited romantic comedies (the obvious choices), but as a whole, the Sniveling 50 resists any defining pattern, save one: the sole film to get three nods is Spartacus, a Real Men's movie if ever I saw one (It's the every man yelling “I am Spartacus!” scene that gets ‘em).

My original post went on to ask of my own male readers, What’s the one movie that makes you blubber?  The answers were surprising, ranging from understandable (Brief Encounter, Lost in Translation, and of course, The Shawshank Redemption), with an emphasis on underdog men-in-sports pics (Rocky, The Karate Kid), to the merely inexplicable (the John Goodman comedy King Ralph).  Kudos to all the commenters for their honesty (rare is the man who'll admit in print that he saw The Sound of Music, let alone wept at it).

What I'm musing on in the present day is the specifics, i.e. What, exactly, brings on these tears?  I ask this because I've become aware that when I cry at a romantic comedy in particular (Judy Gale taught me that I can talk about this as a badge of honor), more often than not, it isn't because there's something sad going on.  In fact, sometimes the on-screen trigger is some movie couple's joyful reconciliation.

These aren't tears of joyful relief.  So am I weeping to see an idealized fantasy of movie-perfect romantic consummation, which life has taught me is unobtainable?  Do I cry because I know I've been had, yet still want to be?  Or - wussiest of all - because there isn't enough True Love in the world?

It's all pretty embarrassing, but because humiliation loves company, I address this question to both genders: What exactly, specifically, brings you to tears when you watch a movie, and love stories in particular?  It's not so much which movies make you cry that I'm curious about, as why.  Living the RomCom wants to know.

Do Try This at Home

In the "Line-o-Rama" bonus on the just-released Bridesmaids DVD, a bonanza of alternate takery, there's one sequence where Melissa McCarthy improvises variations on the same brief line, over and over again, trying out a different gag every time.  How many takes?  Reader, I counted them: there are forty-eight.

The last question asked in the Q & A of my Screenwriting Expo seminar on "Comedy Craft for the Contemporary Romantic Comedy" came out of discussing Bridesmaids, which I'd worked on as a story analyst at Universal.  I'd shown some clips from it and mentioned the screenplay's long (3-4 years) gestation, noting how co-writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo had been in the enviable position of writing and rewriting on the studio's dime, under the guidance of producer Judd Apatow.

"How do you get into a great situation like that?" the woman in the back wanted to know.  "Well," I said, "You might start by being a talented comedic actress who's got a gig on Saturday Night Live..." And we wrapped things up on that wry, we-should-all-be-so-lucky note. 

The Bridesmaids out-takes and deleted scenes tell an intriguing tale, one that suggests luck isn't necessarily the point.  The DVD extras present ample evidence of something I recently discussed in an on-line interview about the movie's development: the idea that honoring any and all ideas, when you're writing a movie, is in fact a great idea.

According to interviews, Wiig & Mumulo wrote their first draft in six days.  But the script got rewritten a dozen times-plus, and all of those in-between drafts embodied the spirit of "Hey, let's try this!"  With Apatow, director Paul Feig, and a passel of (uncredited) talented joke-punchers on tap, there was plenty of inspirational mentorship in the mix.  But writing team's fearlessness was key.  They'd write a draft with one very elaborate ending painstakingly constructed on the page... and then write another which threw that ending out.

Wiig & Mumulo's clear intention was to find the funniest - which often meant the most honest and real - truths about their characters.  And this being an Apatow production, the process didn't stop with a final draft.  Well-known for encouraging improv, Apatow and Feig encouraged their writer-star and her supports to keep going as the cameras rolled.

Here is my point.  We may not all have a studio, an 800-pound comedy-genius gorilla, a canny director and a cast of seasoned comic actor-writers on hand as a support system while we write, let alone the kind of comedy training and improv background that Wiig brought to this party.  But what we do have, all of us writers, are the two most important tools: imagination and time.  Use 'em. 

And then use 'em again... and again... and again.

All too often when I do consults or see students' screenplay work, I encounter writers who are standing with their feet in screenplay cement.  They're married to this plot beat, wedded to this character choice, ball-and-chained to one particular execution of a sequence. Why?  What's to be lost by cutting that shit loose?  There's absolutely no harm in trying to go a different way.  You can always go back to what you had.  And often what you gain by suspending your own judgment, and taking a leap into the unknown is, well, everything.

You don't need a producer's permission to throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.  You don't need a studio's backing to do a table read with some actors and encourage them to do improvs on your material (though you may need a lawyer if you steal too much).  You don't need anyone's help to write a draft of a scene, set it aside, and instead of revising what you just wrote, write the same scene from scratch with a wholly different approach.

