The Wizard of Oz and the “Holy Shit!” Moment Every Script Should Have

May 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Part One: The “Holy Shit!” Moment

I found myself standing before a room full of non-profit executives in New Jersey a few weeks ago, asked to talk about storytelling. I figured I should start by reviewing what a story is, but I can’t stand the “grand theories that explain everything” type of story analysis, so I reread or skimmed five books about screenwriting and mythology from my shelf and came up with my own list of story elements I more modestly called “Eleven Things Most Stories Have Always Had.”

It is beside the point of this post, but they are: 1. Main Character or Hero. 2. Exposition. 3. Unique Opportunity or “The Call.” 4. Major Theme. 5. A goal. 6. A dynamic character. 7. An antagonist. 8. Inner conflict. 9. Setbacks. 10. Divine intervention. 11.Climax.

One thing I omitted from my list on account of my audience – since I wasn’t talking to screenwriters, but to administrators – is the “Holy Shit!” moment. In a three act story, this is the moment in Act Two when things go from bad to worse. No matter how screwed your hero thinks he or she is, he realizes he’s much worse off than he ever imagined.

It’s the moment in Jaws when Brody sees the shark up close for the first time and can only stammer, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” An even better example is the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends have finally gotten an audience with the wizard, and the wizard says, in essence: Did you see that witch who was threatening to kill you on your way here? Go get her broom!

Its delivery is better in Oz than in Jaws because you the viewer have been set up for it better. In Jaws it’s just a matter of scale: You knew it was a big shark, and now you know it’s a bigger shark. In Oz, that witch has been bothering your heroine on and off the whole time. You don’t know yet that the wizard is a big phony, so it’s an unimaginably cruel and impossible assignment straight into the heart of danger. “Holy Shit!” you figure. The one thing that you already know would be hardest for the main character to face is now the exact thing she’s facing.

When I’m reading a script, if it starts to lose me somewhere in the middle, I often suppose it can be fixed by adding a “Holy Shit!” moment. Suppose one of the hero’s friends turns against him. Suppose that kind old lady is also a zombie. Suppose the snitch has to run from the cops AND the drug gang now. Suppose the pilot passes out and now the woman who’s afraid of heights has to fly the airplane. It’s the moment when the plot hits the accelerator because:

1.the antagonist is worse than previously thought (the bigger shark); 2. now you’ve pissed that antagonist off; 3. a plain shitty set of coincidences has suddenly made things harder; or 4. by trying to fix things, your hero has inadvertently made things worse.

Of course ‘adding a “Holy Shit!” moment’ is like adding an earthquake to a landscape. It requires redefining two tectonic plates and repositioning the fault line to that moment. A good writer prepares the viewers for the “Holy Shit!” moment without letting on that they’re being set up, and then re-imagines the rest of the story based on the new reality.

When I am revising a story, I try not to read ahead. There is no future point where your story HAS TO go. There is only the present, and the one question you are always answering: What happens next?

There was a time, 1956 to be precise, when The Wizard of Oz hadn’t been on TV yet, and it was another well-liked, not altogether successful 17-year-old movie that most people still hadn’t seen. Even it had a present tense, and was full of surprises. I’m sure audiences reacted to the “Holy Shit!” moment the way the lion did.

Part 2: The Wizard of Oz As Shorthand For the American Mind.

I love baiting my screenwriter and playwright friends by telling them that The Wizard of Oz is the best film ever. As writers, what we appreciate in films is often the authorial voice: the director or the writer has a narrative plan, and takes us there one step at a time.

The Wizard of Oz had three directors and numerous credited and uncredited writers. It already had a long life as a book, in vaudeville, in films, and in sequels to all of the above. It had close to mythic status in that the public already knew the characters and gist of the story by 1939. All this in just 39 years: It was about as old as The Godfather is now.

I am guessing that there is already a body of psychobabbly theory about why it has become a shorthand, not just for screenwriters, but for all kinds of stories. The only book I’ve ever read about it is Salman Rushdie’s long essay for BFI Film Classics, which – apologies to the living literary saint – didn’t teach me very much.

