BACKSTAGE AT A SCREENPLAY COMPETITION QUATRE

Yet another entry in some things that go on bump in the night behind the scenes in a screenplay competition that can give some insight, maybe, who knows, into how scripts are chosen and make their way to the top.

This is my memory of something that happened during the course of a competition. I was at an office picking up scripts when one of the other readers came in. The reader was very excited about a script he had read not long ago and in fact, I had just read it. I wasn't quite as excited; I thought the script had problems.

He began his enthusiasm over the script by saying it was wonderful to finally read a script where the central character wanted something, had a clear cut goal, instead of being the more passive character that was gaining more and more popularity lately. He asked me, didn't I agree, and I replied, that when it came to passive/active characters, it all depended on the screenplay. This other reader suddnely got very upset and said basically, no, it didn't, that a screenplay with an active character was inherently superior.

For some time now, there had been a conflict arising in the screenwriting world on the idea of active versus passive central characters. Before this, ost people were telling me that books they read, courses they took, etc. said that characters had to be active. Of course, as is often the case, as soon as someone creates a rule, or codifies something, artists try to break it (and often find out that writers in the past had never paid attention to the rule in the first place). And more and more passive characters were being created. These characters became so popular, that the descriptive name had to be changed from passive to reactive as a way the earlier opponents of such characters could justify to themselves such a character's allowability.

At any rate, the reader got so tense about my statement, that the contest coordinator interfered and calmed the waters. I was taken aback by what seemed at the time to be a rather dogmatic reaction to what seemed to me to be an innocous statement.

In the end, this screenplay didn't make the top lists mainly because it's structure was sort of the traditional kind that authors who read books and takes courses write. It didn't take any real chances and it had a final third that sort of fell apart. It was one of these scripts that tended to be written according to a set of rules rather than from a vision on the part of the author. And the scripts that did make the top of the list were, more often than not, scripts that were trying new things, experimenting with structure and form, unusual in style, had a certain edge, were trying to do something different and challenging.

Of course, screenplay competitions vary and different contests have different tastes and slants. But I'm all for the ones that encourage one to be different.

WHERE IS ROBERT TOWNE WHEN YOU NEED HIM: Review of Tetro

At the climactic revelation scene in Tetro I was so hoping for a tribute to Chinatown where the character of Bennie, played here by Alden Ehrenreich (in a good performance only hampered perhaps by his somewhat uncanny resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio), would slap his older brother Tetro (played by Vincent Gallo) and Tetro would say “I’m your father, I’m your brother, I’m your father, I’m your brother and your father”. But alas, it didn’t happen. Tetro is written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and is supposed to be his return to his filmmaking roots, i.e., actually making a film he wants and making it his way. And it’s great to have him back. Unfortunately, it’s with a film that doesn’t work as well as one would like. It’s certainly a beautiful movie to look at with film nourish black and white cinematography by Mihai Malanimare, Jr. The basis to the story (a brother looks up his estranged older brother in Buenos Aires and finds out the family secret, though he finds it out about fifteen or twenty minutes after the audience figures it out) is solid. But it never really connects the way it should for two reasons. The first is Vincent Gallo, who is, to say the least, not that strong in this part and tends to drag the film down with him (there are some scenes where he seems to be improvising, weakening the whole emotional impact of what is going on). The second reason is that when all is said and done, Coppola so wants the big secret to have potentially tragic consequences; and it doesn’t. Bennie finds out Tetro’s really his father and decides to kill himself because of it. The reaction is not that believable and a tad over the top. The movie then tends to get muddled plot wise as Coppola doesn’t quite seem to know where to go from there. There are some other oddities, especially scenes from two plays that don’t resemble plays in the least and the appearance by Carmen Maura, one of my favorite actresses, in a role that doesn’t seem fully explored or thought out. There’s no indication that Coppola has fully lost his touch; this one just comes across as a film by someone who made a couple of boo boos while making it. Hopefully, the next film will work better.

