« May 2009 | Home | July 2009 »

June 2009 Archives

June 10, 2009

Online Dating

All right, everyone. I’m back to beating the dead horse of believability once a-goddamn-gain. Here’s a tip for budding screenwriters out there: problems don’t arise from a far-fetched premise, plot, or even characters. There’s a little something called “suspension of disbelief,” without which no work of fiction could succeed. Assuming it’s a work of fiction that does succeed. At any rate, the writer bears the burden of making their audience suspend disbelief. It doesn’t happen by magic.

While there’s no foolproof method of getting the audience on your side, I think two basic writing goals will help immeasurably:

1. No matter how goofy and/or eccentric your characters, keep them rooted in some sort of relatable/believable struggle.

   I’ll use Rushmore as an example, because back when Wes Anderson made good movies, he did a pretty good job of making eccentric characters into believable human beings. Max Fischer’s personality is extremely out-there, but his central conflicts — falling in love with an older woman and trying to avoid getting kicked out of school — are extremely relatable. The story and characters are fairly ridiculous, but it’s easier to go along for the ride here than in something like, let’s say, Harold & Maude, the inexplicable “classic” that defines “quirky for the sake of quirky” characters.

2. Find a way to omnisciently acknowledge the absurdity of your story/characters/premise.

   You often find this in your middle-tier romantic comedies: the sarcastic best friend who periodically emerges to point out how ridiculous a character’s zany schemes have become. There are a thousand ways to accomplish this, though, and not all of them suck. To use the Rushmore example again, consider two things: Max’s father’s bewilderment of his son’s behavior, and Max’s initial dose of reality when he first attends public school. Eventually, he bends the school to his whims, but at first, taking Max out of the bizarre Rushmore Academy and plopping him down in a semi-normal school is an incongruous reminder that, even in the universe of the movie, Max is an oddball.

Keeping this in mind, it won’t surprise you to discover I got in a little bit of trouble for trashing an awful romantic comedy about online dating. The thing you have to understand is, I love romantic comedies. I just don’t think good ones are made very often — especially not lately — and it disappoints me majorly to read shitty ones. It disappoints me even more when the scripts have decent ideas inhibited by poor execution.

So with this online dating script, I identified two fatal flaws. First, the writer makes the mistake of assuming the audience will buy the idea of an online dating site as a relationship cure-all. Second, the writer makes the mistake of thinking every match on these sites will offer perfect compatibility. Make no mistake: the writer doesn’t portray these conclusions as comically absurd. They form the premise of his script, which is about a couple who put their seemingly idyllic relationship to the test by signing up to an online dating website.

In response to these flaws, I was told: “Five million people sign up to online dating sites every day.” I guess this contention shows that this movie will have an audience. I think it’s sort of a specious conclusion, though, especially in light of the flaws mentioned above. I’d love to get some statistics on why people sign up to these sites, because my personal observations — i.e., friends who have signed up to dating sites — have led me to think only two types of people sign up to these sites: those who have lost hope and gotten desperate, and those who claim to be too busy to socialize. (I say “claim to be” because, in all cases, it’s just a bullshit excuse for either getting rejected or not getting asked out.) In either case, they do not expect much from these sites. They certainly don’t assume it’ll lead to a perfect match, and after a few disastrous dates, they will laugh at the very idea of dating websites leading to perfect matches. They’ll laugh even harder if a movie expects audiences to take the idea seriously.

So I rewrote the coverage, strengthening my argument and proposing a simple fix. It would be so, so simple to turn this piece of crap into a middling, forgettable romantic comedy — clearly the writer’s goal. And it all goes back to believability: a major subplot revolves around the Pierce Brosnan-like creator of a new online dating site, reminiscent of eHarmony (in that the creator uses elaborate questionnaires and supposedly scientific methodology for making matches, although I think the character in this script would not disallow gays from using his site on religious grounds). Why not point out the unbelievable qualities of this site by, say, including a few lines suggesting this particular site has taken off because the character’s formula for matchmaking is shockingly good?

It’s not a perfect solution, but it acknowledges the believability problem and offers a way for audiences to suspend disbelief. Not everyone will buy it, but at least the script would be making an effort to acknowledge its own absurdity. At the end of the day, that’s all I want in scripts and movies: a token gesture. A little goes a long way, and I cut really far-fetched scripts a metric ass-ton of slack if they make mild efforts to keep things believable and relatable. (Do not confuse these with “realism.” I prefer it when movies aren’t realistic, frankly. Just as long as they’re unreal in relatable ways.)

Posted by Stan at 6:04 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

June 14, 2009

A Movie for Cat Ladies

Here’s where I live up to my reputation as a misogynist film blogger. This week, for the first time, I read a script where I kept having one thought repeatedly: “This is the first script I’ve read that seems to want to capture the cat-lady demographic.” It’s not so much that they want to hit this demo — it’s that they want to exclude everyone else from possibly enjoying this movie.

First, let’s take a step back and ponder what I consider the “cat lady” personality type. I know it’s harsh and stereotypical, and as a dude, I’m opening myself up to obvious accusations of sexism, but I’ve spent a lot of time reading television forums, and it’s impossible to not notice this small but vocal group of people — the kind of people who hate some people for being fat hos and hate another because she needs a sandwich, the kind of people who rage against bad parenting while glorifying rapists as misunderstood and quietly pondering brother-on-brother incest.

I don’t care if these people are lonely save for their 25 cats, or if they’re married with five kids and no pets. They’re all cat ladies, based more on personality type than actual cat ownership. To put it bluntly, their defining trait is not so much possession of a certain domesticated feline. In fact, I know women who own cats but don’t fall into the “cat lady” category. It’s more about the type of person who has some kind of damage causing them to not simply enjoy a work of entertainment, or to not level any valid criticism. They watch, and they judge characters in shockingly simplified terms: if they’re good-looking men, they can do no wrong no matter how many women they rape and/or beat; if they’re good-looking women, they can do no right even if they devote their lives to all manner of saintly deeds; if they’re dowdy female sidekicks, they’re abused and mistreated by their beautiful friends; if they’re dumpy, unattractive male sidekicks, they’re obnoxious and need to get off my TV screen.

This personality type seems to work best with TV shows, because unlike other forms of entertainment, the characters (and/or the actors who play them) can be judged on a weekly basis. Each new set of actions creates more and more discussion. You don’t get that with movies; even in a franchise, you have to wait a year or two for a sequel. It doesn’t suit the “call-and-response” of people speculating Izzie can’t get more obnoxious, then patting themselves on the back when that fat whore parallel parks on a hill without angling her tires and setting the parking brake. As a result, it seemed odd to me that they’d target this demographic for a feature film, but then, it’s not a feature film designed for cat ladies to hate. They ought to embrace it like that doughy sidekick from Gilmore Girls.

Here’s a general synopsis of the plot, which I don’t mind giving away because it’s a beat-for-beat remake of a Korean movie that, I assume, sucks just as hard: recently divorced Woman A has been compelled to do two things all her life: cook and fuck. As a consequence, she’s suffered from a slight weight problem, which puts a crimp into her second compulsion, and she grows increasingly obsessed with dieting. She’s also shrill and needy, yet cartoonishly judgmental. Her new next door neighbor, Woman B, is an ex-child star with an active eating phobia masquerading as an eating disorder. It keeps her stick-thin and sexually appealing to men, but she is also terrified of sex. After meeting Woman B and discovering the phobias, Woman A simply cannot understand it and decides to devote her life to forcing Woman B to eat something. Woman A fails repeatedly, and her increasing frustration manifests itself as bitter judgment of Woman B as frigid.

Because Woman A constantly forces herself on Woman B, eventually they form an uneasy bond. Woman B opens up about her history of repeated sexual abuse, sleazy producers forcing themselves on her as early as 12. Perhaps most traumatically, one of them continuously shoved food into her mouth while raping her, in order to keep her quiet. Instead of giving us an equally compelling childhood trauma to explain Woman A’s behavior, the writer treats us to a baffling flashback illustrating how her divorce happened. When her workaholic husband decided he no longer wanted to spend his limited free time doing nothing but eating, Woman A concluded that he was cheating and, in a confusing act of revenge, cooked their pet — a parrot — in a dish for the husband. When he discovered what she had done, the husband filed for divorce immediately. In the present, revealing these nuggets of backstory causes Woman A and Woman B to settle into an alarming, far-fetched lesbian tryst. Soon after, Woman A discovers Woman B has started sleeping with her ex-husband, so Woman A slits her throat. Then, she has a dream of the ghost of Woman B visiting her, grateful for what Woman A has done. Woman A sleeps soundly.