You could say that the stars aligned over Culver City in ’38, and Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, Judy Garland, Ray Bolger and Frank Morgan all happened to rattle off master works at the same time. You could also say that a handful of artists knew exactly when to put their foot down for something good within the studio system; they had to fight to keep “Over the Rainbow” from being cut, for example. You could also say it is a movie about something universal, a girl at the very end of girlhood. It is arguably the most sexually repressed story of all time, or possibly the most ingenious, under-the-radar celebration of sexuality ever put on film:

Dorothy looks like a 17-year-old dressed in her little sister’s clothes. A tornado (puberty) has sent her to a mystical land (adolescence), and she lands there literally bouncing on her bed. It’s no easy passage, however, and childhood doesn’t just give up. She has landed in Munchkin Land, a place where people live in permanent semi-childhood, and babies are hatched from eggs. The leading civic institutions are the Lullaby League and the Lollipop Guild. The munchkins practically worship a Good Witch, who visits by descending in a pristine ovum, but the Wicked Witch, the Satan of their cosmos, carries a disheveled broom, a surrogate pubic bush. Dorothy magically finds herself wearing the Wicked Witch’s ruby slippers (the blood of her deflowering), which the Witch naturally wants back. Since Dorothy just wants to go home, the Good Witch and munchkins cheerily send her off all by herself to the guy who can help, the Wizard of a color-coded city. On her way, she meets the Scarecrow, a sexless guy who joins her. If there is any doubt about his intentions, their first encounter with the Witch’s minions is a slap-fight with a grouchy apple tree, who refuses to let them taste the fruit. Instead of defying God and eating the fruit, as heroes do in myths around the world, they defy the fruit itself and provoke a fight with the tree, who throws its own apples at them as they run off. Dorothy and the Scarecrow, two of the greatest characters Hollywood ever imagined, get to have it both ways for a time: They tricked sexual maturity itself and got to wander deeper into the wide world of adults, while keeping their childhood camaraderie intact. Next they meet the Tin Man, with a habit of crying so much he rusts himself stiff. He is dad, more effective than a scarecrow, but nonetheless male and sexless all at once. Next they meet the Lion, the fully developed sexy guy, who immediately chases Dorothy around, ostensibly to eat her, but also by implication to rape her. Only he turns into an even mushier, simpering pile of pathos. The lion is the hair metal guitarist who tempts girls like Dorothy when they go to college. His greatest secret is that he promises pure physical sex but needs his hand held even more than the others do.

Frank Morgan (Wuppermann) in Green-Wood Cemetery.

Frank Morgan (Wuppermann) in Green-Wood Cemetery.

And that’s one of our greatest national myths, a perverse exercise in cruelty and crude sexual metaphors. It would lose steam once the lion joins the crew,  so the writers upped the stakes temporarily with the poppies, followed by the the counter-narcotic offensive launched by the Good Witch, followed by the most definitive “Holy Shit!” moment in cinema.

Part 3: “Well! Bust my buttons!”

It turns out, Frank Morgan is buried at Green-wood Cemetery just a short stroll from my home. The man behind the curtain, who also played four other parts in the film, is with his family in their plot: the Wuppermann’s.

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R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen

May 8, 2013 By 22 Comments

Ray Harryhausen died yesterday, the visionary responsible for the animation in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, among many others.

Even before I knew or much cared to know his name, he inspired and touched me. If it were ever raining on a Saturday afternoon when I was a kid, we would tune in to Chanel 11 hoping that the Yankees were rained out, and the station would show an emergency double feature of films from Hammer Studios, maybe the B-list of Universal’s classic monsters, or the golden fleece itself: those garishly colored stop motion Greek myths.

To this day, I love showing friends the skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts, but it’s worth remembering that Harryhausen kept making films into the Star Wars era. This film from 1973 made a huge impression on me, especially Kali wielding swords in all her arms.

It’s about as politically correct as Help! and full of adolescent Freudianism: just check out the busty heroine’s reaction to the “one-eyed centaur”!

Reading his obituaries, I’m struck by how many people he knew. Something many artistic legends have in common: how many people they cross paths with who also have the scent of legend around them, more than coincidence can really explain, and more than the obvious principle that “tuned in” people hang out with other “tuned in” people. Long before he had a successful career he joined a science fiction club with a guy named Ray Bradbury, and after he’d settled in London he married a descendent of the explorer Doctor Livingstone.

Every once in a while for as long as I’ve read about film, publications figure it’s their job to ask the question, how much special effects is too much special effects? The last time the NY Times did so, a few months ago, it rehashed the usual positions, and but added a science writer named Natalie Wolchover, who pointed out that the place where CGI turns people off is when it makes humans who are almost but not quite  lifelike. “We then respond to these creatures evolutionarily, as we would toward a diseased or reproductively unfit stranger.” Genius.

