John Michael Hayes, Lucky Bastard

Above is a picture of Alfred Hitchcock, Grace Kelly, and John Michael Hayes on the set of To Catch a Thief.

What a lucky bastard.

For the record and for those newbies who may not know, John Michael Hayes passed away recently. He is the one screenwriter who has worked more often with Alfred Hitchcock than any other screenwriter, having written the scripts for Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much.

After reading Steven DeRosa’s Writing with Hitchcock earlier this year, which chronicled the rise and fall of John Michael’s working relationship with Hitch, I have been on a John Michael Hayes kick ever since. I consumed his screenplays. The Man Who Knew Too Much can be read here. Rear Window can be found here. I’ve also been watching his films. I bought the restored Rear Window just so I could see the John Michael Hayes interview (and also hear the film commentary by John Fawell, which was great). I started watching many of his post-Hitchcock films, too, most recently Nevada Smith, which was good.

There would be no doubt in anyone’s mind after studying Hayes’ work how well Hayes’ style and sensibilities meshed with Hitchcock’s. He was perfect for Hitch, and they met each other at just the right time in both of their careers. It’s little known that Hitch was actually struggling at the time when Hayes came along. Their historic collaboration transformed both of their lives and careers. Of course, make no mistake about it. The auteur theory applies to Hitchcock. Those are all HIS films, and Hayes helped conceive Hitchcock’s vision of those films. However, the contribution of Hayes is not to be dismissed, particularly when it came to characters and dialogue. There are very good reasons why Hayes worked with Hitch more than any other screenwriter, because he brought a lightheartedness to some very dark concepts, which is so welcome and enriching to those films. It was GREAT FUN! Plus, at the end of every John Michael Hayes story, there was always hope. Hayes has become a model for me in those respects.

I don’t know where I’d place him in the pantheon of all-time great screenwriters, but he holds a very special place in my heart.


Here’s another image. He was a good-looking guy! It saddens me greatly how a human life is glanced over in obits in the media, like when they say, as they did in the Times Online, “John Michael Hayes was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1919. He began as a newspaper reporter before serving in the US Army during the Second World War. He moved to California where he worked in radio before turning to Hollywood in the early 1950s…”

That is not the story of John Michael Hayes. His time in Hollywood writing for the radio was actually cut short due to a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, which kept him bed-ridden for months back in Massachusetts. Plus, his family didn’t support his writing career. But as soon as John could walk again, he snuck out of his family’s home (while they were away at the movies), left a note, and hitchhiked his way across the country from Worcester, Massachusetts, all the way to Hollywood, California, while hopping on two canes and with only $15 in his pocket. Seriously, he just left. He didn’t tell his family he was going either because he knew they would’ve discouraged him.

THAT is how much he wanted to be a writer.

Yeah, all you aspiring writers out there think you have it so rough? Tell me you want to be a writer as badly as John Michael Hayes. Tell me you would’ve done what John Michael Hayes did.

Let me quote two paragraphs from Writing with Hitchcock:

Within a day and a half, Hayes arrived at Zanesville, Ohio, where he spent 75 cents on a telegram informing his parents that he was okay. He continued, nonstop, until he reached Flagstaff, Arizona, where he boarded a bus during a thunderstorm. Hayes finally arrived in Los Angeles with $4.50 remaining and checked into the Mark Twain Hotel for the night, planning to go the following morning to CBS, where he had worked previously. En route to CBS the next day, Hayes passed the NBC radio studios, where there was a line of people waiting to get into one of the popular quiz shows, Double or Nothing. Hayes decided to stay and see the show. While he waited on line, one of the show’s assistants saw him on canes and let him inside the studio ahead of everyone else. When he got inside, he was asked if he would like to be a contestant. Hayes said yes. The questions they asked were about English literature, and he won $640.

Hayes remembered, ‘I went down the block to deposit my money in a bank. Next door was CBS. I went in, pressed the elevator button, and ran into Ernie Martin, a friend who had since become a Broadway producer. Ernie looked me up and down and said he needed a writer for a new show with Lucille Ball and he hired me.’ The show for which Hayes was assigned on the spot was My Favorite Husband. Specializing in comedy and suspense, Hayes turned out expert scripts for many diverse series, including Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Story of Dr. Kildare, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Sweeney and March, Alias Jane Doe, Nightbeat, and Richard Diamond, Private Detector.

Can you believe that? And then he married a hot blonde model!

I can’t find where I read it, but I do recall someone calculating that John Michael Hayes wrote roughly 1,500 scripts for a wide variety of half hour radio shows before he turned to screenwriting. Even then, he STILL struggled with screenwriting, because he relied so much on dialogue for everything. Hitchcock had to retrain him on his methods of pure cinema and visual storytelling.

To all you vain newbies out there who have read one book and written maybe two scripts and you think you’re so great – come talk to me when you've written 1,500 scripts with characters and dialogue. Just consider how much experience he had before he wrote all that great dialogue we know and love in his films with Hitchcock.


Chris Wehner reprinted an interview with Hayes. I have always loved this story about his first meeting with Hitch, which is told in greater depth and clarity in Writing with Hitchcock, but it’s still funny here:

I was given a copy of the Woolrich story by my agent, and was told to meet with Hitchcock later that week for dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My job was simple: Read the Woolrich piece, and be prepared to discuss it in great detail and length. It was not unlike preparing for the most important book report of one's life.

The meeting itself was a near fiasco. It felt much more like a personal test of endurance than anything resembling a story conference. Hitchcock arrived late and, with time to sit and worry over his arrival, I had a couple of drinks, which I wasn't entirely used to. Upon his arrival, we had a feast for the ages, along with copious amounts of alcohol.

Plied by the liquor, I rambled on for much too long about Hitchcock's prior films. And I wasn't entirely complimentary. Hitchcock appeared to listen, but once the meal itself was finished he abruptly left. And we had never even spoken about Rear Window at all. Later, after returning home, my wife asked how the meeting went. I told her we'd better start packing our bags, as I felt quite strongly that my opportunity with Hitchcock had vanished along with any future career I had envisioned in the industry.

Amazingly, upon reporting for work on Monday, I was told that Hitchcock immensely enjoyed our dinner and that I was to be hired immediately.

Hehehe…


Now get this. I have to share this, which is why I always think of Hayes as a lucky bastard. Once he got the writing assignment for Rear Window, he got to spend 5 days with Grace Kelly just to get to know her and get a feel for her range so that he could shape her character for the film. Can you believe that? 5 days with Grace Kelly! Not to mention that Hitch was already upset with her because during the last film, Dial M for Murder, she “slept with the writer.”

So you can imagine what I’m thinking, right? I've already admitted that I have spent time with Style and Mystery. Stick around with these guys long enough and they will tell you that any pick-up artist doing everything right only needs... seven hours.

That bastard, John Michael Hayes, had 5 days to spend with Grace Kelly.

Man, they don't make films like this anymore.

Now I’m not suggesting that anything happened. She may very well have still been involved with that “writer” from Dial M and Hayes by all accounts was quite happily married with that hot blonde all the way up to her death in 1989. And she was just as breathtakingly beautiful.

But that bastard got to spend 5 days with Grace Kelly.

I’m just saying, if that was me, Kelly would’ve had second thoughts about that Prince and the world might’ve been a different place.

Hehehe...


There’s another story I must share while they filmed To Catch a Thief:

On one of their days off, Hayes accompanied Kelly and Grant’s wife Betsy Drake on a tour of Monaco, and the writer taught Kelly how to play roulette. She won some money, after which the trio went to lunch and continued their sightseeing, ending up outside the Grimaldi museum. Kelly was delighted by what she could see of the gardens, the gates to which were locked. Hayes remembered, ‘Grace said, ‘I wonder if we could find some way to get in.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’ll see if somebody can get to the Prince, or his public relations man, and get you a tour of the garden while you’re here.’ But we finished the location photography before a tour could be arranged.’ The following year, when Grace Kelly returned to the Riviera, she was a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. This time she did meet Prince Rainier, who gave her a personal tour of his gardens. Within a year’s time, she had retired from the screen to become Princess Grace of Monaco. Years afterward, Hayes remembered, ‘Later, when she invited my wife and myself to the palace, Grace said, ‘Now I can show you the garden.’


BTW - Check out all the Life Magazine pics of Grace Kelly.

When John Michael was hired to write To Catch a Thief, Hitch asked him, “Have you ever been to the Riviera?” No, was the response, and Hitch sent Hayes and his wife to the Riviera for two weeks to do “research” on the new script.

That lucky damn bastard.

It is quite a shame about his break-up with Hitch. I don’t have anything to add to the matter except to say that I side wholly and completely with Hayes. That was about Hitch’s ego and nothing else.

I agree with what was said in the Times: There were losses on both sides. Hayes departed for more lucrative but less distinguished films while Hitchcock rarely again enjoyed the luxury of having brilliant scripts promptly delivered. On later films, such as Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969), where the scripts had run into trouble, Hitchcock’s personal assistant, Peggy Robertson, suggested calling in Hayes. Not one to swallow his pride, Hitchcock ignored her advice.

Steven Derosa has a bio available of John Michael Hayes in pdf. Interestingly, there is a wonderful link found here where Derosa shares a cut third act scene from an early draft of To Catch a Thief, which Hayes loved but couldn’t sell Hitch on the idea.

There was also an interview with him in Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s where Patrick McGilligan asked Hayes about the widely rumored sequel to Rear Window. I loved his response:

I was offered an absolutely monumental sum of money by the man who owns the rights... That money would help me in my old age... I don’t know. Some pictures have a magic that’s almost indefinable. Grace is gone. Hitch is gone. Jimmy’s too frail. Wendell Corey’s gone. Raymond Burr is dead. We couldn’t recapture that kind of innocence. What could it possibly be?

But I’ve done a story, just in case.

Hehehe…

I do love John Michael Hayes. May he rest in peace.

Here’s his official website.

And also, in honor of Hayes, I reposted my article below on the Exposition of Rear Window.

Thank you, John, for everything you've taught me this year.

-MM

Archives: The Exposition of Rear Window

Hey guys,

In light of the recent death of John Michael Hayes, I thought I'd share again this article about the development of Rear Window. There is so much more that could be said that this piece feels too short to give the film any justice, such as the way that all the couples in the courtyard represented different aspects of the conflict between L.B. Jeffries and Lisa Fremont or the ways that Jeffries or Lisa reacted to those other people in the courtyard was a revelation of character. (Lisa understands Miss Torso, but she related to Miss Lonelyhearts.)

In any case, I hope you enjoy it.

-MM

---------------------

One can always point to the obvious strengths of a great film. What a sensational twist! Look at the way they handled exposition! Subtext! Visual storytelling! Look! Truffaut was right! She wasn’t simply showing the wedding ring to Stewart simply because it was the crucial piece of evidence needed to indict Thorwald! She finally PROVED herself to him! That was her PROPOSAL! Wasn't that brilliant?

Studying the strengths of great films always seemed to be a kind of elusive game to me because successful moments in one story does not necessarily equate into successful moments in a different story. You can't live off someone else's successes. You have to use your imagination and create great moments in the context of your own story. I also get kind of fearful about being too knowledgeable about films because I’m afraid I’ll borrow too liberally from the past when I should be creating something new we haven’t seen before. Failure, on the other hand… failure holds universal truths. Flat characters. Lack of tension. Telling instead of showing. You always learn more from failure than success. You take those failures with you when you sit down to write. Because half the battle of screenwriting is avoiding mistakes, and believe me, there’s an infinite field of landmines ahead of you.

However, there’s much to be learned from studying the development of great films. When you see how a story began, read the choppy ideas in its infancy stages, and then study the decisions the filmmakers made about the story to make it truly great, that’s where you find your lessons. Steven DeRosa has a great chapter on Rear Window in his book, Writing with Hitchcock.

Consider this.

Rear Window started out as a short story by Cornell Woolrich published in Dime Detective in 1942. There was no love story. A man was stuck in his single bedroom with an unscreened bay window and not unlike the film, watched the nameless “rear window dwellers” and suspected a salesman named Thorwald of murdering his invalid wife.

First, the studio had a 13-page treatment written by playwright and director Joshua Logan. To brutally simply things, Logan provided a backbone to the film, although the details were kind of weak. Jeff was a sportswriter who enjoyed playing amateur sleuth when he had the time. He broke his leg by, uhh, slipping down stairs. He had a girlfriend by the name of Trink who was struggling as an actress. He didn't think she'd ever make it, which was the source of their conflict, and he couldn't commit to a relationship. In that pivotal scene where she’s caught inside Thorwald's apartment, she "acts" her way out convincing Jeff she's a great actress and thus, they get married.

When Hitch and his new writer, John Michael Hayes, got onboard, they made a number of significant, yet fascinating changes. They wanted to make Jeff’s occupation more EXCITING and the reason for his broken leg more DRAMATIC. Thus, they made him a photographer who was wounded in the line of duty. They also wanted a more plausible way for these two characters to meet. So he wasn’t just a photographer, but a foreign correspondent who had to do a fashion shoot and that’s how they met. I’ve said that characters come first. But when you have a great concept like Rear Window, I see nothing wrong with designing characters that fit perfectly into that concept.


Question – how much dialogue do you think would be required to establish all of this information about Jeff’s background, accident, and relationship to his girlfriend? Answer - NONE.

This was all established wordlessly in the opening shot that pans across Jeff’s apartment. Here’s Miriam from her film breakdown: “The camera comes back inside the apartment to show the thermometer at 90° and Jeff asleep in his wheelchair. The camera runs down his left leg to take in the full cast and then around his apartment to show his smashed camera, the amazing shot that broke both the camera and his leg, and finally his girlfriend on the cover of a magazine: Lisa (played by Grace Kelly), who is both beautiful and smart.”

Isn’t that amazing? It’s debatable to me whether the scene that followed, the conversation Jeff has with his editor, was truly essential to the story. We didn’t need it. In any case, this opening sequence really should be the crowning achievement in film on the art of exposition. How many amateurs write master scene headings and then action lines to describe the look of a room when the materials inside the room has very little to do with the story? But here, the visuals were used to convey essential information to the audience.

Here’s John Michael:

“So that’s how one thing – to break his leg in an interesting way – led to his occupation, and led to something that would get him together with Lisa. That’s how it grew. But there was more you could do with it. He had a telescopic lens we could use later with the picture of the flowers going up and down in the garden. He had flashbulbs to fend off the villain. Out of this grew a whole lot of interesting things.”

The addition of Stella was a masterful creation on the part of Hayes, because this character was the hard-bitten realist. If she buys this story, even the most cynical viewer in the audience will buy it.


Let’s talk about the couple’s story. As you know, their different lifestyles became the source of their conflict. She was fascinated with him, and he was naturally interested in her. It was a twist suggested by Hitch that the woman chases after the man for a change. But Jeff figures models are frivolous and there wasn’t a chance for him. He’s a poor safari guy, and she’s wined and dined by wealthy men. And so, over the course of this mystery, it was really about this couple being tested and her proving herself to him in a deeper way. It was certainly deeper than what we encountered in Logan’s treatment. This was more than a struggling actress proving her skills to the man she loves. Here, she has to prove that she is much more as a person than how he views her, which was a woman only interested in a new dress, lobster dinner, and latest scandal. When she's caught in Thorwald's apartment and wiggles her finger to Stewart to indicate that she had the big piece of incriminating evidence, that is, Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring, there was ALSO the implication, as Truffaut pointed out, that since she just proved herself to Stewart, this was her proposal to him. The two plots came together so perfectly in that one moment.

Of course, at this moment Stewart realizes how wrong he was, how great she is, how he can't live without her, which was taken out of Hayes’ real-life experience with his wife following a car accident. In any case, at that moment of Stewart’s revelation about Grace Kelly, the tables are immediately turned, the watcher becomes the watched, and his onetime dream of freeing himself from Kelly even at the prospect of "welcoming trouble," becomes his own real nightmare. It’s a story ROOTED IN THE CHARACTERS, who they are, what they do, with obstacles created for them, and a conflict that escalates and gets resolved within the context of the murder mystery.

