Download PDF: The Muppet Man
MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.
Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.
Logline (provided by The Black List): “The life story and tragic early death of Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets.”
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Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line
An old, disheveled KERMIT THE FROG wakes from a drunken nightmare in a fleabag hotel in “Moo York” — a sort of Toon Town for Muppets. He looks mournfully at an invitation from Miss Piggy’s wedding. In 1990, JIM HENSON (53) wakes looking much the same as this middle-aged Kermit. He takes some aspirin, stares mournfully at a photo of his wife JANE and their fie children, and watches a promo advertising the 20th anniversary of Sesame Street. This turns into a musical sequence intercutting Jim and Kermit singing “Mahna Mahna” as Jim prepares for a recording session and Kermit rushes to Miss Piggy’s church for the wedding.
Jim attends a meeting with a core group of Henson Company employees. His erratic behavior and apparent ill health concerns them all. Jim insists he’ll be fine. While on a private jet heading toward Los Angeles, Jim starts seeing muppets on the plane with him. One of them looks very much like his grandmother, known only as “Dear.” Jim flashes on his childhood. Washington, D.C., 1950. Jim’s engrossed in television, to the consternation of the real DEAR (60s), who warns that he’ll develop “square eyes” from sitting too close, and further warns that the “box sure ain’t gonna help [him] get anywhere in life.” Jim makes a cardboard cutout featuring “square eyes” to amuse his older brother, PAUL JUNIOR, and his mother, BETTY. He wakes father PAUL SENIOR, who starts yelling, and that brings Jim back to the private jet in 1990. They’ve arrived in L.A.
Jim makes an uncomfortable appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show. He’s painfully shy, and as he did in the meeting, he behaves somewhat erratically and, worse than that, can’t quite perform the Kermit voice. Behind the scenes, Henson Company puppeteer KEVIN CLASH starts freaking out. Suddenly, Miss Piggy bounds out from the audience, disorienting Jim, who flashes back to the fall of 1954 — “Teen Jim“‘s freshman year of college. In a puppetry class, he spots a cute older girl, JANE NEBEL (20). He tries to impress her with his skills and humor, but he’s too shy to ask her out. At home, Paul Senior arranges a date for his son, much to Teen Jim’s consternation. This motivates him to finally ask out Teen Jane, but she already has a boyfriend. Disappointed, Teen Jim has his date with JENNY. She’s a little confused by Teen Jim’s puppetry, even after he and Paul Junior demonstrate for her. Teen Jim takes Jenny to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon, more because he knows that’s where Teen Jane and her boyfriend will be than out of any real desire to see the movie. Afterward, Teen Jim flirts with Teen Jane. Jenny feels embarrassed for even going on the date with him, since he’s clearly not interested.
That night, Teen Jim comes home and learns from Paul Junior that somebody from a local TV station saw one of their puppet shows and wants to talk to them about a TV show. Jim and Paul Junior demonstrate for the head programmer, MAX, who shows no emotion whatsoever — then immediately hires them to make their own show. Teen Jim uses this opportunity to impress Teen Jane, by bringing her in as a volunteer puppeteer for his very own TV show. Teen Jane is bewildered by the chaos, but she is, indeed, impressed. A montage, set to “That Old Black Magic,” follows, chronicling both the rise in popularity of Teen Jim’s Sam and Friends show and in Teen Jim’s education of how he can use the medium of television to innovate his puppetry. Within two years, he’s being commissioned to do muppet sketches for The Jimmy Dean Show — but tragedy strikes. Paul Junior is killed in a car accident. Grief-stricken, Teen Jim immediately drives to Teen Jane’s house, explains what happened, and makes a move. Teen Jane tells him he can’t, because she and her boyfriend are now engaged, but Teen Jim declares his love and kisses her.