You didn’t have to worry about that with Harryhausen! His dinosaurs and gods were clearly otherworldly, and yet also looked like representations. The cheapness was an endearing part of their magic. They looked like rubber, or maybe Playdough, puppets. You could see where human hands altered them between shots, and appreciated the loving attention that every motion received. Sorry, CGI fans, but there is a difference between sitting at a computer and bending the arm of a three-dimensional sculpture, and when you watch one of Harryhausen’s scenes it feels better because you feel that attention; you experience the pleasure and meticulousness the sculptor himself was experiencing, and it’s just more fun to imagine that.

It’s the difference between Oz the landscape in the new movie and Oz the landscape in the real movie. Oz is a place with plastic flowers, bright blue water that gushes in its vinyl-lined stream, and painted horizons. I want to go there, not the place that never existed. I also want to go to the ancient Aegean and Asia Minor, thanks in large part to the genius who just passed away. Even before I was devoted to movies I could tell that Jason and Sinbad and all his other films were the work of one artist. He was 92. I guess it was time. RIP.

 

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Shooting Day For “Fall To Rise”

May 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Very proud of my friend Jayce Bartok tonight after spending a day helping out on the set of his film “Fall To Rise.” The story is about a dancer who has left dancing to have a child, and the struggles she faces when she returns. It’s about dance, and yet about something more universal: integrating or at least resolving parenthood with one’s creative vocation.

Jayce Bartok on set, revising the afternoon's shot list.

Jayce Bartok on set, revising the afternoon’s shot list.

Jayce and his wife Tiffany, who is producing, are two of the kindest people I’ve ever met in the movie business. They are walking, talking examples of  the principle that lots of working actors and crew members leverage to succeed: They are easy to work with, and easy to be with. When they speak, they mean what they say. They are also generous with favors for their friends.

It didn’t surprise me in the least that someone at the Baryshnikov Art Center on 37th Street hooked them up with dance studio space to shoot in. I mean that in the vaguest sense. For all I know they paid market rate. When you show up on an independent film shoot, you don’t say “How did you afford this place?” You just do what you do at any shoot: Make yourself useful and keep your hands off the Snickers as long as you can.

This is the second time in a month I’ve been inspired watching directors at work. One thing they have in common: They’re both actors by trade. To the lay person, screenwriting to directing may seem like a natural progression. The problem is, writing requires lots of time in one’s office. Acting means being on the set, and time on the set, seeing the creative solutions to practical problems unfold, or not, time after time, is irreplaceable.

 

 

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Writer On the Set!

April 25, 2013 By 2 Comments

I spent Easter weekend this year helping a short film shoot for a script called “Late Late,” that I had written. What a range of reactions I got as I told friends what I was doing. Many offered congratulations, naturally, but just as many skipped the congrats and went straight for the furrowed eyebrows full of concern.

The writer on the set? To writers it sounds like a punishing experience: Your beautiful, dancing child traumatized, forced to walk a straight line by sadistic kindergarten teachers. To anyone who has directed or worked in film production, it sounds worse: Just being there I had to own up to some culpability for the power struggles that would erupt.

If a film set is the last bastion of fascism in an increasingly democratic world, as Francis Coppola once said, then a writer hanging around the donut table will naturally attract all the ideas that challenge the director’s authority. As if a script is the only higher authority one can appeal to when trying to trim the director’s egotistical overreach. That’s not how it has to be.

I had gotten a phone call asking to help with the script two months before, and wrote and rewrote it around five or six times. I’d attended one production meeting and read-through, so that I could be sure that we all saw eye-to-eye about the meaning of each moment; it being comedy, it’s easy to misinterpret what’s funny from just words on a page. I declined to attend a night of rehearsals, because I was overdue to go see a movie with my wife.

Now that shooting day had come, and I was busy with other projects anyway, it wasn’t clear how much help I could be. I’d taken on casting one of the parts and figured I’d “drop by” the set to make that introduction. I even brought my laptop with me, figuring I might spend half the day working on something else. The story is about a guy who’s chronically late and absolutely has to be on time for a lunch date.

Thirty hours later, with about three hours sleep in between, I’d busted ass all weekend for the short, and I still gave less than the rest of the crew.

