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February 18, 2008

Easy to Hate: Juno

With the critical accolades, awards nominations (and wins), boffo box-office, a can’t-lose premise, and a fine ensemble directed by the man who made 2005’s best movie (Thank You for Smoking), I don’t think I was looking forward to anything more than Juno. I even had usually reliable friends raving about this thing. One said, “It’s the rare movie where you can believe every good thing said about it.” He hates everything, so it didn’t even seem as much like quote-whoring as it looks there, nakedly in print. He acted astonished and impressed, and I decided, “I must see this movie.” Unfortunately, laziness prevailed, so I didn’t bother to see it until two weeks ago…

…and then I nearly walked out before the first scene gave way to the opening credits. The only thing that kept me there, aside from hardly earned money that could no longer be refunded, was all the external goodwill this movie had built up. But right off the bat, my first thought: “This is some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard.” Seems like as good a place as any to start.

The Dialogue, Part I: One Doodle that Can’t Be Undid, Homeskillet

Don’t think I have a problem with stylized, hyper-real dialogue. If you ignore Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, his liberal grandstanding, and the last 15 minutes of Charlie Wilson’s War, a sound argument could be made that Aaron Sorkin writes some of the most interesting, vivid, and poetic dialogue of anybody working today. David Mamet is great when he’s not being a misogynist. Even Paul Thomas Anderson writes some great dialogue. He hasn’t yet mastered third acts or matching “quirky” with “plausible,”* but his dialogue consistently comes in second place (after cinematography) on the list of good things about his movies.

Read this and tell me Juno doesn’t contain some of the worst dialogue in cinematic history: “That ain’t no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet.” Marvel at that. If you’ve seen the movie, you’re probably remembering Rainn Wilson’s baffling cartoon-character delivery of the line. You’re probably remembering the horrible attempt to throw us “in the moment” with a frenetic opening scene that doesn’t match anything else in the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’re probably wondering what sort of alien language Diablo Cody has chosen for her movie.

Let me tell you: the language in Juno is like that one kid in junior high who’s an outcast, always ridiculed for his utter lack of coolness. So he monitors how the “cool kids” act, what they’re into, what they’re wearing, and he goes out and buys some too-tight acid-washed jeans and has his mom cut holes in them and run them through the dryer 40 times, a leather Members Only jacket, a Ramones t-shirt, a pair of classy gold-rimmed aviator glasses, a bandanna, and a Raw Punk Classix Vol. 1 tape. Then he comes to school on Monday, and he’s ridiculed for trying so fucking hard to be hip and cool, to transform himself from the outcast with the periodic table of elements t-shirt to the badass who shoves sticks into dead squirrels in the woods behind the public library.

There’s a nearly imperceptible line between being just cool enough and trying so hard you embarrass yourself. Diablo Cody’s dialogue goes so far past that line you can’t see it on the horizon, creating a screenplay that wants to be quotable but is so loaded with unnecessary verbiage and trying-hard-to-be-obscure-without-being-in-any-way-obscure pop culture references that it’s almost as unquotable as this blog. Can’t people just talk? Why try to force it by making everything so florid and rhymey and alliterative and just plain unnatural?

There’s an inherent musicality in natural conversation, even conversation riddled with pop culture references, a la Kevin Smith. Diablo Cody doesn’t have enough confidence in her story or characters (not even flawless Juno) to just let the people talk. Every line has to sound like Kerouac on mushrooms. If this had been done in a clever attempt to show that Juno herself masks crippling self-doubt, the horrible dialogue would have been justified. Juno can’t have self-doubt, though; she’s perfect. Also, the fact that every character who isn’t Vanessa sounds exactly like Juno just points to lazy/awful writing. Nothing clever here.

The Dialogue, Part II: Thundercats Are Go!

I would have cut this movie so much slack if it had been set in 1995 instead of 2007. It would still have awful dialogue, but at least it wouldn’t destroy what little credibility it has by making references a 2007 16-year-old would never, ever say, probably never even know.

Let’s start with the stupidest and most obvious: “Thundercats are go!” Aside from trying way too hard to be “wacky” and “clever” (which I will dive into more when I discuss the character of Juno), would any kid born after 1990 know or care about Thundercats? Would they go the extra mile to combine it with a Thunderbirds reference? Would their parents have a clue what they were talking about? Have they even played reruns of Thundercats since it went off the air? I could see a kid born 10 years earlier knowing and making this reference. (And yes, I know plans were recently announced to both relaunch a Thundercats animated series and created a CGI film. I know far, far too much about this, so all you Juno lovers better not jump my shit about this. They are turning the animated series into some kind of Barbie and the Rockers/Hannah Montana shit stain and using the movie, like Transformers, to cram nostalgia down the throats of idiots my age. One is too young for your average teenager, one is too old, and the fact remains that neither are out yet.)

The bit about Juno wanting to watch Blair Witch Project because she “hadn’t seen it since it came out.” Do the math. She would have been seven or eight when that movie came out. Despite her pointless name-checking of Dario Argento, I can’t imagine Juno’s parents (portrayed as always having her best interests in mind) taking her — or allowing someone 17 or older to take her — to see Blair Witch. So what the fuck? If you wrote the screenplay in 2001 and have been hustling it for five years, the least you could do is update the reference so it makes some kind of sense.

The Bone Collector/Morgan Freeman thing. HE WASN’T EVEN IN THE MOVIE. I’ve read a few fans of the movie decry this nitpick by saying it’s a “subtle” way of pointing out Juno doesn’t know everything. Except that contradicts…pretty much everything else that’s established regarding Juno’s character. It’s just a sloppy error, almost like…

The story behind the name “Juno.” Which we never needed to know, for one thing. I hate it when movies think the names of their characters are so clever, unique, interesting, and/or symbolic that it requires a pseudo-poignant scene explaining where the name came from. Fuck you. The only person dumb enough to name a kid “Juno MacGuff” is a screenwriter. But that’s not the point. The point is:

JUNO IS A ROMAN GODDESS. NOT GREEK. You’d think a father so obsessed with Greek mythology would have picked up on that. Or a screenwriter with access to Google. It’s such an easy fucking fix: change his fixation to Roman mythology, or name her Hera MacGuff. The end. A half-second of “find-and-replace” would have made this scene 100% less retarded. It disappoints me not only that Diablo Cody apparently did not know this, but that nobody in the cast or crew felt the need to take three seconds and look it up. Shit, I haven’t even thought about ancient myths since sixth grade, and I knew off the top of my head that Juno was Roman. I couldn’t have told you her backstory or the name of her Greek doppelganger (until I took five seconds to look it up) — but I knew she wasn’t Greek.

There are other annoying references that a 2007 16-year-old would be unlikely to know or care about, but these were the three that bugged me the most.

And while this should maybe fall under the category of “story,” my most hated part of the movie has more to do with the lazy voiceover than with the story per se: “It started with a chair”/”It ended with a chair.” Has there ever been a lamer attempt to bookend a story? Christ, it almost makes “he was good in chair” sound urbane and witty. I’m sure I will delve more into “the chair” later, when I explore the story problems. But before I get there…

The Characters

I will say this: Juno MacGuff is the single most obnoxious lead character to appear in a film in a decade. The last truly embarrassing protagonist I can remember is Adam Sandler in The Waterboy (a movie I found funny, but Sandler’s horrible mushmouth accent almost sunk the whole thing). Her main flaw — get ready to embrace the irony — is that the screenplay would have us believe she’s flawless. Juno is portrayed as the smartest, cleverest, bestest person around. We get a lot of furtive glances and uncomfortable moments from other characters, but they amount to the movie telling us: Juno is so cool, so fresh, so original that these squares and old fogies just don’t understand her uniqueness. Never fear, though. They will be won over by her plucky charm, while she will remain an unchanged testament to perfection.

I’d like to compare her to Enid from Ghost World. That’s another character who is obnoxious and self-absorbed in similar ways, though not nearly to the extent of Juno. The difference is, throughout Ghost World, every single character gives her at least a small amount of shit for acting so obnoxious, and by the end of the movie she decides to grow the fuck up. No such luck with Juno; she is untouchable, and I wish the movie had portrayed her as simply delusional, while everyone around her is just waiting for the day that she snaps out of it and stops acting like a douchebag. Instead, they try to make us buy into Juno as an ideal person.

There are two moments that approach honesty — when Mark calls Juno out on “not being alive” during her chosen “best time for music” (after she stupidly argues, “You had to be there”), and when Paulie Bleeker confesses he tries really hard to be cool. I just wish moments like these were enough to make Juno pause for a bit of self-examination. But hey, who needs to take a step back and reevaluate perfection? There’s nothing she could do to become more perfect, right? …right.

Meanwhile, with the exception of Olivia Thirlby’s overcaffeinated performance as Leah, did every other actor in the movie ingest massive quantities of barbiturates in preparation for the movie? These characters don’t react to anything!

I know it’s supposed to be somewhat funny and ironic that Juno’s dad and stepmom are supportive of the pregnancy, but it just comes across as lazily copping out in the face of truly interesting conflict. Same deal with another pivotal moment: Mark and Vanessa’s divorce. It’s so laconic, it barely exists as a plot point. I’m not asking for screaming matches and hair-pulling (it’s supposed to be a comedy, after all), but this is one of the rare dramatic works that backs away from conflict and interesting character and story development — the fundamentals of dramatic structure — in favor of dropping a few more references to punk bands so obscure, they have greatest hits CDs.

The Story

Full disclosure: when the lights first came up, I said to myself, “Well, I hated the first hour, but it really redeemed itself in the last 30 minutes.” In fact, in thinking so hard about (a) how I could hate two-thirds of a movie but decide the final third was enough to redeem the remainder and (b) why I disliked significant chunks of a movie that seems universally loved, I came around to officially hating it. Because what I liked about the third act does not hold up under close examination. At all.

I will deal with the third act specifically in a minute, but first, the main problem with the whole movie: it has no idea what its story is. Structurally, it couldn’t prop up an empty thimble without breaking apart. It pretends to know what it’s about: a teenager who is unexpectedly impregnated and decides to keep the baby. A winning premise given the most irresponsible and reckless treatment of any movie tackling a taboo subject. “Hey, teen girls living in a world where the pregnancy rate increases exponentially on a weekly basis: you can carry the baby to term and sell it off to a yuppie couple with no physical or emotional consequences. No muss, no fuss.” Good call, movie! I’m glad so many people are seeing you, because that’s really a message that needs to be delivered to the masses.

Whether a great idea in theory or a shallow movie in practice, it doesn’t matter. The narrative doesn’t stick with the premise. Maybe that’s why they tacked on “the chair” bookends. “Gee, they brought up a chair at the beginning and then again at the end, so I guess this is a complete story.” The chair becomes symbolic of everything that’s wrong with the movie: an impossible-to-believe protagonist coupled with lazy attempts to hold the story on a steady course it doesn’t want to go down. It also speaks to the complete non-effect the pregnancy has on her, physically and emotionally. She was only two months pregnant at the time, but seriously? Moving a bunch of furniture from a house to a front lawn? By herself? That can’t be healthy.

Now, the chair annoyed me, but I did initially buy into the story, meandering as it was. And there’s one reason for that: the last five minutes. These precious minutes contain two rare moments of emotional honesty. Nothing in Juno is more effective than Jennifer Garner’s performance as Vanessa, and those last few moments pack a nice emotional punch. I bought into that almost as fully as I bought into Bleeker quietly comforting Juno in the hospital. Then they sang a horrible song and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Bleeker comforting Juno, and their little song at the end, and the joviality expressed in the very last scene, as she happily rides her bike to her man, are actually reminders of why the story doesn’t work.