Back at Arsenio, Kevin insists Jim must see a doctor. He puts Jim into a cab, and Jim tells the cabbie to take him back to his hotel. In 1959, 23-year-old Jim returns to Rome, where he both grieved and studied European puppetry. He immediately seeks out Jane, who’s still working at the TV studio, and asks if she got his many letters. She tells him she called off the engagement. Max welcomes Jim back with open arms, immediately getting him into the world of advertising. Jim and Jane work together on a coffee commercial, but Jim can’t keep his hands off her. Jim pitches the commercial idea to a stone-faced executive — who immediately bursts into laughter and gives Jim money to produce 20 spots. Jim takes Jane to a boardwalk where he awkwardly proposes, but Jane says it’s too soon after her breakup. It’s too late, though — Jim has arranged for fireworks to spell out MARRY ME JANE? Her affirmative response leads to another muppet musical number, featuring Kermit, Miss Piggy, and a bunch of ’50s-style wooden puppets singing “He’ll Make Me Happy” from The Muppets Take Manhattan. This musical number also accompanies a montage as Jim and Jane move up in the world — they get married, lease their own studio in New York, and begin creating more elaborate muppets.
In 1990, Jim has dinner with FRANK OZ, who takes him back to his family. Jim spots Frank’s son playing with some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures and wonders why he and Frank didn’t come up with that. Frank urges Jim to call Jane. Jim refuses. In 1963, a much younger Frank (then 19) is telling Jim the same thing: call Jane. Jim’s distracted by what’s happening with DON SAHLIN (35, his head designer) and JERRY JUHL (25, his head writer). Don pulls a prank on Jim, hiding some creepy monsters in the bathroom. But Jim has already loaded Don’s desk drawers with spring-loaded snakes. Everyone laughs. Jim introduces his Rowlf puppet to The Jimmy Dean Show. Together with his brain trust, they figure out a sketch to do with Jimmy. Jim returns home to Jane — who now has two children — and apologizes for not keeping in better touch. He says he wants to get out, but Jane tells him he just needs to slow down. Jim tells her the more he does now, the sooner he can get them everything they want, and they can be happy. Jane was under the impression that they were happy. Jim drags his brain trust out to make an experimental short film, “Time Piece.” The others are puzzled by it, but soon enough it nets him an Academy Award nomination. He and Jane go out to celebrate. Jane expresses an interest in taking some art courses, but Jim’s too drunk to pay much attention.
In 1990, Jim returns to New York. He picks up his daughter, CHERYL (29), and the two drive down to North Carolina together. She chastises Jim for going on a well-publicized date after he and Jane separated. Jim tells her it didn’t mean anything. He falls asleep, and “Movin’ Right Along” from The Muppet Movie begins to play. Jim dreams that he’s riding with Kermit and Fozzie Bear. Cheryl fears that Jim didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out, but Jim reassures her. In 1968, Jim and his brain trust mournfully watch the news as Dan Rather reports the assassination of Martin Luther King. At home, Jane tells Jim to stop watching the coverage, because it’ll traumatize the kids (who now include Brian and John). Jim attends a lecture in Boston where JOAN COONEY (39) explains that her organization, the Children’s Television Workshop, wants to use the same tools to teach children that are used to sell them toys and breakfast cereal. She illustrates the possibilities by playing a clip of muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show. The audience is unimpressed, but it piques Jim’s interest — and his imagination.
Jim is suddenly brainstorming a plethora of new muppet designs, characters, and settings for Sesame Street. He shows the skeptical brain trust (which now includes Joan) a sketch for Big Bird. Once they design the bird, though, everyone realizes how well this can work. A pseudo-montage follows, as Jim demonstrates characters like Bert & Ernie, Grover, The Count, and Oscar the Grouch (whom they modeled after a grouchy bartender). After showing the setup to his family, Jane rushes out, bursting into tears. Jim follows her outside, baffled. Jane’s concerned because she feels she doesn’t measure up to Jim, and therefore he’ll leave her and the kids, because “[i]t’s the way [her] life works.” Jim reassures her, but she walks away. Some time later, Jane is pregnant again. He’s a little nervous about the upcoming premiere of Sesame Street. This time, it’s Jane’s turn to reassure him. Jim admits that, since Paul Junior died, he’s been “chasing the time [he’s] lost,” but that she’s the most important part of his life. Jim and the Henson Company folks picture-lock their pilot, and within a few weeks it’s the most popular kids’ show on TV, racking up Emmy awards and international syndication packages with ease. As Joan hands Jim a royalty check for over half a million dollars, Kermit creeps up behind him and starts singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” This leads to another musical number, with Kermit accompanying Jim on the long, snowy ride home, where he collapses, exhausted. Across the street, Jim can see kids in several apartments watching Sesame Street, smiling.