There was also a bit of a problem with the disposal of Thorwald’s wife, because in an early treatment, Thorwald dumps his wife’s head in the newly poured concrete foundation at a construction site. This meant that Grace Kelly would have to follow Thorwald to the location, which we won’t see, be in a danger, which we won’t see, and then recount this whole adventure in a long-winded piece of verbal exposition. It was far better to have Thorwald bury her head in the garden.


The ending was a bit of a problem in Hayes’ first draft, too. Let me quote Derosa from his book: “Thorwald is shot and killed by Coyne, which is consistent with the story and treatment. There is also an attempt to wrap up the stories of the surrounding windows neatly. Stella advises Miss Lonely Hearts, ‘Just throw away those pills, honey. If this face could trap a man, yours could get there.’ The newlyweds are observed. ‘H-a-a-r-r-e-e,’ calls the bride in a desirous tone, playing on the audience’s expectations of a honeymoon couple. ‘Start without me,’ calls the young groom, as the camera reveals they have been playing a game of chess. Miss Torso compliments the Songwriter for his lovely tune, and he invites her up to his apartment. Finally, the first draft ends with Coyne, Lisa, and Jeff. Coyne reveals, ‘You were right. There was something in that garden. And I just got a signal. It’s in Thorwald’s icebox now.’ Jeff replies dryly, ‘That reminds me. Two heads are better than one.” Ho hum.

Consider how they ended it with another long, single take that mirrored the opening shot. Here’s Miriam again, “The final scene wraps up all the stories with the same kind of pan shot that started the movie. Miss Lonelyheart helps Mr. Songwriter paint his apartment and tells him his music has been an inspiration to her. Mrs. Balcony-sleeper teaches her new puppy to ride down in the basket. And Miss Torso welcomes home her dumpy boyfriend with a hug and a kiss. The first thing he wants is a good meal. Inside Jeff's apartment, we find that the temperature has dropped and that he now has two casts: one on each leg. [The ‘new’ Lisa is wearing jeans and a cotton shirt] reading a book about life on the road in a foreign land, but when she sees that he's asleep, she sneaks out her fashion magazine.”

MM’s Unsympathetic Protag Survey

Hey guys,

My next article for Script, which is due mid-December for the March/April issue, is all about unsympathetic protagonists.

And I’d like to ask my brilliant readers out there to share with me their favorite unsympathetic protags. I’m already planning to write about Scrooge (A Christmas Carol), Salieri (Amadeus), Phil Connors (Groundhog Day), Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (The Lives of Others), Michael Corleone (maybe from The Godfather), Daniel Plainview (There Will Be Blood), and one of my favs, the Diabolical Don G.

I tried to highlight the biggies that everyone would recognize.

But how many other unsympathetic protags can you think of?

-MM

1939 Alfred Hitchcock Lecture

Hello, my friends,

I have read so much about this lecture but never the lecture itself. Well, I’m very proud to share with you the transcript of the lecture Hitch gave in March, 1939, at Radio City Music Hall, which was organized by The Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University.

(Hat-tip to the Alfred Hitchcock Wiki.)

I’m posting this for my own personal benefit more than anything else, so that I may refer back to it if I ever need to.

In any case, happy reading!

-MM

--------------------------------------

I have some notes here that are mixed up with a letter from my mother, and I am trying to sort them out. First of all, before we go into melodrama and suspense, about which Mr. Abbott asked me to speak to you, I wish to talk about the method one invariably uses in designing a motion picture script.

When I am given a subject, probably a book, play, or an original, I like to see it on one sheet of foolscap. That is to say, have the story, in its barest bones, just laid out on a sheet of foolscap paper. You might call it the steelwork, or just the barest bones, as I said before. Now you do not have to write down very much, maybe just that a man meets a woman at a certain place, and something else happens. In the briefest possible way, this thing should be laid out on a piece of paper.

From that, of course, we start to build the treatment of that story -- the characterizations, the narrative, and even the detail, until we have probably a hundred pages of complete narrative without dialogue. But I do not mean narrative in the abstract, the practical side of what is going to appear on the screen. I always try to avoid having in the treatment anything that is not really visual. In dialogue we indicate it by saying, for instance, that the man goes to the sideboard, pours himself out a drink, and tells the woman that something or other is going to happen to him. We indicate it in the treatment, and this is very full and practically the complete film on paper, in terms of action and movement.

The particular reason why I prefer to do that is because I don't like to kid myself. I do not like to let myself think that there is more in it than there really is, because I believe that one should build up. That is why I prefer to start with the broad narrative, and then from that, develop into this full treatment -- but purely cinematic treatment. You must not go into anything like a short story, or anything descriptive, like "with half-strangled cries" and that sort of thing. You just want the actual movement or action, and then indicate the dialogue.

Dialogue is the next phase, and that depends on how much time one has. Once the story line is decided upon and one has a dialogue writer in, one usually deals with it sequence by sequence. After the first sequence, we call the dialogue writer in and hand it to him. While he has the first sequence, we start the first sequence in treatment, and build up as we go along. Finally we have a whole pile of material which is treatment, and a whole pile of material which is dialogue.

From the stage we go into the shooting script by assembling the dialogue and the treatment. We keep building it even further, and adding to it. We do not do this in a mechanical way, but put up as many ideas as we possibly can. Finally we have a shooting script of the whole thing. Then we cast it, shoot it, and finally it is shown.

A member of the audience sees that film, and probably after seeing it goes home and tells his wife about it. She wants to know what it was like, so he tells her that it was about a man who met a girl -- and whatever he tells his wife is what you should have had on the piece of paper in the very beginning. That is the complete cycle that I like to aim for, as far as possible, and that is the process one works on in designing a motion picture script.

Now to talk about melodrama, you know, of course, that melodrama was the original mainstay of motion pictures material, on account of its obvious physical action and physical situation. After all, the words "motion pictures" means action and movement. Melodrama lends itself very much -- perhaps more than before the talkies came in; more than anything else, I mean.

You know we had the early chase films, and we had those French pictures where a man used to run around Paris. He was on a bicycle and knocked people over as he went along. Are there any of these films in the museum?

Of course, in those days, and even up to the coming of the talking picture, the characters were pretty well cardboard figures. One advantage that the talking picture has given us is that it allowed us to delineate character a little more, through the medium of dialogue. The talking picture has given us more character, and obviously, in the long run, that is what we are going to rely upon.

There has been a tendency, I feel, in the past, in this development of character, to rely upon the dialogue, only, to do it. We have lost what has been -- to me, at least -- the biggest enjoyment in motion pictures, and that is action and movement. What I am trying to aim for is a combination of these two elements, character and action.

The difficulty is, I feel, that the two rhythms are entirely different things; I mean the rhythm and pace of action and the rhythm and pace of dialogue. The problem is to try and blend these two things together. I am still trying it, and I have not entirely solved the problem, but eventually, I imagine, it will be solved. The field of the future motion picture story has obviously got to come from character, and where the difficulty comes is that character controls the situation.

That is the one thing that disturbs me a little. You see modern novels, psychological novels, with frank characterizations and very good psychology, but there has been a tendency, with the novel and with a lot of stage plays, to abandon story. They don't tell enough story or plot. For a motion picture, we do need quite an amount of story.

Now the reason we need a lot of story is this: a film takes an hour and twenty minutes to play, and an audience can stand about an hour. After an hour, it starts to get tired, so it needs the injection of some dope. One might also say there should be a slogan, "Keep them awake at the movies!"

That dope, as one might call it, is action, movement, and excitement; but more than that, keeping the audience occupied mentally. People think, for example, that pace is fast action, quick cutting, people running around, or whatever you will, and it is not really that at all. I think that pace in a film is made entirely by keeping the mind of the spectator occupied. You don't need to have quick cutting, you don't need to have quick playing, but you do need a very full story and the changing of one situation to another. You need the changing of one incident to another, so that all the time the audience's mind is occupied.

Now so long as you can sustain that and not let up, then you have pace. That is why suspense is such a valuable thing, because it keeps the mind of the audience going. Later on I will tell you how I think the audience should participate in those things.

In trying to design a melodrama with these elements of character, action, and movement, of course it does present a pretty big problem, and one has to adopt various methods. One method I have used in the past -- I did it with The Man Who Knew Too Much -- was to select some backgrounds or events that would lend themselves to a colorful, melodramatic motion picture. Of course, this is quite the wrong thing to do, but here is an idea: select the background first, then the action. It might be a race or it might be anything at all. Sometimes I select a dozen different events, and shape them into a plot. Finally -- and this is just the opposite to what is usually done -- select your character to motivate the whole of the above.

Under the present circumstance, people figure out a character or group of characters, and they allow them to motivate the story, the background, and everything else. Now you see, you are liable, unless you get a very colorful character, like an engine driver, a ship's captain or a diver, to be led into very dull backgrounds.

For example, if you take a society woman, she will obviously lead you into a drawing room, into a lot of talk, you see, and there you are! You might choose many characters of that nature, and it is inevitable, if you follow the regular method. I am not advocating that this should be everybody's method, it is only a feeling I have, myself, because I want to get certain things, you see.

Sometimes you cannot get the characters you want to take you into these places, so you say, "All right, I will have the society woman." The next thing is, of course, what to do with her. You might say, "I would like to have her in a ship's stokehole." Your job becomes very hard, indeed! You have to be really inventive to get a society woman into a ship's stokehole, to get a situation that will lead that way, and a character who, by reason of the situation, would find herself in a ship's stokehole.

Of course, I'd bet a lot of you would say, "It is too much trouble. Let's put her in a yacht's stokehole. A society woman is bound to go there." That, of course, is radical and you must not do it, because the moment you do, you are weakening and not being inventive.

If you can summon up enough courage to select your background and your incidents, you will find you really have something to work out. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, I said, "I would like to do a film that starts in the winter sporting season. I would like to come to the East End of London. I would like to go to a chapel and to a symphony concert at the Albert Hall in London."

That is a very interesting thing, you know. You create this terrific problem, and then say, "How the devil am I going to get all those things into it?" So you start off, and eventually you may have to abandon one or two events, as it might be impossible to get some of the characters into a symphony concert, or whatever it is. You say, "Well, can't Stokowski have his hair cut?" or something like that, and you try and blend the characters in the best way you can -- appear to be quite natural that all the events have taken place in those settings because it was necessary for them to do so.

Now in the shape of this thing, it is inevitable that you must design your incidents and your story shape to mount up. I always think the film shape is very much like the short story. Once it starts, you haven't time to let up. You must go right through, and your film must end on its highest note. It must never go over the curve. Once you have reached your high spot, then the film is stopped.

Now one of the things that is going to help you hold all these things together and provide you with that shape is the suspense. Suspense, I feel, is a very important factor in nearly all motion pictures. It can be arrived at in so many different ways. To me, there is no argument that a surprise lasting about ten seconds, however painful, is not half as good as suspense for about six or seven reels.

I think that nearly all stories can do with suspense. Even a love story can have it. We used to feel that suspense was saving someone from the scaffold, or something like that, but there is also the suspense of whether the man will get the girl. I really feel that suspense has to do largely with the audience's own desires or wishes.

There, though, we have another subject -- audience identification, and it is so great that I don't think I have time to deal with it here. I might say that it is a very, very important point. For example, you probably get more suspense out of an audience worrying about a known figure than some unknown person. It is quite possible that an audience will have convulsions at the thought of Clark Gable being shot or killed, but if it is some unknown actor, they will say, "Who the hell is he, anyway?" That is one important aspect of suspense.

Then there is the other thing, and that is where suspense is in a title. Take a film like Mutiny on the Bounty. Suppose it had not had the word "mutiny" in the title, but that it was called The Good Ship Bounty. You would have told the audience nothing. With its real title, however, the audience in the cinema is waiting from the moment the picture starts, wondering when the mutiny is going to start.

That applies again and again with titles. A lot of people are very unconscious of that fact. They do not realize how much suspense the audience is enjoying through a thing like that.

But to revert to the actual writing of suspense, of course in the old days, as I said, it was the race to the scaffold. Griffith did it, you know, in Orphans of the Storm, The Knife, and that sort of thing, but I feel that today we can have two types of suspense. We can have suspense like the old chase, which I would call objective suspense, and then there is a subjective suspense, which is letting the audience experience it through the mind or eyes of one of the characters. Now that is a very different thing.

You see, I am a great believer in making the audience suffer, by which I mean that instead of doing it, say as Griffith used to do it, by cutting to the galloping feet of the horse and then going to the scaffold -- instead of showing both sides, I like to show only one side. In the French Revolution, probably someone said to Danton, "Will you please hurry on your horse," but never show him getting on the horse. Let the audience worry whether the horse has even started, you see. That is making the audience play its part.

The old way used to be that the audience was presented with just an objective view of this galloping horse, and they just said they hoped the horse got there in time. I think it should go further than that. Not only "I hope he gets there in time," but "I hope he has started off," you see. That is a more intensive development. Of course, that is simply dealing with the treatment of what is the convention of suspense, but to get to suspense for a film as a whole, as I have said, a title can give it.

And then there is a thing which one might term the springboard situation. In the first reel of a film you establish a given situation. You might take a sympathetic character who gets himself into some sort of trouble, whatever it might be. The rest of the film, then, is, "Will he get himself out of that situation?" I always call that the springboard situation.

For example, this film that Mr. Abbott mentioned, The Lodger, was based on Jack the Ripper. I took the trouble to spread a description of this man over London. I did it by every known means of disseminating news. The fact that he only went for fair-haired girls was broadcast, or that he wore a black cloak or carried a bag. I spent a whole reel on stuff like that. By the end of the reel you were shown a house where the gas went out, and just as the man was putting a shilling into the meter, there was a knock at the door. The housewife opened the door, and just then the gas came up with a full flood of light on this figure. Now that is what I call the springboard situation. You then knew that Jack the Ripper was in a London boarding house. In the rest of the film, you see, you were bound to hold on to that.

I have always been, as far as possible, a great believer in that sort of thing, such as you had in the Chain Gang picture, where a man escapes and you wonder what happens to him. Galsworthy's Escape is another example. They are what I call springboard situations, where suspense starts practically in the first reel. I have always found that, generally speaking, what I would call letting the audience into the secret as early as possible. Lay all the facts out, as much as you can, unless you are dealing with a mystery element. I have just finished a film, Jamaica Inn, with Charles Laughton, and apropos of this, I came upon a very queer problem. I don't know how many of you have read the book, but there was a character in it who was a village parson. He was in a village where wrecking took place -- the luring of ships on to the rocks by a gang of wreckers. Their headquarters were at this Jamaica inn, and the innkeeper was the head of the gang, but he was under the thumb or control of a shadow described in the book.

Actually, of course, it was this parson character who emerged for the last third of the story, and there he took an active part in the film. He had big acting scenes with the girl in the story, and he really took command of the whole picture, he was that strong. But for two-thirds of the picture, he had to appear just as an innocuous figure.

The problem there was, as I saw it, when I came in on this thing, that one would have to have a very important actor to play this character, because of what he had to do in the last third of the picture. The question was, how could one possibly have an important actor playing in an apparently unimportant part in the first two-thirds, when the characters are talking about a mysterious and influential figure?

Well, as you know, in the "who-done-it" story, the murderer turns out to be none other than the butler or the maid! Now this was a sort of "who-done-it" story, but with that difference, that the part was so strong a prominent actor had to be cast for it, because he took possession of the whole film at the end. The question was that you had neither suspense nor surprise. You certainly had one moment of surprise, though, when Laughton turned out to be whatever it was. A good phrase, that, don't you think?

Naturally, then, the story had to be changed. It is one occasion when journalists say, "Those film people have ruined another good story by changing it around." But one can really hold one's head up here, and say that it has been done with every possible reasoning. We had to let the audience into the secret about that figure and change the whole middle of the story, so that you saw this figure behind the scenes and how he manipulated the wreckers. We had to invent new situations. We couldn't just show what he did and how he did it, but had to have new situations, showing him up against it, investigations going on by the detectives of the period -- if they had them in 1820. The entire middle had to be changed, so that it became a suspense story instead of a surprise story.

