Monthly Archives: April 2015

TWIDDLING MY BLACK MUSTACHE

April 18th, 2015 11 Comments

DJ & Cecil Puppets

 

In the brightly colored comic book world of my youth, I was infatuated with Time for Beany, a wonderful puppet show recounting the adventures of a wide-eyed boy named Beany as he sailed the seven seas on the Leakin’ Lena under the command of his pompous uncle, Captain Horatio K. Huffenpuff.

 

The characters were wonderful: their names alone told you almost everything you needed to know about them.

 

There was Beany’s faithful, if somewhat dimwitted friend, Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent.

 

There was, of course, the yogurt-loving Tear Along the Dotted Lion.

 

And let us not forget his fellow terror of the jungle, Mouth Full of Teeth Keith—the mangy lion with the slippery, ill-fitting dentures.

 

But my particular favorite was Dishonest John, whose black cape, black hat and black mustache announced his villainy to the world as he swept on stage, holding his cape in front of his wicked face and cutting loose with a nasty, sneering, sniggering laugh.

 

You had to love this guy, and I did.

 

The thing is, I’ve always been drawn to villains.

 

Ming the Merciless of Mong was always more interesting to me than Flash Gordon.

 

Jeffrey Hunter as Christ was a bit of a snore, but Frank Thring as Herod the Great stepping on his father’s corpse as he ascended the throne, now he was something!

 

And Darth Vader?

 

The Dishonest John of the future!

 

Who would not prefer his “foul stench” and unforgettable voice—the very embodiment of EVIL—to the nice guy heroics of Luke Skywalker?

 

I like villains, and I’m proud to say that my five year-old grandson is following in my footsteps.

 

In the games he plays during recess at pre-school, he always wants to be the villain. He almost always gets his wish. And he almost always get the holy crap beaten out of him as his good-guy friends, determined not just to overcome evil but to wipe it from the face of the earth, gang up on him with their fists flying.

 

He is undeterred, and I admire him for it.

 

I admire him for succeeding where I myself, in my high school acting days, failed.

 

I always wanted to be the villain, and I always ended up playing the dull, colorless, nice-guy hero.

 

I was, for example, doomed to portray Mortimer, that nicest of all bewildered nice guys, in Arsenic and Old Lace when the role I really wanted was Jonathan—Mortimer’s demented brother whose plastic surgery had made him a dead ringer for Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein.

 

Now there was a role I could really have gotten my teeth into!

 

But it was not to be.

 

It turned out that my high school stage experiences were a preview of coming attractions—a trailer for my adult life.

 

Dull.

 

Colorless.

 

Nice.

 

It’s a sad story and I won’t go into it here, but you can imagine my excitement when I recently discovered that for one brief shining moment I actually achieved my life-long ambition to be proclaimed a villain.

 

I, it turns out, was the villain who destroyed a masterpiece of filmmaking art.

 

I learned about it this way.

 

A few days ago, I engaged in that most popular of current pastimes: I googled myself and discovered that I appear in a footnote to an academic essay entitled “The Screenwriter as Auteur: Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.”

 

A footnote? you ask.

 

Well, it’s not just any footnote.

 

I happen to be keeping very good company in this particular note.

 

My companion in academic esoteria?

 

Jeffrey Katzenberg!

 

The footnote cites the development notes I wrote for Jeffrey about Ephron’s script, and the text which this note documents holds me personally responsible for ruining Ephron’s work!

 

I can’t say that I fully understand just how I managed this because the essay’s author uses all sorts of wonderful words with meanings beyond my feeble understanding.

 

She is, in fact, a mistress of academic jargon and clearly more brilliant and insightful than I could ever hope to be.

 

According to her, I intimidated Ephron and her director, Mike Nichols, into cutting the heroine’s monologues and fantasies…or to put it in her own unforgettable words, “the film omits the diegetic Rachel and refrains from adding any goal or obstacles for the enacted Rachel, [and so] the film’s narrative fails to present a compelling narrative.”

 

There’s some other stuff about “syuzhet structure” and the film’s “fabula,” but the bottom line is this…

 

I SINGLEHANDEDLY…well, I may have a little support from Jeffrey.

 

Let me rephrase that.

 

I, STUDIO DRONE DAN BRONSON, HAD COMPROMISED A MASTERWORK OF THE CINEMA, REDUCING IT FROM GENIUS TO MEDIOCRITY!

 

I am so proud.

 

It turns out that I was, if only for a moment, what I’d always aspired to be.

 

I can almost hear Hamlet denouncing me.

 

“Oh, villain, villain, damned smiling villain.”

 

It was, I feel, a major achievement to have reduced one of the finest writers and one of the three or four most powerful directors in Hollywood to quivering jelly, shaking in fear of the consequences if they failed to execute my notes!

 

This strikes me as all the more remarkable when I recall an experience at director John McTiernan’s Wyoming ranch. I was there, working with him and Jonathan Hensley on the screenplay for Die Hard: With a Vengeance.

 

Jonathan and I had just received Fox’s notes on our work, and we were in despair—the notes were so wrong-headed and destructive.

 

Just then, McT walked into the room, took one look at our faces, and asked what was wrong. The notes, we told him. We just didn’t know what to do with Fox’s notes.

 

John’s response?

 

He picked up the notes.

 

Said, “I’ll show you what to do with them.”

 

And he threw them into the fire burning on the hearth!

 

Now John was big, but Mike Nichols was even bigger, and I—little ol’ me—had forced him to alter his entire conception of his film.