Five Favorite Farces

Playtime


The Miracle at
Morgan's Creek


To Be or Not To Be








Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Some Like it Hot

THE DANCE OF DEATH: A Review of Departures

Departures, a movie about a man who loses his job, is that movie that got a bad rap before it was even released because it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film when other films like Gomorrah didn’t even get nominated. The nomination, and win, seemed to come as a surprise to everyone except, obviously, the branch of the Academy that voted for it. It also got a bad rap because it was released after the release of Tokyo Story, also a film about a man who loses his job. This latter bad rap was a bit more justified because Tokyo Story, perhaps the best film of the year, is a better movie than Departures, but Departures is still a haunting, often beautiful film about living in the midst of dying. In Departures, a cello player, played with appropriate moroseness by Masahiro Motoki, loses his job with a symphony and returns home where he drifts into a job preparing bodies for burial, under the watchful eye of the not to be said no to Tsutomu Yamazaki (an excellent performance). It’s a terrifyingly lovely ritual, carefully and lovingly explained by the characters. Our hero learns to undress, dress, wash, etc. a body with the grace of Fred Astaire dancing. One might not think that playing a musical instrument would prepare one for the funeral business, but here the cross over skills are obvious. The screenplay, by Kundo Koyama, is strong with vibrant characters and engaging plot. It only falters toward the end when the story becomes a bit too formulaic in a twist that could be seen coming an hour earlier.

BACKSTAGE AT A SCREENPLAY CONTEST TROIS: Still more tales from behind the scenes

At an awards get together once for a contest, I was approached by a writer whose script I thought was very good and a script that I thought should have made the finals, but didn't because other readers didn't agree with me. The author did make the list just before finals, which is a pretty good place to end up considering the number of entries. But he asked me if there was a reason he didn't make the top ten.

Usually there is a very definite reason, though one doesn't want to necessarily tell a person that. But often there really isn't a good, solid reason why. Often when a script gets so close to the top, but doesn't make it, it's almost impossible to say why. And that's what I told him. That at that point there really was no reason one could give for it happening. For his script, there were all sorts of factors (some of which I didn't know or understand) that happened to happen to stop him from crossing that last barrier.

In relation to this, I've been asked before whether someone should reenter the same contest. It actually happens a lot, authors reentering their scripts. Probably for three reasons, the first being that they don't keep good records and forgot that they already entered the contest with this particular script the previous year. A second is that they hope that this time around they'll be read by a different reader or sets of readers who might like the script better and thereby make it further than before.

The third reason is that they have substantially rewritten the script. This is actually the only good reason for reentering the same script in a contest. And I've known scripts that have done better because of it.

But when it comes to entering the exact same script hoping to do better, I suggest it's not a wise idea. True, if one didn't even make the lowest group of say, quarter finalists (or whatever they call the first cut), then it is possible you might do a bit better if one gets a different reader. But beyond that, it's unlikely the script will go any farther, if for no other reason than the script will hit the same reader or readers as before (contests tend to use many of the same readers year after year) and they will recognize the script and will probably have the same reaction to it.

In addition, if one made the next to last cut, yes, it is possible that another go round just might get you into that top ten. But what I told the person is that the likelihood of the stars being in a slightly different alignment that year is so unlikely that the person should reconsider spending the enormous amount of money (and screenplay competitions are expensive) to enter. It would make much more sense to just enter a different contest.

A WOMAN'S PLACE: Reviews of A Woman in Berlin and Julie & Julia

A Woman in Berlin is hardly what the previews prepare one for. The coming attractions suggest a hard hitting expose, ripped from the headlines type movie about a sordid bit of WWII history, a story that has been more or less ignored in histories of the time: the rapacious use of women when the Russians marched into Berlin at the end of the war. It’s not that it’s not about that, but in reality, this awful situation is really more the backbone of the story rather than the gist of it. For when all is said and done, this is really an old fashioned 1930’s star crossed romance. I may get in trouble for saying something as outrageously inhumane as this (of course, no one really reads this blog, so who’s going to know), but it’s the type of movie that once upon a time would have starred Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich with Adolphe Menjou, at his oily best, as the man she gives herself to in order to survive; her husband would have been played by an nonthreatening leading man like Herbert Marshall. It’s one of these new movies (like Blackbook and Flame and Citron) which is suppose to be a revisionist look at the morality of WWII where we are asked to reconsider the idea of bad guys and good guys. This is a perfectly acceptable idea, but the revisionism is a bit hunt and peck in this movie as written by the director Max Farberbock and co-writer Catharina Schuchmann. Though a couple of atrocities committed against the Russians are mentioned in passing, one would never know that six million Jews died at the hands of the German (one wants to muddy the waters, but not muddy them too much it seems). In spite of all this, there is much worth seeing here. The subject matter is important and the leading lady is German actress of the moment, Nina (Yella, Jericho) Hoss. And the fate of the star crossed lovers at the heart of it does leave one with a tear in the eye.