Again, it’s a problem with Cody pulling punches and losing the real truth and intrigue of the piece. As soon as we’re introduced to the Lorings, the entire movie becomes a different animal. The more Juno inserts herself into their lives (or, at least, Mark’s), the more interesting it becomes.

It all goes off the rails in the third act, though. First, Juno’s pseudo-pining for Bleeker, and their reconciliation, shows how one-sided and potentially disastrous their relationship is. We’re supposed to think Juno’s flawless, but when they got together and Juno declared her love for him, I immediately felt very, very sorry for him. Because she’s obnoxious and bossy and, for the most part, looks down on Bleeker. You could make arguments for different levels of emotional complexity in the characters, but to me I read her purest motivation as: her entire life has spiraled out of control, so she chose to regain that control by forging a relationship where she can boss a sweet kid around.

It’s around this point that the movie stops being about getting TEEN PREGNANT and the potential problems of getting a bit too close to the surrogate parents. It turns into a CW teen soap, and not a very good one. Consequently, we get no resolution to the real story. Yes, Vanessa gets her baby. Yes, she and Mark get divorced. Yes, one can infer Juno never sees either of them again. So where’s all the emotional fallout? The third act turning point — the divorce — should have given us so much insight into these three characters, who are the true centerpiece of the movie, but once again Cody wimps out and tries to convince us that, hey, these characters we’ve spent half an hour with don’t matter much anymore.

The third act mostly sticks a big, pointy knife into the second act, so what was the point of Vanessa and Mark? Why make us care about them and their story and then not see it through to the end? (Vanessa, alone, receiving the baby does not qualify as a satisfying resolution to their story, emotionally honest or not.)

The Direction

Much of my criticism has been focused on the screenplay, because it’s fucking terrible.

Sadly, I can’t let Jason Reitman off the hook. After directing Thank You for Smoking, the most stylistically vibrant comedy since Election, what happened? Did he look at a bunch of Wes Anderson movies and get all the wrong ideas? I admire him for attempting something so different in style, but I don’t admire him for doing it poorly. I just don’t understand how the direction here could be so flat and dull, from the non-reactive supporting characters to the inert story. Because of my love of Thank You for Smoking and its pitch-black merry-prankster vibe, I wish I could believe Reitman directed this movie as a practical joke, that he hated the screenplay and wanted to satirize the entire “quirky” “independent” “comedy” movement.

Unfortunately, the movie is a little too sincere at the end for me to believe it. (Also, there’s the practical question of why a hot director would waste his time and potentially sabotage his career by making something intentionally terrible. But hey, a true merry prankster doesn’t think through shit like that. Trust me.)

The Soundtrack

I can partly blame Reitman-cum-Anderson for this. Also Ellen Page, who apparently had input on much of the soundtrack. Despite the fact that there’s textual evidence that Juno would hate the kind of music played throughout the movie, Page has insisted she made the selections believing it’s the kind of music Juno would listen to. Seriously, though, can we declare a moratorium on whiny, half-sung/half-spoken acoustic indie music in indie movies? I know these movies are usually done on the cheap, but I think you can afford to clear some music by people who know how to tune/play their instruments.

Am I asking too much?

The Bottom Line

What does Juno need to cross that line into normal. not-trying-too-hard coolness? Self-awareness. Juno the character is as flawed as her eponymous film. If the pregnancy experience caused her to learn something about herself or the people around her and grow as a human being, or if more of the characters made pointed references to her immaturity and obnoxiousness, and it caused Juno to take a few steps and realize hey, she’s 16 and pregnant. Even if she’s giving the baby away, maybe it’s time to grow up. (I don’t qualify her easy-way-out “love” for Bleeker as “growing up” or doing any kind of difficult soul-searching. It’s as random as one of Juno’s pop culture references.) Instead, everything goes right back to normal. Nothing about her experience changes Juno at all. Why did we watch this movie? The premise and the parts of the story that work indicate that, with several rewrites (and probably a different screenwriter altogether, maybe even a different director), Juno could have been a wonderful film. Instead, it’s a disappointing mess.

I’m going to go ahead and declare this the most overrated film of 2007. All the accolades, good reviews, and boffo box-office have baffled the shit out of me. I can’t see what everyone else sees, even though I wanted to like it. I’m just glad, after thinking about it too long and too hard, I can articulate my rage semi-coherently. Since nearly everybody I know loves the shit out of it, it’s nice to lay out all of the problems with it so I can ruin their day. To me, it’s 2007’s Pan’s Labyrinth or Garden State: I hate it deeply and specifically, and everybody hates me for not only my dislike, but my ability to explain in blunt (but detailed) terms why I feel that way.

At the very least, I think the cast should win some sort of special award for making that alien language of Diablo Cody’s sound like words actual humans would say.

If you read through this and said, “This fucking guy — he’s just jealous of Diablo Cody,” I say to you:

YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT. I AM. Good God, I wish I could hatch a calculated scheme to take a stripper job solely to get a book deal out of it, then use my status as a 10th-tier “journalist” to hustle a screenplay written largely in the same style and largely about the same person (face it: Juno MacGuff is either Diablo Cody or the person Cody wishes she could have been at 16), adding some minor taboo subjects to make it “edgy” and “interesting,” and then have that screenplay propel me to an A-list writer nominated for a shit-ton of awards. Yes, I am jealous. She is the kind of hack I want to be.

*Note: I haven’t seen There Will Be Blood yet, so maybe he has.

Posted by Stan on February 18, 2008 2:23 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (27)

September 7, 2007

The Mountains of Indiana: A Story of Disdain

Long-time readers know I have a tendency to act bitter and vindictive mostly for entertainment purposes; sometimes I really am bitter and vindictive for various reasons, but usually I just enjoy being mean. Not mean-for-meanness sake like Bluto or something; I just don’t take life seriously enough to get worked up over much, yet I find it entertaining when others do, so I try to provoke those feelings. It’s not one of my better traits, but it is one I’ve tried to work on (often with unfortunate results). Once in awhile, though, people stumble into my crosshairs and turn into an arch-nemesis, usually without even knowing it. Would I really announce an arch-nemesis to the person? That’s not how I roll; I prefer to quietly plot their demise while maintaining a ruse of friendship. I believe it’s a strategy laid down in Machiavelli’s The Prince, but I might have that confused with Crazy from the Heat by David Lee Roth.

I’m sure it won’t surprise anybody that I managed to gain an arch-nemesis I’d never even met. Back when I was reading for The Manager, he sent me two or three scripts by this particular writer — certainly, all of them were bad in a variety of ways, but one in particular has gone down in history as the worst script I’ve ever read. Worse than Monster Truck Madness, even. There’s no denying the shitastrophe of MTM, but at least it made sense. It justified its existence as a clothesline for lazy jokes and gave off an overpowering “Rob Schneider star vehicle” stench that made me suspect that it really could get made.

The script by this writer — nobody could make it, because everybody involved in the project would lapse into a coma when it came time to unravel the storyline and figure out just what the hell is going on within those pages. I am a big — huge — fan of conspiracy stories, but this shit didn’t even attempt to make sense. It garnered from me a tour de force of coverage, epic in length and attention to detail, featuring an explosive commentary that undid every attempt at a plot twist, every false characterization, every baffling loose end — something I’m so proud of to this day that I would like to believe the very mention of this coverage prompts a weary moment of silence, with anyone in earshot quivering with either terror or ecstasy (maybe both).

I don’t mind spilling the secrets of the “plot,” but I am trying to keep things on the down-low. It’s already easy enough to tie me back to The Manager, so spilling the names of his theoretical clients, the titles of the work, character names — any easily Googled keyword — will be stripped. I don’t trust myself in going the extra mile to alter significant plot details with a similar lack of coherence — I don’t want to be accused of going over the top or of libeling someone when it’s my own crappy writing and not his, so here it goes:

SYNOPSIS: Ten years ago, 17-year-old JOHN watches his father LARRY make a drug deal with mobster VITO DELFINO. In the present, TED GREENWALT works at a car wash. He’s poor, his wife SARAH is fed up with him, and it seems most of his life is spent at a bar with friends LUKE and ETHAN. When Ted forgets “date night,” Sarah locks herself in the den, leaving Ted to sleep alone. He has what he thinks is a dream of going to an exclusive yacht party, driving a Mercedes, owning a mansion, and sleeping with gorgeous MAYA. Everyone keeps calling him “David,” and he runs into Vito Delfino at the party. When Ted wakes up the next morning in the mansion, he realizes it’s all true. He also realizes gunmen are after him, though he doesn’t know why. He leaves Maya and goes back to his “real” life — except with the Mercedes, which he shows off to all his friends and co-workers. In the Mercedes he finds an address scratched on the back of a business card. This starts an investigation — at the address he finds MONTGOMERY, a singer from the party the previous night. Montgomery doesn’t know who he is or what he wants and asks Ted to leave. Ted tries to piece together the events of last night, revealed through flashbacks. He also recalls through flashbacks the events of 10 years ago — getting into a car accident with his six-year-old son Mark and Larry’s son, John.

To impress angry Sarah, Ted shows her the Mercedes and takes her to the mansion. He claims an uncle died and left it all to him. Sarah finds a receipt for the Olympic Hotel and demands an explanation. Ted lies, saying he wanted to give her the option of a mansion or a cheap motel. Later that night, Ted gets a call from Luke. Ted meets him at the bar, but when he mistakes an attractive girl for Maya, he freaks out and leaves. In the Mercedes, a Town Car with a Gunman driving pulls up alongside Ted. This leads to a chase, from which Ted narrowly escapes. Back at the mansion, Sarah’s gone — she found Maya’s bra from the previous night and left an angry note. Ted goes to spend the night at Luke’s. He’s awakened a few hours later by COPS who have come to check out the noise. Ted leaves the others sleeping and sneaks out the back door. At his apartment, Ted finds an angry message from Sarah on their answering machine. He also discovers it’s being watched by the Town Car. Ted sneaks away in the Mercedes and goes to the docks where the yacht party was held. He bribes the VALET for information, and he gives Ted Maya’s address. The Town Car shows up and Ted makes another difficult escape. He goes back to his apartment and has an awkward moment with Sarah. Ted drives to Malibu to find Maya. She says odd things that imply she knows more about the situation than she’s letting on. Two ATVs chase after them. Ted and Maya hop in the Mercedes and outrun them to the freeway. The ATVs fire rockets at them. Ted takes a downtown exit, and Nina forces them to stop—right in front of the Olympic Hotel. He realizes Maya is probably in on the whole thing when he recognizes her shoes — a pair identical to one he saw at Montgomery’s home. They come across Sarah at the hotel. She’s not pleased to see Ted with Maya. They argue, and she stalks off. Ted and Maya take a cab to Montgomery’s house and find it empty, abandoned. A HITMAN comes to take them out. Ted manages to get away, but Maya isn’t so lucky.

Ted goes to the police, a SERGEANT BECKER, to report getting shot at. Becker points out Ted’s picture on a wanted poster, with the name “DAVID HARBOROUGH,” wanted in connection with the death of Vito Delfino. Ted convinces Becker that he has the wrong man — Ted isn’t “David Harborough.” Becker runs Ted’s license and grudgingly lets him go. Ted — at this point looking like a bum — manages to get a lawyer’s business card. He goes to a department store to buy new clothes, gets himself all decked-out and smooth-looking, and returns to the police station. He speaks with DETECTIVE SAMSA, saying he’s Delfino’s lawyer. Samsa doesn’t believe him. Ted returns to the apartment, where Sarah shows him separation papers. She’s kidnapped almost immediately. The police bust in and search his place. They find the bloody knife that killed Delfino. They arrest Ted, who calls Luke and has him use David Harborough’s financial resources to bail him out. Once out, Ted realizes several things: he actually did kill Delfino (but was set up), when he was in the car accident that killed Mark and John it was because John had stolen drugs from Larry that belonged to Delfino, they were run off the road by Montgomery (who worked for Delfino) — and Larry is behind the whole current setup. Ted finally has to spill the beans — apparently he told Larry that John ran off to join the navy, and he told Sarah that Mark was kidnapped. He admits what happened, then pins it all on Montgomery (who’s helping Larry). Larry is so angry that he causes another car accident. Ted wakes up in the hospital, with Sarah in the next bed. Maya shows up, explains that she helped because Larry was her father, and emphasizes that Ted should be paying attention to his wife.