There is always some ridiculous problem on shooting day, and ours came because the script calls for a taxi to get stuck in traffic. Finding a traffic jam is never very hard in New York…except for Saturday mornings of holiday weekends! Just a few weeks before, I was in a car on the Lower East Side on a Sunday morning, and we sat for a half hour due to bridge construction, so I figured I’d go find it again. You never feel like quite as big a loser as you do when you’re looking for a traffic jam and can’t find one. Not only was the L.E.S. around the bridges unclogged, and Canal Street moving nicely, but the Holland Tunnel around Broome and Varick, which is always a shitshow, was moving too. I asked a cop. She referred me to 1010 Wins. Finally a taxi driver told me to relax: as the afternoon set in, the tunnel traffic would start to clog up Tribeca, and it did. I guess I was a nervous parent.

I admit I was a little surprised by the broad, cheap laughs in some of the scenes, but it is comedy, and I had been invited to rehearsals and said No. I made sure not to give any unsolicited coaching, and if anything in the performances didn’t seem right, I brought it up to the director out of earshot of any actors. There’s a time for imagination, and there’s a time to make yourself useful.

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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Stories About Brothers

April 19, 2013 By 2 Comments

Thousands of police are all over the Boston suburbs as I write this, trying to corner a 19-year-old terrorist named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “Dumb boys” is the first thing that comes to mind, “boys” being the key word: You rarely hear of girls losing their way socially or mentally, and then deciding that the best way forward is a pre-written script perceived as a shortcut to heroism that involves killing strangers and waiting for the law to come down. “Why doesn’t it happen more often?” is another gloomy sentiment that comes to mind.

What’s truly heart-breaking about it, though, is the age difference between the two brothers who pulled it off: 19 and 26.

Lots of gangster movies, including many of Scorsese’s films, take place mostly inside the duality of two brothers or close male friends. One brother sees that his alter-ego is no good for him, but either his love is too great to cut him off, or there is something deficient in himself that his brother clearly has a whole lot of.

All the time, I am writing, even if I am just sketching out a story in the roughest phase, scribbling it on index cards in my jacket pocket. When I listen to the news today I imagine Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the college undergrad, graduate of a Latin high school, interacting with 26-year-old Tamerlan.

Preliminary word is that Tamerlan was a boxer who hated school. He spent years in the US but never mastered English. None were particularly religious or political. Perhaps the parents had a good reason for moving back to Central Asia, who knows? But they left Dzhokar essentially in the care of Tamerlan, and that wasn’t the best move.

Dzokhar was at that age when he’d really start to think for himself, so Tamerlan had to provoke a crisis now. This is what the brothers we call “dynamic characters” do: provoke a crisis to preserve the bond with their brothers, because they have nothing to lose. Their brothers, the protagonist-heroes, then face a hard choice between loyalty and goodness. These plots often have a woman who personifies that “goodness,” or that life beyond the confines of the stupid male peer group. Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and On the Waterfront come to mind.

Had he waited a year, Dzokhar would have figured out that Tamerlan is an asshole. They were both athletes, Tamerlan a frustrated one, so he hatched a plan to bomb the mother of all American athletic events. His uncles have no compunction describing Tamerlan as a “loser,” so it’s not hard to figure out that Tamerlan was in turn adept at hazing his little brother, who wore his hair bushy to distinguish himself from the commando. He hung out and studied with women in his dorm, and it was a matter of time before he started spending holidays in Woonsocket with a girl whose parents had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sleepover policy for college boyfriends.

A part of Dzokhar didn’t want to do it, but he went along. Now he’s holed up with a gun.

Of course, I’ve made the story about me. I’m the youngest of four brothers, and see myself in Dzokhar’s sweet face. When I was his age I was skipping sociology class to volunteer for an environmental organization.

Another writer might feel for Tamerlan. Poor guy, semiliterate, gets into boxing but doesn’t quite fit in in that world. People make fun of his accent. Makes a serious go at the Olympic team but fails. Dreamy-eyed little brother falls under the sway of a radical thinker, and Tamerlan goes along for the ride.

We’ll see. The facts are finite, but the writing goes on and on.

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Resurrect Dead: A Just About Perfect Stab at Subjectivity

April 4, 2013 By 2 Comments

Rambling post. Bear with me. It arrives at a sharp point before you know it. A month ago I’m waiting for a D train at West 4th Street after midnight, and a saxophone player of exceptional talent is playing on the platform – the Brooklyn-bound D and F platform being one of the best music venues in the whole MTA system. And who comes limping around collecting money for him, but a man whose face betrayed some kind of organic brain damage from a head injury or Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or something.

