Connect Care Commit: Sunset Boulevard

Our final movie! Next up: TV. I’ve realized that “Convince” doesn’t work because it’s referring to what the writer does, but not what the reader is supposed to do.

Why it might be hard to identify with Joe:

• He’s miserable and maybe just doesn’t have what it takes. We believe Betty that he really doesn’t deserve the living he’s trying to make. In many ways, it’s only his self-deprecating voice-over that makes him sympathetic. Without it, he’d be pretty unbearable.

Connect

• The details of the business are convincing: “Pretty simple to shoot, lots of outdoors stuff.”

Care

• In the present, he’s been murdered. In the past, he’s broke and rejected by the world. He hears what Betty thinks of his script when she doesn’t realize he’s in the room. “It’s from hunger…A rehash of something that wasn’t very good to begin with.” When she meets him she says, “I’d always heard that you had some talent.” He replies, “That was last year, this year I’m trying to earn a living.”

Commit

• He’s got a funny voice-over. He says of his own dead body, floating in a pool: “Poor dope, he always wanted a pool.” As he calls around for money, he tells us “I talked to a couple of ‘yes men’ at Metro. To me, they all said no.” He gets in a car chase to save his car (and livelihood), so that’s always likeable.

Five Es

• Eat: No.
• Exercise: No.
• Economic Activity: He’s desperately trying to get a job.
• Enjoy: No.
• Emulate: He tries talking like a producer around the producers, to no avail.

Rise above

• He’s desperate for any job. Even when he finally starts trying to get out from under his new boss, at the midpoint, it’s so he can work on a spec script with Betty. Only at the end does he decide to move back home and try to get his old reporter job back ...but it’s too late. 

High five a black guy

• Nope

Kind

• Nope