How am I doing? Don't you want to ask questions? I sound bored, with nobody interrupting me.

Around Blogosphere – 11/22/08

Craig Mazin rips apart the new Writers Store Catalog. For example, the script binding kit (pictured above), for a low-low $39.95!

Script Binding Kit - $39.95

Not a bad little package for someone looking to mail out a bunch of scripts. You get three hole punch paper, some nice linen script covers, good old Acco brads, a script binding mallet, and some–

Wait, what?

A script binding mallet? What’s that for, to beat yourself in the face once you realize no one’s buying your 184 page space opera?

I swear to God, just when this thing was looking reasonable, they have to throw in a mallet. I have survived for 15 years in the screen trade without ever malleting a single draft.

Must have been dumb luck.

PASS


Alex Epstein on Bad Language
I think the issue is gratuitous bad language. Where the f-bomb replaces character, you're failing.

Mike Le’s very funny Top Ten List.

Danny Stack’s 3 Steps of the Professional Screenwriter:
Step 1: Reading
Step 2: Writing
Step 3: Networking

FAQ with Lucy
Is format, spelling and grammar really that important?
Personally, I always think it's better to be safe than sorry - never let Nazi readers out there reject you for not "looking right" on the page or carelessness with spelling and grammar.

Julie’s fabulous The Charmin Effect
DIAGNOSIS of the CHARMIN EFFECT
Soft character arcs, soft premise and soft structure.


Alexandra on The Great Climax in Jaws
Peter Benchley, the author and co-screenwriter, was talking about the ending of the film. He said that from the beginning of production Spielberg had been ragging on him about the ending – he said it was too much of a downer. For one thing, the visual wasn’t right – if you’ll recall the book, once Sheriff Brody has killed the shark (NOT by blowing it up), the creature spirals slowly down to the bottom of the sea. Spielberg found that emotionally unsatisfying. He wanted something bigger, something exciting, something that would have audiences on their feet and cheering. He proposed the oxygen tank – that Brody would first shove a tank of compressed air into the shark’s mouth, and then fire at it until he hit the tank and the shark went up in a gigantic explosion. Benchley argued that it was completely absurd – no one would ever believe that could happen. Spielberg countered that he had taken the audience on the journey all this time – we were with the characters every step of the way. The audience would trust him if he did it right.



Above is the hilarious vid of Ian McKellan explaining ot Ricky Gervais the art of 'pretending'. (Hat tip to Dix! Thanks!)

Craig gets critical about Rachel Getting Married
Advertised as a cheery comedy, Rachel Getting Married is actually a dour hodgepodge of the worst tendencies of "independent filmmaking" that White's always railing on about. The screenplay by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney) is her first, and it's filled with rookie mistakes: the enunciating of every emotion; the random acquaintance that the main character just happens to bump into who inadvertently spills the beans in front of the others; and, of course, The Tragedy From The Past that casts a pall over the proceedings. All shot by Demme with hand-held camerawork so jittery you half-expect Jason Bourne to crash the party. In the immeasurably lighter and more unassuming Four Weddings and a Funeral, Mike Newell was able to make the audience feel like a guest at the titular events without relying on cheap devices. It's time to give this visual style a rest.

Emily Blake on Pitch Q
Anyway, if you have a good script this is how it works. You film a pitch of your script - if you don't have the equipment to do it yourself, Pitch Q has a place in town - and you upload it onto the website. Producers are able to browse the pitches and find what they're looking for. So here is why I recommend the site, especially for people out of town who have no access to industry parties: In the eight months this site has existed, six writers who've uploaded pitches have either had their scripts optioned or landed assignment jobs. And when you think about the odds, that's pretty damn impressive.

James Henry’s Top Ten Best Lines in Steel Magnolias
7. "Janice Van Meter got hit with a baseball. It was fabulous."

Thanks to Maggie, you can get your blog analyzed for free.
Enter your blog's address in this page and it analyzes the writer. Hmm! I tried a few and it seemed to be pretty well on target.

Here’s what it had to say about me:

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

WHAT? UP YOURS! Hehehe…


I’ve added Film Studies for Free to my Writer’s Resource sidebar. This is simply the most awe-inspiring film website out there.

SUPERB: Matthew Flanagan on the Cinema of Slowness
In defiant opposition to the quickening of pace in mainstream American cinema, a distinctive narrative form devoted to stillness and contemplation has emerged in the work of a growing number of filmmakers over the last two decades. Most widely exhibited on the festival circuit, this “cinema of slowness” (as categorised by Michel Ciment in 2003) has begun to signify a unique type of reflective art where form and temporality are never less than emphatically present, and a diminution of pace serves to displace the dominant momentum of narrative causality. The most distinctive active practitioners of such a style might be thought to comprise, in loose chronological order, Philippe Garrel, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr, Aleksandr Sokurov, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Sharunas Bartas, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Reygadas, Gus Van Sant and Albert Serra.

The formal characteristics shared by these filmmakers are immediately identifiable, if not quite fully inclusive: the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday. In light of the current prevalence of these stylistic tropes, it is perhaps time to consider their reciprocal employment as pertaining not to an abstract notion of “slowness” but a unique formal and structural design: an aesthetic of slow. The work of the directors listed above constitutes a cinema which compels us to retreat from a culture of speed, modify our expectations of filmic narration and physically attune to a more deliberate rhythm. Liberated from the abundance of abrupt images and visual signifiers that comprise a sizeable amount of mass-market cinema, we are free to indulge in a relaxed form of panoramic perception; during long takes we are invited to let our eyes wander within the parameters of the frame, observing details that would remain veiled or merely implied by a swifter form of narration. In terms of storytelling, the familiar hegemony of drama, consequence and psychological motivation is consistently relaxed, reaching a point at which everything (content, performance, rhythm) becomes equivalent in representation.

(Hat-tip to Girish for this link. He runs a brilliant blog.)


Chris Fujiwara on Jerry Lewis
Taking his curtain call (in character as goofy Professor Kelp) in The Nutty Professor (1963), Lewis stumbles and falls into the camera lens. Lewis's understanding of film is such that the lens is never merely a point in space, an abstract function that organizes images, or a metaphor for consciousness grasping the world. The lens is a physical thing, part of the great big mess of material existence. In The Family Jewels (1965), the photographer Julius (Lewis) repeatedly presses his finger onto the lens of his camera, to show his niece (Donna Butterworth) where she should look ("You'll have a face full of fingers," he even remarks). In The Bellboy (1960), Stanley (Lewis), realizing on entering a room that he is surrounded with female models in negligees, crosses to the foreground and prudishly covers the camera lens with the palm of his hand. In the ball sequence in One More Time (1970), the eruption of a long-suppressed sneeze causes Charlie (Sammy Davis Jr.) to lurch forward, Kelp-like, into the camera lens. The cut shows a reverse field where already—in the instant of the cut—the exaggerated force of Charlie's sneeze has toppled a group of party guests, who slowly start picking themselves up from the floor, like the animated suits of armor in a magnificent gag in The Errand Boy (1961).

In all these scenes, Lewis is concerned with two fundamental questions of cinema: How to see? and What should be seen? He uncovers the logic that makes seeing aggression, the logic of the look that topples the object (like Kelp's out-of-focus look in the bowling alley in The Nutty Professor, when he mistakes a group of people for bowling pins) or of the object that topples the look (Herbert [Lewis] witnessing the infidelity of his beloved Fay in the graduation-day sequence of 1961's The Ladies Man). The look confronting its object (taking or mistaking it, or being taken by it) is one of the basic structures of Lewis's work, from which he forms spiraling long-term patterns of conflict, avoidance, and reversal, welcoming or ignoring contradiction, violating the premises of a scene or even a whole film in search of new experimental truths (as in the classic hat scene in The Ladies Man, the nightmarish Copa scene in 1964's The Patsy, or throughout the breathtaking entirety of 1970's Which Way to the Front?).


FABULOUS: David Bordwell on the Films of the 80’s
So you can make a good case that the 1980s gave America a burst of first-rate films and remarkable new talent. At all levels, from ambitious prestige items to dazzling genre pictures, the decade is nothing to be sneezed at. The maw of home video had to be fed, so the demand was for product of all sorts. Videotape rental expanded specialty niches and cult markets. Filmmakers could finance projects through video and foreign presales, and investors took chances at many levels. The era saw a revival of ambitious independent films, which played alongside program pictures, Oscar bait, and summer blockbusters. Romantic comedy, action movies, and science fiction enjoyed a strong run. And many of the people we still consider genuine movie stars—Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Glenn Close, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, and Tom Cruise—are ineluctably creatures of the 80’s.

Cozzalio’s A to Z Film list

“Ikiru” broke my heart.

Hey guys,

With every new batch of DVDs I get from Netflix, I always have one from Akira Kurosawa. I’ve seen all of his big classics already (and any good screenwriter should be able to easily list those titles). One of these days, I’m going to post an article announcing that I’ve seen EVERY SINGLE Kurosawa film available on DVD. Why shouldn’t I? He’s the greatest filmmaker to ever walk the earth. No human being has ever delivered more cinematic masterpieces than Kurosawa.

None.

He died in 1998, sadly.

But I finally got to see Ikiru! This film completely broke my heart. It’s the story of a man who worked in Public Affairs for the government in post-war Japan and he learns that he has terminal cancer. He realizes he has squandered his life on meaningless red tape. He has no close family or friendships to lean on. And he resolves to use his remaining time to build a children's playground on a piece of land that had become toxic to a neighborhood, and he battles the government bureaucracy to get it done. (It makes me tear-up just explaining it.)


This brings to mind a quote from writer Stanley Elkin: “I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope.”

It’s 2 and a half hours. It’s a stunning picture. Criterion Collection is the only way to go. In 1960, Time Magazine wrote: “The great strength of the picture is the total seriousness and importance of what Kurosawa has to say: to live is to love; the rest is cancer.” Ebert wrote: “I think this is one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead their life a little differently.”

The protagonist, Watanabe, was played by Takashi Shimura, who many of you may recognize from Seven Samurai and other Kurosawa films. He’s a member of Kurosawa’s regular repertoire of actors, and the more films I see with Shimura, the more I’m impressed by his range. He may very well be one of the greatest actors who ever lived. And this character, this poor man, was at the end of his rope with a simple goal of accomplishing something meaningful and he faced a formidable opponent that we all know so well - government bureaucracy, which has many faces and not one single antagonist.

A few random thoughts:

- Consider how, in the Public Affairs office, all the stacks of papers illustrated how isolated and disconnected the people were.

- The party scenes illustrated loss of individualism.

- Wantanabe’s new hat signified a change in spirit.

- Wantanabe speaks so damn infrequently that when he does actually talk, you cling to every single word he mutters.

- We know his pain not because he verbalizes it but because Shimura shows us through brilliant acting. We can see it on his face.

- Notice at his home the cluttered goods of his son and wife (both materialistic) contrasted with Watanabe's sparse room.

- Consider HOW Wantanabe was told he had cancer. In the lobby, a man describes to Wantanabe his symptoms and explains how the doctor won’t tell him what he really has. (At the time, little was known about cancer and it was believed that if the patient knows that he/she has cancer, it’ll exacerbate the condition and they’ll die sooner. Thus, they wouldn’t actually give them the real diagnosis.) So anyway, this guy basically tells him, “if they say ‘it’s an ulcer, don’t worry’ - it’s cancer. If they say you can eat anything you want, that means you have less than a year.” When the doctor speaks the very words that were predicted, Wantanabe simply bows his head for what feels like an eternity and had me in tears. He then turns away from the room, so that only we can see him, and he looks so utterly forlorn.


- Also from Ebert: “In a scene that never fails to shake me, Watanabe goes home and cries himself to sleep under his blanket, while the camera pans up to a commendation he was awarded after 25 years at his post. It is not so bad that he must die. What is worse is that he has never lived. ‘I just can't die -- I don't know what I've been living for all these years,’ he says to the stranger in the bar. He never drinks, but now he is drinking: ‘This expensive sake is a protest against my life up to now.’”

- He spends time with a young girl, Toyo, which was a great scandal in his household. This was not a romantic relationship so much as Wantanabe was attracted to her love of life, and she WAS full of life. But I was also impressed by how they fully fleshed out Toyo’s character. She wasn’t some virginal exemplification of womanhood, but she was youthful, loving, full of life, and also a bit selfish, immature, and in a situation with a man dying of cancer, all of which was way beyond her comprehension or ability to deal with it.


- When they had the argument outside of Toyo’s manufacturing plant, notice how the vibrating glass adds to the tension.

- Consider the meaning of the visual symbol of the rabbit that Toyo gave Watanabe. Oh, to build something of value…

Now for something visual. Here’s a trailer:



Okay, let’s talk structure. Kurosawa worked with multiple writers. He liked to let them compete with each other in order to come up with the best ideas for his films. And this break in structure was suggested by Hideo Oguni who is still alive and still writing screenplays.

An hour and a half into the film, Wantanabe decides to build the park. In the very next scene, he’s dead. We’re at a Japanese-style memorial service. About a dozen men are in a room and at the end is Wantanabe’s photo surrounded by flowers and candles. We learn that the park has been built. The men debate if Wantanabe’s really to be praised for creating this park, because the Park Department actually built the park. And as all the men debate these issues, we discover through flashbacks just how Wantanabe did it. This is a very unusual structure, but it works, because this helps Kurosawa jump to the good parts of a storyline that would’ve been too complicated and difficult to tell in a linear fashion. By changing the perspective, by showing these events through the eyes of his co-workers and family, Kurosawa actually creates depth that he could not in a straight narrative. It also helped him to rise above cliché and sentimentality to create a genuinely moving masterpiece of cinema.


A few thoughts about this structure:

- The fact that Kurosawa took Wantanabe away from us so suddenly makes us want to see Wantanabe that much more, which set up the very moving ending. It turns everything into a sort of mystery. We wonder if he built the park. We wonder how he died. We wonder if he was happy or if the death was suicide. And we’re shown how his accomplishment has impacted the lives of those who knew him.

- Ebert makes another poignant point that is very true about this structure: “We who have followed Watanabe on his last journey are now brought forcibly back to the land of the living, to cynicism and gossip. Mentally, we urge the survivors to think differently, to arrive at our conclusions. And that is how Kurosawa achieves his final effect: He makes us not witnesses to Watanabe's decision, but evangelists for it.”

- Shan Jayaweera, for Senses of Cinema, had this to say: “In having his colleagues figure out for themselves the circumstances of his death one can really appreciate his final deeds and the fact that he did finally break out of his existence to enjoy his remaining months. But this one fact doesn't take away from the film's bleak outlook on humanity, and the really sad thing is that regardless of the different time and culture it is as poignant and relevant for an audience watching it in Melbourne today. It is a deliberately slow-paced film, and enjoyably so. If you stick with it you are in for a truly great cinematic experience but also a lot of personal soul-searching. You have been warned.”

- The point of the flashbacks was not to advance plot but to make us FEEL. We are moved by Wantanabe’s dogged determination and willpower and strength of character that got the job of building a park done. We are moved by his overly polite, super-subservient, and hyper-deferential interaction with others in government, which was done in long takes so that we could FEEL the power of his will.

- At times, you wonder, “why doesn’t he tell them he has cancer?” As you contemplate why he doesn’t tell them, you understand his wisdom and how he got the job done.

- Kurosawa always finds the most compelling approach to every scene. He allows for so many vertical moments in his storytelling. He lets every emotional moment play out fully for the audience to truly experience and FEEL before moving the plot forward. I’m thinking of the moment when, after the pompous bureaucrats practically congratulated themselves for building the park, the poor women from the neighborhood came into the memorial and burned incense and cried in gratitude to Wantanabe, which must’ve lasted at least one full minute, maybe longer. So moving. And Kurosawa cuts to close-ups of the faces of the men in the room, of their reaction to this touching moment that they are witnessing. Kurosawa proves that the most compelling image one can place on the screen is the human face. In fact, in the context of a compelling moment, one could argue that the more eccentric the face, the more interesting the shot.