It’s 1990 again. Jim and Cheryl arrive at a North Carolina farm owned by Paul Senior and Betty — both still vivacious and gregarious. They have a nice, energetic dinner, but ill Jim sort of puts a damper on it. Later, Paul Senior tells Jim that he and Betty think Jim is depressed. Jim disagrees, but Paul Senior nevertheless urges Jim to call Jane. Jim simply stares out at the sunset, seeing a Landstrider from The Dark Crystal drifting past on the horizon. In 1975, Jim and ALICE TWEEDY operate muppets on Saturday Night Live performing a sketch that gets no laughs. A worried LORNE MICHAELS considers inserting a laugh track. Afterward, Jim and Alice watch with frustration as an even-less-funny Chevy Chase sketch gets more laughs. Jim gripes to his agent, BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, about the SNL experience, saying they should write their own material. Bernie tells him he’s close to closing a deal for a muppet-based primetime show. At home, Jim watches The Sonny & Cher Show with Jane and the kids. The kids beg for a muppet show. Jim and Jane break out Kermit and “Hoggy,” a precursor to Miss Piggy, singing along to “I Got You, Babe” to the kids’ amusement. Jim, the brain trust, and Bernie visit a wealthy British producer, LEW GRADE. Jim fears it’ll be a tough sell, but Lew understands exactly what they want to do and gives them carte blanche — as long as they shoot the show in England.
Not surprisingly, Jane doesn’t take the news well. She doesn’t want the kids to have to split time between New York and England, but she knows she doesn’t exactly have a say in the matter. Some time later, Jim brings young Cheryl and Brian to check out the filming of the first Muppet Show episode. Jim explains to them that it’s a lot like Sam and Friends, and he wishes Jane would be a part of it. Cheryl surprises Jim by observing that Jane frequently talks about how much she hates performing. A few weeks later, Jim and Jane have an awkward dinner at an upscale restaurant. After Jim describes how successful the show is, Jane announces she wants to take the kids back to New York. Jim insists he’ll slow down now that the show’s off the ground, but Jane knows it isn’t true. Jane tells Jim that she did a “silly little painting” and sold it, quite by accident, but Jim wasn’t there to share in this moment of her life. Jim grumbles that he’s been busy lately, but Jane observes that she made this sale six years ago, and has made several subsequent sales — more than enough to earn her own income and support the children. Jim wants to make things right, but it’s too late. Jim watches a Swedish Chef rehearsal, in obvious pain. Frank tries hard to make Jim laugh, but it’s just not happening.
At the Henson farm in 1990, Jim watches an Entertainment Tonight profile that glosses over Henson’s many failures since The Muppet Show: Ghost of Faffner Hall, The Storyteller, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, and Fraggle Rock. Jim stares at the TV mournfully when Betty comes in and tells him to stop watching. Cheryl and Jim retreat to a nearby motel, where Cheryl catches Jim hiding under a blanket, shivering, clearly sicker than he has been. When she leaves him, the disheveled Kermit from the opening sequence arrives. Kermit sympathizes about the collapse of Jim’s marriage, now that Miss Piggy has gone off and married someone else, because he waited too long to tell her how he felt. Jim calls Jane, but when she answers, he waits a beat and hangs up.
Jim and Cheryl return to New York by plane, and Jim spots Kermit drinking in the bar. Cheryl brings Jim home. Jim tries calling Jane again, but again he says nothing and hangs up. Later, Jim lies in bed, looking deathly ill. Kermit shows up again, this time with a box of chocolates. Kermit gives Jim a little tough love, noting that the end is coming, and he’s going to be alone. Jim’s about to pick up the phone — when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Jane. He invites her in, and after some initial awkwardness, they fall back into an easy rapport. It doesn’t last long: he starts coughing uncontrollably, hocking up blood. After yet another refusal to see a doctor, prolonged coughing and Jane’s haranguing finally convinces him to go. It’s too late, though — he has an extremely advanced form of a relatively simple infection (the script doesn’t go into too much detail, but the always accurate Wikipedia reports that it was Streptococcus pyogenes, which is easily treated with penicillin but can become extremely severe if left untreated, like that episode of Sliders where everyone’s dying of strep throat because penicillin hadn’t been invented). The doctor tries to pump him full of antibiotics, but anybody with even a cursory interest in Sesame Street knows the story won’t end well.