I should also mention that this script is told in a nonlinear fashion, starting with a police detective investigating the disappearance of Woman B. It has nothing to do with the story, really. It doesn’t build any suspense (we know Woman A is the culprit because, from the moment we meet her, SHE’S FUCKING NUTS) and makes a simple — if retarded — story seem much more convoluted than it is.

Despite its many, many problems, I have to give the writer props for one important thing: he knows his audience. This is a script that doesn’t take the time to justify the protagonist’s actions in order to make her sympathetic or, at least, empathetic. Who needs to waste time on that when you know cat ladies will instantly align with a doughy, sexually frustrated woman trying to win over an evil harlot whose life has been destroyed by her desirability?

Seriously, though, the writer really commits to appealing to the cat lady demographic, and that’s a fairly important lesson for writing. (I’d question the decision to appeal to this base, because while they may rule Internet TV forums, I don’t think they necessarily speak to the broad spectrum of viewers. If they did, shows’ ratings would go up instead of down when showrunners make the mistake of kowtowing to Internet fandom.) Recently, one of my friends sent me a new script he’d written and said, “I don’t know who would want to see this, but I know I would.”

To me, that’s just a bent antenna. In order to succeed as a screenwriter — not to write good screenplays, necessarily — you have to develop the instinct to say, “Here’s who will see this movie.” Taking it a step further, you have to have the smarts to say, “Here’s who will see this movie, and here’s a producer who wants to appeal to that exact demographic,” and then work some ass-talking-out-of-style magic. If all you can muster is, “Well… I like it, at least,” you’re already screwed.

You’re a writer, though. You want to write good before commercial, right? Why can’t you do both? I know it seems like an impossible dream with Hollywood’s current output, but it can be done. Broaden your prospective audience from “me and/or people like me,” but not all the way out to “lowest common denominator,” the thing that makes so many movies into shitstorms. Say you’re into sci-fi. This might be a bad example because it’s plagued with the “fanboy” mentality that tends to cause filmmakers to slip into pandering instead of telling a solid story; it’s also plagued with the perception that it’s box-office poison unless it’s loaded with ridiculous action sequences. Nevertheless, say you’re into sci-fi. You love it, you know the genre extremely well, and you have a story idea that manages to conform to the genre while offering sci-fi fans an experience they’ve never seen before. In other words, it’ll make both you and a broad base of sci-fi fans happy. As opposed to telling a story inspired by your Bergman-bleak struggle to move past your wife’s death and setting it on a space station to appeal to genre fans. It might make you happy, and people who love cathartic dramas might see it, but all those nerds who have never touched a woman, much less loved and lost? They’ll stay away in droves.

Like most screenwriting problems, it’s solved with a happy medium. If you can find a way to tell stories that fulfill you as a person and a writer in a way that appeals to (at least) one large sect of moviegoers, you’re on the right track. If you want to write stories that fulfill you and few to no others, try writing a novel. (That’s not an attempt to be condescending. If you have talent and drive, you can carve out a decent living writing novels about things movie audiences would reject. It’s the last bastion of verbal artistry, so you might as well take advantage of it before shit like Twitter kills both the printed word and society.)

Posted by Stan at 12:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

June 25, 2009

Out of the Moment

I always tend to worry about this problem, which I’m sure I’ve complained about before: novice writers reading shooting drafts. Everybody knows the phrase “development hell,” but few seem to realize that, even if a script doesn’t spend a decade or more in development, all scripts go through a process of development between their selling and shooting drafts. Even ones with largely apocryphal “we told them to shoot it as-is, because it was perfect!” stories attached to them. I worry that certain writers don’t know this, and as evidenced by one of the comically ignorant comments I received for my Fuckbuddies analysis, I have a basis for my concern. (This is not to ignore the fact that many scripts even change between the shooting draft and he actual, finished film — but that issue has little to do with what I intend to talk about today.)

Think about the audience of a selling draft, versus a shooting draft. A shooting draft is sold, and it’s going to get shot. It exists as a blueprint for technicians to follow in pursuit of a good movie. You can clutter it with sarcasm, inside jokes, meta-commentary, whatever you want. I’m still of a school of thought that you shouldn’t, but that’s my choice. Other people can do other things, and it doesn’t make much of a difference to me. (Although, as someone who reads shooting drafts for a living, I can tell you that when a writer’s style drives me nuts, it colors my opinion of the overall work whether I want it to or not. Again, that’s sort of beside the point for the moment.)

On the other hand, a selling draft exists to get sold. This is where skill as a writer comes into play, big-time. Raymond Chandler famously said, “The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.” He wasn’t wrong 60 years ago, and he’s even less wrong now. (Seriously, go look at one of Chandler’s scripts, or any other script from the ’40s and ’50s, and compare it to screenplays from today. He sounds like kind of a whiner, doesn’t he?) On top of that challenge, you have to give people a sense that your screenplay will make a great movie. In order to do that, you have to give your prospective audience the experience of your script as a movie.

You can’t rely on pithy William Goldman and Shane Black crap. Writing “this is the best swordfight in screen history” when you’ve won two Oscars for screenwriting is a lot different than doing it when nobody knows your name. You have to actually write the swordfight, and give it the sweaty, breathless excitement you imagine in your head.

Here’s what you don’t do: “He punches a wall or something.” That’s a line of action block from a shooting script. I get it — it’s a bit of sly meta-commentary, showing the writer really gets that the director controls everything. He or she might choose to have the character throw a tumbler of whiskey at a wall or something, or maybe the scene will be filmed in one of those rare but very much existent wall-free living rooms. It’s all about options, right? You don’t want to step on the director’s toes.

You also don’t want to step on the toes of your prospective selling-draft audience: one-rung-above-bottom assistants and readers, followed (once can only hope) by producers or agents. You want to keep them absorbed, and the easiest way to pull them right out of the moment is annoying meta-commentary. Tell a story — don’t constantly remind your readers they’re just reading a screenplay. It’s not clever, it doesn’t show your exstensive knowledge of the filmmaking process — it’s a combination of distracting and annoying, and it could singlehandedly result in a “pass” instead of a “recommend.”

Posted by Stan at 11:11 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

June 17, 2009

Attachments

I’ve mentioned this before, but I hate sycophancy. I especially hate it when I get yelled at for not being sycophantic enough. I’m much more willing to bend to the whims of those paying me money for my opinion, but I’ll never figure out why some people think pointing out writers and attachments will suddenly impress me. Usually, it just makes me lose a little respect for those involved.

Here’s a little background: over Memorial Day weekend, I was sent a script with no title page and no suggestion of the author’s name. This is not uncommon. I read it, hated it, and shit all over it. Almost immediately, I received an e-mail from my boss at Murdstone & Grinby, Jim, who snidely pointed out who wrote the script and asked me to include more details if I was going to crap all over such a genius’s script. I’m keeping the details as vague as possible, but shrewd readers can piece together the truth: the writer won one Oscar and received another nomination for writing several years later. In between, he wrote a whole bunch of shitty movies. So, awards and nominations or not, his bad scripts outweigh his good ones, so the fact that this one, whose title rhymes with Stink, stunk should shock no one.

This also came on a bad day for Amelia, who had called me earlier in the day to complain about what a prick Jim had become as the stress of Cannes wore on him. Receiving the e-mail annoyed but didn’t shock me, and my reaction was to call Amelia to vent and get some advice. Because, see, all they keep telling me is to be less detailed. My coverage goes too in-depth, so they keep asking me to scale it back. I thought I finally reached a nice equilibrium, and then Jim demands more.

“No,” Amelia laughed. “Jim is a retard who can’t express himself. They don’t want you to be more general — it’s just that, once in awhile, all you do is harp on one single point, without giving an overview of the entire script.”

Let me explain my typical mentality: if a script sucks for a lot of reasons, I’ll go into all of them. If I feel like the script would go from bad to good with the simple removal of a subplot or a horrible ending, I will beat that point like a dead horse, because otherwise the script is fine. I like to use the synopsis in conjunction with the notes, so they can refer to it and say, “I can see this story works except for this horrible ending.” What they’ve decided they want — after telling me for months that I send them nothing but solid gold — is to not read the synopsis at all. Three pages is too long — they want it all in the notes, even though I still have to write a synopsis. I don’t have any problem with this — not now, after talking to Amelia. Prior to this, I’d been struggling to adhere to Jim’s sporadic, confusing, inconsistent feedback.

Nonetheless, while I upped the detail, finding out who wrote the screenplay — and finding out from Amelia that two A-list, award-winning/-nominated actors took the two lead roles — did nothing to change my opinion except, as I said, disappoint me. I like the two actors, I have some respect for the writer’s good scripts, but learning of their involvement does not magically make the script good. It doesn’t make me think I’ve misjudged a gem. The thing sucked, and I don’t have a clue what anybody involved was thinking.