Consider Kurosawa’s faces:


- Consider how Kurasawa doesn’t preach to us about living life to the fullest. He uses one song to convey that message, which was sung only twice. He allows the emotions of the story to impress upon you the meaning of the story without having to explain it.

- As we go through one flashback after another, one heightened emotional moment after another, and you start crying, you wonder how he’s going to top all that we’ve seen before with his ending. And he does top it in a scene that’s one of the greatest closings in the history of cinema. He tells us in advance the image that we’re going to see, that is, Wantanabe in his new park in the snow, dead, and then we’re surprised to see him alive in the park before he dies. And he’s in a swing. He’s swinging back and forth as it snows, and he’s happy. HE’S HAPPY! We spent all that time watching him in agony over his stomach cancer for two and a half hours and now HE’S HAPPY! And he’s singing that song of his… and it just broke my heart.

Life is brief, fall in love, maidens.
Before the crimson bloom fades from your lips.
Before the tides of passion cool within you.
For those of you who know no tomorrow.

Life is brief, fall in love, maidens.
Before your raven tresses begin to fade.
Before the flames in your hearts flicker and die.
For those to whom today will never return.

Screenwriting News & Links! 11/19/08

--------------------------------------

New Screenplays:

Warner Brothers has up-and-running their For Your Consideration page, as does Disney. Between them, 3 new scripts are available:

Wall*E
(Interesting to note that the action lines are all stacked. It’s called action stacking, which is perfectly acceptable, albeit rare.)

Dark Knight

Gran Torino

Also:

Eagle Eye - March 28, 2008 draft script by John Glenn and Travis Wright, J. R. Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, J. J. Abrams, and Hillary Seitz. (Did I get them all? Sheesh.)

[As always, hat-tip to the great SimplyScripts.]

--------------------------------------


Economy Takes its Toll on Hollywood
"Every single source of capital has suffered a seismic shock that we haven't seen in our lifetimes," said Nigel Sinclair, co-principal of film producer Spitfire Pictures. "That's going to lead to a broad squeeze throughout the studio system." The industry's woes are reflected in recent financial announcements. NBC Universal is cutting $500 million from its budget in 2009 and likely trimming staff. Viacom's third-quarter earnings dropped 37% as its cable networks saw an ad revenue dip in the U.S., and chairman Sumner Redstone and his holding firm National Amusements are under pressure from nervous creditors amid a global credit crunch and declining stock prices. Disney's recently announced quarterly earnings dropped 13% from last year, citing a sudden and significant decline in TV ad and theme parks trends. "Studios are taking a much harder look at the bottom line," said analyst Larry Gerbrandt of Media Valuation Partners in Beverly Hills. "When they contract, they contract across the board, and that includes production." For movies, the days of easy money are officially over.

Industrywide cutbacks hit holiday bashes

Roger Ebert on Screenwriters Getting the Nobel
Q: This is a theoretical question. Would you support an accomplished screenwriter being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature? Say, for example, Woody Allen? As film has become the dominant art form of our time, I've thought such an award would be justified. -- Sandy Bates, Ann Arbor, Mich.
A: Absolutely. They give the prize to dramatists, after all. The first screenwriting Nobel should have gone to Ingmar Bergman. Allen would agree. I also advocate extending the Pulitzers to film. I proposed this in an op-ed in the New York Times, which was vociferously cheered by those who had absolutely nothing to do with the Pulitzers.

Berardinelli sounds off on MPAA
Support the film. Tell your friends about it. Don't let Slumdog Millionaire fall into the category of an obscure art-house feature because its MPAA classification indicates it's not appropriate for anyone under the age of 17. That's bullshit.

Four WGA Staffers Arrested for Protesting American Idol


Melissa Rosenberg to write next three Twilight sequels

Interview with Twilight author, Stephenie Meyer
MTV: Would you ever write a proper screenplay?
Meyer: I don't think I could do that unless Hollywood is ready for a 14-hour experience. [Laughs.] I tried once to write a short story, and it was horrible. I don't think in short terms; I have to explore every tiny detail of things. I really admire people who can come in and streamline [a screenplay] and get all the information across, but simply, that's not my talent. I can't imagine doing that, although my ideas are very visual. I'd [need] a partner who knew how to do it.

Yes, girl, you would.

Interview with Twilight screenwriter, Melissa Rosenberg
LL: Were there things you wrote that didn't make it in that you're anxious to see on the DVD?
MR: You know it's funny, but not really. There were scenes when we started, when the screenplay was 110 to 115 pages, but for budget we cut it down so we'd have fewer production days. There were some scenes along the way that got cut where I was thinking "I can't do without that!" But then I saw the film and I had to be reminded that the scenes weren't there because I didn't really miss them. It's a fairly tight edit.

Joan Didion Writing Screenplay for Film about Katharine Graham
HBO Films signed journalist Joan Didion for an untitled film project about the life of Watergate-era Washington Post publisher, Katharine Graham. If the project gets off the ground, the company hopes to sign Laura Linney (who scored an Emmy for John Adams) to play Graham and Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer) to direct.

Motion Picture Academy Honors Screenwriting Talents
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored six screenwriting prospects at a prestigious dinner in L.A. Thursday night, and the man who wrote one of George Clooney's best-known flicks was the evening's keynote speaker! Frank Scott, the Oscar nominated scribe behind Clooney and J. Lo's 'Out of Sight,' spoke at the dinner honoring the six winners of the 23rd Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, presented by the Academy. Movie legend Eva Marie Saint ('North by Northwest,' 'On the Waterfront') served as one of the competition's judges.


On the Centennial Collection of Sunset Blvd

Smallville Scribes Hired to Ruin Live-Action Robotech Movie
Warner Brothers has hired new screenwriters for their big screen live-action adaptation of Robotech. Smallville scribes Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have come on board to rewrite Lawrence Kasdan’s previous draft. This is not good news. Gough and Millar were the team behind The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Herbie Fully Loaded, Made Men, Showtime, and the Shanghai Noon franchise (you remember, the Jackie Chan/Owen Wilson western comedy films?). To be fair, they got a story credit on Spider-Man 2... And to think, Warner Bros gave those two guys the job of rewriting a script penned by the the screenwriting legend responsible for both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back. It’s mind-boggling. The Hollywood Reporter claims that Warner Bros made the move in hopes that it will “bring action and geek cred to the table.”

(Hey guys, Kasdan is capable of screwing up. Dreamcatchers, anyone? And I was disappointed by his treatment of Clash of the Titans.)

Batman Sues Batman
The mayor of the Turkish city of Batman has sued Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros., wanting royalties from the mega-successful The Dark Knight. Green Lantern, Nova Scotia was unavailable for comment.

Sopranos Continues to Sleep With the Fishes
David Chase tells The L.A. Times he still has no plans for a movie version of the show, nor any desire to further explain the show's controversial ending.


McQuarrie Adapting Monster of Florence and The Champions
Oscar winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie has picked up two more projects to work on next. He will adapt both Douglas Preston's bestseller The Monster of Florence with producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (American Beauty, Milk) as well as The Champions, a British TV series from the late 1960s with Guillermo del Toro producing and writing as well. The Monster of Florence tells of a writer's experience investigating a heinous crime that had occurred years earlier on his property. The Champions followed the adventures of a team of secret government agents who are rescued from a Himalayan plane crash by an advanced civilization and given superhuman abilities. Both sound like very interesting ideas and I'm glad to see McQuarrie writing again after winning that Oscar for The Usual Suspects in 1996.

Screenwriting Course Kit transports afterschool programs to Hollywood
The Silver Screen fantasies that nearly every 'tween' and young teen harbors will undoubtedly come to life with the newest product from a highly regarded producer of classroom-ready educational materials for afterschool programs and schools. Being a Screenwriter: Generating Ideas for a Screenplay, the latest Course Kit from Community Learning LLC, delivers a full dose of movie magic for students in grades 6 through 8, according to Michael DeBritz, founder and president of the Scotia, New York-based firm. "Students discover through Being a Screenwriter just how much fun writing can be," DeBritz said.


Bridget Moynahan’s New Mystery Man
What can I say? I’m a cad.

Plus, I do love a cute writer
Julie James jokes that after she stops writing for the night, she envisions her characters frozen and waiting for her to return to the story. She says it's almost like they're saying, "Julie, you've got to get back to us. What's going on next?" James likes the idea of "creating this story that kind of starts in your head and then all of a sudden you have these characters who become very much like real people, and it just seems like it's something that you have to get out onto the page."

Not true! Cindy McCain has Alleged Affair with Mystery Man

Huntsman Takes Aim at Mystery Man at Credit Suisse
Hey, I had to move my money to the Bahamas. Hello?

Fearne Cotton’s new Mystery Man
So very sorry, but I look SO much better than him.

Oprah's mystery man has been revealed!
I only give her ideas for her show.

Nicola Roberts snapped with mystery man
She’s a lovely girl. She really is.

Mystery man was a champ
Still is, baby. Still is.

David O. Russell to tackle The Grackle
As a change of pace, Russell didn’t write the screenplay for the movie. The script was written by a pair of first time writers named Mike Arnold and Chris Poole. Normally, I would be concerned about a writer as brilliant as Russell directing someone else’s script, but this screenplay apparently caused a huge bidding war when it was completed two years ago. So, there must be something to make the script stand out from the pack…

Hey Mike Arnold and Chris Poole – You better learn how to fight. In case you’ve forgotten, O. Russell has been in a fistfight with Clooney and was notorious for his tantrums during Huckabees…





Hehehe…

A super battle over Watchmen
It's taken more than 20 years and any number of false starts to bring Watchmen this far along: Forsaken film adaptations include versions from directors Terry Gilliam (Brazil), Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum) and screenwriter David Hayter (X-Men), with countless script revisions along the way. Joaquin Phoenix was once considered for Crudup's starring part as Dr. Manhattan, the all-powerful but tortured soul at the center of the Watchmen story. Early screenplay costs and abandoned preproduction fees total close to $10 million, and no fewer than four studios have worked on the movie over the decades, including 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal.

Steve Urkel Becomes a Screenwriter!
The Hollywood Reporter posts that White has written a romantic comedy called Did You Get My Text, which Joel Zwick (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) will direct. The film follows a young man who somehow "starts a relationship with a girl on his friend's phone, turning their courtship into a comedy of technological errors." Just how does that happen, anyway? And by comedy of errors, I imagine that means this poor girl finally thinks the young man's friend is into her? Oh dear. Right now, there's no word on cast, but we'll probably hear more about the players soon enough.



Above is a happy vid, a tribute to the gorgeous Jean Seberg who, on November 13, would have turned 70. Below’s from an article.

Fans of old-time flicks recall Seberg as the beautiful yet unpredictable presence in such diverse productions as The Mouse That Roared, Lilith, Paint Your Wagon and Airport. And those devoted to stories of Hollywood tragedies will recall the horrendous FBI smear campaign against Seberg that resulted in her having miscarriage that ultimately wrecked her physical and emotional health (she committed suicide in 1979). Filmmaker Garry McGee’s new biography Jean Seberg – Breathless (published by BearManor Media) presents a complex and often tragic portrait of an extraordinary woman whose great talent, intelligence and sincerity was never truly appreciated in her lifetime. Film Threat discussed the Seberg mystique with McGee...

See also: Jean Seberg’s Wikipedia entry.


Jenny Lumet was recently honored for her Rachel Getting Married script at the 2008 Behind the Camera Awards.

Star Wars: A New Heap, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star by John Powers.

Rushdie and Mehta bringing it back home for movie
Canadian director Deepa Mehta is collaborating with Salman Rushdie on a big-screen adaptation of the author's 1981 historical novel "Midnight's Children."

Exclusive: We’ve Seen Steve Carell’s Beaver Screenplay

Alexandra Sokoloff is “a visual whore,” part 1 and part 2.

John Milius’ bold prediction
This week in San Bernardino, CA, Oscar nominated screenwriter John Milius made a bold prediction while speaking to students at the local Cal State campus. And that is that his current screenplay in progress, about the life of famed conqueror Genghis Khan, will be the best of his long career.

Mendes: Preacher movie has no script
Sam Mendes has revealed that his big screen adaptation of comic book series Preacher has no script. The American Beauty director refuted reports that the project is well underway, telling Empire: "Basically, they should have written, 'Mendes in development with Preacher'. "What I'm doing is, I've got to find a script. I've just got to get it written."

Peter Morgan profile
He considered bungee jumping and mountain climbing, he said not long ago from his home in London. But he chose something even riskier. He wrote a play about the landmark 1977 television interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard M. Nixon. Relying on the accounts of participants and fictionalizing here and there for effect, he made sure to write it, he said, “in a way that breaks every single rule of screenwriting.”

Morgan Confirms He’s Writing Wanted 2, Hints At Sequel Going Global

--------------------------------------

My good deed for today. Here’s James Ricardo’s e-mail.

Hello.

Just wanted you to know that our new comedy "Opie Gets Laid" is coming soon to DVD from Universal/Vivendi. Here's the trailer and movie info:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGuzIgUj6_w

www.target.com/Opie-Gets-Laid/dp/B001FACHAK
www.amazon.com/Opie-Gets-Laid/dp/B001FACHAK
www.tower.com/opie-gets-laid-dvd/wapi/112469590

www.opiegetslaid.com
www.myspace.com/opiegetslaid
www.facebook.com/pages/Opie-Gets-Laid/9160829595

Best,

James Ricardo

--------------------------------------

On the Contest Circuit:

One in Ten Screenplay Contest Announces Winner

ScreamFest Announces Contest Winners

HSI Announces October Contest Winner

Expo Contest Announces Semifinalists and Quarterfinalists

Academy Announces Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship Winners for 2008

One in Ten Competition Announces Finalists

20/20 Competition Anounces Contest Winners

--------------------------------------

And Finally…

Marty Scorsese’s favorite films!

Today’s Sermon: “Quantum of Solace”

Let us open with a word of prayer.

“Oh, great film goddess, Pelicula,

who weaves magic for everyone in showbiz from hopeful actors and writers to animal trainers and gate guards, who allows the most magnificent films to be born out of the most nightmarish productions, who turns ordinary moments into serendipitous ones, often propelling careers at the same time…

Oh great film goddess, Pelicula, we come to you today with humble hearts in this very dark period of cinema history… We beg for your wisdom to see beyond the shortsighted gurus, the endurance to combat all the formula freaks of the world, and the patience to sit with the most ignorant of producers and studio executives.

We need your wisdom now more than ever, as we walk through the valley of the shadow of Hollywood horseshit.

We ask all these things in your honor, and everyone said:

‘AMEN.’”

Friends, open up the Good Book of Screenwriting and turn with me now to the Gospel of Mystery, chapter 3, verse 16:

“And thus saith MM: ‘CHARACTER COMES FIRST!’”

Did you get that? Let me read it once more:

“And thus saith MM: ‘CHARACTER COMES FIRST!’”

Paul Haggis told the world prior to the release of Quantum of Solace to expect a very minimalistic James Bond. And thus, he provided the very reason we are feeling disappointment today – the delineation of character. What did we just read? “CHARACTER COMES FIRST!”

Consider the words of the critics. What did Ebert say? “James Bond is not an action hero! Leave the action to your Jason Bournes. This is a swampy old world. The deeper we sink in, the more we need James Bond to stand above it.” How about A.O. Scott of the New York Times? “That one, called Camille, is played by Olga Kurylenko, whose specialty seems to be appearing in action pictures as the pouty, sexy sidekick of a brooding, vengeful hero. Not only Daniel Craig’s Bond, but also Mark Wahlberg’s Max Payne and Timothy Olyphant’s Hitman. James Bond is a much livelier character than either of those mopey video-game ciphers, but he shares with them the astonishing ability to resist, indeed to ignore, Ms. Kurylenko’s physical charms… [While] there is certainly impressive depth and subtlety in Mr. Craig’s wounded, whispery menace — it also makes him harder to distinguish from every other grieving, seething avenger at the multiplex. Which is to say just about every one.” What are these critics telling us?