Imagination.  Time.  The courage to let go of whatever you've got so far, and let whatever's left inside you rip. 

Do try this at home.

What Should Win

The Emmys aren't presenting a Best Butler award, nor did I ever think I'd want to lobby for one, but Carson (actor Jim Carter), you've been robbed.  The fact that I have such strong feelings about a fictional character is one testament to what's already become a cultural phenomenon.

There was no reason, when it premiered this past January, to think Downton Abbey could be this good - initially set in pre-WWI England, it's essentially an Upstairs/Downstairs redo, and from the promos had a starchy-dull Masterpiece Theatre look (didn't help that you could barely pronounce the name of the damn thing without stumbling).  Well, think again: impeccably cast, beautifully crafted, and absolutely gripping, the six-part high-flown soap opera, written by Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellows, hooked even the most period drama-resistant American viewers, and has already garnered awards elsewhere round the globe.

Tonight it's up against the nice-try-but-ultimately-lackluster Mildred Pierce mini-series, but if there's any justice (and there isn't much), it really ought to bring home an Emmy.  Devoted fans, while keeping fingers crossed for such an outcome, might enjoy this profile of Fellowes, this photo-studded blog post preview of Season 2 (which includes the Vogue photo shoot spread), and inevitably, the viral video parody that's also turning into a series, online; the not-yet-initiated should skip this good take on the Season 1 finale.

Writers in any form will appreciate the inarguably top-notch character-driven writing in Downton; it's a textbook proving the homily that "there are no small parts."  If you're late to the show, it's not too late to catch up before Season 2 begins: the 1st season is presently available on DVD... while us Downton addicts will apparently have to wait until January 8, 2012 to get our long-awaited fix.  Anyone got a time machine handy?  

The Wisdom of Ira

I came upon this quote from This American Life's Ira Glass on a blog I've been frequenting - in sweet delight - so I don't know anything of the context for it, but what does it matter?  As so many of us go back to school (i.e. to work, to our projects, to our ongoing struggle), I can't think of a better piece of advice that can serve as prod and inspiration.  Here's the quote, unadorned:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners -

I wish someone told me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

But there is this gap.

For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good.  It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. 

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.  And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.  Most people I know who do interesting, creative work, went through years of this.

We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. 

We all go through this.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work - put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will fashion one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap - and your work will be as good as your ambitions - and I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met.

It's gonna take awhile.  It's normal to take awhile.

You've just gotta fight your way through.

Spoiler Un-Alert

If you'd never seen it, would you still see Sleepless in Seattle, knowing that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks get together in the end?

One could argue, as Chuck Klosterman does in a canny essay on the issue of spoilers and screenwriting, that even the selection of genre informs how much a given viewer wants to know about the climax of a movie (i.e. lovers of romantic comedy go into any such feature with a pretty firm grasp on how things are bound to turn out).  Nonetheless, controversy still rages over the issue of spoilage, and flames have been fanned by a recent study publicized in Psychology Today:

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, had people read multiple versions of 12 classic short stories, penned by the likes of John Updike and Agatha Christie. Some versions included a summary that gave away the ending; others stayed as the authors had intended. The spoiled readers reported that they still enjoyed the surprise endings, even though they came as no surprise.

The brief NPR piece containing that nugget of information, aired a few weeks ago, evidently created a  problem for a writer friend of mine.  In a teaser for an upcoming episode, producers of the series she's working on had alarmed her and her fellow staffers by leaking what the writers believed to be a surprise worth saving.  My friend felt that her arguments against this all-too prevalent practice had thus been perilously undermined.

I don't think so, and in fact, I question the frustratingly vague, ultimately inconclusive theories tossed around by those researchers (here's a more thorough article on their study, and here's a post graphing the actual stories used).  I don't at all agree that "plot is overrated," and having been a working reader in the studio system for two decades now, I find their "it's writing that counts" conclusion laughable.

Obviously great writing goes a long way in literature.  But I can say with some authority that in the movie industry, at least, writing does not trump plot.  Many, many a terribly written screenplay has been sold on the basis of its story, and never, to the best of my knowledge, has a project ever been greenlit simply because it was written so well.  Like, if only!

As a viewer, I'll go to my grave insisting that I could not possibly have enjoyed the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones as much as I did, if someone had spoiled for me its now infamous penultimate plot-twist.   To make sense of the UC San Diego study, I think we need to further define "enjoyment."

There is a specific pleasure in experiencing a movie you've been told the end of, when you're watching to see and to appreciate how the trick's been pulled off (The Sixth Sense is a paradigm of such rewards).  There can be a singular enjoyment in having prior knowledge of say, a real-life character's eventual demise, as it creates a very different sort of story tension (i.e. We have the privileged vantage of knowing more than the well-known protagonist).  There is a particular smug joy in knowing the ending when you're watching a movie for the second time with someone who does not (the Germans probably have an unpronounceable word for this, and if they don't, they should). 