Just to show I’m not being a whiny bitch, here’s an example of what’s wrong with this script. The story focuses on a college graduate with an unparalleled ability to read facial tics and shifty eyes. He’s the star of TV’s Lie to Me, only he does nothing interesting with his power. I guess it’s supposed to be all deep and insightful that he can expertly read everyone except his shady father and his love interest. What’s wrong with his love interest? He thinks she’s roughly his age, but she’s 14. When he finds this out, he’s effectively creeped out…but continues to pursue her. While the script lacks “bad touching,” the girl’s age adds nothing to the story except an element of inappropriate sleaze on a guy we’re supposed to like. This script’s Oscar-winning screenwriter never takes a moment to give this relationship any real meaning, so it’s left as a creepy red herring that doesn’t enrich either character — in fact, it does the opposite to the protagonist. It makes him even more of an irritating enigma.

The Oscar-winning screenwriter compounds the problem when the protagonist solves his central dilemma — what to do with himself after college — by deciding to teach…elementary school. Although the script tries to be a comedy, the Oscar-winning screenwriter does not portray this resolution as ironic or amusing. It’s a serious, theoretically uplifting ending. I’m all for movies — especially comedy and pornography — shattering taboos, but I don’t generally like it when pedophilia triumphs and it’s not a demented joke. I know I won’t make any friends by saying this, but I don’t think pedophiles are good people.

The script sucked. Nothing except extensive rewriting will change that, and anybody who thinks I should love this script just because of who wrote it or who’s attached to star can blow me. Just keep in mind, I’m over the age of 10, so you might not be into it. On the plus side, it’ll draw a massive audience of frail, glassy-eyed men with inverted pompadours, whose tiny erections visibly press against their too-tight leather pants as they approach the ticket booth.

Posted by Stan at 11:19 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

June 20, 2009

Bad Twist 2: Twist Badder

When I last ranted about awful twist endings, I focused mainly on the “twist for the sake of twisting” problem that plagues so many screenplays — twists that not just come out of nowhere but actively undermine the story and characters. Lately, I’ve come across something infinitely worse: scripts that actively telegraph some of the world’s most misguided Shyamalan twists (more misguided than murderous trees, even).

The most egregious example has a setting I immediately fell in love with: New York City, at an unspecified time in the future, after some sort of hinted-at Apocalypse that left the city at the center of a vast desert. Water is scarce, and it’s suggested early on that, much like Chinatown, he who controls the water supply controls the entire city. Unfortunately, the writers squander the setting by using it as little more than a backdrop for a dull, cliché-ridden detective procedural about urban corruption. Because, no, the water-supply motif is not the only allusion to Chinatown. This always bugs me: why create a unique setting to tell a story we’ve seen a thousand times before? The setting alone doesn’t make it worthwhile.

But wait, it gets worse: throughout the script, Our Hero (a.k.a., the world’s dullest antihero) has these strange flashes. He sees himself, bathed in white, fighting battles. He also has long scars running vertically down the sides of his back. He also has only the foggiest memory of his past. As he works his way up the chain of corrupt command, Our Hero discovers — wait for it — that the chief villain is the Great Satan (as portrayed by a super-hot stripper — eat your heart out, Freud!), and that Our Hero is…an angel.

No, really. An angel. Those visions? His vague memories of fighting the battle for Heaven. The scars? Where his wings once were. Now he’s fallen to Earth and fallen in love with a mortal, and he must trade the chance to return to Heaven in order to allow his one true love — also a stripper — to enter the Pearly Gates.

The thing that bugs me is, if I said, “An angel? Are you high?” I’d get the following response from Murdstone & Grinby: “Sixty percent of Americans believe in angels.” Because that statistic alone makes the script great, right?

Look, having the big twist of your sci-fi wannabe-noir turn out to be “he was an angel the whole time,” that’s fine, but make it count. This entire script felt like 100 pages of wheel-spinning, followed by 10 pages of “big twist.” In other words, the script exists solely for this twist, and that’s not good enough. Let’s quickly apply this structural model to your average road movie. The fun of road movies, theoretically, are the hitches thrown in the perfect travel plans and/or the wacky stops along the way. If this script were a road movie, the main characters would have driven 2000 problem-free miles before running into a slight hitch on mile 2001, then reaching their destination at mile 2001.125.

This is a Screenwriting 101 thing: the first question you ask — just before “How do I sell this?” and “How do I get an agent?” — is “Why does this story need to be told?” If your answer is, “Because he turns into an angel, and that’s awesome,” congratulations! You fail! I would have accepted something along the lines of, “His ‘past life’ as an angel guides every action he makes on Earth, and it’s only when he learns the value of self-sacrifice that he can truly ‘become’ human, although he has to pay a steep price.” It’s not mind-blowing, but at least it gives him some relatable, human struggle and doesn’t mention the repetitive, poorly written gunfight sequences.

Here’s a phrase I love: inevitable but not predictable. This should describe the last 10-15 pages of every script you ever write.

Make no mistake, though: “not predictable” is not synonymous with “big twist,” because in this case, the twist was predictable. When you have a main character named Samhain and random flashbacks to your main character in gladiator-esque costuming, fighting an epic battle amid a backdrop of blinding white… What else could it be? Unlike the earlier rant about twists that undermine what’s already established in their efforts to blow our minds, this new brand of twist is even worse: they tell stories that exist solely for the twist. They can’t undermine a halfway decent story because there’s no story to undermine. I can’t figure out which is the bigger cheat: the one that takes a halfway decent story and throws it down the toilet, or the one whose story is a total waste of time aside from a slight moment of surprise at the end.

I guess the former is disappointing, because it squanders some small amount of potential, but the latter is fucking irritating. It doesn’t even have potential to squander. Hollywood spends all their time wondering why movies keep making less and less money — or, more accurately, they spend all their time accusing pirates of ruining their industry. The fact of the matter is: THIS SHIT IS WHY MOVIES MAKE LESS MONEY. It’s the “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” principle. You can only be burned with so many waste-of-time twist-ending piles of garbage before you start to realize seeing them is a waste of time and money.

Adding insult to injury, two extremely high-profile, justifiably well-regarded actors signed on to play roles in this anal fissure of a movie, elevating it to an undeserved level of importance that will probably cause moviegoers to waste some hard-earned cash, only to walk out two hours later saying, “Angels?! Were they high?!”

But you know what? Maybe next time, they won’t fall for it. After all, Robert De Niro hasn’t been in a financially successful non-comedy sequel in a decade. Deservedly, despite his stellar past work. I just feel bad audiences have to get screwed this time, but you know how it is. Kids have to touch the stove flame in order to know not to do it again.

Posted by Stan at 4:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay

June 5, 2009

Line-Jumping

The past month should have been agonizing, but frankly, both of my shitty jobs kept me too busy for me to stay in suspense about my imminent career launch. Also, I made a conscious effort not to think of it, on account of knowing (a) I did not submit my absolute best work, and (b) I could generously estimate the chances of success at one in a million. At the end of the day, I have no qualifications other than scripts, and scripts aren’t enough.

Mitch Michaels called last night. Sounding thoroughly nonplussed, he said, “There’s a lot to like, but it’s just too fucking dark.” I can’t say it surprised me, considering he had the exact same reaction to the feature script based on this character. I’ve always had a particular fondness for entertainment that seamlessly combines raucous comedy with brutal drama, and I thought maybe a fringe cable outlet would be more willing to embrace this than the Big Four. Of course, maybe they would, but I’ll never know because the production company rejected it without anyone at the channel knowing of its existence.

Mitch brought up other factors. He didn’t have any hard numbers — why bother, since he was rejecting me — but just from reading it, he decided it’d cost too much. He’s probably not wrong, but remember I didn’t write this with a budget in mind. Hell, I didn’t write it with an audience in mind, other than myself. These scripts were really… I don’t even know what they were anymore. If I really doubted their commercial prospects, I would have continued writing them as publicly accessible blog posts instead of private teleplays. I could call them an exercise or a pipe dream, but if I look a little deeper, I can’t deny it: I hoped that, someday, I’d gain enough respect/clout to make my depraved vision of rock-star decadence a reality.

At best, I can say now’s not the time. I have no clout or respect — hell, I couldn’t even get Mitch to say this stuff was good enough for him to consider me for the staff of whatever show he does try to get on the air. He’s just given me the world’s softest “no,” three times in a row. I guess it’s time to take the hint. Especially when he pointed out a few easy-to-remedy problems but made no suggestion that we take time to develop the material into something this channel would buy.