ANALYSIS: On the positive side: the opening exposition that establishes Ted’s character — his daily routine, his habit of lying, his marital problems, etc. — that all works pretty well. The reappearance of Sarah periodically to continue that conflict also works, building toward that resolution where Ted can finally value his wife at the end.

However, this screenplay is packed to the gills with logic problems that render the story first incomprehensible, then just plain frustrating:

• When Ted wakes up to the sounds of gun-toting scumbags beating on his door and has to make a deft escape, why does he think it’s a good idea to take his wife back there? Especially when he didn’t even bother to remove the “evidence” of his infidelity the night before.
• If I understand the basic conspiracy, it goes like this: to avenge his son, Larry wanted to not just frame Ted for Delfino’s death — he wanted to get Ted into a drugged state where he’d actually commit the crime. The ultimate goal, one assumes, is so that Larry can get some justice. It’s never really clear why Larry wants Delfino dead, why Montgomery would go along with his father’s murder, or why they’d send people to try and kill Ted when their main goal is to have him arrested and convicted of murder. Is that not their goal? If not, what’s the point of setting up the whole conspiracy in the first place? Why not just kill Ted?
• In the same vein, what’s the purpose of providing Ted/”David” with a mansion, a fancy car, credit cards, etc.? All he has to do is exactly what he does: go back home, go back to work, realize this is a “fake” life. They go to great expense to get Ted to “accept” this fake life, but they don’t think he’d be curious enough about how he got this life to find out any information? Even if he has no interest in details, sending mercenaries to hunt Ted down seems like it’d make even the least curious person just a little bit interested in what’s going on with this fake life.
• They also provide Ted with just enough clues to put together the whole conspiracy, which seems like it’d be the antithesis of what they want. People going to the trouble and expense of creating an identity out of thin air (especially a “wealthy playboy” identity) would hopefully be smart enough to tie up loose ends like having key players’ addresses written down, hotel receipts in pockets, etc.
• The mysterious house in the Hollywood Hills. It seems like an odd setup that’s never cleared up. Is this where Montgomery actually lives? Did he clear out as soon as he knew Ted was on to him? As written, it’s an intentional layer of mind-fucking, but to what end? The visits to that house are more helpful than any other clue in Ted figuring out the conspiracy, so what’s going on there needs to be made clear.
• Sergeant Becker scoffs at Ted for giving what he assumes is a fake ID. When he runs it and finds out it’s real, he gets angry but lets Ted go. He doesn’t think that, perhaps, “David Harborough” is an alias? Or that “David” pasted his picture onto Ted’s real driver’s license (therefore all the information would check out)? Or that a guy accused of murdering a known mobster would have the resources to create plenty of legitimate-but-fake IDs in police databases? Why would Becker let him go?
• From the beginning of the script, it’s clear that Ted lies constantly, but he’s possibly the worst liar I’ve ever seen. It’s very difficult to believe he could have kept the charade involving John and Mark going for any length of time. Even if he did — why? Obviously Larry is fond of blood-vendettas, but considering how easily he accepts that Ted was pushed off the road by somebody else because John had his cocaine, Larry could put two and two together and realize Ted’s telling the truth. Ted can feel guilty all he wants, but he wasn’t responsible for the accident. Even the police (who obviously handled the situation; Larry mentions a police report) didn’t find him responsible/negligent, so why the big cover-up? I’m not saying he doesn’t have to cover it up or lie about it, but (a) make him a better liar, and (b) make it clear exactly why he felt he needed to lie to both Sarah and Larry about their kids for a decade.
• Big loose end: Ted actually killed Delfino (didn’t he? if not, that’s unclear). Sure, he survives and unravels the conspiracy, but he’s still got a murder rap to beat. Considering Ted actually did the crime, this might not be easy. Where’s the resolution?

Aside from this, another big problem pops up on page one: the short scene involving John, Larry, and Delfino. It makes everything too obvious — we know it’s going to come back to those three in the end. By the time we realize John is most likely dead in a car accident (which is obvious long before it’s fully shown to be true) and Delfino was murdered recently, the Larry reveal is pretty obvious. There’s nobody else it could be.

It seems kind of silly that Montgomery is Delfino’s son, and as I pointed out it creates a logic problem as far as why he’d allow Delfino’s murder to take place. Making him hired muscle, willing to do anything for the highest bidder, makes it far more believable and loses the necessity for an explanation for why he wants Delfino dead; his only loyalty is to money, so Delfino doesn’t matter. It’s also a little too neat and tidy that not only is he Delfino’s son, but Maya is Larry’s daughter. It oversimplifies the motivations — both Montgomery and Maya are willing to commit crimes (or force others to commit crimes) out of nothing but family loyalty? It diminishes their characters by not giving them any ulterior motives or shades of gray.

I don’t usually go on that long. It’s usually two or three short paragraphs for the synopsis, then one or two paragraphs of analysis. When a story relies on so many little details to make it such dreck, you need the detail or else the feedback makes no sense. I also wanted to get the point across, this being the third and worst script I had read from this writer, that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. Here is one area where the bitter-‘n’-vindictive kicks in. I’ll admit a slight tinge of jealousy that somebody so bad could be a “client,” while I was slaving away as an “intern.” Of course, the more I found out about The Manager, the happier I was keeping my distance.

If nothing else, The Manager took the hint — I never received another script from this writer. Also, my friend Mark got a rewrite of this same script that incorporated many of my suggestions, but it was still a disaster. Poor feedback, or poor writing? You be the judge!

Why did I get so angry, though? Surface-wise, I’ve read worst scripts — scripts written by people whose grasp of the English language (despite being born-and-bred Americans) is so poor that trying to figure out what they’re trying to say is an act of futility, comedies so unfunny I can’t even fathom the mind that would put the “jokes” to paper, action scripts that try to coast on a brilliant first 15 pages while circling the drain for the next 60 before just bottoming out. I’ve managed to read an entire gamut of awful shit sent to shady men with no credentials, only because “accepts unsolicited material” is written in the ad. The problem with this script, the reason I got so angry, was the raw potential. The man can string together a sentence. He can write decent dialogue. He even has a fairly good sense of characterization, and a shitload of ambition crammed into his scripts. The end result is messy as hell, and adding insult to injury — he doesn’t learn from mistakes. Each screenplay I read had the same kinds of problems, over and over again, despite the feedback I (and others, I’m sure) gave.

After I quit reading for The Manager, I tried to keep track of some of the more memorably offensive authors (some of whom were general submissions, not “clients”). Most of them have blogs and/or MySpace pages I can read for the bitter-‘n’-vindictive, but it came as a huge, coronary-inducing shock that the author of the screenplay mentioned above had a novel coming out.

A novel?! From this guy?! How?! My first thought was that he is as depraved and deceptive as I am, creating a fake publishing company (in fact, he’s the one who gave me the idea) to perpetuate the myth that he’s published. No dice — this is actually a real place, to my unending horror.

Weeks passed between my discovery and the novel’s publication, and my rage and confusion softened. It was replaced with an odd, dewy sensation I’ve come to know as “hope.” Yes, I put my prejudices aside and reminded myself — this guy is a fellow writer. Maybe screenplays aren’t the medium for him; maybe he needs the the authoritarian control and added details only the novel form can provide. All the elaborate twists and confusing characters will make sense thanks to the magic of internal thought and droning, ponderous explanations — material bad screenwriters think of as excess fat (Syd Field agrees!) and good screenwriters know how to work around.

In a show of meaningless solidarity, I bought the book the day it came out and started a-reading.

And it was a-awful.

My change of heart made me want it to be good so badly that I tried to ignore the initial flaws and hope he’d find his groove and by the end, I’d be waiting breathlessly for his sophomore effort. About 50 pages into it, I was already ready to give up. Let me describe the very, very basic plot: a disparate group of people from all over the U.S., for various reasons, set out to find a girl. They don’t know why, but they feel compelled to search for her, if only to figure out why she’s turned into the object of their obsession.

At the very least, it’s an interesting premise. Here’s the biggest problem: there is no real plot (for 300 of its 330 pages, it’s just people wandering around for no clear reason), which is fine if you can rely on interesting and unique characters to carry the story. You…can’t. He gives each character one (maybe two, if we’re lucky) trait that carries them through the book. They aren’t even interesting traits. “This guy’s a secret cutter.” That’s his entire character. We find out little else about him, or anyone else, over the course of the book. It’s supposed to be a journey of discovery, I guess, but it fails so spectacularly there’s a tacked-on epilogue explaining to us, in blunt terms, how they changed.

Aside from that, there are big story and character questions that all pretty much boil down to: why would anyone, real or fictional, do that? With no explanations, we’re left to guess, and most of my guesses ended up as “sloppy writing and no research.” I could go on and on, in detail, but none of it is terribly important. I’ll sum up some of the typical goofiness by using as an example a few early scenes:

One of the characters dials a phone number for no apparent reason (in fairness, it’s not apparent to the character, either — that much is fairly interesting). When he gets somebody on the line who sounds like she’s been kidnapped, he calls the cops. Later, a police detective forces two uniforms to break into his home while he’s showering. Again, to his credit, he at least questions the legality of them breaking in — but never explains what would motivate them to do this. It’s an unnecessary (and, again, illegal) action, made even more confusing by a few questionable police procedure actions. Now, I know not every detective has a partner, but this doesn’t mean the ones who don’t are given uniformed cops as foot soldiers to break and enter for them or act as secretaries. In a later scene, these same uniforms show up at his office…to take him upstairs to a conference room where the plainclothes detective is waiting. Why? Don’t they have parking tickets to hand out?

It’s compounded by the illogic of what happens next: the guy goes back to his cubicle, and his boss tells him if the police show up again, he’s fired. This is a man who hasn’t committed a crime, who is helping the police as a concerned citizen, and the whole exchange makes it more difficult to believe the uniforms have any purpose for being there (other than to cause this dust-up). I could understand the boss getting flustered if the dude had a record, or if he was getting arrested, or if the boss had it in for the character — there are plenty of explanations for all of these things, but we are provided with none. It’s difficult to maintain suspension of disbelief when there is little attention to detail, and we can’t believe the broad strokes we’re given.

And then there are the mountains of Indiana. You heard me right, and any Illinoisian who has driven to obscene corners of that rural state looking for the finest illegal fireworks and unconventional (some might say “physics-defying”) pornography knows full well: while there may be more than corn in Indiana, there sure as hell aren’t mountains. Yet, the climactic point in the book occurs in a small town nestled in “the mountains of Indiana.” Look, I’ve read a couple of reviews that make the (misguided) case that anything that doesn’t make sense (plenty of it!) can be chalked up to a David Lynch-like surrealism. How can you read anything about mountains of Indiana and not agree that it’s a mess of poor research and inattention to detail? The book does nothing to draw attention to the strageness of this imagery (or any of the other notable examples of “surrealism”), and the story could easily take place in a region that is authentically mountainous. I’m a big fan of ironic throwaway lines, or even a placid little, “Such-and-such had never been to Indiana and didn’t realize how mountainous the terrain was” if he wants to maintain the leaden, Bergmanesque seriousness. Just something to address the fact that the author clearly has no idea what he’s talking about: he’s never been to Indiana, he’s never even heard of the stupid knobs!