 

Now I have to confess that I didn’t even remember that I had done the development notes on Heartburn until I stumbled across this insightful essay on the Internet, so I headed out to our storage barn, dug up my coverage from my Paramount days, and found a copy of the coverage in question.

 

I started to read, prepared to be dazzled by my brilliance.

 

And what did I discover?

 

That I had loved the Annie Hall approach Ephron had taken to her material!

 

What?

 

I’d loved the heroine’s monologues and fantasies?

 

The very elements the essayist claimed I had forced from the script?

 

Oh, I’d suggested they were a bit too verbose and could use some tightening, but search as I might, I could find no place in the notes where I recommended they be cut.

 

You can imagine my disappointment.

 

One minute, I had stood proudly in the villain’s hall of fame, heir to the legacy of Dishonest John, Ming the Merciless, Herod the Great, and Darth Vader himself.

 

The next, I was just another nice guy.

 

Oh, the pity of it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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STAYING IN THE ROOM

April 3rd, 2015 1 Comment

Unknown

Not long ago, I experienced an epiphany—one of those sudden moments of revelation that James Joyce compared to the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

 

It came to me, as such godsends often do, under the most commonplace of circumstances—a tutorial with a student who alerted me to the existence of a screenwriting manual humbly entitled Save the Cat.

 

The book, perfectly designed for the Millennial Generation, is a wonder—so clear in its step-by-step instructions that you don’t even have to read it!

 

A quick glance at the table of contents tells you everything you need to know.

 

Make sure your hero does something nice in his introductory scene.

 

Include the fifteen plot points every script must have.

 

Take care to place those plot points on the correct page.

 

Do all these things, and you can’t fail to produce a guaranteed-to-sell screenplay!

 

If I’d only known!

 

Oh, the wasted years!

 

Watching all those movies!

 

Reading all those scripts!

 

Fumbling around, clumsily trying to teach myself the craft of the screenplay when all I’d have had to do is peruse Save the Cat.

 

I’m now embarked on a new adventure as a writer.

 

I’m attempting to write my first novel.

 

(Well, my second actually. I did my first back in the eighth grade, but the manuscript has—much to the regret of literary historians, I’m sure—been lost.)

 

I’m attempting to write my first novel, and I’ve vowed not to repeat the mistakes I made when I fumbled my way into the screen trade.

 

For help, I’ve turned to an old friend.

 

Acclaimed novelist Ron Carlson.

 

Author of ten or twelve books of fiction and director of the creative writing program at UC Irvine, Ron has published what I’m hoping is the fiction writer’s answer to Save the Cat.

 

He calls it Ron Carlson Writes a Story.

 

Hmmm.

 

An odd title.

 

I myself would have preferred something along the lines of The Twelve- Step System for Writing Great Fiction.

 

No matter.

 

Let’s see what Ron considers the first step in writing a story.

 

Ah!

 

Finding an idea.

 

Well, not finding it so much as selecting it.

 

Ron insists that every experience, whether the author’s own or someone else’s, is a potential seed for a story.

 

That’s pretty vague, Ron. Can you be more specific?

 

If an idea, an experience, an image or an event matters to the author, then Ron feels it’s worthy of exploration.

 

But what are the rules? What are the five elements of a great story idea?

 

There are no rules, Ron insists, and every idea is different.

 

But…

 

All you have to do, he claims, is choose an idea or experience that you the author care about—something that you yourself would like to read about.

 

Ron chooses, as the subject of his eponymous story, the time he lost a mattress off the back of his pick-up truck.

 

Uhhh…

 

…I know Ron knows what he’s doing, but…how many of us are going to want to write about the day we lost a mattress?

 

How is his choice going to guide us in making our own choices?

 

Well, perhaps he’ll be more helpful when it comes to developing a character or crafting a plot.

 

No. Apparently not.

 

He claims that when he wrote the first word of his piece, he had no idea who was speaking and even less idea where the story was headed!

 

He insists that writing a story is a journey—a journey of discovery, a journey that requires focus, attention and effort—and that the most important thing a writer must do after writing the first sentence is stay in the room.

 

Resist the temptation to refill your coffee cup.

 

Ignore the television screen that beckons from the den.

 

Forget about the chores crying to be done.

 

The carpet that needs vacuuming.

 

The lawn that needs mowing.

 

Barricade your mind against all the wonderful excuses you can invent not to write and stay in the room.

 

Stay in the room and write the next sentence and the next and the next.

 

Stay in the room and watch the characters reveal themselves.

 

Stay in the room and watch the story unfold.

 

But…but…but…

 

Where are the steps, Ron?

 

Give us some rules!

 

Some blanks to fill in!

 

Some dots to connect!

 

It’s hard for me to admit because Ron is such a good friend, but the fact of the matter is…

 

…I’m disappointed.

 

I’d hoped for Seven Days To a Better Novel, and all he’s given me is some malarkey about the mystery of creation and some advice about how to nurse that process along.

 

I have to face it.

 

Ron Carlson Writes a Story offers me next to no guidance on how to write my own story.

 

I wonder.

 

Do you suppose the For Dummies series includes a volume on crafting fiction?

 

I certainly hope so.

 

In fact, I’m going to check into right away.

 

But in the meantime, I think I’ll send Ron a copy of Save the Cat.

 

Blake Snyder could certainly teach him a thing or two.

 

Yes, Ron can claim rave reviews from shabby journals like The New York Times and The Washington Post, but he’s never written anything to compare to Snyder’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

 

After all, what are a Booklist Starred Review, an NDEA Fellowship in Fiction, a National Society of Arts and Letters Award, or a Ploughshares Cohen Prize alongside a Golden Raspberry for Worst Writer of the Year?

 

 

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