But Jim does get the chance to tell Jane he loves her one last time before Kermit takes over, singing “I’m Going Back There Someday” as Jim starts coding. Jane hastily gathers the children, and everyone else catches wind of it. The bulk of the Henson Company (including, obviously, his longtime brain trust) have showed up to pay him a visit — but he’s gone. Days later, a somber crowd gathers for an attempt at an upbeat memorial service. Fighting back tears, Brian reads a loving, letter Jim had written while in the hospital (under the assumption that the kids wouldn’t make it before he died). As Brian reads, it’s clear that this memorial service does not just include humans — hundreds of muppets sit right alongside them. His puppeteers perform various songs as muppets, culminating in a huge group performance of “Just One Person.”
Meanwhile, back in Moo York, Kermit’s still depressed and eating chocolates. Directly to the camera, he says, “You didn’t think we’d end like that, did you?” Kermit storms out of his fleabag hotel along the streets of Moo York, to the mansion where Miss Piggy now resides. She answers the door, and after a long staredown, Kermit tells her he loves her. Miss Piggy immediately goes into the mansion and tells her new husband, Link Hogthrob she no longer loves him. Hogthrob isn’t terribly interested. Together now, Kermit and Miss Piggy duet on “The Rainbow Connection” — joined quickly by Fozzie, Gonzo, and tons of other muppets as Kermit and Piggy marry. Animal tears the church apart, revealing a giant soundstage, then punches a hole in the ceiling, allowing a rainbow to shine down on Kermit and Piggy. Statler and Waldorf gripe about the quality of the ending.
I feel like I have both the best and worst qualifications to analyze this script: ignorance and apathy. I know exceedingly little about Jim Henson and the muppets, and I don’t really care. Like most, I grew up with them; unlike most, I don’t have fond memories of kneeling inches from the television to watch Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. The best I can muster is an extremely foggy memory of watching Fraggle Rock and Labyrinth with my sister, and a slightly less murky recollection of getting the flu and my grandma checking out Follow That Bird from the public library. I have more specific memories of later projects that had little to no Jim Henson involvement: the Star Wars movies, the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, the (better than is generally recognized) sitcom Dinosaurs, and the sci-fi classic Farscape.
On the level that I understand their contributions to entertainment, puppetry, and society as a whole, I respectfully acknowledge the place in history that Henson and his creative team deserve. But I don’t really care. I feel neither the yearning to recapture childhood memories nor the compulsion to seek out or embrace the more adult Henson material. If pressed, I could come up with a laundry list of things I’d like answered in a Jim Henson biopic. Chief among them: why the shift from kids’ shows to the more adult-themed (but still kid-friendly) Muppet Show to the fucking crazy-as-shit Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, which are both nightmare fuel for adults and kids alike?
The Muppet Man makes no real effort to answer this question. True, writer Christopher Weekes occasionally touches on Henson’s vague, ill-defined desire to not allow people to pigeonhole him as a children’s entertainer, but rather than making that the semi-tragic arc of his story (man wants success in one realm, finds it another, uses that power to finally pursue what he originally wanted but fails to succeed), Weekes is content to mention it offhandedly, then distill the entire “adult” phase of Henson’s career with a comically brief Entertainment Tonight profile.
That speaks to the larger problem of the biopic. To make a two- or three-hour movie that encapsulates a person’s entire life is an extreme challenge. I don’t envy the task Weekes took on, but that doesn’t make me like this script any more. It’s shockingly shoddy (shocking only in that 47 allegedly high-powered executives elected this their favorite script uniquely associated with 2009). To put it bluntly: after 138 pages, I feel like I know a lot about what Henson did in his life but virtually nothing about why (or, in some cases, how) he did it.