CHARACTER COMES FIRST!

Can I get an “amen” out there?

“AMEN!”

What makes us love James Bond movies? Is it the action?

“No!”

Oh, please. Give me a “Hell, no!”

“HELL, NO!”

Is it the girls, perhaps?

“HELL, NO!”

How about the pretty locations?

“HELL, NO!”

The gadgets, right? I know some of you feel gadget-envy…

“HELL, NO!”

All right, what is it? I give up.

“JAMES BOND!”

I’m sorry. I can’t hear you.

“JAMES BOND!”

Ohhh, so you want to see those films because of CHARACTER…

“AMEN!”

Hehehe…

Let’s say the devil comes knocking on your door (looking suspiciously like Robert McKee) and he says “I have a suggestion – write a minimalistic James Bond...” What are you going to tell him?

“HELL, NO!”

What did you say?

“HELL, NO!”

What did Scott Frank tell William Goldman about characters?
“Character is everything… Character is what makes us give a shit. Don’t you think?” Yes, I do! And what's that verse in Mystery 3:16?

“CHARACTER COMES FIRST!”

Let’s talk villains. There is nothing worse than a WEAK ANTAGONIST, am I wrong? What did Hitchcock say about villains? “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.” So when it comes to the art of creating villains, what's the rule again?

“CHARACTER COMES FIRST!”

What did you say?

“CHARACTER COMES FIRST!”

Hehehe…

And now, my friends, it is time to turn your hearts over to the gospel of characters. Choir, I want you to sing “Amazing Characters.” Members of the screenwriting congregation, I want you to come foreward to the alter of characters, confess your sins, and repent…

"Amazing Characters, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretched-screenwriter like me...
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see…”

That’s right… Come on up here…

All you aspiring screenwriters out there, get off your blessed assurances right-fucking-now and come to screenwriting’s precious altar and give your hearts over to characters…

“T'was Characters that taught…
my heart to fear.
And Characters, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Character appear...
the hour I first believed…

All you supposed “pros” out there, do you think you’re so special? Get up here and repent right now, dammit!

That means you Paul Haggis! Think you’re above the law of characters because you got a little gold statue for Crash? Don’t ever “minimalize” James Bond or any other character again! You have sinned and fallen short of the glory of screenwriting! Get up here and repent!

Through many dangers, toils and snares...
we have already come.
T'was Characters that brought us safe thus far...
and Characters will lead us home.

Those of you who adapted video games this year, turn your hearts over to characters! Skip Woods, where are you? Get up here for writing Hitman! You failed to learn from Swordfish. Beau Michael Thorne, I know you’re out there. Confess before Pelicula today your sins for all the shitty characters in Max Payne!

Characters have promised good to me...
Their word my hope secures.
They will my shield and portion be...
as long as films endures…

Lawrence Kasdan, you need to find peace over the disaster that was Dreamcatcher and promise you will never fail characters again as you did with your Clash of the Titans script… Akiva Goldsman, why are you looking so smug? You ought to repent for every Batman script you ever wrote… and for putting exposition above characters in The Da Vinci Code. Repent, you bastard writer, repent! David Koepp, get your pompous little ass up here. That’s right! Get on your knees, mother fucker, for the travesty that was Indy IV…

When we've been here one hundred years...
bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days to sing Characters’ praise...
then when we've first begun.

Woody Allen, where are you? The voice over in Vicky Cristina Barcelona delineated your characters! Get up here and repent! J. Michael Straczynski, you cared more about moral injustice and historical accuracy than you did the character of Christine Collins! Repent! M. Night Shymalan, you are not God! You are a sinner! Pray for forgiveness for Lady in the Water and The Happening! That means you, too, George Lucas, you failed all of your characters in Star Wars with those damn prequels… You failed Indiana Jones, too! Embrace the gospel of characters or find yourself in movie purgatory!

Why am I singling people out? The entire industry needs to beg for forgiveness! That’s right! Not just writers but producers, too! You people approved those scripts! What the hell were you thinking? Get up here! Everyone, and I mean everyone, ON YOUR KNEES NOW! REPENT TODAY! Cry out to Pelicula, “I have sinned and lost sight of my characters! I failed to listen to my characters… I cared more about action than arcs... I imposed my own personal agenda ahead of the goals of my characters… I admit, I failed them… I hereby place my faith and trust in characters… I will never turn back…”

"Amazing Characters, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretched-screenwriter like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see…”

Bond, Bond, and More Bond!

A new Bond film always generates some hilarious articles, and I thought I’d share a few today that may be of interest:

A History of the Bond Villain
For the producers… the challenge has been to cast these villains astutely. They had to have charisma and seem plausibly evil. If they were too restrained, they risked appearing dull. If they were too extravagant in their villainy, they could teeter on the edge of kitsch.

When 007 Was Off-Target
THE RAPE OF PUSSY GALORE - Look, we know gender politics isn’t Bond’s finest point, but forcing yourself on a woman like this in the hay was surely unacceptable even in the 1964 of Goldfinger?


13 fictional spies made possible by James Bond
7. Sydney Bristow
Alias has all sorts of hip modern elements, as one might expect from its impish creator, J.J. Abrams. There's the tortured family drama, the betrayal of trust, the divided loyalties, the suppressed romantic yearnings, and the mysterious Italian prophet/inventor. Yeah, yeah. The real appeal of the show, and its ass-kicking, name-taking heroine, Sydney Bristow, is that she's James Bond for the Lost generation. The parallels are so obvious, they're painful: the mildly disapproving head man, the mildly incomprehensible gadget man, the shadowy enemy organization with impenetrable goals, the international jet-setting, the barely maintained disguises, the elaborate pre-credit action sequences: the whole show simply screams "Bond." Jennifer Garner spent a little more time crying than 007 ever did, but at least Anna Espinosa was easier on the eye than Jaws.

Cheesiest Lines from Bond Films
M: “Moneypenny, where’s 007?”
Monneypenny: “He’s on a mission sir. In Austria.”
M: “Well, tell him to pull out. Immediately.”

Six thrillers with unusually anguished heroes
The Naked Spur (1953): Think Jimmy Stewart’s all roses and sunshine? For five Westerns with director Anthony Mann, the definitive nice guy played an asshole, most memorably in this ensemble thriller as a manic bastard consumed to his very core by greed and insecurity.


5 Bond Girls Who Died After Wearing a Bikini

The Amnesiac Bond
I've been revisiting the Sean Connery Bonds lately, on widescreen projection, where the immaculate detail and lush photography of airports, country roads, mosques, and Ealing Studio interiors come alive. But what I am really noticing is the full greatness of Connery's multi-leveled performances.

20 Bond Villains You Love to Hate

James Bond trivia challenge!

The Best of the Bond Girls

James Bond Babes: Best and Worst


-------------------------------

A Couple Reviews of Note:

Ebert’s 2-star review!
OK, I'll say it. Never again. Don't ever let this happen again to James Bond. Quantum of Solace is his 22nd film and he will survive it, but for the 23rd it is necessary to go back to the drawing board and redesign from the ground up. Please understand: James Bond is not an action hero! He is too good for that. He is an attitude. Violence for him is an annoyance. He exists for the foreplay and the cigarette. He rarely encounters a truly evil villain. More often a comic opera buffoon with hired goons in matching jump suits… This Bond, he doesn't bring much to the party. Daniel Craig can play suave and he can be funny and Brits are born doing double entendres. Craig is a fine actor. Here they lock him down. I repeat: James Bond is not an action hero! Leave the action to your Jason Bournes. This is a swampy old world. The deeper we sink in, the more we need James Bond to stand above it.

From James Berardinelli
Sadly, there's something a little hollow about the proceedings. There's no real catharsis. In fact, the whole thing doesn't feel like a complete movie, or at least not a complete Bond movie. While there are plenty of nods to previous Bond outings (such as the Goldfinger-inspired human artwork), the missing staples leave unfilled holes. For example, there is no utterance of "Bond. James Bond." There are none of the verbal puns and one-liners we have come to relish. There's no bloody iris at the beginning. Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme" is relegated to subtle cues in David Arnold's largely generic score. At least one of the Bond girls has a typically outrageous name: Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton) - but you have to sit through the credits to learn that; in the movie, she's simply called "Fields."

The film's biggest problem is its director. Marc Forster is an experienced art house filmmaker with impressive credits (most recently, The Kite Runner), but he is clueless when it comes to action sequences. His approach seems to be to shake the camera as much as possible and, to further obscure what's going on, to allow no cut to last more than about a half-second. Most of the action scenes, including a car chase, a boat chase, and a couple of fights, are so incoherent that it's necessary to wait until they're over to figure out who's still standing. (The plane chase is a little better, but not much.) We've seen this technique before, but never with Bond. And, to be frank, it's not something I ever want to see again in a 007 movie. Forster seems to have taken the phrase "shaken not stirred" too literally, applying it to every scene with a pulse.

As the film's chief nemesis, Mathieu Amalric is about as weak as one could imagine. Greene is neither frightening nor intimidating. Amalric, an excellent actor, is entirely defeated by the role - although, in fairness to him, he's not aided by the writing. Olga Kurylenko is a perfect Bond girl - sexy, capable, and bound to Bond by ties that have nothing to do with love. She's got a lot of screen presence and meshes well with Craig. Giancarlo Giannini shows up again as Mathis, although his character is treated even more shabbily here than in Casino Royale, as difficult as that may be to believe.

Derek Elley at Variety
Though references to Bond's late love, Vesper Lynd, pepper the script, and his desire for revenge provides an explanation for the plot whizzing around the world every few reels, the script by "Royale" writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (with Haggis taking a more senior role this time) never tackles Bond's grief head-on or gives him any meaningful dialogue as he aims for closure.

Duncan Shepherd at San Diego Valley Reader
The totality perhaps meets the fundamental requirements of action and pace, hurtling forward with only the briefest of pauses and coming in at a tidy hour and three-quarters, the shortest Bond film, if I’m not mistaken, in the entire series. As a likely result of that, it can seldom make time for the preparation that would give the action scenes sense and import. They are little more than turbulence. And the underlying split personality still remains: Why bother to infuse the Bond character with a greater air of reality if he’s going to continue to be allowed the acrobatics of a Jackie Chan? Surely our rougher and tougher superspy wouldn’t want us snorting in derision, or even chortling in delight, when he’s busy exacting payment for the snuffed-out life of his beloved. James Bond appears to be turning little by little into Jason Bourne. It’s not a step up.

Quantum Creep
How fascinating is it that 2008’s two most inconsolable, borderline psychotic movie heroes are Batman and James Bond...? But what lingers after Quantum of Solace, besides the urge to whack the director over the head with a rolled-up newspaper, is the sheer pitilessness of its outlook. As in The Dark Knight, there’s a deeply dismaying sense of a world without rules and nobody looking out for us save for that damaged, sadistic maniac who’s ostensibly the hero… Our childhood idols grew up and got mean.

-------------------------------

Plus, a scene.



What were your thoughts about the screenwriting in Quantum?

-MM

MM’s Belated Halloween Meme

Okay, I was tagged by the Anonymous Production Assistant to list Top 10 Halloween film selections. I’m afraid my list would be terribly clichéd, filled with such obvious greats as Aliens, Alien, Terminator II, Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Psycho, Vertigo, Jaws, Poltergeist, The Fly, Misery, Se7en, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Halloween. I’d also offer a few classics, like the silent, German expressionistic landmark, Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (in other words The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Nosferatu, M, Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Invisible Man, Cat People, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, Rosemary’s Baby, and a few others like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, and Ghostbusters.

That’s, like, a couple more than 10.

I will confess that I get sucked into films with seemingly impenetrable mysteries. I’ve already written extensively about Eyes Wide Shut. Here are two more with some interesting analysis…

-----------------------------

Mulholland Drive



I read Ebert’s 4-star review before seeing this film and he gave the first tantalizing clue: “There have been countless dream sequences in the movies, almost all of them conceived with Freudian literalism to show the characters having nightmares about the plot. Mulholland Drive is all dream. There is nothing that is intended to be a waking moment. Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines. If you want an explanation for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams--old ones and those still in development.”

There is also an article at Salon called Everything you were afraid to ask about Mulholland Drive. I have nothing new to add to the analysis that isn’t already exhaustively explored in this fabulous piece put together by Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein. Here’s a taste:

What the fuck is going on in this movie?

Well, it seems that Diane had her girlfriend murdered. Then, in a masturbatory fantasy cum fever dream in the moments before she commits suicide, she reimagines her ruined career and failed relationship with the woman she loves.

The dream begins with Camilla/Rita miraculously escaping the hit Diane had taken out on her. From there, Diane, a product of Hollywood, imagines the story in cinematic fashion: She sees herself as the naive wannabe starlet Betty, who succeeds on sheer talent and solves whatever problems are thrown her way. She even gets the girl!

Thematically, Lynch seems to be working out a number of things: the enticing but empty imagery of the movie screen; the accompanying imagery that is used as stardust to cover up the unpleasantries of the movie-making process; the imagery that the ambitious use to reimagine and remake themselves; and the imagery and imagination actors put to work to create their characters.

Other sites of note:

Lost on Mulholland Drive

Anthony Kusich’s explanation of the 10 clues inside the DVD box.

The Script

-----------------------------

Donnie Darko



Needless to say, there is another fabulous article at Salon called Everything you were afraid to ask about Donnie Darko:

What the hell just happened?

The vast majority of Donnie Darko takes place in a parallel universe. From the moment the clock in the Darko house strikes midnight, 10 minutes into the film, right up to Donnie's hysterical laughter in bed, the setting of the film is Tangent Middlesex, a parallel dimension, spontaneously created, which exists only during the 28 days that cover the majority of the film's action. The through-line of the film is Donnie Darko's quest to erase the Tangent Universe before it destroys the world.

To understand what actually occurs in Donnie Darko, it helps to have read "The Philosophy of Time Travel," by Roberta Sparrow. This is difficult in that the book is an imaginary one, written by a fictional character. Luckily, much of the book's text is included on the film's Web site and DVD and is now incorporated into the director's cut.

"The Philosophy of Time Travel" explains that time, while usually stable, will occasionally become corrupted for reasons unknown to all. When this happens, a Tangent Universe is created -- an alternate reality parallel to the primary universe in which we all live. "If a Tangent Universe occurs," Sparrow writes, "it will be highly unstable, sustaining itself for no longer than several weeks. Eventually it will collapse upon itself, forming a black hole within the Primary Universe capable of destroying all existence." During that collapse, a time-space vortex will form that leads back to the birth of the Tangent Universe.

You can actually read the pages from “The Philosophy of Time Travel” at the Cellar Door, which also offers Donnie's poem, the “Dear Roberta Sparrow” letter, and other Darko goodies.

The Stainless Steel Rat has a nice Q&A section on Darko.

Finally, there is also a fabulous essay by Emerson at RogerEbert.com:

The first dialog scene in the movie begins with an attempt to provoke political sparks at the family dinner table (first line: "I'm voting for Dukakis," stated as a challenge to her parents by Donnie's older sister). And from there it switches into an exchange of obscene insults between Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his sister Elizabeth (played by the lead actor's real-life sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal). (Aside: on the original DVD commentary, director Richard Kelly remarks how special it was to have Jake's real-life sister in the role. Why? He doesn't say. But it does add a little extra-forbidden sexual tension to the film.) Elizabeth, enraged at a crude childbirth reference Donnie has made in front of their younger sister, calls him a dick and tells him to "Go suck a f---k!" Donnie sarcastically replies, "Please tell me, Elizabeth, how exactly does one suck a f---k?" She sees his bet and raises: "You want me to tell you?" Donnie cups his hands to his ears and silently mouths, "I'm all ears!"