There is one plus side, though. It’s partly the reason for this post (the other part is to update you on the tragic conclusion to last month’s misguided optimism). I think people — both in and out of the business — spend far too much time terrifying newbies into thinking one false move will get them blacklisted for all eternity. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read panic-stricken accounts of meeting executives and blowing their One Big Shot. Hell, I even wrote one.

I won’t say it’s not true that you can screw yourself, quite easily, with false moves and misguided statements. I know the movie business is built on passive-aggressive behavior, but I sincerely believe two things: (1) if my writing really sucked, Mitch would have told me not to send him anything else, and (2) if he was too much of a puss to do that, he would have simply stopped e-mailing me. People have done both to me, so the fact that he kept coming back, and that he’s welcomed me to continue coming back (even after I practically begged him for a job and he turned me down)… It’s gotta mean something.

At the very least, it means you can send something that isn’t your best work, or isn’t a person’s cup of tea, and the world won’t crumble around you if they reject it. Like anything else, it’s a business of relationships. Mitch and I, despite a shaky past, have developed a good relationship, so I could probably fling shit at him until the day I die, and he’ll always read it. Maybe I’m off-base, but I really think that’s what it’s all about.

(Trivia: Mitch Michaels — not his real name — knows all about the blog. Even more mysteriously, he’s known about it since I worked for him in 2005, when I stupidly accessed it from a company computer. I don’t think he — or anyone else who has stumbled across this dung pile — would consider himself an “avid reader,” but I honestly think keeping this blog has a little something to do with his willingness to talk to me after a three-year communication lapse. He can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in the comments. Ironically, I’ve spent years trying to keep this blog as secret as possible for fear of offending and alienating people I know in the real world. Despite this suspiciously positive result, this blog will remain as secret as possible.)

Posted by Stan at 5:56 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

June 12, 2009

The Fake Fiancé 3: Not Fake But an Incredibly Confusing Simulation

Check out the first two volumes in this epic trilogy.

Immediately after intensifying my investigation, I hit a roadblock in the form of Kelly. We started to talk, to bond, and it seemed like old times — what remained suspiciously absent was talk of the fiance, wedding plans, living arrangements, etc. She limited herself to either old stories about high school or new stories about teaching high school. As usual, whenever I steered the conversation in a wedding-related direction, she changed the subject. I tried to rationalize — maybe she didn’t want to bring it up because the plans weren’t to her satisfaction, or maybe she knew I was trying to score an invite but knew she couldn’t — but it looked grim.

Flash-forward to two weeks ago. After essentially abandoning her MySpace profile roughly three days after creating it, I didn’t expect Kelly to give social networking another chance. However, she came back with a vengeance on Facebook — adding me right off the bat, and posting tons of “can’t possibly be misinterpreted” photos from the three bridal showers she’s had (one for her family, one for his family, and one for friends). Only one thing made me suspicious: why the hell was the groom at the bridal showers? But hey, it’s not completely unheard of, and like I said, these photos clearly indicate a bridal shower, and clearly indicate them both as a couple, almost to the point of overcompensating — seriously, maybe they’re cute, but do we really need photos of them awkwardly kissing?

So it appears all is well on the fake wedding front —

But something is still amiss. Something I can’t quite put my finger on… Wait, my finger just landed on a giant, boldfaced word: LIES. Right, right — all the unnecessary lying. If, indeed, this relationship is real, as it appears to be, why’d she make up at least one (possibly more) fictitious story of his proposal, and why’d she lie about them buying a house? More than that… Put aside the lies for a second and allow me to pat myself on the back for my surprising yet impressive ability to size up a character and/or situation almost immediately. (Keep in mind that, just because the logic centers of my brain accurately assess a person or scenario, doesn’t mean I’ll make good decisions.) As I’ve mentioned, when Kelly discussed this guy… Basically, I knew she was lying because I knew when she wasn’t lying. To put it in a way that makes some small amount of sense, she would mention certain things about this guy, and I knew it was true. I could feel it. Then she’d launch into lies, and her tone and body language would change completely.

Add to that another tiny inkling of uncertainty — on both her MySpace and Facebook profiles, Kelly does not count her fiancé as a “friend.” It’s not because he doesn’t use the sites — he has a profile on both. Yes, I checked. I don’t know what this says about their relationship, but compare it to her former best friend/current nemesis, Sarah, who’s also my Facebook friend. She and her husband are not only friends — they regularly exchange syrupy, almost obnoxiously cutesy banter on their respective walls. I can dig the notion of not wanting to be so publicly affectionate (except for the part where she posts a bunch of photos of them kissing at the showers), but not wanting to be “friends” at all? Just seems a little weird…

While perusing Kelly’s new pictures, I remembered Lucy’s assessment of her earlier photos: based on the awkwardness and clear disinterest in her fiancé’s eyes, it suggested they were not in a relationship at all. Even in the new kissy-face photos, I got the same impression. I started to wonder if maybe I was right about the lies — but wrong about what they signified. If they aren’t marrying for love, but they are marrying — what’s the story?

Bear with me, because I’m about to test the tensile strength of reality. Now, I know they aren’t marrying for money, because neither of them have any, and they aren’t headed down career paths that will yield dollar signs. Let’s consider some broad stereotypes for a moment… She’s 6’2” and bulky, with a voice deeper than mine. She never dated in high school, which isn’t that unusual, but she also had zero interest in guys, aside from briefly making up a story about a guy kissing her on the swingsets near her church. Although she tries to deny it, she’s a strict Catholic, which spells out its stance on marriage and sexuality in few uncertain terms (the pedo priest thing makes the message slightly confusing). He’s a small-town, Bush-loving redneck from downstate, obsessed with body sculpting but not actual fitness.

I’d be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that, yes, when faced with the reality of the alleged relationship, I thought, “Maybe they’re gay.” There are dozens, maybe hundreds of possible reasons for them to enter into a loveless marriage contract. I just leaped to the most obvious conclusion, based on the stereotypes and generalizations laid out before me.

No matter the explanation, the fact remains: something about this relationship stinks to high heaven. Maybe it’s none of my business, but I really don’t like it when friends — especially longtime friends I once depended on — start lying incessantly about significant things. Kelly always lied, but they were usually tiny white lies, fodder for behind-the-back shit-talking more than anything else. This… Whatever this is, I don’t like it.

Posted by Stan at 5:44 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em

June 28, 2009

Comedy Bronze

Hey, remember The Webmaster? Good, because I…basically forgot about him. Per that last entry, we left off with me deciding I’d wait a week before asking him to remove all my content, plus my login/password, and then I’d post them all here. That was on May 2nd, and I haven’t posted any of that stuff here. Why? I…basically forgot. That, I guess, illustrates how much that crappy film-review site means to me in the here and now.

Thankfully, my friend Mark decided to jog my memory by e-mailing me a Craigslist posting featuring the following hi-larious “job posting,” written by The Webmaster:

[Website name redacted] is looking for interns to review films and TV shows on DVD then write reviews. There also exists opportunities to attend press screenings and perform interviews with filmmakers and celebrities via telephone or one-on-one.
This is part-time work which typically only takes up roughly three to four hours of your time per project.
This is a non-paying internship.
Anyone who tells you they can make money off the web is either lying to you or does not understand how the web works. Only a handful of sites make any real money. We have been in business online for 13 years and have yet to make a profit. We do this because we love what we do, and you should, too.
If you’re interested, send writing sample and level of interest. Be honest; if you cannot meet deadlines then you probably should not try this - deadlines are a part of any writing job.

Bitter? Nah…

Mark sent me the posting because it gave him a good laugh, and he thought it’d do the same for me. It did, but it also reminded me that I had yet to write The Webmaster back and make my demands. In fact, The Webmaster sent me one final (apparently) e-mail on May 27th that I ignored, then forgot about. It’s similar in tone to the previous e-mails, but it sort of maintains the passive-aggressive pseudo-guilt trip while heightening the defensiveness. Check it:

To: Stan From: The Webmaster Subject: [Blank]

Hey, Stan,

Just checking in to see what’s up. That last email from you was really a surprise and honestly out of left field. I had not heard from you in some months then tried reaching you for several months and was wondering what happened to you and was a little bit concerned. I apologize for calling the old phone number I found on some class papers from that class, but you weren’t answering emails or your phone messages. In all fairness, how am I to know who you want me to call or not call if you don’t tell me before hand? Seems a little unreasonable. And you seemed more upset at me than it just being about that. If you’ve been upset at having agreed to do the work on the site but did not share that with me, then how am I to know what you’re thinking or how you’re feeling.