Julie & Julia is that movie about Julia Child and another real person that isn’t as famous. I could repeat the usual analysis of it in which people point out the story line with Julia Child (brilliantly portrayed by Meryl Streep; poor girl, she actually has to go to the Oscars again) is great, but the part with Amy Adams, a good actress stuck with a dull, uninteresting character, isn’t so much so (it’s even hard to understand, based on the excerpts read aloud in the movie, why anybody even read her blog). Instead I’ll focus on an odd through line that I found somewhat disturbing. For a movie that has two women as central characters, the movie as a whole doesn’t have much positive to say about women as a whole. In the screenplay by director Nora Ephron, there are two kinds of women. There are the friends of Julie, high powered businesswomen played at the height of soullessness in their best Faye Dunaway/Diane Christiansen manner by an assortment of actors. They’re the bane of Julie’s existence and ridiculed mercilessly by Ephron. The other kind of women, the ones that Ephron seems to approve of, are nonthreatening, never even considering doing a man’s job. For Julia, it’s to take a cooking class without the goal of becoming of chef and then writing a cook book; for Julie, it’s writing a blog about cooking and then writing books. Nice, safe womanly things to do (even in Julia’s world, the male chefs are accepting and encouraging, it’s the female who runs the cooking school herself who is the gorgon). Though on the outside this movie would seem to be an antidote to the misogynistic turn of romantic comedies like The Proposal and The Ugly Truth, once the surface is scraped away, it’s not really that much different.

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT: The LA Times passive agressive article on the LACMA film series

There is a fascinating article in the Sunday L.A. Times on LACMA closing its film series and how it spotlights other similar venues in L.A. It's a great summary of LACMA's competition, but there is something kind of humorous about it in its passive aggressiveness. It's saying, Go ahead, LACMA, leave us, please don't leave, see if we care, there are plenty of other fish in the sea, please don't leave, I hate you for your finickiness, I love you, don't leave.

I love LACMA, it has a slightly different approach to film programming that some other places (the LA Times article is correct when he calls the American Cinemateque in Hollywood, which I attend all the time and am a member, as appealing to movie geeks). My problem with LACMA is that I don't have a car and coming home at night is a tricky proposition. Otherwise, I'd be there far more often.

BACK STAGE AT A CONTEST DEUX: A Further Look at How Screenplays Are Chosen at a Contest

I thought I'd continue on with some more examples of how scripts get to the top at contests. If anything, it should tell you that quality is not the only thing that comes into play, that other issues are also factored in.

For one contest, I and some of the other major readers would get together with the person running the contest and try to take a list of 15 to 20, the ones that had received the top scores, and determine which should be among the top ten. Of course, there are often five to six that are just obvious and little argument is going to be made over their making it. But politics can sometimes come into play for the others.

After a couple of years at this, I learned a trick. After talking to many of the readers off and on during the course of the contest, I realized there would always be one, maybe two, that I did not like and did not think should be anywhere near the top ten, yet a couple of the other readers thought the screenplay was the best thing since sliced bread. I also knew that there was going to be one or two that I and another thought were genius, pure genius, I tells ya, that others thought should be burned and have salt poured on their remains.

What I learned to do is not to put up much of an argument on the one I didn't care for (and after all, I've been wrong many a time and maybe the one I hated was a work of great art) so that when mine came up for consideration I could chime in and say, Look, I voted for yours, you should at least give me mine.

This happened one year when the argument got a little contentious over the subject matter of the script (and actually not so much the subject matter as the way the subject matter was treated) and there was a great deal of tension in the discussion. But I said, Hey, I didn't put up this much of a fight over yours, and when I said that, the script I was pushing got included in the top ten.

A correlation to this is in another contest where there weren't enough screenplays that enough readers thought deserved to be in the top 20 and I and some of the others would be asked to name one we thought should be up there that wasn't yet and I'd pick a favorite I felt had been overlooked.

So the lesson here is that it's always helpful to have a script that at least one person really wants to champion. Of course, you can't know that before hand (it's like the saying in bridge, if the King is a singleton, lead the Ace), but still.

Robert McKee on the difference between English and Foreign Language films

Via e-mail I received an interview with Robert McKee. The whole interview should also be found at The Writer's Store, though when I went to the website, I couldn't find it. But I was especially struck by the following question and answer. I thought this was perhaps the most insightful analysis of the difference, often exaggerated, of films made in the U.S. (and other English speaking countries) and Europe and other non-English speaking countries, especially the conclusion that one is no better than the other, just different.

Q: Quentin Tarantino once said, "The thing that distinguishes an American artist is his capacity to tell a good story." Would you agree?