I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish. If this was supposed to be a dream-like meditation on…something, there’s too much reality; if it’s supposed to be real, the book is sloppy and riddled with implausibility. My reading on it is that he was going for something along the lines of “magical realism,” in the very vague sense that “everything’s real until it’s not.” The book is loaded with very obvious moments of strangeness, heightened reality, things that can’t or shouldn’t happen — but it mostly tries to remain grounded in reality. Tries.

You might notice problems in this novel that crop up in the screenplay I talk about above. This is the main source of frustration: in the few interviews I’ve discovered online, he keeps mentioning how frequently he writes, but what does it mean if he’s not allowing himself to improve the craft? I’ve read four full pieces of work by this man, and all four of them have the same plausibility issues, lack of continuity, lack of payoff, and lack of authentic character development. It’s hugely disappointing and makes me a little happier to continue having this guy as an arch-nemesis.

I won’t deny this: part of my reaction comes from jealousy. He got published, legitimately (even if it’s a tiny press who will undoubtedly fold after this misstep), and I didn’t. But go back and re-read the part where I wanted this book to be good. Obviously I’m pissed because he got a piece of shit published, but not as much as you think — it actually makes me optimistic. Rather than going with tricks and fakery, this hunk of junk has me convinced I could get a legitimate novel published, at a bigger and better place. No, I think I’m really mad because I think this writer does have talent (I wouldn’t have made it through 330 pages if he didn’t); he just can’t or won’t learn from his mistakes, and he has an uncanny knack for generating a lot of goodwill at the beginning, then squandering it all by the end.

Posted by Stan on September 7, 2007 6:45 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)

May 8, 2005

Roots

Note: This was originally posted in the form of a comment at a blog I stumbled upon thanks to Google.

I first discovered the miracle of the boner in fifth grade. I had no idea what made it start, I had no idea how to make it go away. It would either just hang limply or suddenly stand at attention. Who was I supposed to talk to about this? I told my friend Mike, who had a sister in high school and consequently was pretty knowledgeable about sex.

“It’s a stiffy,” Mike said. “I get ‘em, too. You’re supposed to stick them in girls’ pussies.”

“They let you do that?” I wondered.

“My sister does, all the time,” Mike replied matter-of-factly.

“Cool,” I said, somewhat in awe. “I don’t know any girls. How do you make them go away?”

He shrugged. That summer, we often rode bikes to the Playboy factory in the industrial park, searching for discarded issues in the Dumpsters. We’d hide behind the bushes in Mike’s backyard and ogle these newfound sexual objects, these women. If a girl was particularly attractive or in a particularly erotic pose, we’d gladly drop our pants and show them our boners, but beyond that, we really had no idea how to get them to go away. We just knew, even in the fantasy world of Playboy, that women would be gratified by the mere sight of our 11-year-old units.

Something had to be done. I needed to consult with an expert. At the time, my father was working two jobs, so he was barely home. I decided to go to my mother. I told her that, every once in awhile, unprompted, my penis stiffened.

She looked at me for a long moment, then solemnly led me to a bookcase in the garage (where all great reading material should be kept, bookended by Chilton’s auto guides and a socket set) and pointed out a series of thin hardcover books, titled The Life Cycle, which dealt with the various, horrible aspects of puberty. “If you ever have any questions like that,” my mom said in that wise matriarchal tone she had, “just consult these books.”

In the 30-minute sex ed class we had in fifth grade, we men discovered a term called “masturbation,” but nobody really knew what it meant. We knew it was a way of gratifying ourselves — and, more importantly, making the boners disappear — but we didn’t know anything beyond that. Nothing about orgasms, very little about ejaculations, and most detrimentally — nothing about how to masturbate. The first thing I did when consulting the books was look up “masturbation.” It said something to the effect of, “You can stimulate yourself by encircling your erect penis. This is called masturbation.” I looked up “encircle” in the dictionary, and I was on my way.

As was often the case during this period, I snuck and watched late-night HBO. I had analyzed the TV Guide’s subtle codification of nudity: BN meant butts, N meant boobs, and SSC meant everything. I had discovered a film that HBO often played called Husbands and Lovers (I often confused it with Woody Allen’s dramedy Husbands and Wives — this was a horrible mistake to make while in boner territory, and it led to my early and unwarranted dislike of his work), which not only had women on display at almost all times but also had a bit of male nudity. It was the closest thing to porn I had ever seen at the time.

Upon discovering how masturbation worked, I waited for two weeks before Husbands and Lovers was on again, and I was ready to finally try masturbation out. I huddled under a blanket in the dark, clicked on the HBO, waited until that nudity got my li’l guy going, slid my hand around my penis, and —

Nothing happened. What the fuck, man? I just sat there, hand limply surrounding my unit, until it got all warm and sweaty and finally shriveled back into oblivion. This was the first — but certainly not last — failure of my unit.

In the fall of sixth grade, I often spent time with a kid named Dave, who was the resident porn junkie of my little clique. We’d go and hang out at his house after school, listening to Pink Floyd and sneaking peaks at his dad’s ridiculously huge collection of Playboys. On a really overcast, windy day, we stood outside the school waiting for his mom to pick us up. I sat on my gigantic backpack, and he stood, keeping lookout.

He looked down at me and asked, “Do you masturbate?”

“No,” I said glumly. “I don’t know how.”

“Oh man,” he said, “it’s so easy. You just pull on it with your hand.”

Pull on it? Yes, I could see how that would affect things. This was the component I had been missing all along. I just sat there with my wet-noodle hand surrounding my dick, expecting something to magically happen. That weekend, I decided I was exhausted and needed to take my nap. Under the light of my extremely nerdy, illuminated globe, I removed a large, empty box from my top closet shelf, grabbed a Cindy Crawford magazine from my secret supply under my bed, and attempted this pulling concept.

I was slow and goofy at first, sliding my hand forward and completely off before I learned it’d save time and energy just to gently rub back and forth. The main thing I remember about these early incidents was the smell of semen. It smelled weird to me, and while I retain a sense memory of the odor, I can’t place it to this day. The closest thing I could say is it was something like salt and rubbing alcohol, but that doesn’t really do it justice.

Many a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode was defiled by my masturbatory tendencies, and I slowly improved in efficiency and technique. I wished it wasn’t such a private thing, because I could have bragged about many things that humiliate me now — number of times per day, disturbing locations that don’t involve my bedroom or home bathroom, the shortest time from grip to spurt.

While I’m no longer beaming with pride at my masturbatory habits, I will say that, as I’m currently alone and often a little depressed, waxing the poetic warlock really does the job of perking me up, and I’m thankful for that.

Happy night-before-Mother’s Day, everyone!

Posted by Stan on May 8, 2005 12:19 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (4)

October 22, 2004

Owen Strikes Back

As I’ve stated, mostly in the form of thanks to THE LORD, I have no classes with Owen this semester. Both of my screenwriting classes this semester feature mostly the same people I was with last semester, except without Owen. The main difference: classes are now enjoyable. Except for the portfolio review class, but that’s a whole other thang…

Since school has started, I’ve taken to visiting a girl named Laurie. We had a class in the spring and kind of hit it off. She works in the screenwriting center, so I’ve taken it upon myself to wander in there before my class and flirt with her for awhile while also pandering to her boss so he’ll give me a job. This was rarely my initial intention — the idea was to have dinners with Maria before the portfolio review class, so we could bitch. She dropped the class but is still downtown on Thursdays, so we’d been planning on dinner for awhile, but we never actually did for one reason or another.

So I’ve been hanging out with Laurie, who digs on the Stanbeef. It disappoints me that I went the whole summer without calling her. Not that she was any different than anyone else, but I guess I undervalued the fact that she and I are attracted to one another. I’m kind of retarded, but more on this point later.

Last night, same ol’ shit. I was planning to hang with Maria; it was set, so I left a little early so I’d have 20 minutes or so to talk with Laurie before Maria got out of her class. About three minutes after getting there, a sheepish freshman wandered in, complaining that some copies of Ghost World (one of the scripts studied in script analysis, which apparently is now a mandatory freshman class; this is a good thing) are missing.

Laurie and I went to make the copies together. Because she’s in charge, she has to throw everyone out and lock the door when she leaves. So the sheepish freshman stood in the “homework lounge” (a small area directly outside the center with couches and tables — I’ve never, ever seen anyone do homework there) waiting for us. Over the summer, they installed little, swinging doors to block people out of the offices. They aren’t locked, and they’re so small that even if they were locked, somebody could just lift their legs and step over, but they actually keep the freshman out, which is the goal.

Upperclassmen have no respect for the swinging doors.

So Laurie and I went back to the copy room, made the copies, and as we turned back down the hall toward the center, Laurie saw Owen hunched next to the center’s door. It was closed, but not actually locked, because we were just going around the corner for five seconds.

“OWEN!” Laurie shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

Owen froze, clutching the door handle, like a deer caught in headlights. Then, he looked sheepishly up at Laurie and me. He let go of the door, which was only open a tad, and it shut quietly.

“You know better than that,” Laurie admonished. Her motherly tone amused me. “When the door’s closed, you don’t go inside. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Sorry,” Owen muttered.

Laurie gave the copies to the freshman, who thanked her and ran away quickly.

We all went inside the center, Owen and I exchanging greetings after not having seen each other all summer.

Owen presented me with a business card with his name, e-mail address, and website URL. “There’s nothing on the website yet,” he explained, “but drop me a line sometime.” Sadly, my schadenfreude instincts kicked in the first time he ever mentioned the site, shortly before the end of the spring semester. I’d memorized his site URL, his DeviantArt URL, and his LiveJournal URL. I checked them periodically over the summer, hoping to be amused by him. Unfortunately, Owen is true to his word: there’s almost no content on any of his sites.

“What do you want, Owen?” Laurie snapped. He was interrupting our flirt time.

Owen explained he needed to get a script for one of his classes. It could be any random script, so he forced me to choose it. I suggested Breaking Away, because I figured it’d be the type of script Owen would hate. I snickered when he agreed to go with it. Laurie demanded his student ID; he handed her a driver’s license.

“This isn’t your student ID,” she grunted.

“I left it at home. Can’t you just type in my ID number?” he asked.

“I have to scan the card in order to get into the system,” Laurie replied.

“Well,” Owen said, changing the subject rapidly, “I can’t find my ID, but check out my new license. It has an updated picture and everything.” He handed her the license, along with his state ID (a worthless card for anyone older than 16; it looks just like a license, except without the information pertaining to driving ability). Laurie stared at the pictures unadmiringly before handing it back to him.

“Wow,” she said unenthusiastically.

“I needed to get them so I can vote,” he said. I hoped to God he wasn’t going to launch into another Bush tirade. I’m not a Bush fan, but Owen has a habit of going waaaaaay overboard. Fortunately, he didn’t, because he stumbled on his student ID amid the other rubble in his pocket. Laurie scanned it quickly, shoved the script in his hands, and we hoped that’d be the end of it.

But no. He stayed.

Much like a tornado, when Owen hangs around, you mostly just want to huddle, shivering, with the nearest person and weep gently, praying it will all be over soon. Laurie and I exchanged that desperate, wishing-we-could-huddle-right-in-front-of-him look before turning our attention to ignoring him. Mildly aroused at that point thanks to our exchanged glance, I suddenly found my cup of tea fascinating. I stared at it blankly to avoid eye contact with Owen.

Laurie, meanwhile, became entranced with the Internet. We sat in silence, Owen staring at us without anything to say. Generally, Owen is not a conversation starter; his problem is that, when anybody says anything at any point in time ever, he will jump on it and twist it into a conversation about Emma Peel or something. Either that, or he’ll say completely in(s)ane things that make everyone silent once again.