The primary motifs of the movie are laid out in this first scene, and the sexual back-and-forth between brother and sister is freighted with a peculiar tension that goes deeper than just typical family tiffs and teenage foul language. We soon learn that Elizabeth has stayed home from college for a year to be with her boyfriend Frank. (We don't know it at first, but we see Frank's red sports car zooming past Donnie in the opening sequence.) Later that night, Donnie has a vision of a rather tall, erect rabbit named Frank -- or, rather, a person in a fuzzy bunny suit with a grotesquely contorted metallic mask over his head.

So, the question arises: Why a bunny? (and you thought maybe the question was "Why a duck?") Throughout the movie, sweet little bunnies and other stuffed animals are associated with childhood, and specifically with Elizabeth when she (and Donnie) were little. In one scene we see Donnie lying on the couch (where he sleeps after his bedroom has been squashed) in front of a framed photograph of a little girl -- Elizabeth -- and a bunny. In the last scene between Donnie and his sister, he comes into the house to find her sleeping in a chair, and a stuffed bunny just to the right of the frame.

There are other bunnies and stuffed animals (and Smurfs and cartoon rabbits from "Watership Down" in the deleted scenes and "Director's Cut") throughout the movie. But the big one is, of course, Frank. Donnie knows his sister isn't just sleeping with her cuddly stuffed bunny anymore -- she's sleeping with a full-sized and (relatively) hairy man. That Frank has the body of a stuffed animal and the head of a vicious metallic animal seems to be an indication of Donnie's mixed-up feelings toward him (fear, arousal, rage, respect, envy), as the male who's bedding his sister. The only time bunnyman Frank appears in front of another waking person is when Donnie is under hypnosis with his therapist (in which he reverts to a childlike way of speaking, much as he does when sleepwalking), and Donnie is clutching a stuffed animal -- a doggie with big floppy ears this time -- like a child.

For Donnie, the idea of attributing sexual characteristics to childish things -- say, asexual kiddie cartoon characters (like a slutty Smurfette, about whom his friends enjoy spinning pornographic fantasies) is particularly infuriating. And yet, he concludes his let's-set-the-record-straight outburst about the Smurfs on a melancholy note: "They don't even have any reproductive organs underneath those little white pants. That's what's so illogical about, y' know, being a Smurf. What's the point of living if you don't have a dick?" The innocent sexuality (or asexuality) of his childhood is giving way to a more complicated post-pubescent incarnation, fraught with moral questions for Donnie.

Frank is a manifestation of that ambivalent aspect of Donnie's own erupting id, his stifled/frustrated hormonal urges, his feelings of being trapped in his own body and his own brain between childhood and the full-blown sexuality he so desires but knows he can't act on (with Elizabeth, anyway). How appropriate that he's attending Middlesex High School; when it comes to sex, he's stuck in the middle. When Donnie taunts Elizabeth about how to "suck a f---k" while miming that he's "all ears" -- well, whether he knows it or not, he's conjuring up a prescient image of Frankenbunny, whom he no doubt imagines engaging in all kinds of polymorphously perverse activities with his sister.

Happy belated Halloween. Hehehe…

-MM

I’d Marry Rachel and Her Crazy Sister, Too.

I hate to follow-up so quickly with my previous post, but I finally saw Rachel Getting Married and wanted to get all of my random thoughts down while this film’s still fresh on my mind.

Rachel is such a contrast to Changeling. Where Straczynski seemed to be more interested in historical accuracy, Jenny Lumet has the heart of a dramatist. Her characters come first. While Straczynski’s characters seemed cold and aloof at times, Lumet’s characters just burst to life and they’re so true and vivid (and full of needs and deception).

In fact, here’s a scene from the very beginning when Kym is picked up from rehab by her father and step-mother.



It’s interesting to note that Jenny Lumet wrote an unsympathetic protagonist in Kym (Anne Hathaway). There’s no other way to describe her. She’s a tornado of emotions and drama, and she’s not exactly likeable. But this kind of character is certainly recognizable to us. We know people like her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’d want to move in with her. This is not sympathy with a goal but rather a character with depth going through a tough transition in her life. Is there anything wrong with that? I don’t think so. In fact, this reminds me of Away From Her, another film I loved and wrote about.

But Rachel works, because Kym, with all of her faults, is surrounded by a range of sympathetic characters trying to cope with this difficult situation and we can relate to that. (This kind of story design is not new. I’m reminded of Mozart and his Diabolical Don G.) Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have all this drama surrounding a wedding, an occasion which evokes in and of itself the happiest feelings of love. But I’ve always believed that we are more satisfied by depth in protags than flat sympathy with a goal. Consider the opening fifteen minutes of Rachel and all the ways Lumet aims to show depth in Kym. We are given so many sides to her character – anticipation, anxiety, strength, weakness, rebellion, obedience, fear, courage, love, hate, tension, relief, and probably a dozen other emotions I failed to mention. That’s great stuff. That keeps you watching (and entertained).

Of course, Kym can be quite grating at times. She is self-centered. She is a drama queen. She may even be bi-polar. But Lumet’s point seems to be more about making us understand the sources of pain, which has a great social value. It’s so easy to hate people who are mean-spirited and selfish and think of them in inhuman terms like “freak” and reject them. But with Lumet, she helps us to understand and there’s value in that. There are no easy resolutions to these kinds of problems and once the wedding is over, the film thankfully, didn’t dip into so many clichés. There’s no closure. You know that Kym’s trials and tribulations will not end with her sister's wedding, and that’s true to life. Isn’t drama supposed to be about holding a mirror up to life?


I also want to mention that I admired the way Lumet kept the conflicts interesting. When two characters are going at it and the argument almost feels like it’s going on too long, Lumet reveals something new to keep the plot progressing forward. Nothing’s ever quite what it seems. That’s a good dramatist. I loved that about Jenny’s writing and would love to see more of her work.

Any criticisms? Yeah, a few. I don’t think the scenes between Kym and her mom really worked. That was the only time the conflicts felt forced and a bit contrived. The ending to the dishwasher showdown seemed forced to me. The ending (and who Kym leaves with) came out of nowhere to me and I’m not sure was the best choice. I’m also not quite sure how the multi-cultural wedding supported the theme or Kym’s story. If anything, there were too many scenes of celebration and partying to the detriment of story. While these are minor complaints and I love the film, I’m not sure it’s worthy of an Oscar.

BTW, Jenny Lumet is still fabulous.

-MM

Sex and Screenwriting, Part II

Hey guys,

Part II of Sex and Screenwriting has been posted, which includes Eyes Wide Shut, Cabaret, Boys Don’t Cry, and a few others. At the end, I think a few readers and I AM so very thankful for everyone’s help:

Without Them We Wouldn't be Getting Any
I’d like to thank Jennifer van Sijll, Eric, Joe, Kelly, Randy, Rebekah, Joseph, Jeff, Erin, as well as the readers of my blog: Emily Blake, Joshua James, David Alan, James Patrick Joyce, Laura Deerfield, Purpletrex, Miriam Paschal, Pat (Gimmebreak), Christina, Matt, Nestori, DougJ, terraling, Lisa, Christian M. Howell, Seeing_I, deepstructure, Gabbagoo, James, Scott, Kevin Broom, Bob Thielke, Spanish Prisoner, Cody, Ben, Trevor, rdas7, hwee, Unknown Screenwriter, and the Anonymous Production Assistant. Their raging debates about sex in film last July on my blog provided much needed food for thought. Thanks so much, guys.

Why “Changeling” Doesn’t Deserve an Oscar

Hey guys,

This is my time of year when I’m usually hopping from theater to theater to catch all of the latest Oscar contenders. I love it! I live for GREAT FILMS! Bring it on! Give me your best shot!

Hehehe…

Yeah, well, there are some very slim pickings this year, sad to say. Regardless, I’m going to blog about those films as I see them. And I just got back from seeing Changeling and thought I’d try to get my thoughts down while the movie’s still fresh on my mind.

Warning – lots of spoilers!

Well, this film just doesn’t work. The whole endeavor felt so flat. We sat in the back row, which I love to do so that I can also watch the audience. I could tell it didn’t connect with the audience, as many people seemed restless, shifted in their seats, and one woman sitting in front of me kept checking the time on her phone. At times, the film tested my patience, too. So I thought I’d try to identify some of its problems and see how my brilliant readers also felt about it.

* Lack of tension. This is yet another example of why I feel we’re in a screenwriting state of emergency because so many writers have no clue about the importance of good tension to make a film great. Mr. Straczynski made a number of missteps in this category. First, the kid. The kid suddenly disappeared. Later, everything is explained to us either verbally or though flashbacks with voice overs, all of which undermined tension. The story unfolds in a way that EXPLAINS too much after the fact, which completely deflates all the scenes of tension because it already happened and we already know the outcome. We’re not IN the moment WITH those characters hoping against hope it’ll work out AS it happens. Only then would we, as an audience, be persuaded to truly care. It’d also be far more compelling if Mr. Straczynski established the threat of the serial killer first and gave us dual storylines – one of the mother frantically trying to find her son and another of her son while he’s in custody of this serial killer, locked up in his chicken coop, and how he ultimately helped that other boy. That approach would’ve come alive to us and the audience would’ve been more involved. Other ways the film lacked tension – the serial killer was never a threat. We watched him try to skip town, which is certainly not as engaging as watching him try to kidnap children. He was never a threat to the police either or to the cop, Ybarra, who was snooping around his farm. I have to agree with Berardinelli: “The central problem with Changeling is that the lengthy secondary story of Ybarra's investigation and the revelations surrounding the serial killer come across as unnecessary appendages rather than important aspects of the story. Every time the movie strays from Christine and her crusade, the film loses energy. There's enough going on with the main character, who suffers grief at losing her son, goes through a One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest phase, and ends up in direct conflict with the police department in a court of a law, that the introduction of a murder investigation muddies the waters. Changeling feels long and cluttered because it is long and cluttered.” Straczynski also established early the corruption of the police department. Reverend Briegleb tells Christine about the “gun squad.” Yet, these guys never play a part in the narrative and Christine is never put into a position where she thinks they may be trying to kill her. All of that “gun squad” talk felt like a setup without a payoff. Another aspect that robbed tension is that Straczynski protected Christine for most of the story by making her a media darling. In doing this, practically everyone in L.A. is on her side rooting for her, and it’s no surprise at all that others will fight on her behalf. Once she was locked up in the insane asylum, she also became passive the remainder of the story because by this point so many other people were fighting for her cause. Whose story is this? The people of L.A. fighting for Christine Collins or Christine Collins? Once you take the story out of her hands, everything falls flat.

* Weak scenes. Straczynski uses his writer’s pen more as a blunt instrument than a tool for a devoted dramatist. We had blunt, obvious characterizations. Good guys were good. Bad guys were bad. Christine Collins is a victim. Okay, we get that. So what? How are you going to make the experience of this story interesting? You have to add a few layers of complexity to heighten the drama. An example would be the scene in the house with the boy that’s pretending to be her son. What happens? He says “good night, mom,” or something like that. She blows up and tells him to never call her mom ever again. She screams at him. In the next scene in his bedroom, he’s lying in bed with his back to her strangely and pretending to sleep while she apologizes and tries to persuade him to confess that he’s not really her son. That’s weak to me. It’s all so very obvious. The boy’s character was cold and aloof and unengaging and so obviously not her son. A good dramatist would’ve aspired to give us so much more emotional mileage out of those scenes. The boy could’ve been more proactive to lie and convince her he’s her son. There could’ve been the subtext of desperation behind his words to convince her that would’ve added some much needed emotional layers to that scene. Yes, he’s pretending to be something he’s not but we’d feel for him.

* Christine had too much emotion and not enough depth. I thought, “how many more times will we have to watch Angelina Jolie cry?” I believe she cried so much because her part was underwritten and deflated of depth. Jolie didn’t have much else to do.

* The ending went on too long. He should’ve ended the story shortly after the hearings and the trial.

Have you seen it? What are your thoughts?

-MM

MM’s Drunken Musings

[I’ve had three cigars and I don’t know how many brandys…]

Above is the photo of a truly brilliant man who knows who I am, yet he knows nothing of “Mystery Man” or my blog or Script Magazine, although he has Script on display in his very popular cigar store.

Hehehe…

And he knows important people, too. I frickin’ love that man. He’s the smartest cigar aficionado on the planet. In the photo, he’s smoking something Cuban while following his favorite football team (USC) on his laptop, and yet, he’s chomping on Cheetos.

Hehehe… I LOVE that man.

My shoe photo was taken outside of his cigar store. I’m there all the time. I once pointed out the sex article in Script Mag, and he loved it. “This is really deep stuff,” he said. “Did you write this?” No, I told him. I just loved the article, I said, and then I laughed.

His favorite paragraph was about Annie Hall. I wrote, “Annie Hall gave us scenes filled with problems in the bedroom (usually bad timing, mood-killing mishaps, or lowered romantic interests) all of which satirized the idea that sex was the foundation upon which all contemporary relationships were built. Here, if the sex was dead, so was the relationship. You may recall the sequence where Annie and Alvy are seeing their respective therapists and revealing their differing perceptions about the same question of 'How often do you have sex?' Alvy: 'Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.' Annie: 'Constantly! I’d say three times a week.' Hehehe… Those two seemed fated to always be searching for a love that lasts but never find it, which was punctuated by Woody Allen’s non-linear structure.”

Coincidentally, we watched the last half of Annie one night last week. My favorite scene (and his as well) is when Diane Keaton sings in the club. God, that just cuts right into the heart. Everyone in the store was silent when Keaton sang. When it was over, he lamented the sad state of contemporary clubs today and how no one showcases singers in wonderfully intimate settings like that. Oh, screw it. Here's a vid:



BTW - the hands of the African American man in the foreground are none other than… well, I probably shouldn’t tell you.

Hehehe… SO very sorry.

Yeah, yeah, I get complaint e-mails every time I share personal bits about myself. Some people love the mystery, but sometimes, I can’t help myself. It gets old being mysterious ALL the time, ya know.

-MM

Two Fabulous Unused Hitchcock Ideas

From Steven DeRosa’s Writing with Hitchcock:

A quote from screenwriter John Michael Hayes:

“…I remember one idea involving an automobile production line that never made it into the completed picture [North by Northwest]. The hero would arrive to question a production foreman. As the scene would begin, the foreman would point out a frame coming on the line and talk for a minute about the wonders of the assembly line. Then the questioning would begin and the two men would start walking. In the background, we’d see this frame being built into a car. After a few minutes, the necessary dialogue would be finished. But before the scene ended, the foreman would point to this car that the audience has seen assembled from a frame. The hero would go over, admire it, open the back door, and a corpse would fall out.”

From David Freeman’s Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock:

Occasionally, he would have ideas for film, or chunks of films, but no real story to hang them on. One beginning that amused him took place at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. A performance of “Lucia” was in progress. When the soprano was at the height of the mad scene – he said he always imagined Callas doing it – and impossibly high notes are ringing through the great house, a shot is fired, its sound muffled by Callas’ voice. But it goes wrong and the man shot – he’s seated in a box – pitches forward and tumbles into the seats below. People scream, the orchestra stops playing, and the stage manager whisks the diva into the wings. We cut backstage to her dressing room. She’s pale and frightened. Her dresser and various assistants cater to her until she says to them all, “Please… thank you… but I must lie down. Thank you. Please go now.” Her attendants bow and depart. When she’s alone, she picks up her telephone, dials, and then says, “Well, it’s done. You almost botched it, but he’s dead.” That’s as far as he got.

Around Blogosphere – 11/9/08

Tom Stempel has a fabulous series on Understanding Screenwriting.

James Berardinelli thinks Nolan should avoid a third Batman movie and laments the pitiful state of this year’s Oscar-bait.

Two important questions about the financial crisis:

1) What Would George Bailey Do?
2) What Would Charles Dickens Do?

David Bordwell on Categorical coherence: A closer look at character subjectivity
Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances—as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances, narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Barthes’ essay, along with other Structuralist studies, initiated the academic field of “narratology,” the systematic study of storytelling as it is manifested in many media. From the 1970s to the present, this became a vast, varied, and exciting area of inquiry.