I’m a believer that fewer video cameras are better in lots of cultural circumstances. I even got into a fight with a Danish guy at the temple of the Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul one time over the subject. He was aghast that I was taking up a prized seat during one of their weekly performances and hadn’t read so much as a single book about Sufism (fair enough), but he meanwhile had a video camera with a large microphone mounted on it. Whenever you introduce a video camera to an environment, you change it, and it’d better be for a damn good reason.

So there I was: great jazz, brain damaged dude collecting money, video opportunity, and I reach for my iPhone. No! Don’t even. Let it be.

Two weeks later I’m walking down the street in Philly, and my friend points to a linoleum-looking tile in the crosswalk. It’s a “Toynbee tile,” she says, and recommends the 2011 documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.

Its subject matter is the person or people who started putting tiles in the streets of Philly and elsewhere in the early 1980s that read “Toynbee Idea/In Kubrick’s 2001/Resurrect Dead/On Planet Jupiter.” Fascinating detective story about amateur obsessives delving deep into the world of political paranoiacs and short wave radio in the early 80s.

Great documentaries take you someplace new – in this case, a working class block in Philly. The Philly accent has never sounded so delicious! But writer-director Jon Foy makes two great choices in telling the story: First, he settles on a narrator, the leading detective, who has baggage of his own, an obsessive and a misfit who started documenting the tiles while he worked as a foot messenger in the 1990s. Second, as they exhaust every possibility and start to settle on a lonesome paranoiac in South Philly, Foy shows his detectives attempt to reach out to him, but then…they respectfully back off. It’s clear enough who did it, but there are some places a camera shouldn’t go.

It’s also worth watching to study how nimbly it uses re-enactment footage for things that already happened, presumably before Foy started shooting video of them, and artfully gets into the head of the paranoiac. Foy had the nose to be there with the camera rolling during some key moments in the investigation. Light touch. Just enough of everything. A new favorite.

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How Much Do You Pay the Writer for a Short?

March 17, 2013 By 1 Comment

Discussing short films with a few different friends recently, we kick around ideas and talk about how much we’d like to work together, and before you know it we enter that nebulous zone regarding pay. Either we make some joking acknowledgement that we don’t have the money to pay ourselves, or someone whispers that there actually is some money in it. Here’s how I wish every “up and coming” writer would start answering that question of how much to pay the writer for a short:

“Can you pay me at least as much as you pay your sound guy?”

Take it as a rhetorical game-winner in some contexts, or take it as an honest question. It moves the conversation in the right direction. Under some circumstances, producers really might want to ask for a freebie and aren’t trying to rip anyone off. A writer likewise (like a D.P. or an actor) might want to do a freebie out of their own self-interest. If you’re not getting paid, however, then this question is still the springboard to discussing why you’re doing it, and what you want to get out of it.

Usually a short film germinates like this. A producer and/or director think they have a great idea for one. It would be a needed credit, and a showcase for someone’s talent. It might provide festival exposure, or it may just be fun, a noble ends unto itself. They have friends with technical skills willing to help for free or reduced rates, and they have a little money. So they write a synopsis or maybe even a rough draft of a script.

The producer: What do you think of this story?

The writer: It’s okay. Personally, I’d make the following changes.

Producer: Good idea. Can you rewrite it for me?

“I’d like to,” says the writer, and then you enter that zone. If it’s a terrible idea, you say you’re too busy, which is how we say “No” in our culture. If you love the idea, and it’s your best friend who you know is paying for it with money she’s saved copy-editing, then you’re inclined to say, “Don’t pay me, spend it on the film.”

Most often it’s somewhere in the middle. It’s an okay idea, not your favorite. The work they’re asking you to do is fixing deficiencies, not really going all out creatively. You realize that the whole premise is based on a free location, or a relationship that’s not going to pay any dividends, and you’re not that desperate, so you hedge. “Is there any money in this?” you wonder. You want to bring good vibes all the time, and you don’t want your pay to get in the way of your friends’ project, but you’re also human and tend to do work that is about as good as you’re getting paid for.

That’s where you pop the question. “Can you pay me at least as much as you pay your sound guy?”