At the end of the day, it’s a cookie-cutter biopic, relying on every cliché in the playbook as it moves through the beats of Henson’s life (clumsy childhood foreshadowing, the same awkward early romance the future wife, the marital strains frequently found in the “career-obsessed genius” category of biopic, endless musical montages showing the passage of time and increase in success, and so on). The unfortunate fact is that biopics are generally reserved for highly successful, famous people, and when you hit the main beats of successful, famous people’s lives, they all come out pretty much the same. Weekes spends too much time glossing over the details that should make Henson’s story unique. What drove him? How did he assemble his brain trust and learn to rely on them instead of doing everything himself? As mentioned before, did he always have a strong desire to do adult-themed material, or did that somehow come later in life? Or did it even come from him? The script portrays him as exceptionally introverted and easygoing, so did the brain trust pretty much walk all over him and push him into areas he didn’t really want to explore?
The answer to all those questions and many more are: I don’t have a fucking clue.
However, the script has more problems than a simple lack of relevant, interesting details about Henson’s career. The Jim-Jane relationship, which Weekes tries unsuccessfully to use as the lynchpin of the movie, suffers immensely from the “gloss over” approach to biopics. It also suffers because, in order to create the surprise moment that Jim hardly knows a thing about his own wife, Weekes keeps her hidden from the audience. Early on, she seems happy. Shortly after their marriage, she actually states that she’s happy (it’s Jim who isn’t). Several years later, when she has her meltdown upon seeing the elaborate Sesame Street display, Jane has a sort of breakdown that took me completely aback, hurling all these half-crazed statements about people “just leav[ing her], because that’s just the way [her] life works.” Where the fuck did that come from? I have no doubt that this argument actually took place, but nothing we’re ever shown of Jane suggests this sort of fragility or insecurity. In fact, the only other character she interacts with — other than her children — is the guy she got engaged to before she fell for Jim. The guy she broke it off with.
So who the hell is Jane? What’s her story? Understanding her might help make Jim clearer; even if it doesn’t, it’ll at least make her more interesting, and maybe make the breakdown of their marriage a little less cliché-ridden.
The last major problem is the big elephant in the room: the muppet sequences. These sequences did nothing for me but piss me off, for two reasons. First, from the moment we see a disheveled, middle-aged Kermit in Moo York, the sequences felt like nothing but a calculated attempt to bring a combination of nostalgia and “uniqueness” to the script. Like Man on the Moon, The Muppet Man tells a familiar story in a familiar way but periodically tosses moments of subject-appropriate absurdity to create the illusion that it’s not familiar. That’s fucking annoying.
Secondly, it’s a distraction. Remember all that stuff about Weekes glossing over the actual compelling, unique details of Henson’s life? Well, part of the reason he has to gloss over it is because so much time is spent drawing a parallel between the Jim/Jane relationship and the Kermit/Piggy relationship. It’s a parallel that doesn’t even work particularly well. My dim recollection of their characters tells me that Kermit faced Piggy’s aggressive advances with a combination of ignorance and disinterest — this just doesn’t fit with the Jim/Jane dynamic at all. Maybe I’m misremembering the Kermit/Piggy dynamic, but it felt like a poor fit to me.
That’s it for the significant, story-destroying problems. I don’t know enough about Henson to construct my own version of how his biopic should go, which is probably for the best, but I’d start with giving him some basic screenwriting 101 crap like “goals” and/or “obstacles.” For someone so career-driven, he doesn’t seem to have much interest in his own life, and his progress is only impeded by the untimely death of his brother, and then only briefly. He’s pretty much on Easy Street from the moment Sam and Friends hits the airwaves. That may reflect the reality of the situation, but it’s not dramatically compelling.
On to the nitpicky stuff, which I’ll try to keep brief.
Now, I understand that what I’ve read is allegedly a selling draft of the script. I also understand that Hollywood is all about The Concept. However, I hope I’m not beating a long-dead horse by wondering, yet again, why such a sloppily written script has garnered so much goodwill? I mentioned my ignorance of most things Henson, yet even I recognized frustrating inaccuracies*. I suppose some of them would be forgivable if not for the rampant, Australianisms, which, like Britishisms, shatter my suspension of disbelief more quickly than anything else. Recognizing that it’s more about The Concept than the writing — shouldn’t some of it still be about the writing? Am I misguided in my belief that absorbing a person in your story is of equal importance to having a killer concept and/or a killer pitch?