We knew the only way to defeat him was to not give him any fuel whatsoever. He asked me a few questions about classes, about the summer, et cetera, which I either answered with monosyllabic statements or with jokes. Without leaving any wiggle room for follow up questions, most of his attempts at starting a long conversation died. Briefly, I felt sorry for him. I wondered if it was a chicken-egg thing; is he so tactless and obnoxious because his social skills remain undeveloped because nobody wants to talk to him, or does nobody want to talk him because he’s always been, and always will be, a social retard?

Laurie decided the silent treatment wasn’t quite effective, so she dropped the j-bomb: “Don’t get your hopes up,” she said to me, “but the boss was talking about possibly needing a fifth person. I’m gonna drop your name if he decides that’s what he needs, so be ready.”

She glanced at Owen briefly, and I realized that this, in addition to being potentially good news for me, was her way of saying to Owen, “Neener-neener, I actually like this guy, and you’re scum to me. Go away.”

Owen understood. “Hey, if Stan doesn’t work out, don’t hesitate to mention my name,” he said to her.

“Oh, I’ll be sure,” she said, rolling her eyes toward me.

I joked, “Hey, maybe I should print out a copy of my resume —”

“— which you won’t need —”

“— so he’ll be really impressed with my string of two-month-long jobs.”

“I have five copies of my resume with me,” Owen offered, apparently under the delusional impression that merely having his resume meant he’d get the job.

“You’ll need all five,” I told him. “I hear he makes lots of notes.”

Owen’s face fell. Honestly, I feel mean taking advantage of gullibility like that, but I simply cannot help it.

“He’s just joking,” Laurie explained, and suddenly we were saved. Two other employees showed up for active duty, which meant Laurie could leave the center. Almost immediately after explaining to the others what needed to be done over the course of the evening, she said, “Come on, let’s go to Jewel.”

I enjoy assertive women, and I have the scars to prove it.

“All right,” I said. We got up and ran for the door. To our dismay, Owen followed us.

Laurie and I exchanged “goddammit” glances as we headed toward the stairwell.

“What the fuck, Stan?!” I heard from down the hall. Bear in mind, this could be anyone, friend or foe, so I wasn’t sure who it’d be. It, of course, turned out to be Maria, and I suddenly thanked the heavens. She’d gotten out of class early.

Maria, so you know, is like the Owen antidote. We all can’t stand Owen, but we try to keep it to ourselves and put up with it, for the most part. Not a great strategy, but much easier to deal with. Maria, however, openly disdains Owen. She was assigned to be his first reader in the spring semester, when he was so unnecessarily hostile, and because of that hostility, she ripped his shit apart. It was fucking brilliant; I know this because I helped her write some of the feedback.

“I just tried calling you,” she said. “You didn’t answer.”

Yes, despite my new phone, I still can’t get a goddamn signal when I’m on the third floor of the film building. It drives me nuts.

“So are we doing pizza or what?” she asked.

Shit. I had the plans solidified, so I didn’t want to renege. Plus, I knew Maria had some sort of warding spell that would save us from Owen. At the same rate, though, I wanted my personal time with Laurie. I was planning to tell Laurie about my dinner plans, but Owen showed up and I didn’t want to get into it. Maybe I should’ve, since the mention of Maria would have made him run away, screaming.

All of a sudden, the whole evening was a fucking catastrophe.

And then Owen headed for the stairwell; thank God, one problem solved. But then there was me, Maria, and Laurie.

“I’m gonna go with Maria,” I said. “We already had plans to get pizza. Hey, you wanna come with us?”

Typically, I wouldn’t invite somebody else along, but Laurie’s special and destroys any mental rules of etiquette I may have.

“No, I was gonna go get a salad at Jewel,” she said. “I don’t want any greasy-ass pizza.”

Touché. I feel like a jackass now, but I forgot to mention the pizza place we go up to is really a pizza-salad joint. I guess they thought out the health-conscious people and decided to offer a little of both. It didn’t really enter my head, though, because Maria and I were planning to hang out and shoot the shit at the pizza place, and I knew Laurie wouldn’t be able to stay. At the same rate, we all could have gotten it to go and shot the shit in the center. It would eliminate the personal time aspect of it, but she’d still be there.

Essentially, I both over- and underthought the situation and ended up botching the whole thing. Status quo.

I thought I might be sabotaging myself, which is not an unusual occurrence with me, particularly after my hilarious string of disastrous relationships.

In the first book of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, there’s an illustration of the gunslinger after the massacre of Tull, with a long trail of bodies leading up to him, standing there with his guns out. Whenever I think about the last four years in terms of my romantic relationships, that image flashes through my mind. I don’t think it’s coincidental.

I’ve had a (and excuse the gunslinger pun here; I should be shot — oh fuck, there’s another one — for this) habit of being a bit gunshy with women lately. My habit of choosing women who seem normal and then turn out to be holy shit crazy is the probable cause. Laurie, on the surface, seems like a really pleasant, normal person. That’s how it starts. I take her out to dinner, and suddenly she’s a fucking nutjob.

Now, this is not me saying all women are crazy; I’m not one of those retarded misogynists who has a couple of bad relationships and decides all women are crazy. It just happens that, in my particular position, I have actually dated mostly insane people. The Ex, of whom I often spoke Way Back When, did do some crazy shit toward the end, but I think it was more immaturity than insanity. Still, dinnerware exploding over one’s head tends to scar emotionally.

And those are just the women I’m willing to besmirch on this blog. If those are the ones I talk about, imagine the horror of the few I haven’t mentioned.

So yes, I’m afraid of going further. I want to, and I don’t. I think that she might be the one not-completely-insane person who digs on the Stanbeef. I just don’t want her to turn out to be a knife- (or plate-)wielding maniac, and it’s holding me back. Perhaps Owen was a harbinger of what’s to come; his arrival may be saying to me, “Dude, back off Laurie. She’s bad news. Run. RUN!”

But here’s the problem with me, generally: that type of thing intrigues me more than it scares me away.

Posted by Stan on October 22, 2004 2:12 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (3)

October 20, 2004

Junior High School Politics, or: Bad Blood Brothers

My cell phone is a goddamn piece of shit, as almost everyone who calls me will attest (mostly because I say, “Goddamn this piece of shit — can I call you back?”), so I decided to get a new one. I walked up to the Cingular store in town and was helped by a strange man who seemed to be looking above my head every time he talked to me.

While I was there, I ran into an old, old, old, old, old, old friend. And things got weird for me.

You might dimly remember me talking about my old crew from junior high. I mentioned them in at least one entry that I know of, but the hierarchy of friendship has always been sort of muddy.

In the Ben Franklin entry, I called Art the fearless leader, but some time in the midst of eighth grade, he allowed his leadership to be usurped by another friend, Joe. Most of us had been friends with Joe previously (I’d known him since first grade), but Art didn’t know him until we introduced him. They became fast friends, and eventually Art gave up his position as alpha-male to Joe.

Why? Simple: Art was promoted to “low man on the totem people with lots of high school friends.” At the time, very few of us knew high schoolers, but Art was a stoner long before it was trendy, and he had a lot of cousins in high school, so he invariably ended up making good impressions at high school parties. More often than not, he ditched us in favor of his older friends, which we found acceptable. We were in awe of his high school friends, because we weren’t in high school yet, so we didn’t realize that making friends with high schoolers is easy.

Bear in mind, when I break down the strange chain of command, all of this was unverablized but still basically recognized. It’s hard to explain, and I sometimes wonder if my group of friends was the only one to go through this (I sure hope not), but in retrospect, there was a leadership hierarchy that we all followed. The fact that we followed it is kind of the point of this story.

Other than Art, the major players in the Ben Franklin story were:

Mandi and Jenny: Girls who helped me with my assorted life issues by yelling at me and extolling the virtues of drug abuse to solve problems. Can you see why I ended up such good friends with Lucy?
Mike: A funny guy I knew since third grade, and one of the many guitarists in our terrible band.
Mark: An unusual, geeky Mexican guy I met during sixth grade. Most of the sixth graders went on a long trip to some camp in Wisconsin, so those that stayed behind fit into one class, so we all had different schedules and classmates. During that time, Mark and I bonded over mocking our math teacher and were friends ever since.
Nick: Art’s cousin. He was never really a friend of mine. Ever.
Steve: The bass player.

Now add to that:

Joe: While we all hung out with him independent of Art, he ended up becoming the leader rather quickly.
Jeff: Who was friends with all of us but was never quite in the band.
Dave: A strange, porno-obsessed dude.

There were more friends than that, but they don’t really apply to this story.

Here’s a little history lesson involving my life: after Art allowed himself to be unseated by Joe, Nick quickly and willingly disappeared from our circle. Mandi and Jenny mostly just hung out with me because they fucking hated Joe and really were fairly indifferent to most of my other friends — they just liked Art and me.

With Nick (the drummer) and Art (the fourth guitarist) gone, the band fell apart. It was better that way, since we only practiced maybe twice and spent the rest of the time just talking about how we wanted to be in a band.

Enter Dave. Dave had a guitar. Dave had a basement. Dave was reasonably good friends with Joe. Art out; Dave in. Furthermore, to maintain his leadership, Joe got a guitar. We weren’t a band, per se, but we would get together and jam.

Meanwhile, Steve and I started talking — really talking — about a band. He had a gotten a bass by that time, so we thought if me, him, and Mark (the only other guitar player who could really play) got together, we could really make it work. We shared the same musical influences, the same general interests, similar senses of humor, and we had similar philosophies about how to make a band work. We figured if we got a reasonably polished act together, we could find a drummer easily.

Consequently, around this time, Steve and I started hanging out a lot. We brought Mark in on the band idea. Then we brought in Jeff, who didn’t play an instrument but was enthusiastic about picking one up. He was there partly for moral support and partly because, at the time, the band was still all talk. We’d basically just hang out, only playing on the rarest occasions. My work ethic has not improved since then.

You’ll notice some people were left out: Mike, Joe, and Dave. First, none of us really liked Dave all that much; second, Mike liked Dave more than us; third, we all liked Steve more than Joe, so on the rare occasions we invited Joe to hang with us, we got tired of him usurping the leadership. Really, since we were all passive followers, the old, functional hierarchy was somewhat restored: Steve became the leader, and I became his go-to guy for ideas and information.

To give you an idea of how low Joe, our former leader, had sunk at this point, let me illustrate it through a song we wrote during a mega jam session with all of us but Joe (and began playing at every subsequent jam session). We called the song “Joe Sucks.” A rather simple shift from an A power chord to a B-flat power chord, the songs lyrics went as follows:

(Verse) Joe sucks Joe sucks

Joe sucks
Joe sucks

(Chorus) Joe sucks
Joe sucks

(Repeat verse and chorus until boredom sets in)

Virtuosos, we were.

So everybody liked the new arrangement…except Joe. With Mike and Dave hanging together, and Steve, Jeff, Mark, and I hanging out together, his usefulness waned. When we’d be at school, he’d still rule us like a tyrannical king, but after school and on weekends, we’d all ditch him and do our own thing. Joe was not a fan of this at all, so he got together with Dave and Mike and the anti-Steve propaganda began.

You have to bear in mind that Steve was partly his own undoing. He was handed a great position of leadership for no other reason than being extremely likable and intelligent. I don’t really know why he did this, or why he thought he had to do it, but he, essentially, made up a girlfriend.

I don’t know why; perhaps it was our mutual obsession with porn. At the time, though, none of us had girlfriends. None of us had ever really seriously entertained the thought of having a girlfriend. We thought about having sex nonstop, but we didn’t really understand at that time (and some of us are still struggling with the idea today) that there’s more to a relationship than nonstop sex.