Alexandra Sokoloff on Creating Supsense
A good story makes the stakes crystal clear – from the very beginning of the story. We know right up front in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS that there’s a serial killer out there who will not stop killing young women until he is caught or killed. How do we know that? The characters say it, flat out, and not just once, and not just one character. Harris makes us perfectly, acutely aware of what the stakes are. The story ups the ante when a particular victim is kidnapped and we get to know her – we really don’t want THIS particular, feisty victim to die.

Unk on Concept and Execution
Perform your DUE DILIGENCE. We’re selling something, right? They say KNOWLEDGE is 90% of the sale and boy does that ever ring true with spec screenplays… How many times have I finished reading a spec where it was obvious the writer trying to sell me didn’t even have 50% covered. LOL. 50% does not a sale make unless you’ve already made a sale.


Danny Stack says Blogging is Good for your Career
Now that blogging, and in particularly, scriboblogging, has been officially endorsed as a positive way to promote yourself, it’s interesting to see more and more people willing to tip their toes in the blogging waters to see what it’s all about. Is it geeky? Needy? Pointless? Who reads them? Who writes them? How? Why? What should I write about? How do I get people to read? Will I get any work from it?

Mike Le has a Rock Star Moment
Hollywood Survival Rule #83:
Your agent is only as good as the script you wrote.
If your agent/manager had the power to sell 110 pages of crap, they would all be billionaires. Your reps cannot perform miracles. They cannot turn water into wine, part the Red Seas, or sell a poorly executed script. Humbly take notes from your reps, but do not DEPEND on them to tell you what makes a good script. Agents don’t know what makes a good script, producers don’t know what makes a good script, and studios don’t know what makes a good script -- which is why it’s your job, the writer, to show them what a good script is. So what is a good script? I don't know. Just write the story you want to tell, and tell it well.

The four latest from Ted & Terry:

- Situation-Based Writing
The most important bit of writing advice for the beginning writer.

- Targeting
Do not write only to your talent level. Your job is to imagine something that you can't yet imagine.

- Scene Character
It's not that you've done a good job or a bad job, you haven't done the job at all if you haven't characterized the scene.

- The Second Concept
Bad news, one great killer concept is not enough. In today's competitive market, you might need...


Julie Gray on Kurt Vonnegut and Story Graphs
I was especially delighted by the story graphs in Chapter Three. They are so basic and make such sense. The Kafka graph made me laugh. Start low. Proceed downward...to infinity. For those of you who may not have seen these graphs, click HERE and enjoy. Kurt Vonnegut passed away in April, 2007 and I just have to say that Kurt is up in heaven now. That's something he found very funny and I just had to say it.

Scott’s mantra: “The only way out is through”
The only way to find the story is to go through the entire writing process. If you don’t, you won’t.

Tim Claque gives The best single bit of advice for new writers – EVER!
For each character know what they want. And know what they need. They may think they want to get through the working day. But we all know they need to change their home life priorities. They may think they want to survive the shoot out. But we all know they need to discover their partner is a rat.


Chris Fujiwara on the melodramas of Vincente Minnelli, master of illusion and disillusionment:
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) has, no doubt, its "melodramatic" aspects, but it lingers in the mind more as a celebration of the energy of its unregenerate producer-hero (Kirk Douglas), and that of Hollywood, than as a condemnation of them. The remaining "Minnelli melodramas" are diverse in tone and concerns: Tea and Sympathy (1956) is a delicate coming-of-age story, The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1963) an often boisterous comedy-drama; and one could add the unclassifiable A Matter of Time (1976), another European excursion for Minnelli and his last film. Furthermore, Minnelli's musicals and comedies have so many links to his melodramas that it is hard to separate them.

Diverse as they are, the Minnelli melodramas share this common ground: their mise en scène of excess and release happens inside what looks like a blandly normal and conventional framework. Minnelli specializes in plots that revolve around institutions (hospitals, movie studios, schools) and deal with conformity. The young heroes of Tea and Sympathy and Home From the Hill must learn, not necessarily how to be men, but how to act like men. Fear of community opinion paralyzes Frank (Arthur Kennedy) in Some Came Running. The viewer of these films becomes sensitive to the film frame itself as a measure that determines the value of its contents (the characters and the objects in their environment) and limits their circulation.

MM Inspires Gnarls Barkley

Here's the premiere music video of Gnarls Barkley's "Mystery Man."

Hehehe...

First Look at Mystery Man!

Hello, all you brilliant readers,

Above you'll find the world’s very first photo of ME!

This image was taken for the contributor’s page in conjunction with my very first article in SCRIPT MAGAZINE! Yeah, baby! I’m quite proud to have tackled the very taboo topic of Sex & Screenwriting!

Like me, the article is HOT-HOT-HOT! Hehehe…

Part Two will become available on the website very soon, I’m sure. Pick a copy up. Let me know what you think.

-MM

Screenwriting News & Links! 11/6/08

--------------------------------------

New Screenplays:

Universal Studios already has up-and-running their For Your Consideration page, as does Paramount Vintage. Between the two, there are four new scripts available:

Changeling

Frost/Nixon

The Duchess

Defiance

(The script for Revolutionary Road is “coming soon.”)

Also:

Halloween IV - February 26, 1998, draft script by Alan B. McElroy

Halloween V - March 31, 1989, draft script by Michael Jacobs, Dominique Othenin-Gerard, and Shem Bitterman

Max Payne - August 24, 2007, draft script by Beau Michael Thorne

The Dragons of Krull – Nov, 1980, draft script by Stanford Sherman

(leaked) Prince of Persia – June 15, 2006, draft by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

--------------------------------------


Politics & Movies Blog-a-Thon

Tyler Perry writes a screenplay inspired by Michelle Obama.

Weinstein Company Blames Mystery Man For Spreading "False" Writedown Rumor
Harvey, be a man, for God’s sake. Own up to your losses.

Hehehe…


MM in the news:

Anne Hathaway's new sexy Mystery Man revealed...
She's a lovely girl. She really is.

Mystery Man identified through cell phone.
Like I'm going to use MY OWN CELL PHONE. Morons.

Who Is The Mystery Man Behind Prop 8?
I would tell you, but I'd have to kill you.

Mystery Man cause for concern in the aftermath of 'emotional affair'
No need to get all upset about this. It was perfectly innocent...

Mystery Man's name sought by authorities
Yeah, you'll never catch me, ya frickin' morons. BRING IT ON!

Other news:

Say hello to the fabulous Gena Blake.
She's a follower of the blog, a writer who strips for a living, and I wanted to quote her in my review of Kasdan's Clash but couldn't work it. In an e-mail, she wrote, "Noticed your post on Clash of the Titans. I attended a few panels at the Austin Film Festival this weekend, including one with Lawrence Kasdan. He says three of his recent screenplays aren't being produced because no one's interested in the "D" word -- Drama. He said he's less invested in Clash and Robotech, which is kind of good because he's not worried about the stories getting screwed up in production."

So long, Michael Crichton
While the world knew him as a great story teller that challenged our preconceived notions about the world around us -- and entertained us all while doing so -- his wife Sherri, daughter Taylor, family and friends knew Michael Crichton as a devoted husband, loving father and generous friend who inspired each of us to strive to see the wonders of our world through new eyes.

And here’s the NYT on Crichton:
Most of his books relied on a simple formula. Like a scientist in a lab, Mr. Crichton (who had been a medical doctor before turning to fiction) would introduce some worrisome new specter into his fictional universe and then watch it run amok. Sometimes the menace was biological, like the space-borne plague in an early novel, The Andromeda Strain, or the genetically engineered dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World. And sometimes the problem was human beings, like the Japanese businessmen in Rising Sun intent on taking over the United States economy, or the rapacious female executive in Disclosure. The implicit prophecies embedded in those two books — a world run by sinister, unreadable Asians or castrating female honchos — proved to be wide of the mark, which was perhaps embarrassing to Mr. Crichton but that did not deter him from speculating in... State of Fear, that global warming might be a hoax.


"I write a lot of sonnets. One of my favorites is called Me And Clouds. And of course my most famous one, which you can read on my blog, Rain In My Heart."
- Paul Rudd on why screenwriting isn't that challenging

The e-mail from Kristen about Five Sprockets:
My name is Kristen and I work with FiveSprockets.com, an exciting new virtual production studio for writers and filmmakers. I’m writing because I recently came across your blog, Mystery Man on Film, and I thought that you and your members may really be interested in our new site. We would love to invite you and your readers to visit www.FiveSprockets.com to register for a free user account and take a look at what we have to offer. We welcome and appreciate all feedback, so please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think! Also, if you have any questions at all or would like more information, please feel free to send me an email to Kristen@rkpr.net.


NYT’s The Look of Australia
“Baz was very interested in the ethnic mix in Darwin, because Darwin is closer to Asia than it is to Sydney,” Ms. Martin said. “He started talking in a very literal and logical way: If you lost all your clothes on the drove and you had to get something made in 24 hours in Darwin, where would you go?” There were Chinese tailors working there, so she imagined a confluence of a cheongsam with a fashionable chrysanthemum print on organza.

David Foster Wallace’s Contribution to the Writer’s Thesaurus
One of the more interesting notes I came across was for pulchritude, which is a synonym for beauty. Wallace points out that this word is anything but beautiful: “A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols... and very real things themselves.”


BTW - Jenny Lumet is STILL fabulous
But then, “I have a husband” she says, “I have an adolescent son, I have a 4-month-old daughter so nobody listens to me at my house. I’m thrilled to be interviewed. I’m also a schoolteacher. This year, I haven’t been able to go back to school yet. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to school next year.”

Mark Twitchell: Canadian Murderer And Screenwriter!
We have a bizarre news story for you today about a Dexter fan who decided to write a screenplay about murder, and then murder people that way.

Huffington Post Writer is a Murderer!
Carol Anne Burger killed her former lover by stabbing her 222 times with a Phillips-head screwdriver and then took pains to hide her crime, police said Wednesday.

Don't fuck with writers. Hehehe...

“The desire for escapism that accompanies rough financial times is real, but boom times are also followed by painful and protracted cultural hangovers, and cultural hangovers are all about artistic reckoning," Carina Chocano wrote. "When good times give way suddenly to bad (or, in this case, when bad times give way suddenly to worse), fashion, materialism and excess suddenly become suspect. The arts revert temporarily (until there's money to be made again) to the starving, the angry and the ugly. There's something cathartic about this - the nihilism of film noir, punk rock, the 'pathetic aesthetic' of the early 90s constitute a jubilant 11th hour yawp against unreflective hedonism in boom times." You almost have to wonder if Chocano knew this piece would be one of the last, if not the last she'd write for the Los Angeles Times. As Anne Thompson notes, the paper cut 75 jobs in Editorial today, and Chocano's is one of them.


Bond seen as recession proof.

Writer: Expect a 'minimalistic' 007
Audiences should expect "a very minimalistic Bond" when Quantum of Solace hits cinema screens. Speaking at the Hollywood Film Festival's awards gala in Beverly Hills, Paul Haggis - one of the movie's writers - was keeping as tight-lipped as 007 himself when it came to dishing out details of what we can expect from the 22nd installment. He did, however, say fans won't be disappointed. "I think if you liked Casino Royale it's more of the same but the director Marc Forster put his own stamp on this," he said. "It's a very minimalistic Bond," he added.

David Geffen Makes a Sudden Exit

Studios Are Pushing Box Office Winners as Oscar Contenders

Milos Forman Searches For The Ghost Of Munich In Nazi-Era Epic
“Ghosts are everywhere,” Forman laughed when we caught up with him at the Director’s Guild Honors. “We’re just finishing the screenplay [for The Ghost of Munich] and I hope to be shooting sometime in the late spring.” Forman’s screenplay is by former Czech president Václav Havel, and it’s an adaptation of the book of the same name about the the Munich conference in 1938, when Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and... Edouard Daladier, convened, promising “peace in our time” only to see Hitler then invade Czechoslovakia.


Farrelly brothers to bring back Three Stooges
MGM, which showcased the comedy trio in shorts and features as early as 1933, is in the process of acquiring the film rights to the Stooges from Warner Bros., which has been developing a feature project for years. The Lion hopes to fast-track the most recent screenplay written by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly, which provides an origin story of sorts for Moe, Larry and Curly. The Farrellys are attached to direct. They also will produce along with Bradley Thomas and Charlie Wessler. Earl Benjamin and Robert Benjamin of C3 Entertainment, the executors of the Stooges' estate, will executive produce.

Screenwriter Announced for Spider-Man 4
When you’ve trained at Juilliard and won a Pulitzer Prize for your playwriting, there’s only one rung left for you to grab on the ladder of success: writing dialogue for a bespectacled nebbish who has been bitten by a radioactive spider. David Lindsay-Abaire, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the drama Rabbit Hole (as well as his breakthrough dark comedy, Fuddy Meers) will write the screenplay for Spider-Man 4, a representative for Mr. Lindsay-Abaire said.

Is David Fincher’s Torso Adaptation On The Fast Track?


What’s her name again? J.K. Roll-something?
But Rowling's astonishing track record as a writer is equaled by the string of successful adaptations. Magically translating and compressing Rowling's 870 page Order of the Phoenix, the longest book in the series, to the bigscreen takes more than a wave of Harry's wand. Rowling, as the 800-pound gorilla, could have gotten in the way ... but she didn't. Just ask Order of the Phoenix screenwriter, Michael Goldenberg. "I was really encouraged to find the best way to make it work as a movie," he says, "and often that entailed coming up with something that wasn't in the book. I ended up writing a lot more original material that I expected to."

A Conversation with Secret Life of Bees Writer/Director
It only took her 30 days to adapt the beloved novel into a screenplay.

iTunes to give credits or refunds due to WGA strike

Road to Perdition Sequels
Two sequels are in the works to the acclaimed 2002 graphic novel adaptation Road to Perdition, which starred Tom Hanks, Daniel Craig, Jude Law, and the late Paul Newman and was directed by Sam Mendes. An announcement picked up The Hollywood News and MTV reveals that Perdition author Max Allan Collins will direct the two films -- Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise -- from his own screenplay adaptations. JBM Production Company and EMO Films will produce. Road to Purgatory will be dedicated to Paul Newman.


Interview with Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg

frieze’s Life in Film
In an ongoing series, frieze asks artists and filmmakers to list the movies that have influenced their practice.

Straczynski Interview
"That's one of the things that was unusual about this script... usually when a writer is brought on to tell a true story, it's based on a book or other major document. Here, there was nothing," said Straczynski. "I had to go back and sift through thousands of pages of material to end up with about two thousand relevant pages of testimony, court documents, correspondence and the like." (Another one here.)


Gears Of War Screenwriter Aims For ‘Gritty And Real’ Big-Screen Version Of Video Game
“It would be a crying shame not to deal with Marcus and Dom,” Morgan told MTV News. “I would not be interested in the movie if we weren’t dealing with them. I want to see those guys. I want to see ‘Emergence Day.’ I want to see this stuff happen.”

Nichols 'High' on Kurosawa remake
Mike Nichols is set to direct a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low for Miramax Films. Written by David Mamet and produced by Scott Rudin, the film hasn’t started casting. Martin Scorsese originally commissioned Mamet to write the screenplay back in 1999; it took two years for Rudin to pull the rights together. Scorsese likely will executive produce. Kurosawa’s 1963 detective thriller starring Toshiro Mifune was based on the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom, about a businessman who is ruined when he honorably pays ransom to kidnappers who mistakenly nabbed his driver’s son. (I watched this film last week coincidentally. The first hour was brilliant. The second hour and a half dragged quite a bit.)

Oh God, they’re making Walter the Farting Dog
Another hot Disney Channel act is poised to make a bigscreen splash — at 20th Century Fox. Fox has locked the Jonas Brothers to make their feature starring debut in Walter the Farting Dog. Based on a bestselling series of books by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray, the film is being adapted by Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen into a family film that will revolve around Nick, Joe and Kevin Jonas, as well as their younger brother Frankie.