The entertainment world runs on three currencies: dollars, credits, and favors. It’s astonishing how high up the food chain of independent projects you go before work gets paid in dollars. It’s more likely that you negotiate some kind of additional credit, and/or a promise to help you back when you get your own pet project going. This is why so many of us inflate our own rates. “We charge a thousand dollars a day,” a post-production audio engineer once told me, “but what do you have?”

That phrase, “but what do you have?” essentially means, “Let’s make a deal for a reduced rate and some combination of the other currencies,” and these other currencies are the capital that short films get made with. That’s why I often say it is harder to make a 90-minute feature than nine ten-minute shorts. At five minutes per day, a producer can shoot a ten-minute film in a weekend, and talented people will spend a whole weekend doing a favor, or trying out some new relationships. Shooting for eighteen days is another matter. Then they’re taking themselves off the job market, and landlords generally don’t take favors or short film credits for rent.

Which brings me to the sound guy. Every competent producer knows that viewers have a higher tolerance for a hit-and-miss video image than they do for poor audio. Getting clean sound is that important. Furthermore, no one has ever put “from the sound recording engineer who brought you Little Miss Sunshine” or “from Werner Herzog’s boom operator” on a poster. Nor have I met many sound recordists who are secretly writing screenplays on weekends: they are more likely to be in bands. So the sound recordist is relatively impervious to the other kinds of currency, and on indie projects he is sometimes the highest paid person on the set.

Fair enough, but what about you? Are you so desperate for a credit that you’ll work for someone who expects you to write for nothing? What kind of lines of dialogue is that sound guy going to record if you wrote them on the subway on your way to your bartending job? Writing is work, like auto repair or putting up sheetrock. It’s easy to do it badly. It takes time and experience to do it well.

The counter-argument says, unlike the sound guy, the writer’s credit does have some currency, and you can work in your spare time, so you don’t have to be compensated for the days you’re off the job market. This holds true if the producer is flexible about when you hand in the writing. You can always find a day to rewrite ten pages sometime in the next month, if you love the story. If they need it by tomorrow, though, unless it’s the greatest project ever, loaded with the other two currencies, then they’d better offer you a number.

There is no one way to resolve this, but it’s in everyone’s interest if the understanding becomes explicit. Some producers read in a book that they should give everyone a written contract, and that’s fine I guess, but what really has to happen is the conversation: What are you expected to do, and to get back, and why are you really doing it. You can start that negotiation by saying the magic words: “Can you pay me at least as much as you pay your sound guy?”

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Stoker: A Future Without Screenwriters

March 10, 2013 By 1 Comment

 

I am disoriented and can not possibly sleep yet. What a difference between watching a film near the end of its long, accomplished theatrical run (“Zero Dark Thirty” on Monday) and catching one that’s been in theaters for a day and gotten a hot and cold reception. That was “Stoker” tonight.

I got the feeling, during much of it, that I was watching one of the great young actresses of cinema, Mia Wasikowska, getting sexually violated. Halfway through what seemed like an awful movie, the dime store Freudianism, garish emotions, and straight up misogyny got so ridiculous we literally screeched with laughter, and I started wondering whether I was missing something subversive – obviously, I must have been, right?

Wrong! Andrew O’Hehir at Salon is one of my favorite critics, not least because he knows that there is a time to call bullshit, and he called it on this film. “Each of these characters seems freakish and disconnected, both from each other and from any actual or fictional vision of reality,” he writes.

He even supposes that the Korean director, critics’ darling Park Chan-wook, might not have understood the English script by Wentworth Miller, but I see the opposite dynamic at work.  This is one of those films that’s all about the director, and Park found a no-name screenwriter whose first draft could be hi-jacked, and who’d dutifully keep plugging lousy dialogue into the most laughable plot developments he might insist on. Watching “Stoker” is like looking at a future without screenwriters. One fantastic shot after another creating all their intended poetic inflections, and none of it offering any feeling whatsoever.

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Zero Dark Dirty

March 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

 

After essentially boycotting “Zero Dark Thirty” for weeks on account of its endorsement of torture, someone pointed out Michael Moore’s defense of it: It’s a film that proves the opposite, he says, and is more about how men ignore women in the workplace. I found “The Hurt Locker” terrific, even after an actor told me that his brother was in Special Ops, and that it took too many liberties for him to get into it as a film. “So what?” I figured. Should we let that prevent us from appreciating a well-told story. And yet here I was, with my own ideological axe to grind, shunning a film I hadn’t seen yet.

So I finally arrived, with high expectations. Michael Moore got it pretty much right, but the film grated on me nonetheless.