Robert McKee: I generally would agree with Tarantino, but only in a limited way. First of all, it isn't just Americans; it's the whole English language tradition. Anywhere that English is the dominant language, from America to Britain, Australia to India, the English language has a grand tradition of storytelling that is very rich, and a world view, as a result of this tradition, that inspires stories that we consider are well told. On the other hand, I would argue that the most impressive and creative film culture in the world right now is in Asia, and they are telling stories out of their great traditions and cultures that are just as compelling, comic and/or tragic, as anything coming out of the English-speaking world. But Quentin Tarantino is overstating it, because every great language tradition, certainly the Spanish language, has magnificent storytellers, but there is a tendency outside of the English language, especially in the romance languages, the cultures rooted in the romance languages, to put more emphasis on mood than emotion. Or they put more emphasis on static moments of life rather than dynamic moments of life, and consequently the storytelling on the continent of Europe is often more open, more moody, more contemplative, more intellectual perhaps, than the stories that are told in the Anglo-American tradition. But those are broad generalities, and one could argue that many writers outside of the English language tradition are trying to use story to explore aspects of life that the English language tradition tends to ignore, and those aspects of life are more static and more contemplative, more mood than emotion. But no matter what, the tradition of every great culture in the world produces master works. So Tarantino's statement tends to imply that stories told in the English-language tradition are better than stories told outside of that tradition, and that's simply not true. They're just different, not necessarily better.

BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS, WATCHA GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU: REVIEW OF PUBLIC ENEMIES

I spent more than two hours with John Dillinger in Public Enemies and after all was said and done, I still felt like I didn’t know a damn thing about him. According to what everybody says (including the screenwriters Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann—who also directed—and Ann Biderman), he was popular with the people, though it was never clear why (his bank robberies, carried out in beautiful cathedral like buildings, were horrendously brutal and he would take terrified hostages with him, scaring the living bejesus out of them; maybe things were different in the 1930’s, but in today’s society, it’s doubtful this Dillinger would have been voted most popular in high school). Dillinger tells his girlfriend Billie (played well enough by French flavor of the month Marion Cotillard) that he believes in living for now, which is great, except that you never really see him living at all. Johnny Depp is perfectly fine as Dillinger, though he doesn’t have much of a character to play. Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis has absolutely no character to play and proceeds not to play it (the titles at the end inform the audience that he killed himself as if that meant something, though it’s unclear what). There are some fine performances in supporting roles like Stephen Graham who is pure loony tunes as Baby Face Nelson and Patrick Zielinski in a blink or you’ll miss him scene as a doctor. But perhaps the best performance is Billy Cruddup who is absolute brilliance as a tense and wound up J. Edgar Hoover, full of repressed fury. Unfortunately, one of my favorite character actors, Lily Taylor, is on hand in a misogynistic joke about women sheriffs (what do these screenwriters have against women). The set and art direction is quite impressive. But after it was all over, I still wasn’t quite sure why anybody wanted to make this movie.

BAD MOVIE, BAD MOVIE

I've been watching a lot of bad movies lately. On purpose, sort of. I don't normally watch bad movies if I know ahead of time that they are bad movies, but through a series of circumstances I've been confronted by more than usual lately. They have their use. One might think of them as the sherbet one eats between courses in a fancy meal, something that cleans the palate for the really good stuff.

Every Wednesday, I go to some friends house for bad movie night. This week it was peril in the air week and we watched Turbulence, an action movie about Ray Liotta playing a psychotic (I know, I know, a bit redundant) serial killer who manages to kill all the pilots and police officers on a plane leaving only a flight attendant, Lauren Holly, to land the damn thing. All I could think is, I don't remember Doris Day in Julie or Karen Black in Airport 1975 being so annoyingly helpless (yes, believe it or not, this is not the first movie about a flight attendance having to land an airplane, though it's doubtful there's enough yet to make a genre all its own--at least, let's hope not). Brendan Gleeson plays another psychotic criminal though what is even more criminal is his poor attempt at a Southern accent. Ben Cross from Chariots of Fire is on hand as a pilot who looks like he's had that Rupert Everett type non-face lift face lift. As the movie goes on, one can see what probably went wrong: the producers spent so much money on the special effects, they didn't have enough money to pay a good screenwriter or hire a good director. Art is full of little trade offs. Wouldn't you love to be able to read minds as the different actors watched this movie? I keep thinking of the night Jay Leno had Hugh Grant on after his being picked up while receiving a blow job from a prostitute--the first thing Leno asked was "What were you thinking?"