All of these possible reactions to movie spoilers, and more, aren't covered in the extremely general homilies voiced by the researchers (clearly, they're not writers).  Whatever the human psychology that motivates it, there's an extra-special frisson of deep pleasure, not to be under-valued, in experiencing - unspoiled - the "how it happens" in a cleverly constructed plot twist, even when the resolution is a bygone conclusion.

This is, after all, the essence of the studio exec's ethos, expressed in the oft-heard cry, "Give me the same - but different!"  How boy gets girl in the end has provided some of the great saving graces in an otherwise often too-formulaic genre.

And there are even those rare cases where a secret kept has created a classic, don't-try-this-at-home climax.  Much as I'd love to know what Bill Murray whispered in Scarlett Johansson's ear at the end of Lost in Translation, I'm fine with the fact that I'll never find out - it keeps the relationship between these imaginary characters all the more intimate, in a uniquely provocative way. 

So where do you stand on the "plot doesn't matter" issue?  Living RomCom wants to know.

Does Your Character Need a Job?

This past Sunday's NY Times profile on screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna catches the screenwriter saying what writers who haven't tried writing rom-coms won't cop to:

McKenna came to realize that writing a straight romantic comedy — or at least writing an interesting straight romantic comedy — is very, very hard. “Thin people who want to be in love and their concerns about their love life — that’s not a very dynamic want,” McKenna said over lunch near her Hollywood office. “There’s that, and then there’s the nuclear briefcase. There’s a spectrum of urgency, and wanting to find someone is a not-very-directed goal. Whereas, ‘I need to get through this year and then get promoted,’ or ‘If we don’t get the ratings up the show will close down’ — there’s an urgency.”

That urgency - particularly, the stakes and jeopardy that come alive when a given script hones in on its protagonist's professional life (as opposed to her romantic difficulties) - is the big asset that comes with what McKenna has carved out as her own niche turf:

What feels modern about McKenna’s version of the romantic comedy is that, as she explains it, “the women have goals that are not strictly speaking romantic.” When a young news producer in McKenna’s “Morning Glory” is transformed by a stunning dress, it is for a job interview, not a date. “The Devil Wears Prada” concludes with a reconciliation between the heroine and her boyfriend, but it is almost besides the point: the happy ending is delivered by a better job.

“I Don’t Know How She Does It,” which comes out in September, could be considered the third in a trilogy of McKenna work-love movies — a grouping that McKenna refers to as “the BlackBerry 3” because the women in them are forever clutching their phones or chucking them or eyeing them longingly or putting them in the freezer (the relationship maybe be put on ice, but only temporarily).

McKenna can also do straight relationship-centric stuff well, as her effective 27 Dresses of a few years back has proven (while kicking off what's become a full-fledged Katherine Heigl backlash).  Meanwhile, what resonates for me in her success story is a question it poses for romantic comedy scribes: Does your protagonist have a job that really matters?  And is your movie really about a woman and her work (or a man and his) in a way that reflects the importance of a livelihood in real life?

As the McKenna profile points out, female protagonists still seem to be stuck in the sterotype of "job versus romance" - the trope of a woman who can only have a successful career if she's sacrificed her romantic ideals on the altar of commerce.  Meanwhile, given that we're living in a particularly precarious job market moment (one that isn't likely to end anytime soon), the whole question of character employment for either gender has more resonance now than ever.

Nonetheless, I can't tell you how many rom-com specs I read on a weekly basis where "job" is code for "obligatory subplot." All too often the "what the character does for a living" in a given romantic comedy serves as filler - it's something thrown in to open up the movie a bit, to add a little extra action and conflict.  What's missing is that urgency that McKenna has honed in on as her ostensible subject: the idea that the gig defines the character, and that the stakes in one's livelihood are actually the most important stakes in the story.

In real life, how you feel about the work that you do is a hugely significant indicator of your level of personal happiness.  Our work does define us - even if it's in our thinking that what we do every day is nothing but a way to pay the rent. 

Character-driven rom-coms that put their protagonist's livelihoods front-and-center (even broad farces like The Proposal) are grounded in worlds that audiences find relatable and credible.  And rom-com screenplays that place their characters in an intriguing but believable workplace (see the McKenna oeuvre) benefit from the kind of real-life intensity that can connect an audience to that most primal of moviegoing experiences: the sense that those dream people up on the screen are actually up against the kind of quotidian concerns that occupy our own every waking hour.

Does your character have a real job?  How much does it matter to your story?  The more it does, the more your movie is likely to matter to us.