I often think that people who go to theaters are like people who vote in primaries. We think of ourselves as insiders, tastemakers, viewers whose ticket purchases and opinions set the agenda for the greater public. Arrogant? Yes. But it also means that we get a very different viewing experience when we see a film at the beginning of its theatrical release, when the jury of opinion is still out, versus the end, when ten of us sit in a vast theater whose manager wonders why he didn’t book something newer. (I guess that’s like voting in the New York Presidential primary!) Add the passing of the Oscars to that swing, and the wondrous new cinematic sensation seems smaller: its post-theatrical marketing plan is already in place, and you’re just there to attend a film.

Not that I’m complaining! Anything that’s heavy on the cinematography is going to be more spectacular on a giant screen, and that’s a good enough reason to hurry up and catch it before it’s consigned to home video. These are the films I find myself rushing to see at the Village East or the Quad or other NYC theaters where important films go to pasture for a while before they leave theaters.

“Zero Dark Thirty,” for all its “based on true events” pretensions, was full of moments that happen in movie genre-reality, but generally don’t happen in reality-reality. I can forgive one or so of these, but at two and a half hours it expects you to swallow too many of them. God bless screenwriter Mark Boal (who also wrote “Hurt Locker”and “In the Valley of Elah”) for bringing the Iraq War and the uglier side of the War on Terror to American screens, but he went so Hollywood this time around, it felt insulting.

When the CIA heroine and her best work pal happen to be in the dining room for a hotel bombing, I said “Okay, we’ll give you one. Maybe it even actually happened.” But when that same pal was present for a bombing and betrayal that even my companion who didn’t remember the headlines could see coming minutes ahead of time, I felt depleted. When the new CIA station chief had his desk-pounding scene, it felt unearned. (Michael Moore thought this was the hidden tribute to Obama, the speech that says “don’t torture, be detectives.”) Even if we give him that, militants soon attack the heroine directly as she’s driving through an embassy gate, and I was feeling, “Just get on with it.”

The thematic crux is: Sometimes you’re just so sure of an educated hunch that you have to go with it. Or: The story of a woman who guessed right. Which feels so trite after watching militants get tortured for 45 minutes. When Bigelow takes control of the film from the writer and turns it into a play-by-play of the night raid, it seems like a creative solution to the fact that he’d beaten this particular narrative horse to death already.

I can’t help comparing this movie, unfavorably, to Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” (written by Scott Z. Burns), which had the same “just the facts, ma’am” air about it, but challenged you to appreciate the heroism of people who weren’t necessarily provoked by an escalating spiral of vendettas, but rather just doing their jobs, with efficiency and some extra passion because they knew they were onto something important. Something tells me that’s how bin Laden got found. It’s just my hunch, and I’m going to go with it.

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On the Second Inauguration of Michelle Obama

January 20, 2013 By 3 Comments

On the morning of September 5 this past fall I woke up and started writing, for this blog, “I get the feeling that the election got decided last night during Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.” I thought better of writing something so cheeky when the election was still up in the air, so I put it aside with the pile of unfinished junk on my desktop.

Well, it’s over. We’re not trying to get anyone elected. And it’s time for a more sober look at what I was thinking – and for those of us on the left to find our sense of humor again. To explain why it all was over by September, I could list some nuggets from Michelle’s speech, such as her father’s life story, suggesting that Democrats understand bread and butter issues better than their opponents, but really you don’t have to look any closer than her bare arms, and her knack for talking about the First Relationship in terms that are familiar, warm, and affirming.

We don’t elect presidents, we elect first ladies! You could make a better case for first ladies determining elections than you could for lots of other much-discussed factors, such as running mates or (boring!) policies.

To the public, the first lady is the woman we want leading the country: the mother we want, and the co-creater of the sex life we want inside the conjugal bed of the commander-in-chief. Often it comes down to one versus the other. Mother versus sex partner. When the nation wants a mother, it elects the candidate whose wife we understand as a mother. When it wants to leave the safety of mom and the nuclear family, it elects the “modern” first lady, the smart, daringly independent, and youthful (i.e. sexually active) leader.

It’s not a matter of iconography or representation. It’s visceral, it’s about who exactly we want in that place, and it’s by no means bipartisan. It affects Democrats differently than Republicans because the public has enormously different expectations. Of course, we want mom on Thanksgiving AND sexy wife on wedding night all the time, but we know we won’t be able to get all of our supporters to the polls for any woman who is too much of one or the other for our side’s taste. That’s why elections seem to be about anticipating what kind of family and sex life the electorate will be in the mood for by the end of the year.