The week before I saw Candy, that oh so controversial movie from 1968 from the oh so controversial novel by Terry Southern. The movie has Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, James Coburn and Marlon Brando as the various men trying to bed the virginal teenager Candy Christian played by nymphet Ewa Aulin (who ain't half bad), though it seems awfully odd that she has a Swedish accent when she's John Astin's daughter. The story never makes sense, though Brando is very funny as a fake guru. What's interesting here is how times have changed. In 1968, Candy would have been seen as a symbol of sexual liberation, that she was someone all men wanted to bed and it was her fault because she was so sexual and innocent. Today, it's a film about pedophilia and a bunch of men who want to rape a teenager.

And to finish it all off, I saw Xanadu. Where to begin, what to say. Michael Beck says that the Warriors opened all sorts of doors for him in the movies that Xanadu then closed, which isn't fair. He was never that good an actor. As the people who introduced the movie said, he was a triple threat: he couldn't sing, he couldn't dance and he couldn't act--so of course let's cast him in a musical. I went with a friend and we commented how we would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when this movie was being put together. The ideas had to come from coke induced production meetings. There's no other possible explanation (or at least let us pray there are no other explanations). It's as if everyone agreed to find the kitchiest, campiest choice in a scene and double it. It's mind numbing and oh so much fun. One can't look away. There's a charming moment when Gene Kelly dances with Olivia Newton John (obviously choreographed by Kelly himself) and an animation sequence by Don Blum which would have worked well in a different context (and what an interesting way to have an actor who can't sing and dance sing and dance, animate him). It's the kind of bad movie that has a following and Xanaduians were there in force, clapping in rhythm at the big climactic skating dance number. This is a movie that has to be seen.

THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS: REVIEWS OF YOO HOO, MRS. GOLDBERG AND NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD

Two documentaries opened on somewhat similar subjects. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, about Molly Berg, who wrote one of the most successful radio shows ever that she later turned into a successful TV shows, The Goldbergs. And Not Quite Hollywood, about a period in Australian film history where there was a rash of B films that often dominated the movie market.

Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg is the most successful film overall, though perhaps not the most visceral (when push comes to shove, warm family comedy doesn’t have the same immediate impact as car crashes, rape, werewolves tearing people apart—in case you were wondering, the car crashes et. al. refers to Not Quite Hollywood). In fact, the visuals in Yoo-Hoo… are probably its weakest part. It’s one of those documentaries in which generic footage is used, which always feels like a cheat no matter how well intentioned. In addition, one is never always sure which generic footage is really generic and which are not. But Molly Berg led a fascinating life creating a show about a Jewish family that even nuns listened to. Since it was radio, she was able to get away with a bit more, like dramatizing a sedar, having a rock thrown through a window and talking about what was happening in Germany (on TV it’s unclear she ever went that far). The most fascinating and suspenseful part of the film is her run in with the black list, something she fought, but lost: she was never named, but the man playing her husband, Richard Loeb, was and he eventually committed suicide (for those of you who have seen The Front, with Woody Allen, the part played by Zero Mostel is based on Loeb). The Goldbergs were soon overtaken by I Love Lucy (both literally, as in the time spot, as well as in the hearts of the viewing public), but Molly’s life is still a fascinating one worth knowing about.

Not Quite Hollywood is certainly interesting and I love movies that fill me in on niche sections of the film industry. This documentary tells us all about the B films made in Australia from the 60’s to the 80’s that were mainly shown in exploitation theaters and drive ins in the U.S. Much of it, mainly the commentaries by people who were connected to the films as well as film critics from the period, is fascinating. But it does seem to fail in one area: I didn’t come away wanting to see any of these films or feel like a treasure trove of movies has been overlooked. In fact, the documentary convinced me that these were pretty awful movies overall (even Quentin Tarrentino, one of the main commentators, rarely came out and say these were great films, but tended to say that certain scenes were great and that they were influential). Even Mad Max, perhaps the best film to come out of this, looks like a piece of merde in the context of the films shown here. The best line is probably that of a critic referring to a particular producer and set of movies saying they “should be burned to the ground and his ashes sown with salt”.

BACKSTAGE AT A CONTEST: INSIGHT AS TO HOW SCREENPLAYS ARE CHOSEN FOR A TOP 20 LIST

One of the things I do for a living (let's face it, until I sell that screenplay for a million dollars, it is the only thing I do for a living) is do coverage, script consultation and read scripts for contests. I actually really like doing it because, at the risk of sounding incredibly egotistical and near sociopathic, I am incredibly good at it. It's not unusual for my first reads to make it to the top ten (when I started at Slamdance, the first four years in a row one of my first reads was chosen first place--even if I didn't vote for it).