Perhaps he thought he needed to make up a girlfriend to justify the reason for his leadership. We all approached hero-worship for a time when he told us just who he was dating, and that worship was legitimized when he announced at one point that the two had performed the dirtiest of dirty deeds.

But the shit hit the fan. I think Art, in one of his rare appearances, was the first to announce that Steve had made up this entire relationship. He actually knew the girl, Erin, that Steve was claiming to date. Art had asked her about Steve, and Erin had no idea what he was talking about.

Dave had already planted a seed of doubt after the infamous “We did it” conversation. When pressed for details, Steve said very little. Understandable, being that it was a very personal moment. On the other hand, he was the first of any of us to even come close to losing his virginity, so we wanted the details.

“What was it like?” Dave asked.

“It was…” Steve paused, searching for the mot juste. “…flowing.”

Flowing? Huh. We all accepted it. Our frame of reference consisted of seeing some porno movies and many, many pictures of naked women, so who were we to accuse him of lying? Plus, none of us even thought he was lying, until he had to go. The first thing Dave said when Steve left was, “Flowing? He’s making it up.”

We all shouted down Dave’s complaints, saying that he didn’t know what he was talking about anymore than we did. Dave believed he did know more than we did for two reasons: (1) he was the supply of all our porn, and therefore he had to know everything (clearly he had the extra time with the material to thoroughly read the articles), and (2) his older brother had supposedly had sex. We didn’t believe it, though; Warren was a whale and an asshole. We couldn’t imagine any woman having sex with him.

That was basically the end of it, until Art’s announcement. While most were hesitant to believe him, I kind of had to side with Art. I had made a personal discovery that I didn’t tell anyone until after the fictional girlfriend came out. Steve was, when you come down to brass tacks, my best friend, and I wasn’t going to use anything against him when I hadn’t even talked about it first.

Ever tactfully, Art made his announcement during a large-group summit in Dave’s basement. Even Joe was there, possibly because he was the svengali behind Art’s announcement. More importantly, Steve was there, so accusations came flying right at him, and all he could do is argue and hide behind the defenses of myself and Jeff (Mark stayed neutral).

Jeff and I believed Steve’s rhetoric; he claimed his relationship with Erin was secret, which was why they rarely acknowledged each other in public and only went out occasionally. In retrospect, this seems way too simple, but Jeff and I had very romantic mentalities, so we found the idea of a secret relationship more endearing than fradulent.

With the heat on, Steve decided to leave while everybody else went upstairs to get snacks and argue further. I went back to the basement with Steve to help him collect his bass and his backpack.

“I can’t believe them,” Steve said. “You believe me, don’t you?”

I looked him right in the eyes and said, “Yeah, of course.” I knew otherwise, though; perhaps that should have been the time to bring it up.

My personal discovery came in the form of song lyrics Steve had given me awhile back. It was kind of an unhappy breakup song, which he claimed to have written with Erin, but it was good. As was the nature of our songwriting collaboration at the time, he handed me the lyrics to set to music, and I stuck them in a desk drawer so I could work on my own stuff.

Maybe a month or two after that, I decided to listen to the Goo Goo Dolls’ album that was big at the time (A Boy Named Goo, har-har). I don’t recall who made that recommendation, but at the time, the general consensus was that the Goo Goo Dolls sucked huge amounts of ass (I still believe that; listening to the album did not change my impression of them much), so it was probably some girl I wanted to ask out.

So I’m listening to this album, and all of a sudden one of the songs strikes me as very familiar. I’d never heard the chords or melody before, but the lyrics were so familiar.

It hit me. I pulled the lyric sheet out of my desk drawer, rewound the song, and listened again. He’d just copied the lyrics of “Ain’t That Unusual.” It made sense, choosing a band he probably liked secretly and logically assumed we’d never listen to. It’s nothing more than a coincidence that I listened to the tape, anyway.

Does this mean he made up a relationship with a girl? No. I guess this is the reason I never lost faith or trust in him, even though in retrospect it all seems so obvious. I was going to confront him about the fake lyrics, but that wouldn’t necessarily lead to an accusation of fake girlfriends. I actually do recall thinking at the time I made the discovery, “Man, Erin and Steve made up song lyrics.”

But now, with the allegations starting to add up, I wondered. And I looked my best friend in the eye and bullshat him. I could have — and should have — told him about my doubts, but I thought that’d make me a bad friend, since at this point he had very little support from our nerdy clique, and at least I, the officially recognized best friend, could stay in his corner.

So yes, at the time, I firmly believed straight-up lying to friends was more acceptable than telling them truths they may not want to hear. Since this incident had a remarkably profound impact on my life, does it now make sense why I’m such a hardass with Lucy? Not that she listens to me…

I went out with Steve and waited until his mom picked him up before going back into Dave’s house.

Then, the idea that ruined Steve was pitched. I don’t remember who brought it up, but it was either Dave, Joe, or Art. I’m leaning toward Art, but I’m not even sure I was in the room when the actual pitch took place, or if it was relayed secondhand because I was outside with Steve. It’s beside the point, though. The point is the idea came out: let’s go to Erin’s house and ask her directly.

I live in a pretty small town, in the grand scheme. It’s not an everybody-knows-everybody place, but it’s pretty close to it. We all, merely by living in this town for our entire lives, knew where Erin lived. We weren’t friends with her or her twin sister — hell, we didn’t even particularly like them — but we knew.

So must of us trudged across town on a cold winter day, making the long walk (we didn’t all have bikes, so we all decided to walk) to Erin’s house. I know some people stayed behind, because my dad came to pick me up and was told by Dave that we had gone for a walk.

I believe it was Mark, Jeff, Mike, Joe, and myself making the trek. Art and Dave stayed behind.

We got to her house and knocked on the door. I can’t imagine what her mom may have been thinking when five guys showed up at her house asking to speak with one of her daughters, but nonetheless, she went and got her.

Erin, stunned that a group of low-class jackasses would show up at her door, wondered what the hell we wanted.

“Are you dating Steve?” we asked, point-blank.

“No…” she said, looking genuinely perplexed.

Mark said, “He told us all about you and how it’s a secret. You don’t have to keep it quiet. We just want to know.”

“I barely even know Steve,” Erin said, actually looking sorry at this point.

But there it was: our answer. Steve had made the whole thing up.

After that, Joe’s thirst for power was pretty much quenched. Mark, Jeff, and I were still overall willing to forgive Steve, although we were mad; I’m not sure if that says how likable Steve was or how much of an asshole Joe was. We mostly just wanted to talk with Steve about it, but Joe squashed that. After all, if we talked to Steve, we might understand why he did what he did, and Joe couldn’t let that happen.

I had little to no involvement in the rest of the story, other than giving Steve the cold-shoulder. Essentially, Joe made a plan for a literal attack (like, a random act of pussy-gang violence) on Steve. I don’t recall who was involved, except that I wasn’t, but they basically ganged up on him in a classroom, tried to attack him, he ran away into the principal’s office (inconveniently across the hall), but they chased him through it anyway and ended up knocking the shit out of him in the main hall before running away to avoid getting caught.

After that, a meeting was called to basically decide on a very open level who would be the new boss of us: Joe or Steve. I dimly recall being violently ill at the time, so I missed the entire meeting, but from what I learned from others, they were all gathered in the park across the street during the recess half of our lunch period, and Steve was confronted verbally instead of physically. Mark and Jeff aired our grievances, Steve accepted our distrust and apparent loathing, and skulked away all by himself. He ditched the second half of school and went home.

After that, we all ignored him, and he ignored us. This ruined my friendship with Mandi and Jenny, who pitied and befriended him for obvious reasons. They took the whole thing out on me; although I was willing to forgive and forget, they chided me for not standing up for him in the first place. While I could have stood up for him on the night we went to Erin’s house, it was more difficult during the subsequent bullying because I wasn’t there.

But hey, I made my bed…

I really found out very little about Steve after that. Our close friendship had ended. He started hanging out with Mandi and Jenny, obviously. They introduced him to tobacco, drugs, and alcohol, three things he was dead against when he hung out with us. I guess being betrayed by your only friends will do that to you.

A reconciliation of sorts occurred our freshman year of high school, when Jeff and I rebonded and became best friends once again (Steve interrupted that) and decided that Joe simply had to go. With Steve’s help, he went. But after that, even though things were “better,” they still weren’t the same. We were cordial and occasionally joked around, but we didn’t seek each other out. It was just too difficult.

I had a few classes with Steve later in high school, and we mostly sat in the back of the room mocking everyone and everything that happened. But that was as close as we got. It seemed like some kind of psychic mutual agreement.

A big step came when he moved. His parents divorced, and he ended up moving to Wisconsin with (I think) his mother. He tracked down Mark, who gave him all of our contact information. He got ahold of us and periodically let us know how he was doing.

The last I heard — and this was a few years ago — was that he was married and working in interior design in Wisconsin. It sounded happy.

Meanwhile, everything else fell apart. Mark and Mike sided with Dave and Joe’s thuggery, Art disappeared (which I explain in the Ben Franklin entry), Jeff and I remained great friends (mostly independent of them) throughout high school. We went through a rough patch during our first year of college, but we got past that. We don’t talk much anymore, though; he has his own thing, and I have mine.

Aside from Jeff and occasional snippets of Art, I haven’t seen any of those people in years, which is surprising since we all, by and large, live in the same place. I know Mark went into the military. He e-mailed me from a nuclear sub a few years ago, and I never responded because I’m an asshole. Of course, he supposedly tried to seduce Lucy last year and then turned out to be engaged, but I’ve heard about 30 sides to that story, so the question remains whether or not he’s as big an asshole as I am.

Today, though, I saw Steve. He’s back from Wisconsin, working at the Cingular store to pay to go to an architecture and design school. I think I was as surprised to see him as he was me. He was extremely cordial and friendly, but I know he was thinking about the exact same things I was thinking about; mainly, what happened during eighth grade. The aftermath and reconciliation don’t have the same resonance as the few weeks that marked the downfall of a great friendship.

And I know his strongest memories are not of our sophomore-year lit class or the rare occasions I’d see him at the smoking lot (visiting friends); it’s all about that year, when we were in a band, becoming the best of friends, and then it all went to shit.

He asked, “Do you still play guitar?” A reasonable question, since we were in a band together and I took the instrument very seriously (still do, though now it’s a hobby rather than an eventual career path), and I played at a few shows in high school, so obviously it’d stick out.

I told him yes, and then he chuckled and said, “Curmudgeon,” and that’s how I knew for certain that he was remembering all that bad shit.

At some point, we agreed to name our band Curmudgeon, partly for the junior-high-angst-filled songs we wrote together, partly as a reference to a B-side by what we believed was the greatest band in the universe (Nirvana). I didn’t even remember that until he brought it up, and when he did, I realized that he probably remembers all that stuff even more vividly than I do, because he got the shit-stained end of the stick.

I walked home, new phone in hand, feeling like the worst human being who ever lived. Should I have exchanged numbers or e-mail addresses with him? Should I have stayed and talked longer (they weren’t busy)? Should I have gotten down on my hands and knees, weeping, and beg for forgiveness?

I realized that I can never right those wrongs, but maybe we can slowly rebuild. He’s in town; I’m in town. Why not hang out? Why not stop into the Cingular store sometime next week and invite him out for dinner or a drink?

I may do that, but I may not. The entire conversation felt extremely awkward; I don’t know if he felt it, or if it’s just my guilt working overtime, but it just felt like trying to rekindle an ages-old friendship would never work. I haven’t had a lengthy conversation with him in about nine years.

We have so much to talk about, and yet I can’t seem to think of a single thing to say other than “Sorry.”

Posted by Stan on October 20, 2004 3:42 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (5)

April 24, 2004

The Theory

Another week, another Owen story. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m already almost to the point of suicide, I’d try to get into some classes with him next semester just so I never run out of blog tales.