The Democratic Party since F.D.R. only wins the presidency when it seizes the banner of a youthful sex life in the Whitehouse.

Before you go accusing me of being a perv for imagining that Barack and Michelle have the Everything But the Girl Pandora station going in the Lincoln bedroom during twice-weekly afternoon delight (replacing George and Laura’s Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits CD, which they got out for anniversaries and Valentine’s Days only), hear me out! Here are the last fifty years of presidential elections, broken down First Lady vs. First Lady. Remember that certain other factors do sometimes contribute to who gets elected: their husbands’ qualifications, incumbency, demographic headwinds, criminal records, etc., but here’s what has gone on since 1960.

1960 Pat Nixon vs. Jackie Kennedy. The election when the Democratic Party found its prototype for the coming century. No more Eleanor Roosevelt (God bless her memory!) wannabes. Young, stylish, and sexy. The country isn’t sure it’s ready, but the scales tip for Jackie in the end.

1964 Lady Bird Johnson vs. Margaret Goldwater. A heavily favored incumbent! Doesn’t count really, but doesn’t disprove my theory either.

1968 Muriel Humphrey vs. Pat Nixon. The first example of Democrats shooting themselves in the foot – or, an assassin shooting the husband of their would-be savior, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, wife of Bobbie – who would have trounced Pat.

1972 Pat Nixon vs. Eleanor Stegeberg McGovern. Another incumbent, doesn’t really count.

1976 Betty Ford vs. Roslyn Carter. You could say this was another anomaly of an election, on account of Watergate, but Roslyn was definitely a new kind of Better Homes and Garden mom, snapping her fingers to Atlanta Rhythm Section, emerging at the time.

1980 Roslyn Carter vs. Nancy Reagan. Damn Republicans! They figured out how to have it both ways. Sex Symbol AND Grandparent. Find two retired sex symbols. Ron and Nancy both. Such a potent combination it knocked out an incumbent Democrat, although I’d argue that it was a no-brainer since the Democrats were still trying to recast Eleanor Roosevelt instead of recasting Jackie Kennedy.

1984 Nancy Reagan vs. Joan Mondale. Incumbent, unstoppable.

1988 Barbara Bush vs. Kitty Dukakis. An interesting election, since Kitty was intelligent and “modern” without the sex symbol status. The Democrats were thinking along the right lines, but got spooked when Gary Hart got busted during the primary with his hands all over Donna Rice, having not yet faced adultery in the face and stared it down.

1992 Barbara Bush vs. Hillary Clinton. A return to form! Mom versus Big sister with an advanced degree. A big step in the right direction. Pair Hillary with a rock and roll husband, and it’s over.

1996 Hillary Clinton vs. Elizabeth Dole. An incumbent, and a no-brainer besides.

2000 Tipper Gore vs. Laura Bush. Democrats! The only way you could lose this election is if you run…Tipper Gore?!

2004 Laura Bush vs. Teresa Heinz Kerry. Despite stopping the tide of political idiocy that followed September 11, the growing realization that Iraq was a disastrous mistake, and the obvious case for a return to Clintonomics, the Democrats ran a camera-shy, billionaire for first lady, five years older than their official candidate, who joked about having married her for the money. How this party EVER wins elections, I don’t know.

2008 Michelle Obama vs. Cindy McCain. This was epic! A black, working mom and lawyer from Chicago against a bleached blonde sorority officer who grew up in a wealthy family of Arizona beer distributors. Two kinds of sexy, one for a shrinking, and one for an expanding fraction of the electorate.

Michelle was a conscientious mother whose workplace credentials and general attractiveness were all the more likable on account of her all-too-apparent awkwardness at public speaking. She was glamorous on a budget. Unlike Hillary circa 1992, you never thought Michelle had any ambitions for herself, and none of the stigma of people who gain access to the inner circles of power via their spouse’s connections. So you conceded nothing to her critics. Anyone who doesn’t like her is just an asshole, you could figure.

In 2012, Michelle and her husband faced a non-threat from a Mormon throwback to Pat Nixon and her husband. She won, of course. The media were watching the jobs reports and following the daily gotcha videos that make politics so much dumber than ever, telling us it was going to be close, when they should have been looking at the wives. It was over in September.

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