I thought I might write about something that happened at the end of a contest once upon a time when the quarter finalists and finalists were being decided, something that might shed some light on how the process works. This time the process was a bit more interesting than before because the person who ran it had me do something she hadn't had me do before. She asked me to pick my top twenty. This meant I had to reduce a list of 35 that I recommended for a further read (not just my first reads, but also second and third reads) to twenty. Now, of course, some of the choices were easy (in fact, I think she and I agreed on what was the obvious best script, though I could be wrong). But after choosing the obvious ones, it became more and more painful to winnow it down to 20.

But I did it. Since this was the first time I did this for this contest, I was actually kind of panicked. How many of my choices would the head of the contest agree with or would she think, "this guy is really full of shit if he thinks he knows a good script from a bad one". In other words, would this list confirm that I knew what I was talking about, or would it show me to be a fraud?

Add to this that I didn't know which of my first reads got a second and then third read, which meant I could be putting scripts on my top twenty that I liked, but others thought were the product of the mentally ill off spring of a brother and sister, scripts which might have been dumped weeks before.

Then, after submitting my list, I got an e-mail back and she asked why three particular scripts didn't make my top ten. And I didn't know what to say and I panicked, of course. I did like all three scripts, but one can't put everything on a top twenty. But what could I say? I did respond with my reasons (I thought one incredibly well written, but too formulaic, etc.) and she was very supportive of my reasonings (though not in full agreement).

However, something interesting did happen here that might give insight into the decision making process. Out of the top 35, there were eight that I considered to be somewhat similar in tone and style, what I call small, independent films. These are actually my favorite types of films. However, I wasn't about to have eight of the same type of films on my top twenty list, so I ended up with only four of them on the list. Two of the three she had e-mailed about had ended up on the cutting room floor for the reason (though not completely, I did have some problems with them that also made me leave them out) that they were too similar to some other scripts.

When I told a friend this, he asked me, "But aren't you suppose to chose the best script no matter the genre, niche or style, etc.". Yes and no. What I told him is that it is like the choosing of Sonia Sotomayor--at some point there is no such thing as the best. There gets a point where there are a bunch of equals. So what do you do then? Well, you bring other elements into the decision making process, like not wanting to have two time travel movies in the top ten even if both are extremely well written.

She then asked me to something even more nightmarish: winnow my top twenty down to a top seven. This was so painful. But it had to be done. The interesting part of this was that she e-mailed me and asked why I included one particular one; she thought it very flawed. It was a second read on my part, so it wasn't like I was the first person to like it, but again, I had to explain my reasoning. Though one of the things I said, among others, was that it could be that it was just one of those scripts that effects one strongly and one may never be able to rationally explain why. And all readers have those (it can lead to some very interesting discussions/arguments at decision making times).

What was also interesting here is that of the seven (actually nine because I mentioned two more that I said were so difficult to remove, but I did because again, I felt they were too similar in style to another one in the top seven--the three were all high concept films), none were my first reads. This particular year was perhaps one of the only times where, though I liked many of my first reads, they didn't excite me as much as other people's first reads. In fact, I was getting frustrated at times wondering why everybody else was getting all the good scripts (but it happens; scripts are assigned randomly and there has to be a year where others are going to get all the good ones).

But it didn't stop there. All nine of the ones I chose here were going to be in the top 20. Now I had to chose two from my list that weren't in the top nine, two that I wanted to fight for in order to help fill out the top 20 list. That was also very hard, but I chose two comedies that didn't cross over to other genres, one because I did like them very much, but two, because I thought I hadn't recommended enough pure comedies.

So I don't know if this gives people who enter contests any more of an insight as to how some decisions are made, but I thought it might be something worthwhile letting people in on.

BOYS WILL BE BOYS, PART DUEX - REVIEW OF HUMPDAY

Humpday is about two straight men who decide to have sex on film as an art piece with the plan of entering it in a film festival called Humpfest. Actually, from my perspective, it’s about a writer and director, Lynn Shelton, who thinks she is doing something daring and unique, when, as in the movie The Art of Being Straight, she is hopelessly behind the times. The comic high point of the story, unintentionally so, is a party that the two breeders, played by Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard, attend. Duplass calls the party Dionysian, but the party is only Dionysian to people who think the orgy scene in La Dolce Vita is a realistic orgy. Of course, that may be the point here, but Shelton doesn’t let the audience know whether she actually believes the party is Dionysian or whether we are suppose to laugh at Duplass because he actually thinks it is. This is actually topped when Leonard suggests that for Humpfest he and Duplass do something unique—film two straight men having sex. Now this is only unique to people who have no idea what’s been going on in the world of pornography in the last ten years or more where “gay for pay” has been one of the most popular and fastest growing subsidiaries (this Dionysian party actually has a couple of gay men there, yet none of them decided to point out the absurdity of Leonard’s statement). In the end, the two men can’t go through with it (thankfully; if I’m going to see two straight men having sex, it sure ain’t going to be two men with mediocre bodies like this). So what is the point of the film? What did these two people learn about themselves? It’s not clear, at least to me, that Shelton really thought that through. It’s as if she thought all she had to do was come up with a high concept mumble core film and the rest would fall into place, but I question whether it did. I still remember the wonderful morning after scene in Y Tu Mama Tambien in which the two male characters, after having a three way the night before in which they kissed, wake up in horror realizing that terrifying fact that two straight men can actually enjoy having sex together; the result was that they never wanted to see each other again. I’m not convinced that anything like that happens here.