So last week, as we all know, the following things occurred:

• Owen intentionally butchered a reading of another student’s treatment, in particular highlighting a few spelling errors by mispronouncing the words to match the inaccurate spelling
• My friend Maria was assigned as his first reader
• Owen made an enemy for life (i.e., me)

And this week came The Theory. While reading this, bear in mind that we screenwriters are unbelievable gossips. Actually, “gossip” is too light a word. We’re shit-talkers; I’ll admit it. Long before any of us ever make a sale to legitimize our cynicism, we take on the role of “jaded asshole who thinks he is better than everybody else.” We’re just preparing ourselves for a career of being the lowest possible person on the totem pole (we’re lower than PAs, for the love of God!).

In addition to our shit-talking, we also have incredible, insane imaginations, because we’re hack writers. We understand the value of taking tiny snippets of disconnected information and turning it into cinematic gold! Or lead.

Essentially, in our off-time, we talk shit about everybody we know, and when we run out of shit to talk, we hone in on tiny details and use that to fuel fictional shit to talk. I make no apologies for this behavior. I know it’s wrong and that I, and all of my compatriots, are horrible monsters. Unfortunately, that’s not going to make me or anyone else not do it.

So during our class on Monday, Fellow, Maria, and I filled in another classmate on the events of Thursday. He was absent for whatever reason, so he didn’t know anything about Owen’s behavior. That’s when, after we spewed out all the details of the Thursday session, Fellow spewed out The Theory:

“I think he’s gay.”

Of all the people to pitch this concept, Fellow would be the one. He’s quite gay himself. Maybe he just understands the way homosexuals act more than we do, or maybe he has a more finely tuned “gaydar.” Whatever the reason, Fellow blurted it out and then explained that on Thursday, one of the hotter days of recent weeks, Fellow came to class wearing a muscle shirt. He’s pretty pumped, so it wouldn’t be like, for example, me coming to class wearing a muscle shirt, where, after the horrified recoil and vomiting of my classmates, they will settle on merely averting their eyes for the duration of the class session. Women stare at Fellow. This is not his desired goal, of course, but I haven’t noticed any men staring at Fellow.

Of course, Fellow has noticed men staring at him. One example he gave: Owen, who apparently could not take his eyes off of Fellow on Thursday. I didn’t notice this, myself, but then again, I don’t generally pay attention when people (least of all men) check Fellow out. I notice a lot when women check him out, when I’m with him, because I’m all, “Ladies, he’s playing for a different team. Why not give Stan a whirl?” That doesn’t really go over well, and I get jealous.

My neuroses aside, Fellow pitched this idea, and we were all sort of reluctant to agree with it, although we wouldn’t necessarily rule it out. It was just an odd, random declaration, backed up with no independent evidence. I mean, we’re all unabashed shit-talkers, and sometimes we dabble in the realm of fiction in our conversation, but we at least have inscrutable arguments to back up our claims.

But Fellow’s theory started to take shape on Wednesday. As I mentioned last week, I have a class with Owen and Grey on Wednesday nights, and Owen has apparently taken it upon himself to enter the group, much to the chagrin of myself, Grey, and the two ladies we hang with before class. Now, awhile back, I bought a shirt from Glark that reads, “Seventies sci-fi was all about hexagons.” I should’ve known better than to wear it at a time when I knew I’d see Owen. He instantly honed in on the shirt, read it to me aloud (because I am illiterate), and then said, “I thought seventies sci-fi was all about men in knee-length tunics.”

What the fuck was he talking about?

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked. I’m too nice to embarrass other people* by making a scene, which is why I didn’t rip Owen a new asshole the instant he approached us, but I am not feigning niceness anymore. Not by a long shot. More on that in a little.

“You know how they wear those tunics, and they only go down to the knees, so you see their shaved, hairless legs,” Owen said. “It’s disturbing. I don’t want to see that.”

I’m sure Owen wasn’t making this up out of the blue, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a single example of seventies sci-fi involving men with unshaved legs wearing tunics that look like women’s dresses. Plus, for somebody who doesn’t want to see that, he’s spent an awful lot of time considering it. I thought about The Theory, and it suddenly seemed like there might be something to it.

I wasn’t convinced, though. People say tangential, homophobic things all the time. It doesn’t mean anything. Or maybe it does.

On Thursday, our morning class was pretty much a blow-off. The prof was taking a trip to San Francisco, so she just spent half an hour teaching us how to use a budgeting program, then let us loose in the lab to do our budgeting. Instead of doing that, we all sat around shooting the shit. My friend Maria, Owen’s first reader, was trying to get her work done for our afternoon class. One of the assignments was to read his treatment and give feedback.

She let me read his treatment first, because she didn’t want to have anything to do with it initially. I have some minor nitpicks and some major nitpicks. The minor is that it’s not a treatment; it’s a short story. He’s all, “A long, black sedan drives down a desolate country highway, makes a right into the gravel-strewn parking lot of the store, and parks behind the building. Murton emerges from the vehicle, dusts off his pants, and slowly enters the store, which has a sign hanging above the door that reads JONAH’S HOUSE OF VIDEOS.” That’s not a treatment. A treatment is this: “Murton drives to the video store.” Visual, observable behavior, without any frills. Economy of phrasing is key, since most producers and executives will barely skim your shit anyway — it has to be tight, and it has to be short. I now know why his treatment was 10 pages when the rest of ours were three.

My other nitpick was that he wasn’t even finished writing the goddamn thing. A little more than halfway through, he has a little note saying, “Here’s where I changed the treatment, but I didn’t get to the end, so you’ll see some notable differences in subplots and secondary characters.” Which is fine, except for the fact that the story, which barely made sense to begin with, becomes completely illogical for the last four pages, because everything is completely different. It’s like Mulholland Drive, except unintentional.

But here’s the biggest problem I had with his treatment. After making such a big fucking juvenile stink about the spelling errors and lack of proofreading in that guy’s treatment last week — guess whose fucking treatment wasn’t proofread? Yes, he spell-checked it, but that’s only half the battle. He had more than one “problem” word on every page, beating the other guy’s one-per-page average by quite a bit. I got tripped up on the first fucking page, when he described a character as “a bard,” with “hair legs.” I assumed he meant “hairy” on the latter, but I was baffled by the “bard” thing. I figured it was some kind of British slang term or something, but later I found out he just misspelled “beard.”

And the grammar wasn’t much better. The last time I saw that many comma splices, I was reading one of my blog entries! And ordinarily I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. Yes, it’s sad that both the screenwriting and fiction departments are filled with people who don’t know basic English grammar and think that a spell-checker will repair all their mistakes. They’re writers, for Christ’s sake. They should know it. But here’s the difference between all of them and Owen: they know they don’t know it. Every writer I know complains they don’t know grammar. They know how to spell, but they’re too lazy to proofread. Hell, most of them (myself included) are too lazy to even spell-check.

Plus, even if they do know proper grammar and spelling, everyone makes mistakes. Even in proofreading (especially proofreading your own work), you miss things that you know are wrong. Which, I think, is why we’re all (except for Owen) so lenient when it comes to errors in others’ work. In addition to the fact that it’s mean and humiliating, we know that everybody knows better, or at least they know they don’t know better.

So, when Owen started that shit up last week, he was a goddamn motherfucker, and because of it, he does not have a get-out-of-jail-free card. If he’s gonna be such an asslicker, he should have made sure his shit was immaculate. But it wasn’t. I pointed out the many errors to Maria and insisted she read it, write some constructive feedback, and be sure to own his ass on the fucking lack of proofreading. And she, as bloodthirsty for petty vengeance as I am, immediately agreed and ran off to read Owen’s treatment.

Later, as I was talking with some other friends, Maria approached me, claiming she had airtight, empirical evidence of Owen’s homosexuality. It was all in the treatment, she insisted, and while I agree she made a good case, I still was not necessarily convinced.

Owen’s story is an ensemble piece. It has five main characters who are gay, one of whom is a repressed and angry (and unwilling to admit his homosexuality until the end) reverend, another of whom is hiding in the closet. The other two main characters are straight, and one of them is a woman. With that in mind, here was Maria’s point: we screenwriters are lazy hacks. We take the old, elementary school mantra “Write what you know” to a whole new level of bland storytelling. And most of us, especially since we’re still in college and pretty inexperienced as writers, have a central protagonist who is basically a gussied-up version of ourselves.

For example, Maria tends to write about straight, single, white, suburban women in their 20s. Fellow tends to write about gay, single, black, urban men in their 20s. I tend to write about straight, single, white, suburban men in their 20s who jerk off a lot and live with their parents. It’s just a natural inclination, no matter how outlandish or unknown the subject matter is, to have a central character who is rooted exactly in something we know better than anyone else: ourselves. We’re hacks.**

Maria’s argument was that Owen, writing about not one but five gay characters, and the “central” character (yes, it’s an ensemble piece, but there’s still the one point-of-view character, through whose eyes we see most of the action) is the angry, repressed reverend who hides his sexual identity through random misogyny and homophobia that makes him feel like a “real” man. Sound familiar?

I immediately bought Maria’s argument, but after thinking about it awhile, I still wasn’t totally convinced. Writers do try to stretch their wings, especially if they’re really talented and experienced (or think they’re really talented and experienced). Owen’s the most arrogant person I’ve ever met, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he, perfectly straight and woman-loving, thought he could accomplish the task of writing five characters whose lives are completely unlike anything he’s ever experienced. It’s harder to do than it sounds, no matter how much research you think you can do on the subject. Even putting yourself into a different culture, sociologist-style, isn’t the same experience of living your entire life that way. There’s no way it can be, and no amount of interviewing, reading, or interacting will give you that experience. All we can do as writers is guesstimate based on what we’ve learned, and usually we’re pretty bad at it (see also: any female character in a David Mamet script).

During class, two things happened that pretty much forced me to believe The Theory:

1. The coolest fucking thing to happen in a long time is that there’s a free screening of Baadasssss! on Monday night. This film, originally titled How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass (which, seriously, is a million times better), was directed and co-written by Mario Van Peebles, in which he also stars as his father, Melvin Van Peebles (the other co-writer), and it tells the story of the difficulties he had making Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. And here’s the kicker: Mario and Melvin are both going to be there, and they’re going to do a Q&A afterward. Unbelievably awesome, and you better believe I’m gonna be there (and I’ll blog it!).

   Anyway, Fellow was the one who alerted the class to the screening. He found a flyer/ticket and passed it around and told us to pick up our own in the film office. After we basked in the joy and confusion of our memories of seeing Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song for the first time, Owen announced to the class, “You all know Mario Van Peebles is gay, right?” He didn’t say this in a homophobic way, necessarily; it was more a declaration of something we absolutely had to know if we didn’t already.

   After an awkward couple of silent seconds, Ted responded, “A gay man in the film industry? I don’t believe it.” He’s amusing, that Ted.

   But it made me think. Again, this isn’t the open-and-shut case Fellow and Maria think it is, but of all the people I know who are fascinated to the point of obsession about who’s gay and who isn’t, only two of them are straight. And I’d say I know about a dozen, so there’s a 17% chance that Owen’s straight.

2. We had to do evaluations for this class. Normally, we’d be doing them next week, but our prof scheduled individual conferences, so that fucked everything up. We were given permission to do them early, but we were not given a TA to proctor. My prof sought me out Wednesday night and asked me to get the evaluations and proctor them myself. Yay for the fun.

   It wasn’t something I wanted to do, and I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible, because I thought we would be dismissed to go home afterward. It turns out we were not, which made me even more irritated, since it was getting close to the end of the session, and guess who was holding us up? Fucking Owen, writing a dissertation on the quality of our particular profession. Fucking Owen.