I appreciate all you’ve done. It’s a huge improvement. But to suddenly disappear and then respond with such negativity really surprised me, because you hadn’t voiced anything about being upset before. I’m sorry if you resent me or what you’ve done, but I did not cause it. You volunteered to do this because you were interested in doing something with your time. I did not coerce or force you to do any of this.

I’m open to discussing any of this.

All the best,
The Webmaster

If you go back and read the post I linked above, you’ll note that most of the first paragraph is a heady combo of bullshit and revising history. If you change “several months” to “several days,” it’s a little more believable, but then, I think, it makes my reaction a little less “unreasonable” and “out of left field.”

However, “in all fairness,” he does make a semi-decent point in the second paragraph. I did volunteer because I was interested in doing something with my time. Now, as I explained to him in my last correspondence, I am working two jobs that pay actual money. Why would I continue to make something that I’ve always been aware has never paid and will never paid a high priority?

As I’ve said, I never ignored him — in fact, with the exception of the Twitter debacle, I handled most of his requests pretty quickly, because they were mostly easy tweaks. But I did stop volunteering to review things, and I did stop writing my column. I could blame it on my increasing wrist pain, but the honest truth is that I grew disillusioned with it. I’d worked on it for over a year without hearing any feedback from anyone except Mark and my mom, so I felt safe in assuming nobody was reading. This was reenforced by the total lack of reaction when I stopped working on it, unannounced. Not even The Webmaster noticed this until about three months after I’d stopped.

Admittedly, this was irresponsible, but I did intend to get back to writing it. It turned into a low priority, but it didn’t cross my mind that I’d never write another column until I had to see a doctor about my wrist, couldn’t type for a month, and then had to deal with a massive influx of scripts throughout April and May, during which time all sorts of shit went down with The Webmaster. But even if I were still writing for the site, I would have looked at the ~18 columns I’d need to power through in order to catch up and said, “Fuck it. It’s over.” At which time I would have likely e-mailed The Webmaster to tell him someone else can take over the column for me, or we can just archive it. And if that doesn’t sound like professional behavior, you’re right, it’s not. But it’s amazing how professional I can be when somebody’s handing me a paycheck.

Anyway, while The Webmaster did not “coerce” or “force” anything upon me, he did — as I pointed out previously — make certain promises that convinced me to participate in something I would have otherwise turned down, like that he’d use his elaborate network of contacts to help me find a decent, well-paying writing job. He also sort of misrepresented the site, leading me to assume it was a semi-professional endeavor. It was not, at all. I’m still wondering how he got so many actual PR firms to send real press packets and screeners to himself and his staff. The only conclusion I can draw is that it’s really, really easy to make a shammy film-review website legitimate in the eyes of soulless publicists.

Point being, he can deny responsibility all he wants, and at the end of the day, he’s not responsible. I found out pretty quickly that I’d been handed a lemon, and I stupidly wasted a couple of years trying to turn it into lemonade. So yeah, that’s my bad. Now I’m making up for it. Still, I think I have the right to resent someone, at least a little bit, who more than once made promises involving big fat dollar signs that actually amounted to big fat steaming turds.

So I had my laugh, but then I realized I should shit or get off the pot in terms of getting all my old articles. I was very angry when I wrote my last post, and I wanted to be pseudo-confrontational in demanding he remove them, but it’s been nearly two months. I’m still pissed, but I’ve regained enough of my trademark cold, calculated rationality to realize that a mini-confrontation like that just isn’t worth it. I figured I’d just go to the site, load up my writer page, and copy/paste all the text.

I figured wrong.

The reviews? They were fine. I actually grabbed the HTML source so it’d retain all the formatting, so that was cool. But the column? They showed nothing but blank HTML files…

Why? Well, it goes back to one of the ways I had to design around the CMS. Like most CMSes, it allows for multiple categories. However, it doesn’t strictly allow for different templates for each category. I developed a workaround, using a plugin that tells the system to use X template for Y category and sticking that code into the basic template. My column had its own category, but I discovered as I clicked back to the main page that The Webmaster had replaced my column with another…

I looked at the new version of my column — which, as of my discovery last night had no posts — with horror and disgust. It’s not that The Webmaster’s new web monkey — don’t think for a second I believed The Webmaster decided to take an interest in HTML or graphic design — did anything offensive to the web design; in fact, it displayed a test page that looked exactly the same as my design, with two key differences. First, it had none of my columns, instead listing test posts. Second, the new web monkey had altered my header image.

Look, I don’t have a background in web or graphic design, either. I redesigned the film-review site largely by the seat of my pants, rolling the site’s old, ugly layout into a new, more aesthetically pleasing package. The only real creative input I had was in differentiating what I considered different “main sections.” Each of these sections — reviews, interviews/features, and TV — had different color schemes to separate them aesthetically. For another holdover from the old design, the image of a film reel shoved into one corner of the web page, I added an image of a TV screen to differentiate the TV stuff from the film stuff. It’s pretty elementary.

So the header images were pretty simple: either a film reel or a TV set in the corner, the name of the section in big block letters, and the section’s color scheme highlighted in the background. I had always intended to send the Photoshop files with the templates for each header to The Webmaster, in case he ever needed to change them. Some of them — including the one for my column — specifically mention the writer’s name or mention a particular sort of mission statement for the section that may end up changing. However, The Webmaster never took much of an interest in the redesign, so I never took the time to send him those files.

As a result, I guess theoretically one could argue the new web monkey did the best he could. He took a portion of the original header image that did not contain any text, enlarged it to cover the full area of the header, and added new text describing the new version of the column. The new typeface doesn’t match the one I used for graphics — Futura, one of the most well-known and easy-to-get fonts in the history of time — and the web monkey made the mistake of also keeping the non-enlarged TV in the corner. The result? A jarring, somewhat comical change in color and background-pattern sizes, with no attempt to feather it or anything else to make it look the tiniest bit professional.

You know what I would’ve done if I had to come in and clean up after somebody else’s design? I’d just find new graphics and start from scratch, to give the overall site coherence. But hey, maybe I’m just anal. And for those of you thinking that’s a lot of work to change one aspect of the site, you’re wrong: it’s nothing more than one background pattern in three different hues, with different text for each section and a different “icon” in the corner. I used one .psd file for the entire thing, simply hiding and unhiding layers to create the appropriate combinations. Like I said, I have no background in graphic design, I barely have an idea of what I’m doing, yet to me this is just common sense.

What could I do, after discovering I could no longer access the text of my columns because (a) I lacked access to the backend, and (b) this new/horrible design for a new/horrible TV column had decimated my column’s HTML files? For all The Webmaster’s goofy paranoia in stripping me of said backend access, he’s made no effort to change any of the passwords for FTP access or the MySQL database (it’s entirely likely he doesn’t even know what the latter is). He also never deleted my CMS account. I guess he realized doing so would permanently erase all of my reviews, as well, so he merely unchecked every available preference to lock me out. Funny thing about that, though: the MySQL database stores all the username preferences, which one can easily toggle by replacing a “0” (no permission) with a “1” (permission!).

With my “superuser” access restored, I logged in to the database and saved every one of my columns into one large text file. I took a few moments to snoop around and confirmed my suspicion that he’d brought in another web monkey: the activity log was flooded with this user deleting templates, creating templates, creating test posts, altering templates, etc., etc. I snooped around to look at the other new templates, but I only found one — a test template for a new version of the index page, which retains my design but adds horrible/unnecessary ClipArt to each of the sections. Again, it doesn’t fit with the aesthetic at all, and… Seriously? ClipArt? This shit is so generic, it might actually have been taken from MS Office’s stockpile of ClipArt. Or maybe a free GIF site. To each his own, I guess, but it’s fucking ugly.

At first, it pissed me off: some douchenozzle is soiling my design. My mind combines three unfortunate personality traits: intense anger manifested through elaborate pranks concocted with the maturity and wit of a 12-year-old pothead. I had the following thought, and even though I’ve tried to push past it, committing to this prank is so fucking tempting: rather than allowing them to sully my design, I should rewrite all the templates to reflect The Webmaster’s old, rickety, crap design. Fine, keep the CMS backend. Who cares? But all my graphics and spiffy Web 2.0-ification can go. He can return to his GIFs and his GoLive default templates, and the new web monkey can try to concoct his own redesign.

The only thing holding me back — other than the vague, nagging realization that it’s not worth my time (not just the time required for redoing the design, but the time required dealing with the fallout) — is that this isn’t really my design. The Webmaster was very hesitant about the prospect of a redesign, so I didn’t do much more than make his version of the site look a little spiffier. Once he’d dipped his toe in the water, I’d start springing more advanced features like horizontal menus, non-Verdana fonts, and redundancy elimination. Of course, we never got to that point. I didn’t even last six months after launching the redesign.