AND THEY'RE OUT OF THERE

I just saw that the two Bens, Lyons and Mankiewicz, are no longer going to be representing the acme of movie criticism when they are replaced on their show At the Movies by A.O. (Tony) Scott of the New York Times and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune. From what everyone says out here in Hollywood, they will not be missed.

I never really minded Mankiewicz, but I have to be honest and say there was just something about Lyons that made the hair on my neck (during the periods when I didn't shave them) stand up on end. It wasn't even his opinions. It was just him. One of those lack of chemistry things, I guess.

But it will be good getting the show back on track with two critics who seem to be better suited to the job.

BUDD SHULBERG HANGS UP HIS RUNNING SHOES

Budd Shulberg, one of the finer screenwriters in Hollywood, author of such films as On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd and The Harder They Fall has passed away. He named names during the blacklist years because he grew disallusioned with the Communist party. On the Watefront was often seen as an apologia for his actions, though he denied it while at the same time claiming that he poured his heart and soul and everything he was going through at the time into the screenplay. Both can be true.

I highly recommend A Face in the Crowd, an underseen movie starring Andy Griffith (of all people) as a nobody who climbs to the top of TV as new-facist television star. It is perhaps Griffith's greatest performance with wonderful turns from Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau (in his pre-Jack Lemmon days) and Lee Remick as a jail bait cheerleader.

Schulberg was also known for scandalizing Hollywood (which seems hardly possible) with his book What Makes Sammy Run?, a book about an amoral bastard who works his way up from mailroom to producer. Like the Michael Douglas character in Wall Street, though the character was presented as a villain, people turned Shulberg's Sammy Glick into the poster boy of Hollywood success.

RIP

MOST DEPRESSING AD OF THE WEEK

While walking down the street I saw an billboard for a bank on the side of a building:

More ATM's that unsold screenplays in Los Angeles.

Why Buy a Script when you can make it from scratch

I just finished reading What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line by Art Linson. Linson is the producer of such films as The Untouchables, Scrooged, This Boy's Life and many, many more. This particular book, which is fascinating in the same way that all books about the making of films in Hollywood is fascinating, is mainly about the movies The Edge, Great Expectations, Pushing Tin, The Fight Club and Sunset Strip.

For those of you who've always wondered about the origin of the story line about the Bruce Willis character having gained weight and not wanting to shave a beard in the movie What Just Happened (produced by Linson), you'll find it here in the problems Linson faced (pun intended) with Alec Baldwin while shooting the Edge.

What I found most interesting in the book is that Linson never bought (he seemed to have never even read or even heard of the concept of) a spec script, a screenplay already written. Instead, he always made a movie from scratch (like our grandmothers or great grandmothers would make cakes). This made no sense to me. It's not that I believe that making a movie from a spec script is going to guarantee a higher quality of movie than one that originates between Linson sitting down with David Mamet and bullshitting until they came up with an idea for a film about a bear; it just seems so damned inefficient.

Though the stories of how the movies he made got made is fascinating, he comes up short when trying to explain why so many of them didn't work. In the end, though he so wanted to blame marketing (and he often does), his answer is more existential: there is nothing to know because no one really knows why something doesn't come together and work in the long run. He may be right. They say hindsight is 20/20, but not always.

But Linson's still making movies and I'm writing about it in a blog, so who am I to say.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE STRONG WOMEN GONE, PART DEUX (TO EUROPE APPARENTLY)

Everyone complains about the roles written for women, but no one’s doing anything about it. Well, that’s not totally true since three movies with strong female characters have opened in the last couple of months, but you might not know it based on the attention and box office given to such movies as The Ugly Truth and The Proposal.