Sam Mendes to Direct Preacher

MRC, Shyamalan dance with Devil
M. Night Shyamalan and Media Rights Capital have formalized the first project in their three-picture deal to hatch fright films. Brian Nelson (30 Days of Night) is set to write the first project, Devil, which Quarantine helmer John Erick Dowdle will direct and produce with his brother, Drew Dowdle. Supernatural thriller is based on an original story by Shyamalan, who'll produce with Sam Mercer under the Night Chronicles banner. The Dowdle siblings will be executive producers. The PG-13 film will begin production next year.

God, the Movie
The Bible contains what many consider to be the greatest story ever told. I realize that this particular phrase has been used as the title to a film about the life of Jesus, but I would like to suggest that even the life of Jesus, as recorded in the four gospels, is part of a bigger story that begins in Genesis and ends at the end of Revelation. Think of the larger story as The God Story. In my preceding article I made mention of the fact that the Bible is a book composed of sixty-six separate documents. We often refer to these individual documents as “books” of the Bible. Contained in those documents is a story that is truly miraculous. I say this because it is a story that perfectly fits the three-act structure of a great screenplay, and yet was written by forty different “screenwriters” over a period of sixteen hundred years!

Greatest Films Never Made
Floods put a stop to Terry Gilliam's pet project; Stanley Kubrick's studio pulled the plug on his; Orson Welles ran out of funds. Some of the greatest directors laboured over films that ultimately never saw the light of day. Killian Fox rounds up the potential classics that fell foul of fate. (You can read MM’s review of Kubrick’s Napoleon here.)

Vince Vaughn set for Sunny and 68
Universal Pictures is acquiring Sunny and 68, a spec script drama that Vince Vaughn will star in and Gavin O'Connor will direct. O'Connor, who wrote the script with Anthony Tambakis, will produce with Vaughn's Wild West Picture Show Prods. banner. Universal got first crack at the script because Vaughn has a deal there. He's currently starring in Couples Retreat, which he produces with Scott Stuber. O'Connor, whose Pride and Glory was released this past weekend by Warner Bros., said he and Tambakis wrote the script, a drama with comedic overtones, with Vaughn in mind for the lead character.

Paramount gets Agnes Quill
Paramount has acquired screen rights to Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery, a graphic novel by Dave Roman. Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs) is attached to direct, and Evan Spiliotopoulos is writing the script. Pic marks the first acquisition for Adam Goodman since transitioning from DreamWorks, where he shepherded Hotel for Dogs. Graphic novel’s title character turns 16 and inherits from her grandfather an estate and an ability to communicate with the dead.


Amy Adams is the Queen of Sheba
Script, penned by Karen Croner based on the bio of NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden, centers on how a woman uses her mother's madness and delusions to empower herself.

Universal bought a Skyscraper
Universal has preemptively bought Mike Sobel’s disaster-actioner pitch Skyscraper. Neal Moritz is producing via his Original Film banner. Project is described as a modern-day Towering Inferno, in which a Donald Trump-esque developer sets out to build a mile-high structure in Chicago. When the tower starts to falter, a crew must rescue the city from mayhem.

Rookie in charge of Lionsgate's Assets
Lionsgate has hired newbie screenwriter Andrea McCloud to pen its workplace comedy Cover Your Assets. Jon Shestack and Ginny Brewer are producing. Lionsgate vp production Jim Miller is overseeing for the studio. Described as a reverse Working Girl, McCloud's pitch explores modern gender-role complications in a story about a wealthy and powerful female executive who gets involved with a new guy. Assets had been in turnaround at New Line when Lionsgate picked it up.

A few more Script Sales.


Chris Nolan’s first interview since The Dark Knight’s release
He says: "I have to ask the question: How many good third movies in a franchise can people name?"

Sure, no problem. Ever heard of James Bond? It was called Goldfinger. Also, LOTR: Return of the King didn’t suck. Harry Potter and Bourne upheld some consistency in quality. As a stretch, I might also include Last Crusade and Return of the Jedi. Plus, admit it. As a child, you loved Rocky III! It had Hulk Hogan and Mr. T! Hehehe...

Nolan dissects his favorite scene in Dark Knight
To be honest, it’s pretty easy for me. The scene that is so important and so central to me is the interrogation scene between Batman and the Joker in the film. When we were writing the script, that was always one of the central set pieces that we wanted to crack.

Beer for My Horses “Screenwriter” Rodney Carrington
Collaborating with Toby Keith to co-write the screenplay for the film, Beer for My Horses, was a lot of hard work, but Rodney Carrington says things got better after that. "Once the writing portion of it was done and we started shooting the movie, then it was just fun," he says and then adds with a laugh, "Fun and games -- liquor, pot, drinking, girls. Lots of stuff -- movie star stuff."

Orem screenwriter shoots new movie at Provo burger joint
Karen Peck, mother of three children and the holder of a graduate degree from Utah State University, completed filming on her first movie, Start with Nothing, at the former Broiler Express on Tuesday. A self-proclaimed "movie junkie" along with her children, Peck said her 1983 cinema experience seeing Return of the Jedi at age 12 was a pivotal moment in her silver screen education. "I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen," she said.

The area screenwriter who wrote the script for the HBO movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and the London filmmaker who brought the story of Northampton's Young@Heart chorus to the screen, were both recently honored for work that "affirms our individual and collective dignity, and reveals common humanity."


David Benioff on his novel and the upcoming Wolverine film
The screenplay I wrote for Wolverine, it’s pretty faithful to the source material. Fans who have read the Barry Windsor-Smith Weapon X or the other comics will recognize most of the story beads and certainly I hope will recognize the character. I think he’s much closer to the character we know from the comics than the character we know from the X-men movies. We’ve made him much more brutal and brooding and more like the Logan that I grew up with.

Darren Aronofsky Talks RoboCop Remake
“It's a real reinvention,” he told us, responding to those rumours that the movie would somehow follow on or be a direct sequel to Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original. “Me and David Self are working on the screenplay. He's a great, great writer and we're trying to do something new and fresh. We'll see what happens when the screenplay comes.”

Hollywood’s Hottest Mavericks

The Hobbit in 3-D? Del Toro Says "Maybe"

--------------------------------------

On the Contest Circuit:

Details Launches Screenplay Contest

Nicholl winners

Samuel Goldwyn Award Winners Announced

20/20 Competition Anounces Contest Winners

Script Savvy Announces September 2008 Contest Results

MoviePoet Announces September Contest Results

WILDSound Announces Fall TV and One Page Screenplay Finalists

RIIFF Announces Contest Winners

People's Pilot Announces Contest Winners

Spec Scriptacular Contest Winners Announced

Scriptapalooza Interviews 2008 Contest Winners

Writers on the Storm Announces Finalists


--------------------------------------

And Finally…

Silence of the Lambs, baby!

“Clash of the Titans” – The Complete Series

Hey guys,

Below are links to three articles covering some of the ideas behind remaking Clash of the Titans. We begin with a discussion of the original film, followed by reviews of Travis Beacham’s January 25, 2007, script and then Lawrence Kasdan’s June 29, 2007, revision.

Hope you enjoy it.

-MM

-------------------------------


Part One
“Now we cannot leap into remake territory without first discussing the original film.”

Part Two
“The heart of the matter is this – If Mr. Beacham has any aspirations of having a career as a screenwriter, of having HIS scripts filmed and not passed off for others to rewrite, he must address the fundamental flaws in his thinking as a screenwriter.”

Part Three
“But when I step back and take in the house as a whole, I have to ask myself: ‘Okay, how does this make me feel?’”

Part III – Kasdan’s “Clash”

----------------------------------

Hey guys,

I apologize for the delay in posting this review. I was never satisfied with this article until I just gave up and started over from scratch.

-MM

----------------------------------


Not sure how to describe Larry Kasdan’s revision except to say that Kasdan merely redecorated the house that Beacham built, which had always been fundamentally unsound. The overall structure and design is intact, which is not a good thing. However, Kasdan certainly made the individual rooms more pleasant, colorful, and appear lived-in by real human beings. In fact, some of those rooms are quite stirring to see. But when I step back and take in the house as a whole, I have to ask myself “Okay, how does this make me feel?” I can only conclude that it is still a cold, hollow, uninviting eyesore that should be completely demolished and rebuilt from the ground up.

In fact, it makes me want to take another tour of the house that Beverley Cross built. Because you want to admire again his wonderful craftsmanship, the sound structure, the elegance in its simplicity, the focus on the journey supported by the clear functionality of every room, the way he provided a point and reason to every tiny detail, and you also appreciate something new - the fact that he had the discipline to avoid building a lot of unnecessary additions to his house that would’ve made you lose sight of the heart and soul of his creation.

I wonder if this was a case of studio insecurity. Perhaps the writers were pressured to deliver something like 300 with big war scenes, because they were so influenced by the amount of money 300 made. Perhaps the studio wanted big war scenes in Clash because they knew they’d be going up against War of the Gods in 2010, a story Variety describes as “a mythological tale set in war-torn ancient Greece, as the young warrior prince Theseus leads his men in a battle against evil that will see the gods fighting with soldiers against demons and titans.” But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps this was just a case of weak screenwriting, of a new writer wanting to impress the studio with something big but lacked the discipline to focus on the characters and Perseus, in particular. You have to know what your story is and have the courage of conviction to tell it. Clash has always been a romantic adventure story. It’s a waste to try to turn it into something it has never ever been.

Too many non-essential things are going on in the plot. You have a war between gods and man. You have so much thought put into how this war happened and how it effects both sides. You have the debates amongst the gods (and private conspiracies), as well as the debates amongst the leaders of man, and the negotiation for peace. You have discussions about faith vs. science & self-reliance, and pre-destination of the gods vs. the free-will of man. And none of these things satisfy me because there’s no emotional core behind any of these discussions. There’s too much emphasis on the intellectual over the emotional, and there must be an emotional center to a story before you can get anyone involved in an intellectual discussion. And this settlement for peace, this forced marriage between Perseus and Andromeda, is a bad move. They don’t connect. They DON’T fall in love because they’re both so annoyed about being in a forced marriage. Thus, you’ve robbed Perseus of ANY emotional motivation whatsoever to go on this adventure to save Andromeda. He’s just doing what everyone says he’s pre-destined to do. What does Perseus want?


I’m not even a third into this script and I want to put it down and do a complete revision of the entire story. It’s a mess. It’s a total mess, and they’ve lost all focus on the story. Because there’s been so much thought about everything else in the story, what gets lost is Perseus, as a character, and his journey. Who is he? What’s his emotional logic for going on this adventure? Why am I supporting him? Am I supposed to support him just because he’s a believer in self-reliance? Are you kidding me? So what? Why should I care? Why should HE care? What’s personally at stake FOR HIM in all of this? Do you even know what you want him to be – a scientist, rebel, or hero?

There is nothing more annoying than a weak, passive, unmotivated HERO protagonist. Even while they are on the adventure, Perseus is terribly passive. Do you remember the scene I described in the last article about how the team of men JUST SO HAPPEN to come upon a bunch of Pegassi and for fun, coax Perseus into mounting one? He fails. Then a dragon appears. This dragon was sent by a very bad god to eat Perseus. At this point, I’m sure all the fanboys are thinking, “Oh cool! A dragon! I love this script!” But me, I’m shaking my head because Perseus fails to step up to be the hero. Everyone else on his team fights the dragon and defeats it. Perseus does so very little, and after it’s over, he gets roundly condemned for it. He’s “too important” to risk his life like that because “the hopes of multitudes” reside with him. Doesn’t that mean he should be acting like a fucking hero by fighting the fucking dragon? Isn’t that what heroes do? In my notes, I wrote, “What’s so bad about this scene is that everyone else does damage to the dragon except Perseus. This could’ve been his chance to prove himself to the team. He could’ve tamed a Pegasus, used the animal to kill the dragon to the stunned looks of everyone. He could’ve earned their respect and spot as rightful leader of the expedition. Plus, this would’ve introduced a REASON to have Pegasus in the story in the first place. Better yet, Perseus should’ve been the one to insist that they try to tame these animals so they could fly to the witches to save time.”

Even anti-heroes make decisions that push a plot forward. Toward the end of the story, a goddess named Vidalia tells Perseus, “A hero. They’re waiting for you, Perseus.” I wrote in my notes, “Yeah, I’m waiting for Perseus to be a hero, too.”


Everything in this story, all this bloated extraneous shit about a war and all these discussions about things unrelated to the story should be stripped away and the focus should be on Perseus and HIS JOURNEY. Nothing else matters. If you can’t get an audience behind your own hero protagonist with an emotional core to his story, then everything else you do is a complete waste of time and money.

I’m not done. This Medusa scene is shit. Kasdan only marginally improved upon Beacham’s efforts by raising tension slightly. Not only that, Medusa is still stripped of the bow & arrow and the acid for blood. The men, again, enter the temple with blindfolds and the only thing Medusa does is slither around them, untie their blindfolds, and try to get them to look at her. (My friend, Eric, suggested that, every time she takes off a blindfold, she screams, “BOO!” Hehehe…) Come on, guys. There’s so much that could be done with Medusa to make it GREAT. The reason everyone is going to pay to see this movie is for the Medusa scene, and you have to make Medusa BIGGER and BETTER than the original and make the scene MORE TENSE, not less.


Another notable change Kasdan made was to have Perseus’ human father tag along on this expedition, because, I guess, this character was a waste in Beacham’s draft. But I wasn’t sure what the dramatic point of bringing him along would be. Well, his father enters Medusa’s temple WITH Perseus. I thought, “Ohhhh, Larry’s going to change the dynamics of this scene. I’ll bet his father gets nailed by Medusa, which really sets off Perseus and his drive to behead her.” But no, that doesn’t happen. Perseus AND his father leave the temple together with Medusa’s head. Oy vey… And again, because other soldiers from his team are standing outside the temple, we’re robbed of the iconic image of Perseus holding up Medusa’s head in victory.

You guys are making Clash of the Titans, right?


Please, cut the soldiers fighting the centaurs while Perseus is with Medusa. It doesn’t work because there’s no tension. It’s action for action’s sake without any point. We don’t feel any tension because A) the centaurs are blind, so it shouldn’t be THAT difficult to kill them, and B) Perseus is ALREADY in the temple. If they were fighting to get IN the temple, then that’s different. The only reason to have an action scene like this while Perseus is in the temple is to RAISE TENSION for the audience. Like, say, the centaurs kill all the soldiers and we’re worried about Perseus stepping out of the temple, because he’s going to be attacked by the centaurs. See? TENSION. Thus, you should not make them blind so that, as a twist, when they charge to attack Perseus as he leaves he can hold up her head to kill them.

Are you guys even thinking in terms of tension & suspense?


I want to talk about Andromeda. In the original film, she wasn’t simply a damsel in distress. She was also headstrong, and wasn’t going to be bossed around. Thus, she informed Perseus and his team that she’s going with them. Here, in the remake, there’s no love between the Andromeda and Perseus. She’s left in Joppa, and we’re given a completely different kind of story about her changing from her spoiled, selfish, sluttish, diva-like indulgences to becoming a good ruler of Joppa. There’s nothing emotionally resonant about that kind of arc, because “becoming a good ruler” is so bland and generic. What does that mean? Look, give yourself multiple solutions to every problem and ask yourself – what’s the most emotionally resonant approach to a subplot? It’s far more emotionally resonant to see her change early but face resistance, because it’s not until we see her fight for things that are important that we’ll care. Instead of her bitching and moaning about her father choosing to let her be sacrificed to save the city, which is contrived and melodramatic, Andromeda could’ve submitted herself to her father to be sacrificed for the sake of her city, but he resists. He can’t go through with it. He cares too much.

Finally, without giving anything away, I’ll say this – cut Vidalia. She’s a terrible idea. She’s uninspiring, completely one-dimensional, and void of any qualities that would make us care about… her subplot.

-MM