Let’s talk about the redundancy, though, because it’ll become important in a minute…

I’ve always felt the site suffered because of The Webmaster’s odd choice to repeat information all over the site. Right off the bat, we have two main pages: index.html and main.html. The index is the first thing you see, and there’s a link to the main from there. Although they have different layouts, both pages contain pretty much the same information, listing the latest reviews. There’s an archive page that also lists every review on the site — this, at least, is necessary because the reviews fall off the main pages once they get too old. But because the archives page — as mandated by The Webmaster — is divided into full lists of each category, is it really necessary to include separate archive pages of these categories? (To make that clearer: you have an “Interviews” portion of the archives page, and then a separate archive page listing just the interviews. Necessary?)

Well, I discovered this morning — now that the reinvention of my old column has officially “launched” — that The Webmaster has mandated still more redundancy: they have a TV section that lists all TV reviews — except my former column. Now they have the new version of my column, which…lists all TV reviews. They’ve also added new sections for “theatrical releases” and “DVD releases,” despite the fact that these categories already exist. You might ask why, but merely asking yourself that question means you’ve officially put more thought into the website than The Webmaster has.

Does this rambling collection of thoughts have a moral, or any kind of point? If it’s not “never do free work for people,” it’s this: people aren’t worth it. I’m an angry and spiteful kind of guy, but I’ve reached a point of spiritual awareness where I can — for the most part — avoid making horrible snap decisions as a result of anger. When I calm down, I always realize that it’s not worth the time, energy, and/or expense. I could completely decimate The Webmaster’s site — do much worse damage than merely rewriting templates to give the site that vintage 1999 look it had when I started writing for it (in 2006) — but life’s too short.

I guess where I’m at is: will The Webmaster learn a lesson? He’s already justified his side of things to such a degree that, in his mind, he bears no responsibility. Although, if you parse those e-mails again, it’s clear to me that most of his defensiveness comes from guilt. Despite that, he’s justifying and spinning so he doesn’t have to consider that maybe he doesn’t know how to run a website or a business or interact with other humans respectfully. If I fuck with him, it’ll only reenforce his conclusions and wash away what little guilt he feels. Other than briefly amusing me, how will that help? He’s not worth it.

Oh, and here’s the happy-ending postscript: since I had to hack the database and log back in anyway, I just quietly deleted all my old posts myself, without interacting with The Webmaster at all. No muss, no fuss.

Posted by Stan at 10:53 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Job Shit, Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation

June 30, 2009

The A.V. Club on Woody Allen

I don’t usually write long, ranty responses to articles unrelated to Juno, but I read one yesterday that really stuck in my craw. This will possibly sound obnoxious, whiny, and defensive, but deal with it — this article offended me deeply, on a personal level. (Note: I’ve included the article link, but feel free to not waste your time reading it, since I plan to quote from it extensively and respond to each of their “points.”)

Longtime readers know of my deep and abiding love for Woody Allen. Despite the oddly inconsistent quality of his movies over the past, let’s say, 20 years, his body of work from 1969-1989 more than makes up for a few dark spots. Even now, he still occasionally makes great movies; mostly, they range from “decent” (Small Time Crooks) to “unwatachable” (Scoop). So defensive though I may be, I’m not blind to the man’s flaws (both personally and artistically). Keep that in mind if what I write after this sounds insufferable.

I guess I feel compelled to respond because it’s hard enough to get people of my generation to watch Woody Allen movies without a complete hatchet job of an article discouraging them from ever taking the plunge. Typically, I enjoy A.V. Club’s reviews and articles, but this is just a flaming turd.

1. African-American people
For a brilliant writer and perceptive chronicler of the human psyche, there’s a whole lot that Woody Allen, or at least the Woody Allen we know from his movies, just doesn’t seem to understand. Allen’s charming, maddening new movie, Whatever Works, provides another in-depth glimpse into the strengths and weaknesses of his neurotic, acerbic, New York-centric worldview. Allen is a whiz at exposing the anxieties and desires of the upper-middle-class Manhattan smart-set, but his blind spots are legion. Take African-Americans for example. Allen named his son after the great pitcher Satchel Paige and has a deep abiding love for jazz. But African-Americans have, by and large, been conspicuously absent from Allen’s films. Allen very tardily tried to rectify that situation by casting Chiwetel Ejiofor in 2004’s hopelessly muddled Melinda And Melinda—a veritable master class in all the shit Woody Allen doesn’t get—as an impossibly suave, unthreatening musician so improbably perfect he makes Sidney Poitier look menacing. Congratulations, your progressive treatment of race just caught up with 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. 

So… He loses points for portraying a black man as dignified, educated, and well-spoken, with abundant charm and artistic talent? I guess on one level, this article chaps my ass because it sort of implies through its half-cutesy, half-hostile tone that Allen himself isn’t aware of his shortcomings. He’s stated multiple times — because the A.V. Club is not the first to bring up the lack of black characters in his movies — that he doesn’t feel confident writing authentically about the black experience. That’s why he went from making an ultra-depressing movie about black jazz musicians to making Radio Days.

And then there’s the fact that the writer of this little tidbit completely ignores Cookie, the black prostitute played by Hazelle Goodman in Deconstructing Harry. She effectively becomes Harry Block’s sidekick, receiving nearly as much screen time as Allen himself, and although the “black prostitute” characterization is a stereotype, Allen’s screenplay and Goodman’s performance give Cookie enough dimension to make her one of his increasingly rare strong, interesting female characters. Plus, it’s one of the rare late-period Allen movies that gets around the inexplicable, self-indulgent “old man conquers women young enough to be his granddaughter” conceit by (a) making their relationship 100% sexual and (b) making Harry Block pay for the “relationship.”

2. The American South
Complaining to a friend about the insularity of New York in Annie Hall, Allen says, “Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.” So if that’s how the rest of the country sees New York, how does New York see the rest of the country? Based on Whatever Works, Allen’s vision of the South is pretty much the opposite of New York, populated by right-wing, Christian, uneducated yokels (and closeted homosexuals) who devote themselves to intellectually vapid pursuits like beauty pageants. When teenage runaway Evan Rachel Wood arrives in Manhattan from backwater Mississippi, she’s an empty vessel that David can fill with his misanthropic “wisdom.” Her conservative parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr.) arrive later in their Sunday best, but their regressive Southern values are easily tamed by the bohemian polyamory and tolerance of the big city. Being Southern is a disease that New York City can apparently cure. 

It’s harder to find specific examples to refute this point using a specific example, because I can’t think of a Woody Allen movie (other than Whatever Works, which I’ve not yet seen) that even acknowledges the South’s existence. I guess this is their only valid point, although it’s at least sort of funny that the A.V. Club and others have railed against Allen for not writing more minority characters, yet nobody seems to care that he’s patently ignored vast oceans of the Caucasian world, as well.

Also, I’ve spent enough time in the rural South to know that “right-wing, Christian, uneducated yokels” is the rule rather than the exception. Mainly because, when I’m not being shot at for hiking into somebody else’s ill-defined property line, the friends and family I have down there (many of whom suffer from this themselves) insist that the anti-intellectual movement has swept locals up in such a fervor that they actually value their lack of education, just as they value their religion and their (generally right-wing, often to the unfortunate extreme) political views. And it’s fine that they feel that way, until you disagree with them. Then you never hear the end of it. On the plus side, they’re easily distracted, which defuses a lot of tension. They also believe words like “grandma” are “grayma,” derived in their mind from the hair color, and they call ghosts “haints,” which actually is derived from the word “haunt,” but became a laugh-out-loud stupid part of the standard lexicon generations ago. So, really, how smart and non-yokely could they be?

It’s a generalization, yes, but just because some Southerners are pinko liberal abortion-loving atheists who teach junior college and drive hybrids doesn’t mean the “right-wing, Christian, uneducated yokels” don’t exist and shouldn’t be portrayed in cinema. As I said, I haven’t seen Whatever Works, so I can’t say how offensive and/or stereotypical the characters are, but they can’t possibly be worse than any of the characters in Mighty Aphrodite (which, admittedly, they call out as obnoxious and cartoonish). Nevertheless, it shows that Allen can stereotype his native New York culture with the same skill and aplomb as Southerners.