Seraphine is the lovely, lyrical and based on a true story film about an obscure painter in the early 1900’s (at least obscure to American audiences), a lower class working woman who does cleaning and laundry but paints in her free time because she received a message from her guardian angel to do so. She does the usual artist stuff: she talks to trees (though fortunately, not like Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon); makes much of her own paint from various liquids, like chicken blood, that she steals because she doesn’t have enough money to buy them; goes without food to purchase her supplies; and stays up all night singing and making awful noises while painting, driving her landlord to distraction. She’s also out of step. The art world is changing, but new forms like impressionism are still finding it difficult to gain a foothold, so Seraphine is ridiculed by her bourgeois employee for her somewhat fanciful interpretation of the natural world she sees around her. But Seraphine doesn’t care; like the Blues Brothers she’s on a mission from God. Then into her life stumbles a gay German art critic in town for his health (this is where the plot diverges from the one with Jake and Elwood). The critic accidentally discovers one of her paintings and starts representing her, but first WWI gets in the way (don’t you hate it when that happens) and then the stock market crashes in 1929 (damn you, Herbert Hoover). She then slowly loses her mind and spends the end of her life in a mental institution. Seraphine is played by the magnificent Yalonde Moreau who has already received a slew of acting awards, including the Cesar, in one of those performances in which the actress totally disappears into her role. The screenplay, perhaps as beautiful as Seraphine’s paintings, is by Marc Abdelnour and the director Martin Provost.

If one saw the previews to The Girl From Monaco, one would think it one of those delightfully quirky French comedies that often graces our shores. One couldn’t be more wrong. Though there is humor in it, it’s actually a rather serious story about a lawyer who becomes so obsessed by an ambitious weather girl who likes to manipulate and use men that the lawyer is in danger of losing a very important murder case (I don’t remember Perry Mason ever having this problem, but this is France after all). It’s a perfectly enjoyable movie, nothing great, but not boring. Its main strength is the femme fatale character played by Louise Bourgoin. There is just something about her that makes one believe that she could get a man to do anything she wanted, even if he fully well knows it means his own destruction. She’s one of those people who will sleep with you, then have sex with someone in the next room knowing that the next time she asks you to do something, you will. What can one do but kill her, which is what the lawyer does (or manipulates someone into doing, much like he himself was manipulated). The script, by Benoit Graffin (who also worked on the fun Priceless and the wonderful Apres vous) and director Anne Fontaine, is enjoyable enough, but it stumbles when it comes to the court case itself. The strategy of the lawyer played by Fabrice Luchini is never very clear and he makes speeches and cross examines witnesses in ways that would drive Jack McCoy to distraction). In the end, his defense seems to be that someone’s mother has the right to kill a man if the man is her son’s lover and threatens to expose the son’s homosexuality to the world. It’s hard to say what to make of such a homophobic attitude; what’s even more horrifying is the writer has the jury find the mother not guilty on this basis. Though I enjoyed the movie well enough, I left feeling that I and the director and writer lived in a very different moral world.

Lorna’s Silence is the latest film from the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc), two of my favorite filmmakers in the world. They’ve already graced us with such possible masterpieces as Rosetta, La promesse, The Son, L’enfant. Lorna, played with quiet intensity by Arta Dobroshi, is an Albanian immigrant who, for money, agrees to a sham marriage to Claudy, a drug addict, arranged by mobster Fabio so that she can become a Belgian citizen. To fulfill her Faustian bargain, she would then help or allow Fabio to kill Claudy, so she could then, for more money, marry a Russian immigrant so he can become a citizen. Her goal is to open a snack shop with her immigrant boyfriend. It’s a pretty neat little scam, until Lorna develops a conscious, helps Claudy get off the drugs and tries to just divorce him rather than kill him. It doesn’t work; Claudy is killed without her knowledge. But by then, she has had sex with Claudy and thinks she is pregnant by him and has to find a way to survive since she’s put a kibosh on the new marriage and Fabio now wants his pound of flesh in the death of Lorna. As in all of the Dardenne films, this is about someone who has to make a momentous moral choice and the suspense is often as great or greater than whether James Bond will stop Dr. No. I do think this film does make a slight misstep by making Lorna’s pregnancy an hysterical one; there doesn’t seem to be a satisfying point to this. But just because it may not be as good as their other ones doesn’t mean the film isn’t better than most others.

But the question does become, why can Europe make films with exciting and strong female characters like this, but the U.S. can’t? Is it the way European films are financed, so that directors and writers there can make films that don’t have to make the massive profits they do here? Is it because the audiences in Europe are more open to movies about women? Is it because there are more writers and directors there who are simply interested in making films with women as central characters and they don’t feel the need to degrade them all the time? I wish I knew.