Examples abound of flat-out bad writing that don’t involve this lack of verisimilitude (see also: any one of the musical montages), so this is the irritating icing on the shitty-tasting cake. “Right-o,” “unspoilt,” “Chinese takeaway,” “air con,” “bloody hilarious,” “X is meant to Y” (example: “a sea monster is meant to breath [sic] through gills,” as opposed to “a sea monster breathes through gills”), and those are only a few of them (I didn’t write down all of them and stopped counting on page 67, but trust me — this script is loaded with them). It both surprises and disappointed me that this is acknowledged as the overall favorite; however, it heartens me a little to learn that the Henson Company bought the script with the intention of pretty much burying it (at best, they may incorporate some of its ideas into an existing biopic script).
I suppose I should also comment briefly on the ending, since certain other bloggers have decreed it’s emotionally devastating and that “[i]f you don’t need a towel to clean off your keyboard at the end of this scene, there’s a good chance you don’t have emotions.” Now, I have bawled like a baby at movies, and I have no problem admitting that to anyone other than good-looking women. The last act left me pretty cold, though. Henson’s death was indeed tragic, but I feel no emotional connection to him in my private life, and since Weekes didn’t create an emotional connection to him within this screenplay, I felt nothing during the memorial service and subsequent Moo York sequence. I’m sure I would have felt the proper emotional response in a better script, or if I really felt strongly about Henson and/or his work.
Jim Henson is the sort of person who deserves a biopic: an undeniable genius who changed the entertainment landscape permanently, yet someone I assume general audiences don’t know much about. So, in terms of The Concept, I can’t think of a better biopic. In terms of the script itself — holy fuck does it need work. From the story to the characters to the minutiae of its diction, this cannot and should not be made without a page-one rewrite.
Update, later on 12/14/09: Just stumbled across a bile-inducing blog post from the L.A. Times:
They soon found he had written, entirely on spec, a script about one of the most enigmatic and private of contemporary artists without having ever met or even read much about him (there exists no major published biography about Henson).Instead, Weeks [sic] conjured the story mostly out of his imagination, basing it on a series of photos he’d studied and whatever strands of information he could find on things like Wikipedia. “Even though I was just 10 when he died, Jim Henson had been this Walt Disney-like figure in my life, and I wanted to create a version of him as seen through these kind of rose-colored glasses,” Weekes said Friday from Australia.
The funny/annoying thing is: while I perused Henson’s Wikipedia page for more detailed information about his death, I looked over the beats of his life story and thought, “Holy fuck, did Weekes just copy/paste the Wikipedia entry and add dialogue?” Apparently the answer is “yes.” Still, it infuriates me that he’s being rewarded for what amounts to robbing a bank, then returning the money and receiving a 10% reward instead of a prison sentence. (I’m inferring from the article that Henson Co. bought the script to avoid potential lawsuits for infringing on his widely circulated script — despite the fact that Weekes’s script infringes on their copyrights and trademarks — with any attempt they make themselves. I could be off-base in that assumption, but Lisa Henson doesn’t sound terribly enthusiastic about Weekes’s script, and, well, “Weekes is no longer actively working on his script — he, in fact, has not written a new draft since the original was sold to the Henson Co.” So it is a happy ending!)
*Sesame Street, in this script, debuts in 1970 instead of 1969; just days before his death, Jim sees Frank Oz’s son playing with a Ninja Turtle and doesn’t know what it is, despite the fact that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie — with which he was involved in designing the puppetry — was made in 1989; Cheryl drives Jim to North Carolina, but they fly back with no explanation; I’m sure there are others; and, more often than not, the years indicated in the sluglines fluctuate for no discernible purpose, as if Weekes restructured scenes but forgot to change the years. It makes it difficult to read, when reading, to think years have passed, only to discover in context that it was supposed to be days or weeks after the previous scene. [Back]
Posted by Stan on December 14, 2009 5:10 PM