3. Great Britain
Back in 2005, Match Point was widely hailed as a major comeback for Allen, who seemed refreshed after leaving New York to stake out new territory in the British Isles. British critics were not so kind: Allen’s decision to repurpose a thriller set in the Hamptons for London made for a vivid change of scenery, but his cultural tone-deafness showed, too. Guardian/Observer critic Peter Bradshaw dismissed his portrait of upper-crust Brits as “quaintly conceived,” took issue with dialogue that “sounds clenched, stilted and occasionally plain bizarre” (and also contained lots of egregious mispronunciations and errors), and resented Allen’s tourist’s gloss on the city itself. Allen didn’t much improve with 2007’s Cassandra’s Dream, which attempted to tell the same reheated Crimes And Misdemeanors story from the other half of the class spectrum. The two “cockney” brothers played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell sport accents so egregiously inauthentic that Uncut critic Stephen Trousse mocked them as “wavering between Dick Van Dyke and Tony Curtis doing Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot.” And Allen’s understanding of working-class South London isn’t much more nuanced. The bickering family in Cassandra’s Dream looks virtually interchangeable with their counterparts in Annie Hall or Radio Days; the only difference is that the brothers in Cassandra’s Dream have access to a yacht. 

I’m probably not qualified to dispute this because I’m not a Brit, and aside from what I’ve gleaned from the absurd amount of British TV I’ve watched, I don’t know much about their culture. However, the fact that most of the English reviews when Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream didn’t do much more than take potshots at the shit they know Allen may not know much about (colloquialisms, cultural norms, etc.), rather than reviewing the movies themselves, suggests that there isn’t that much less to complain about, or maybe just that the Brits are living up to their stereotypical reputation as stuff, condescending pricks. It’s not that the movies are great — neither is, although I think Cassandra’s Dream was inexplicably and unfairly maligned — or that I hate British people, but the article fails to acknowledge Allen was sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. His Dreamworks deal ended, his popularity in the U.S. has decreased to a pitiful point, and the only deal he could get was with BBC Films — on the condition he set the stories in the UK using primarily British actors.

Most of that’s beside the point, however. The thesis of this bulletpoint is: “Allen’s UK-set movies sucked and got bad reviews; therefore, Allen doesn’t get the UK.” Melinda and Melinda was significantly worse than either Match Point or Cassandra’s Dream and got mostly bad reviews. Does this mean Allen doesn’t understand New York? Also notice that this argument never once mentions Scoop, the worst of his UK movies and an absolute low point in his career. Could this be because the universally negative reviews concentrate on the actual broadness of the movie itself, rather than nitpicking the many things Allen clearly doesn’t understand about the culture?

4. The Female Psyche (post-Husbands And Wives)
Woody Allen is a fascinating paradox. He’s written some first-rate roles for women and guided multiple generations of actresses to their defining performances. Then, in 1994, the part of Allen’s brain that understands women apparently exploded and his female characters became a thinly sketched parade of castrating shrews (Christina Ricci in Anything Else being an especially egregious example) and vapid, rampaging sexpots intent on bedding Allen and his countless surrogates. With Melinda And Melinda, Allen set out to showcase the formidable talents of Australian actress Radha Mitchell and ended up giving her two terrible, borderline unplayable roles, one comic, one dramatic. Mira Sorvino picked up an Oscar playing a sentient Playboy Party Joke of a hooker with a heart of gold in 1996’s Mighty Aphrodite. But the ultimate late-period Allen female creation is Samantha Morton in 1999’s Sweet & Lowdown. She’s cute, sad, supportive, and completely mute. On the upside: The carefully crafted women of last year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona suggest that this situation might be righting itself.

What the hell does this even mean? “From 1977 to 1995, Allen created a plethora of vividly written, well-acted female characters. Then he started creating awful caricatures, except in certain movies, and maybe now he’s going back to writing good, solid female roles.” Were they high when they wrote this?

Never mind the sloppy argument. I don’t have any great insight into Allen’s personal life, so I won’t spend time arguing about the odd metamorphosis of his post-Farrow filmography. I’m sure someone who took the time to thoroughly research it could make a solid case about the impact his personal life and feelings have on his films and the way he writes his characters, but I’m not that guy. I only know this: eventually, writers just start pumping out shit. I’m sure there are hundreds of reasons why this happens, but the important thing is that it happens. So this argument is sort of like saying, “Man, Stephen King sure writes crap now. He clearly doesn’t understand how to scare people.” In order for that to make sense, you have to ignore a sizable, more memorable and more artistically worthwhile chunk of his material — which is essentially what the A.V. Club does. Cherry-picking examples using arbitrary time periods and pointing out counterexamples without acknowledging that they totally obliterate the argument…is just shitty writing. I guess that means I need to ignore the hundreds of other well-written reviews and articles and say the A.V. Club doesn’t understand how to persuade people.

5. Gentiles
Despite the fact that the goyim of America make up a large chunk of his audience, Woody Allen doesn’t quite seem to get them, despite his romances with people named Farrow and Keaton. In Annie Hall, it’s easy to get the impression that Alvy Singer gets off on dating a non-Jewish girl from the Midwest in the same way he would if he showed up at a party with a space-alien on his arm. Gentiles are so lacking in neurosis—which, in a Woody Allen movie, is essentially the trait that defines humanity—that they might as well be robots. Indeed, Woody’s robot butler in Sleeper seems more natural and unaffected than the chilly, affected Gentiles who populate films like September and Alice. 

Nice job ignoring Hannah and Her Sisters, Interiors, and Another Woman, in which the “chilly, affected Gentiles” are nothing but neurosis. And ignoring the fact that Annie Hall sort of treats Alvy and his ultra-New York Jewish liberal intellectual Central Park West Brandeis University socialist summer camp upbringing with the same space-alien attitude.

6. Los Angeles
Woody Allen’s films seem to be funded by a mysterious cabal of Europeans, well-heeled New York comedy buffs, and clarinet aficionados. He therefore has no use for the motion picture industry, or for its Los Angeles headquarters. His characters seem vaguely aware that there is a place called Hollywood, and that it’s geared towards the production of movies that people in Woody Allen movies would never see, but otherwise they react to any suggestion of La-La Land with the kind of revulsion that most people reserve for “Best Fascist Dictator” Adolf Hitler. Woody’s famous line about California—that its only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light—only rings false because obviously, he’s never driven a car in his life, and wouldn’t know that you can’t [sic] do that in New York, too. Speaking of…

A filmmaker with a ’70s heyday who disdains and distances himself from the Hollywood establishment?! If you say so… I can’t wait for A.V. Club’s next inventory: “12 things Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, and George Lucas don’t get.”

Seriously, though, regardless of Allen’s personal feelings (and one could argue those feelings come not from not getting Hollywood but from getting it a little too well), half the points on this inventory seem to come solely from repeated viewings of Annie Hall. Allen has taken his fair share of potshots at the Hollywood establishment, but the only time an open disdain for Los Angeles and the entertainment industry became an actual character trait and plot point was in Annie Hall. Even in Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen’s character laments not moving out to L.A. with his former writing partner and becoming rich as kings writing horrible sitcoms — he’s portrayed as the one who made the bad move, not the other way around.

Also, I’m all for taking unfair potshots, but could you make rights on red in New York circa 1976-1977? I’d trust Woody Allen to know that more than the Midwestern 20- and 30-somethings who wrote this article. Speaking of…

7. Driving
It’s hard to imagine Allen behind the wheel, but maybe that’s because 1977’s Annie Hall made his driving neuroses a fundamental character trait. As a kid, Allen’s Alvy Singer worked out aggression via bumper cars, impeding his ability to drive as an adult. When he attempts to drive during a trip to Los Angeles, he can’t leave a parking lot without ramming other cars and smarting off to a police officer. He’s uneasy as a passenger, too—first with a flighty Keaton behind the wheel, then with her potentially psychotic brother Christopher Walken, who confesses to him, “Sometimes when I’m driving on the road at night, I see two headlights coming toward me fast. I have the sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.” Hmm, Allen should probably stay off the road.

Like the last point, Annie Hall is the only movie where bad driving is both a plot point and a character trait. (In Manhattan, bad driving is a plot point, but he drove badly intentionally, in order to run over his ex-wife’s lesbian lover.) I recall a few offhanded references to bad driving in other movies, but it’s balanced by movies like Broadway Danny Rose, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Manhattan Murder Mystery, and Deconstructing Harry. He drives cars like a normal person. Nobody dies or crashes. It’s almost like Annie Hall is a work of fiction.

8. Violence
For a guy who’s made a handful of murder-mysteries, Woody Allen seems to have the same attitude toward violence that most people have toward sewage disposal: They know it exists, but dwelling on the details is unpleasant and probably offensive. Whenever his movies make reference to war, they might as well bring up “Yakety Sax” on the soundtrack; references to the Holocaust are generally used as punchlines. And in his murder-mysteries, the violence itself is usually handled with the lightest touch this side of Agatha Christie. Crimes And Misdemeanors begins this tradition, and it hasn’t gotten any less ridiculous over time; in Woody Allen movies, violence is something that happens to other people, and then it’s only to get the plot rolling so he can do what he’s really good at. It’s this reluctance to portray things that make him feel icky that made Joe Queenan observe: “The only thing Woody Allen has in common with Ingmar Bergman is Sven Nykvist.”