   We were all done, sitting in silence, and people started grumbling. Most were bad-mouthing Owen, which, I discovered, can be heard very easily from the front of the room. Our prof, I’m coming to realize, hears all the comments we make about him from the back. As does Owen, who sits right next to her so he can annoy her at close proximity.

   Finally, Owen said to me, “I’m probably going to need a few more minutes. Is there somewhere I can drop this when I’m done?” It was surprisingly conscientious, but still fucking moronic. Why? I explained it to Owen, so I may as well explain it to you, too:

   “No, there’s not. You know why? Because these things need to be put into the envelope by me, sealed, and delivered by me to the assistant to the chair. If they aren’t delivered by me, and if they’re not in the envelope, you know what they do with them? They throw them the hell away. You know why? Because anybody could have written them, or told you what to write.*** So if you want to waste your time filling the fucking thing out to have them throw it away, by all means, be my guest. If not, hurry the hell up, because we all wanna get the fuck outta here.”

   I am aware, of course, that if I hadn’t grandstanded, he would’ve been able to finish the evaluation that much faster, but the dude just pisses me the hell off, and I needed to vent. And nobody seemed to mind, since they all agreed with me, and since I’m one of the very few who pointed out how fucking stupid he is despite his guise of tortured brilliance.

   Owen, who looked all stone-faced and stoic (though his eyes betrayed his shock and horror), said nothing and continued with the evaluation. A few minutes later, he quietly slid it across the conference table to me.

   “You wanna give me the fucking pencil, too?” I asked. We’re given little, cheap golf pencils because, for some reason, nobody uses number-two pencils at my school. Since they’re such cheap pieces of shit, and there are millions of them, I wouldn’t have cared if it was anybody else. It was Owen, though. I had to give him as hard a time as possible.

   Owen handed me the pencil and said, jokingly, “Maybe I should stick it up your arse.” He tried to fake a British accent and failed spectacularly. Then he giggled, very much like Robert Carradine in Revenge of the Nerds. “I bet that’s what you want, anyway.”

   At this point I had the door open to leave with the evluations, but I turned around and was going to make a comment when I saw the look in his eyes. The tone in his voice, and that look. It both disturbed me and convinced me, now and forever, of his homosexuality.

   Because, you see, it wasn’t what I wanted (and even if I did, Owen would be the last person I would ask to perform the chore) — it was what he wanted. That’s what that really fucking weird, suggestive tone in his voice told me. Although most of what convinced me was in his eyes, which were, quoth Eric Carmen, hungry eyes. With that one look, he cannot disguise that he feels the magic between he and I.

So what does this mean? I was last to leap aboard The Theory man-train, but now I’m convinced. But what’s the point of it all? He’s gay, he’s apparently repressed and masks his real feelings through a mixture of homophobia and misogyny. Added to his ordinary attention-whoring and misguided obsession with British culture, it makes him the worst human being I’ve ever personally met.

But, if The Theory is true, it almost makes him a real, human person. He’s not some walking, real-life stereotype of The Prisoner-loving, J.G. Ballard-reading, British spelling-using, opinion-screaming, it’s-time-to-slay-the-dragon-playing über-geek. He’s a guy with a problem and a secret and what he obviously considers a flaw, despite the fact that at an art school, being straight is considered more of a social taboo than being gay.

When I think about it that way, it makes me want to make fun of him less. But then, he says anything at any time, and not only do I want to mock him until the day he dies, but I also want to say horribly mean, abusive things to him and beat the shit out of him. Because, flawed human or not, he’s still the worst human being I’ve ever met, and I just. Don’t. Like. Him. At all.

*Not to mention myself. When I get angry and start yelling at people, I tend to get really incoherent. It’s a trait I inherited from my father, who has been known to spout more puzzling phrases than Darren McGavin.

**Which is not to say we only write through those characters. No, they’re just the main characters. Not every person in everything I write is somebody just like me, but there’s usually at least one thinly-veiled Stan trolling the story for some loose women or free coffee.

***This sounds like a logical fallacy, I’m sure, and it is. Usually students don’t proctor the evaluations; it’s either done by an impartial faculty member or an equally impartial TA, but here’s the thing about humanity: nobody’s impartial, so we’re pretty much on the honor system. I’m on my honor to seal that envelope, not look at what anybody wrote, not change what anybody wrote by filling out blank evaluation forms, or to say to the students, “Hey, everybody, let’s all write that she’s a bitch!”

I could do all those things, but they’re trusting me not to, and for the most part, proctors respect the rules. Most of the time they are impartial or simply apathetic, but if a faculty member is proctoring, they are sometimes competitive with others, and if a TA is doing it — well, they’re students, and they may not like this prof and try to influence us against her. I’ve never seen that happen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t.

Posted by Stan on April 24, 2004 4:01 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

January 24, 2004

South Side, or: The Culture of Fear, or: I’m a Big Wuss

Longtime readers of this blog have, I’m sure, drawn many strange and accurate conclusions about me. Chief among them: I’m sort of paranoid. I like to think of myself as “cautious,” but I’m apparently not a very good judge of character. So, when I learned two weeks ago that my fiction writing professor was having a going-away party today (she’s moving to Maine) at a house on 77th Street, I decided to cautiously not go.

Then, my friend Anne said, “I think I’m going to go to that party.”

I said, “Yeah, me too.”

I didn’t do this because I’m trying to impress her with my faux world weariness, even though I am. I did it because sometimes my sense of machismo gets in the way of common sense. If this had been anyone else, I would’ve said, “Are you fucking crazy?” But I, as sworn protector of any female polite enough to not openly disdain my physical appearance, decided I had a duty to her. I wasn’t going to allow her to go to an unfamiliar neighborhood on the south side by herself.

So I trudged downtown in the snow, met her at the Van Buren Street Metra station, and we took a train down to the stop at and 75th Street and Exchange Avenue, approximately 62 blocks away from the farthest south I’ve ever gone in the city of Chicago. As a result of many years being bred to fear everything by both my parents and the news media, I was terrified.

The train station, according to a very misleading map, was about three blocks away from where we needed to be. According to reality, it’s more like six. This may not seem like a lot, but it is when you’re terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought (™ Egon).

The platform and station house looked abandoned, which fit well with the overall aesthetic of the neighborhood. In the station house itself, I swear to God there was a large, rusting sign that said “Attention: Purse Snatchers,” with a little blurb and a large picture of a purse with a big red circle and slash. A positive sign, I’m sure.

I led Anne west onto 75th, as I had spent many long hours consulting the misleading map, and I knew Marquette Avenue was a block away.

I was wrong. As a matter of fact, there was no street a block away. Just one run-down, closed-up-and-barred-shut business after another. And the few businesses that were — gasp! — open after noon on a Saturday were similarly barred or at least had steel shutters blocking the windows and doors. Not really a good sign. Plus, the addresses were in the 2500’s and going down as we headed west.

“I think we went the wrong way,” I said quietly. The street was empty, almost to the point of being desolate (there was one guy standing on the corner who looked like he was waiting for a ride, but he was balanced out by the cop car parked right in front of him), but I still figured I should be as quiet as possible. In case some random person was hiding in the shadows somewhere, it seemed like a bad idea to let slip that I was lost.

I just turned around, and we walked back to Exchange Avenue and started going southwest. I knew that, at some point, Exchange intersected with 77th, and all would be well.

A little sidestreet called Saginaw diagonaled off of Exchange a little ways south, and in the little triangle of land between the two was a blandly nondescript restaurant (like the businesses lining 75th, it was all steel shutters and very little visible glass), out of which an old black man literally stumbled out onto the snow-littered sidewalk. He held a paper bag in his right hand, out of which the neck of a green bottle protruded. Subtle.

So, he was an old drunk. I’m not afraid of old drunks; hell, we have old drunks in the suburbs. They ride bicycles to Walgreens and ramble incoherently, just the same as city drunks. Okay, except I’m afraid of old suburban drunks, too, so this was not good.

He shambled slowly ahead of us, toward 76th Street, and I slowed down a little bit, so we wouldn’t catch up to him very quickly (if at all). I had mixed feelings about this decision, because as much as I wanted to avoid a strange encounter with an old drunk, I thought it best to get to where we’re going as soon as humanly fucking possible, and fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice us trailing him about a quarter of a block away.

At this point, Anne piped up, “See, this place is a lot different from the suburbs.”

“Aw, Jesus,” I thought, but the old drunk still didn’t seem to notice us. And he was slowing down even more. I decided that, fine, if he was either going to not notice or pretend to not notice us, I may as well follow my initial plan of going extremely fast. So, I sped up and wedged my fat ass past him, grabbing Anne’s hand and pulling her as close to me as possible. This was half an attempt to make sure she was safe, half a conscious effort to cop a feel. I succeeded in both respects.

We passed a small apartment on the corner of 76th and Exchange, which, I swear to God, had many, many busted-out windows and a door that was being propped open by what looked like a long abandoned stroller.

As we kept moving past 76th, we passed two enormous but not particularly intimidating black men walking in the opposite direction. Still, I was on my guard. When I was in high school, we had this weird seminar with a retired CPD detective, and one of the nuggets of advice he gave us was to carry a decoy wallet at all times. Fill it with slips of paper to create the impression of bulk, even put in outdated (or outright fake) IDs for an air of realism. If you get mugged, throw it into the street. They want the money; they don’t want you. When they run for the money, you high-tail it in the opposite direction.

A good concept, but when you’re in the middle of the south side of Chicago, and your only access to transportation is a train that won’t be arriving for half an hour, it’s troublesome. Of course, I didn’t think of that beforehand. I did make a decoy wallet from my old, worn-out wallet, and I decided while I was at it to make it into a sort of practical joke, for my own amusement. Instead of money, I put in old Wendy’s coupons, good for a free Biggie Frosty. They were expired, which I thought was hilarious. Not only does the guy get nothing but Frosty coupons — they’re expired. Mugger comedy gold.

At any rate, we passed these guys without incident. Like I said, they didn’t look particularly intimidating, but better safe than sorry. Or better paranoid than oblivious.

Okay, so we passed 76th. The next street would be 77th, and we’d be home free, right?

Wrong. As we approached the next street, I squinted to see the sign. “76th,” it said.

“What the fuck?” Anne asked. She noticed it, too.

“I think we slipped into an infinite loop,” I said. Instead of being irritatingly cheerful and utterly without fear, for the first time Anne seemed sort of pissed and — gasp! — a little afraid. It only lasted a second, and in retrospect I think she was more pissed off about my stupid joke than anything else.

As we got closer, I noted it was 76th Place, which, according to the misleading map, starts east of Exchange. I thought maybe we were on the wrong side of the street, but we couldn’t be. We pressed on.

Seriously, for a neighborhood as desolate (very few cars passed by, and there were almost no pedestrians), they sure had their share of people designed solely to creep the hell out of me. The next guy we passed was walking literally in the middle of the street — possibly to avoid the snow that lay unshoveled on the sidewalk, but it’s not like he was next to the curb or anything — and he started randomly shouted incoherent things.

Another drunk? Maybe. A crazy person? Maybe. Somebody I never, ever wanted to communicate with any way? Yes. Oh, God, yes.

“That’s great,” Anne said. “I always wanted to be a person who just randomly screamed things to nobody.”

“Shhh,” I whisper-shouted. I am a wuss.

We passed the drunk-crazy guy without incident, and as we approached the next street, I noticed the buildings — actual houses, as we were entering a genuine residential area — were creeping closer to Exchange. This pleased me, because the wide gulfs of empty, snow-covered parking lots only added to the horrible feeling of desolation. Which is weird, considering it was creating open spaces.

“Why does the next street start with a ‘B’?” Anne asked. I squinted to see the street sign and wondered the same thing.

“Where th