So The Maltese Falcon is a bad movie because Archer’s death is kept to the shadows instead of having CSI-like CGI close-ups of the bullet ripping into his flesh? I know that sounds like an obnoxious straw-man argument, but I’m being 100% serious: Archer’s death puts the plot of one of cinema’s greatest movies into motion, but the movie doesn’t linger on the details. In fact, thanks to the one-two punch of the Hays code and common decency, Golden Age movies were never explicit in their violence, and the movies themselves rarely dwelled on on grisly carnage. So this means Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-Psycho output is a waste of time? Should Woody Allen have made Crimes and Misdemeanors a little more like Se7en in order for it to have any impact? What the fuck is the argument here?

(As a side-note, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen it, but I seem to recall Jonathan Rhys-Meyers icing the neighbor with the shotgun in Match Point being fairly gruesome and shocking.)

9. Bob Dylan
Give him this much credit: It takes a certain kind of courage to mock one of the best loved and most respected musicians in the history of modern pop music. In 1977, Bob Dylan was still very much in the public eye. He’d released Blood On The Tracks, one of the all-time greats, only two years before, and was still touring regularly when Annie Hall hit theaters. But despite Dylan’s critical acclaim, Allen wasn’t a fan, and there’s no greater way to slander an artist than through the praise of an idiot. While trying to get over his breakup with Diane Keaton, Woody Allen goes on a date with music reporter Shelley Duvall. She throws out words like “transplendent,” she’s nearly impossible to please sexually, and worst of all, she’s a devoted Dylan fanatic, prone to quoting from “Just Like A Woman” in rapturous, vapid tones. “And she aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl,” is beautiful when sung, but in this context, it sounds like the brain-dead meanderings of some college poet high on empty profundity.

What? Woody Allen doesn’t love Bob Dylan? HOW DARE HE?! (Full disclosure: while I love Highway 61 Revisited, I don’t particularly like Bob Dylan. Call the cops if you must. I’ll go willingly. But don’t say I don’t “get” him; I just don’t find his songs, lyrics, or performing ability particularly worthwhile.)

Honestly, though, neither my opinion nor Woody Allen’s matters with this oddly distorted point. Go ahead and watch Annie Hall. It’s okay; it won’t bite. One could argue it remains his most accessible, appealing film, so you’re bound to — at worst — not hate it. When you’re through with it, answer this: is the joke of Shelley Duvall’s character at the expense of Bob Dylan or not? I’d argue “or not.” Allen portrays her as lacking any original thought — she spends the bulk of her time quoting the opinions of others (not just Dylan) rather than expressing herself, and when Alvy makes a quip about his sexual functioning, she asks him “who said that?” (To which he responds, in one of the movie’s best lines, “I think it may have been Leopold and Loeb.”) So, in my mind, it’s not Dylan he hates so much as people who quote people like Dylan because they themselves have nothing to contribute. I don’t really see that as the same thing as “slandering through the praise of an idiot.”

10. Modern music in general; rock music in particular
The vast majority of Woody Allen’s films are set in New York, a city that gave us Brill Building pop, American punk, and hip-hop. But as far as he’s concerned, the music scene stopped evolving approximately three years after he was born. Every time contemporary music rears its ugly head in a Woody Allen movie, it’s the subject of scorn and derision, from his mockery of Annie Hall’s Fillmore East program to his reaction, in Hannah And Her Sisters, to Dianne Wiest’s taking him to a punk club. He acts like rock music was invented specifically to get on his nerves. Even his famous love of jazz, documented in the inappropriately named Wild Man Blues, focuses on traditional New Orleans styles from the teens. In Woody’s universe, even post-bop and cool jazz seem like intolerable intrusions on music as it should be; if Charles Mingus or Miles Davis ever showed up at one of his parties, he’d probably call a cop. Allen’s beyond-arms-length distance from rock did lead to the one funny line in Hollywood Ending, though, when Allen told his silly cartoon of a punk-rock son, “I love you Scumbag X.” Punk might just be silly names and abrasive noise to Allen, but the bond he shares with Scumbag X remains profound. 

Stop the presses! A man who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s loves jazz?! I know I keep getting sarcastic, but I can’t figure out why, tonally, the writers seem so aghast at what’s at best a preference and at worst a personality quirk. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. My music preferences lean toward rock and metal, but I also like jazz, opera, Romantic, and bluegrass. However, I will openly admit I don’t understand rap. Theoretically, I’m right in the age bracket and demographic (white suburbanite!) who should love rap. But I just don’t get it. I don’t get why the percussion has to be so overbearing, or why people think talking in rhythm is more impressive than singing. Like Allen and rock music, rap will only infect my work in the form of vaguely hostile jokes. Because I don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand, I ridicule. What’s wrong with that?

11. Independent And International Cinema After 1975
Allen studied at the feet of the masters and makes no attempt to hide it. Many of his films recall the style of great directors like Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes, paying homage while—usually, anyway—not letting the mimicry get in the way of his own artistic personality. But the films of others, or at least others to which Allen likes to pay tribute, pretty much ends with late-period Federico Fellini. Allen’s casting choices could double as time capsules for which actors were bubbling up at the time of the film’s production. (If that’s Juliette Lewis, this must be 1992.) But when he wants to try on another director’s tricks, he tends to return to the same sources, the stuff that made the deepest impression while he was still finding his own voice.

Am I wrong for assuming filmmakers are more frequently inspired by those who came before them than their contemporaries? Or, when they do find inspiration in contemporaries, they’re accused of being hacks? Look at the Quentin Tarantino phenomenon: a man with an alarming, near-encyclopedic recollection of cinema’s past that has given him the tools to make very interesting (if not wholly original) movies. Meanwhile, all the people making knockoffs of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are — even now, 15 years later — accused of hackery, while Tarantino is (somewhat justifiably) hailed as a visionary.

Maybe it’s hard to tell when a filmmaker’s career reaches a certain longevity, but I guess it makes sense that filmmakers would continue to find inspiration in the directors of their youth and young adulthood than in contemporaries. To accuse Allen of this and not contemporaries like Spielberg, Coppola, and Scorsese (the latter of whom is lately more egregious in imitating his influences than Allen was at his worst) is pretty lazy and irresponsible. Would I expect Woody Allen to start operating his camera like Sam Raimi? Not any more than the other directors listed. (And even the most visually inventive of the three — this is debatable, but I’d go with Spielberg for that — shows more Bergman and French New Wave influence, even in his newer movies, than in any of the notable directors who came up over the past 25 years.)

12. Recreational Drug Use
Woody Allen worships all things intellectual; for him, life isn’t something to be experienced so much as catalogued, criticized, and over-considered. It’s not really a surprise then that he’s not much into things that make analysis an after-thought. But it’s not just that Allen abstains from spirits and drugs; the very concept of other people willingly clouding their judgment for pleasure baffles him to the core. In one scene mid-way through Annie Hall, he tries to explain his reservations. Diane Keaton isn’t much interested in sex, and wants to get high before they screw, and Allen isn’t having any of it. First he dismisses pot (“Yeah, grass, right? The illusion that it will make a white woman more like Billie Holiday”), then complains that making love to a woman who’s high makes the whole experience a cheat, like getting a laugh from a stoned audience. As always with Allen, he’s a little ridiculous and a little right at the same time.

Yes, Allen’s brave and irresponsible anti-drug stance has frequently confounded audiences and critics alike. Seriously, though, the argument here is that drug use is the only way to “experience” life? That’s the type of retarded sentiment I’d expect from the 19-year-old son or daughter of wealthy, conservative parents who decides to get revenge for years of perceived and actual repression by going off to art school and going wild. I would’ve hoped, like most of these kids, the A.V. Club writers would’ve outgrown such a laughable point of view. I guess they’re entitled to their opinions, but again, just because they feel that way doesn’t mean anyone else has to agree with them. But I guess they expected more out of Allen, who has always touted himself as the mouthpiece for Gen-Y slackers.

(Side-note: As someone who has had the misfortune of (a) screwing while high, (b) screwing while my partner was high, and (c) screwing while both of us were high, I can vouch for Allen’s perspective on the subject.)

So there you have it, guys: ignore this article and check out some Woody Allen. Ironically, I’d recommend reading the A.V. Club’s surprisingly well-written Primer on Woody Allen.

Posted by Stan at 5:24 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings