Underrated TV on DVD #16: Life on Mars (UK)

Series: Life on Mars (UK)
Years: 2006-2007, 16 1 hr. episodes
Creators: Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan, Ashley Pharoah
Stars: John Simm, Philip Glennister, Liz White

The Concept: Ultra-modern Manchester police inspector Sam Tyler is trying to catch a killer in 2006, but he gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. In this alternate reality, he is still on the force, but one that is scientifically and ethically in the dark ages. At first all he cares about is getting back, but he soon notices that the 1973 police cases have strange little connections to his own work back in 2006. He comes to suspect that he will have to solve their mysteries in order to solve his own.

How it Came to be Underrated here: ABC bought up the remake rights, which kept this off DVD in America until the remake had thankfully flopped. The original did appear briefly on BBC America but they would cut every episode down from 60 to 40 minutes!

Sample Episode: 1.1, Pilot
Writer: Matthew Graham
The Story: Sam arrives in the past and solves his first case, but he comes to suspect that if he destroys evidence in the past, he can keep the killer from getting out in his future and killing someone close to him. This is, quite simply, the best damn pilot episode I’ve ever seen of any show ever. It’s so smart and quick and rich that it blows me away every time.

Why It’s Great:

1. It’s the dark fantasy of every modern white man: would our problems be solved if we could return to the unreconstructed ethos of our fathers’ times, when our gender and our race would have given us more license to run roughshod over everybody else? Or has the newfound sensitivity made the world a better place for everyone, even for us? This is even more exaggerated for a cop. Have they lost power or gained it now that they’ve traded away their right to casually slap suspects around in exchange for modern technology? This show’s outlandish premise cleverly addressed these issues in a dramatic and entertaining way.
   
2. This tension generates a dozen different ways for Sam’s principles to get in his way, week after week. This show explored the same idea explored by American shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica”: Do we hang on to our principles because we personally believe in them or because our society demands that we play nice? If those principles became inconvenient, would we fight for them? I think of these as post-9/11 issues, but obviously those who didn’t directly experience that crisis were also grappling with these issues in the mid-‘00s.
3. Sam is solving crimes in 1973, and also trying to reach out back to 2006 and help them through his actions, and also trying to solve the mystery of his strange journey, but over the course of the show, we realilze that there’s another, sadder mystery at play here: Who killed Manchester? Life has gotten better for individuals, but our cities and economies have rotted out from the inside. Sam is acutely aware, with everything he sees, of what has gotten better and what has gotten worse.
   
4. As great as Simm is, Glenister’s neanderthal boss Gene Hunt grew so appealing that he almost succeeded in stealing the show. In fact, after the show ended and Simm’s story concluded, audiences decided that they just hadn’t had enough of Glenister. The BBC did a follow-up show about another cop who was transported back in time to the same cophouse in the ‘80s, called “Ashes to Ashes”. They obviously love their Bowie songs.
   

What the Remake Did Wrong:

1. For all of his toughness, Simm’s still a runty little guy, but that’s the whole point. In a civilized society, you can be a bad-ass cop even though you’re not physically tough. The American show had some great things going for it, including Harvey Keitel and Michael Imperioli as 1973 cops, but the lead was a big bland himbo named Jason O’Mara, who had none of Simm’s smarts, intensity, depth, or runty charm.
   
2. Beyond that, the show just generally refused to embrace the complexities or darkness of the original show. It went for “what a goofy situation!” gags, rather than dealing with the central metaphor.
3. Finally, they felt that they needed to create an even stranger ending. I won’t spoil the UK ending, but I’ll gladly spoil the American version: it turned out in the end that the series was really set on Mars, and the whole show was a virtual reality experiment. How’s that for a beyond-parody example of American literalism?

How Available Is It?: It’s finally available on DVD uncut here in America. Make sure to avoid the remake.

But Don’t Take My Word For It:

Underrated Movie #97: Shoot to Kill

Title: Shoot to Kill
Year: 1988
Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Writers: Harv Zimmel and Michael Burton and Daniel Petrie, Jr., from a story by Zimmel.
Stars: Sidney Poitier, Tom Berenger, Kirstie Alley

The Story: A San Francisco hostage situation ends badly: the hostage is killed and the killer gets away with 2 million in diamonds, headed for the Canadian border. Tough-as-nails G-man Poitier is hot on his trail, but that means he has to do some harrowing mountaineering with an anti-social backwoodsman as his guide.

How it Came to be Underrated: Nifty little chase thrillers like this were no big deal in the late ‘80s but today they seem like a lost art. Your milage may vary with this one --it’s rather cheesy and unambitious-- but I was pleased to find that it was just as lean and sharp as I had remembered it.

Why It’s Great:

1. People assumed that Poitier had retired in the ‘80s. That wasn’t true, but it might as well have been: he had grown tired of playing “righteous racial rectitude” types, so he quietly decided that he was only going to play roles that hadn’t been written for any particular race. That meant that he got little work. I’m just glad that he had one last kick-ass big-screen starring roll.
   
2. Poitier is an Oscar winner. Berenger and Alley… aren’t, so you might think that they’d be a drag on the movie, but lo and behold they both do great, unaffected work here. This might have been Berenger’s best role. He’s a natural-born mountain man.
   
3. The script pulls off a very risky trick for the middle third. We cross-cut between the pursuit by Poitier and Berenger on the one hand, and the group of fly fishermen that Alley is taking into the wilderness on the other hand. We know that one of the fishermen is really the killer, but we don’t know which one. To make it harder for us to guess, they cast a bunch of character actors who had already played killers in other movies. The camera keeps suspiciously lingering on the faces of each one, even though all but one turn out to be innocent this time.
   
4. But I think this movie makes one big but forgivable mistake. The final act, where the chase moves back to the city, is still very exciting, but I think they should have let things wrap up in the woods. Ending it the way they do causes two problems: First, it’s not believable that Alley or Berenger would still be involved with the case at that point. Second, it makes the whole mountain trip into a red herring. We see Poitier struggle mightily to overcome that mountain, so it would have been nice if that hadn’t all been for naught.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Poitier’s previous visit to the northwest was another underseen little nail-biter, The Slender Thread from 1965.

How Available Is It?: It’s on a bare-bones DVD.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Free as a Bird!

Storyteller’s Rulebook #54: Just Listen To Yourself

The best damn karaoke bar in my city is a place called the Old Carriage Inn in Brooklyn. It’s an odd mix of ironic hipsters singing Meatloaf and retired cops crooning Sinatra. Nobody gets laughed at but anyone who puts in extra effort gets appreciated.

When you first visit a karaoke bar, you refuse to sing until you get really drunk, then you finally stumble up there and trip through a song, but if the crowd is kind then they give you some support and you wonder what you were scared of. Maybe you get hooked, like I did, and you keep going back. If you do, you start to notice something. For the most part, the stage is a parade of drunks who warble and laugh and nobody minds, but every so often that quiet guy from the back of the bar meekly takes the stage and does an amazing “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” All the background conversation drops away and spontaneous applause erupts at the end. You watch this and you start to think... “Gee, I’m glad they don’t boo me, but they don’t cheer me either. Maybe I should try to get a little better. I’d like to hear the conversation quiet down some night...”

And that’s when you’ve got a fateful decision to make. Because there are two ways to enjoy yourself onstage: you can just not listen to yourself, or you can stay within your range. Either method is perfectly valid. If you don’t care to sing in tune, that’s fine: nobody out there is paying attention anyway. And as long as you don’t listen to how you sound (which is actually very hard to hear if you’re not trying), then you don’t care either. It’s all part of your rock and roll fantasy, and that fantasy is all about image. You get to strut and shout, which is all you really wanted to do. But if you want the crowd to quiet down and listen, then first you have to start listening to yourself. Warning: you might not like what you hear, at first. Ouch! You’re blowing a lot of notes.

Now here’s some more bad news: you’re probably never going to hit those notes you’re missing. The surest way to get better is to limit your ambition. You have to figure out what your range is and pick only those songs that you can naturally sing. What a bummer. You used to have 50,000 songs to choose from, but now you’ve only got a few hundred.

And writing is the same way. There are two ways to enjoy writing. You can write any story about anybody doing anything, which might result in some polite applause, or you can know your range. Eventually, you come to admit, “I’m good at scaring people, but not so good at making them laugh…” or vice versa. Suddenly, those 200 ideas you had for your next story shrink down to 5. 

Maybe, once you’ve proven that you can win the crowd over, you can try to stretch yourself again, but if you’re trying to break in, it might be good to ask some of your readers what they think your strengths are and start focusing on those. If all you want to do is live the fantasy of being a writer, then it doesn’t matter—write a different genre every time. But if you want to get paid, then your best bet is do what you’re best at.

Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #7

We’re ringing the bell for round two of Special Guest Picks! Many of our original contributors will return but we’re also welcoming a whole new gang of guests. We’ll start out with Michael Stark. I met Michael online and we’ve been pen pals ever since, though we’ve never met in person. We turned out to be ships passing in the night: I’m an Atlantan who ended up in NYC, while he’s a Native New Yorker who ended up in Atlanta. Here are three of Michael’s picks:

Midnight (1939)

Director: Mitchell Leisen

Writers: Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett

Paris is the ultimate cinephile’s paradise, home to half a gazillion tiny retro moviehouses scattered throughout the city. My ex-wife was French, so we made many a sojourn there. Every time I opened the weekly Pariscope, I’d make a wish that a fave flick or a rare gem I’d never seen before would be playing at one of those tiny retro house and it’d always come true. Always! The CineGods kept answering my prayers. I’d sure like to see Cronenberg’s Crash or Greenway’s Baby of Macon and – BAM -- there they were, playing somewhere the week we were in town. So seeing Midnight, Billy Wilder’s (screenwriter, not director on this one) valentine to Paris on my first visit there was the kinda serendipitous magic that can only ever happen at – well -- the movies. It wasn’t a Midnight showing, however, so no film lover’s hat trick achieved that time around.

This classic screwball has former showgirl and current gold digger Claudette Colbert fleeing Monte Carlo, arriving in the City of Lights without a sou. She’s rescued by gallant knight (and errant taxi driver) Don Ameche, who instantly falls for her witty repertoire and spitfire charm. He agrees to drive her around town till she finds a job so she could eventually pay him back for his noble services. She responds, “Here’s how things stand. I could have you drive all around town and then tell you I left my purse home on the grand piano. There’s no grand piano. And, no home. And, the purse? Twenty-five centimes with a hole in it. That’s what’s left of the Peabody stake.” But soon Colbert starts falling hard for Ameche too, which in these hard economic times wouldn’t be wise, so she ditches him, crashing a posh party in search of bigger fish to wry. And, she lands a whopper – John Barrymore, a millionaire who sees right through her disguise, hiring her to woo away the charming wolf who has been schtupping his wife.

Midnight is a Cinderella Story but with a mercenary heart. Colbert is no virginal princess. She doesn’t really deserve Barrymore’s fairy godfather nor Ameche’s noble prince. Yet, even a gold digger can find true love and a happy ending in Wilder’s usually pessimistic worldview. Favorite scene: Ameche rallying his brethren of drivers to scour the city and find his lost love. Imagine a rain soaked city full of eager cabbies. For anyone who’s ever tried to hail one of the chariots during inclement weather, you know this is something miraculous that can only happen on the silver screen.

Expresso Bongo (1959)
Director: Val Guest
Writer: Wolf Mankowitz

We now move from ‘30s Paris to hopping ‘50s London. Really hopping. Ten years before it actually started swinging. Bongo is a strange hybrid of The Sweet Smell of Success and Absolute Beginners. A 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll exploitation flick that must be seen to be believed.

Lawrence Harvey is a sleazy Soho talent scout looking for the next big star to leech onto. His stripper girlfriend, who usually just throws a coat over her work clothes, takes him to a hipster coffee house, where he accidentally discovers the next big thing – a bongo playing Cliff Richards, the Brits’ answer to Elvis. Changing his name to Bongo Herbert, Richards quickly rockets to fame. To fame, but not to fortune, ‘cause his deal has Harvey getting fifty percent of all their profits. To get out of this devilish contract, Bongo must channel his own inner sleazebag and out hustle the long-time hustler. Luckily, he has an aging American pop star girlfriend to help him maneuver.

It’s chock full of great tunes, snappy patter and hot, world-weary chickies who can double cross with the best of them. This is one of Harvey’s finest performances -- a wheeler-dealer who could give Sidney Falco pointers in the art of the schmooze. The cinematography of London’s nightlife is as lush as anything in Night in The City. Think of it as Teenybopster Noir!

Hear My Song (1991)
Writer/Director: Peter Chelsom

When ya think of Ned Beatty, a tax-evading Irish Tenor in hiding might not be the first image that springs to mind. You’ve got that mental picture of him squealing in Deliverance; not singing sweetly like a celtic angel. Hear My Song will finally erase that scene from your memory banks once and for all. It’s one of my all-time favorite movies and a cure for all that ails you. Sure, it’s the overly-romantic-Hollywood- magical-roguish-sentimental Ireland drenched in dewdrops and Guinness that offends my officially Irish mates, but who really wants anything that smacks of reality when you’re really, really depressed and need STAT movie therapy? If you like Local Hero and I Know Where I’m Going (Okay, those are set in Scotland, but I don’t know much about geography.), you’ll fall in love with this little charmer by Peter Chesolm, a director who would go onto the vastly underrated Funny Bones, the wonderful The Mighty, the whimsy dervish of a Romcom Serendipity and somehow end his illustrious career with the Hannah Montana Movie. ARGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

A sleazy cabaret promoter (Adrian Dunbar) in Liverpool books the famed, exiled singer, Josef Locke, to save his dying club and win over his future mother-in-law who just happened to have dated him back in the ‘50s. Turns out the horn-dog singer is a talented imposter, who takes advantage of the nostalgic, still pining mum. Thus, this leads to the trademarked Asshole’s Journey of Redemption as Dunbar goes on a wild search through rural Ireland for the real Locke, a man who doesn’t quite want to be found. Especially cause ex-Man From Uncle, David McCallum, never gave up his This-Time-It’s-Personal hunt.

What I adored about Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart is that not only did it show him sweating on stage, but loving what he’s doing, connecting to his audience, having a blast like a kid jamming out for the first time. When Beatty raises his arms and lifts his voice, you see a performer whose gift was stolen from him, finally reclaiming both his talent and his greatest joy. His eyes twinkle like 2,000 years of collective Christmases. If you are not moved by his triumphant return to the opera house, you are surely made of stone and should immediately be sent back to the quarry or the Medusa’s lair that turned you.

Michael Stark has had his screenplays optioned by lots of important people, but he’s also taught English in Barcelona, imported art from Russia, worked for Wall Street and the UN, been a minister and a professional rock-and-roller… He’s been everywhere, man. Don’t freak out or anything, but he’s probably standing behind you right now. These days he juggles his screenwriting with his blog and his bookstore. Check ‘em out!

Storyteller’s Rulebook #53: Do More Than One Thing

My school had its own official storytelling guru, an energetic contrarian named Lewis Cole who had led a very colorful life as an SDS man before he became a screenwriter. Unfortunately we were the last students he shared his unique perspective with, since he passed away shortly after our class. Here’s something he said that’s really stayed with me:

Bill Condon had just come through to show his latest film Kinsey. I thought it was pretty good, but I saw Lewis looking unimpressed during the Q and A, so I stopped him in the hall and asked him what he had thought of the movie. He shrugged and issued a definitive “meh.” I was surprised. I asked him why he didn’t like it and his complaint was one I’d never heard before: “Every scene only did one thing.” Yeah, so? Is that bad?

Lewis launched into an even more sweeping condemnation (as he was always wont to do), explaining his general theory of why bio-pics almost never work: Even if they find a way to follow the thread of one guy’s personal development over ten years, you can be pretty sure that there won’t be more than one thread that follows that circuitous path. As we fastforward from year to year, each scene will be one piece of one puzzle that neatly snaps together at the end, but none of the other characters will ever get to live and breathe, because the story is moving too fast to serve them.

Thinking about this afterwards, I went back to Aristotle’s “Poetics”, which Lewis had made me read. Aristotle famously insisted that a drama (by which he meant a drama on stage) should obey three unities: unity of time, place and action. One short period of time, one confined setting, one story. Lewis had encouraged us to apply the same standards to our screenwriting. Now you all know by now that I would certain agree that a story has to be about one major problem. So I clearly agree with the third unity, but, up until then it had seemed to me that movie-making had the freedom and therefore the responsibility to shake off the shackles of the first two. Why stick to one time or place? We can go anywhere, man!

But as I re-evaluated Kinsey through Lewis’s eyes, I came to agree with him. It was too breezy. You can follow one story all over the world if you want, or over several years, but your subplots will suffer. Every scene will only do one thing. If you want to construct a more complex narrative, then all your characters have to be stirred up together in the same pot.

Another great teacher of mine, Malia Scotch-Marmo, goes so far as to insist that every movie should have six big formal occasions in it. If you keep gathering the same bunch of people together then your characters will keep colliding in fun ways. Just because movies can cut away to anybody doing anything at any time, doesn’t mean they should. Sometimes the best way to write a satisfying movie is to re-introduce some of the limitations of the playwright.

Underrated Movie #96: Diva

Title: Diva
Year: 1981
Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix
Writers: Beieix and Jean Van Hamme, based on the novel by Daniel Odier, writing as “Delacorta”
Stars: Frederic Andrei, Wilhelmenia Fernandez, Richard Bohringer, Thuy An Luu, Jacques Fabbri, Dominique Pinon

The Story: A romantic young Paris postman secretly bootlegs a performance by an African-American opera diva on the same day that a dying woman hides another tape in his bag, implicating the chief of police in a prostitution ring. Different gangs come after him looking for the two tapes, but he is oblivious, blithely pursuing romances with both the singer and a punky young Vietnamese shoplifter. Soon he finds himself caught up in several harrowing chases across Paris.

How it Came to be Underrated: This was a cult favorite in the ‘80s but it’s largely forgotten today.

Why It’s Great:

1. When one talks of movies from the ‘80s, the phrase “style over substance” often comes up, and this movie could certainly be accused of leading that revolution—it’s gorgeously shot but it has little of the social critique of the New Wave. But this movie gives style a good name. This is the look that American schlockmeisters like Simpson and Bruckheimer wanted to replicate, but their soulless big screen car-commercials lacked the lyricism that makes this come alive. For one brief moment, this movie actually made it cool to be cool.
   
2. It’s amazing just how ‘80s the movie is—neon, a wave machine, pink plastic raincoats—it’s like stepping inside a Nagel print. In America 1981 still looked like the ‘70s but France had already left the wide ties far behind.
   
3. While this movie moved away from moral considerations, it was nevertheless a refreshing leap forward in terms of showing the multicultural world that France was becoming. Godard’s characters may have carried around Mao’s little red book, but it rarely occurred to them to actually get to know any persons of color.
   
4. As you can tell from the plot synopsis, the story is basically absurd. It’s all played perfectly straight, but it operates on another level as a postmodern goof on the conventions of the thriller genre. This movie looks forward to Tarantino as much as it looks back to Hitchcock.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Dominique Pinon, who plays a quirky killer here, would finally get a chance to be a star in Delicatessen, which was even more off-kilter and stylish.

How Available Is It?: The DVD looks nice and it has an interview with Beineix.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: No, No It Won’t.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #52: Heroes Should Tackle Their Own Problems Too

Until the last vote is counted!

I’ve previously stated my preference for heroes who do the job out of some sense of civic duty, not just revenge. It’s okay for a real hero to help out strangers, and not every problem has to be personalized. But you shouldn’t go too far in the other direction either. If a goal is too abstract, or the hero is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t affect them or their community at all, then it gets a little fishy.

Over the years, a lot of filmmakers thought that a Howard Hughes bio-pic would be a sure thing. After all, the guy did a lot of stuff! He invented airplanes, made movies, dated actresses, went crazy… That’s a pretty easy way to fill up two hours, right? But movies aren’t about a lot of stuff. They’re about one big problem. Hughes’ tendency to drift from project to project actually makes him poor material for a biopic. When Martin Scorsese finally tried it, the movie fell flat on its face.

It’s not that Hughes didn’t have one big problem. He did: his crippling OCD. And a film about his fight against that disease might have been interesting, but in The Aviator, Hughes never even attempts to solve his own problem. He never goes to a therapist or confronts his childhood traumas. We do see him struggle to ignore his OCD symptoms long enough to pursue other goals, but we don’t really care about that struggle because those secondary goals are never important to us.

In the first half, he makes a big expensive movie, even though the other moguls don’t want him to. Well, okay, but why should we root for him to do that? We know it won’t help his problem, or anybody else’s. In the second half he finally decides to help other people. How? He fights a corrupt senator to de-monopolize transatlantic air travel. Once again, he achieves his goal. But so what? What are the stakes if he fails? Slightly more expensive flights? I guess it’s good that he wants to solve somebody’s problem, but all we want to see him do is solve his problem.

Hughes struggled to overcome a lot of external obstacles, but he never seriously tried to confront his internal conflict. As a result, his life was full of incident, but little of it had any meaning. All the obstacles in the world will never add up to one real conflict.

Underrated Movie #95: Kansas City

Full election coverage from our cockeyed newsroom!

Title: Kansas City
Year: 1996
Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
Stars: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Bellafonte, Steve Buscemi, Dermot Mulroney, Michael Murphy, Brooke Smith, Jane Addams

The Story: Altman does what he does best: a big sprawling portrait of an interconnected city, rich and poor, black and white, crooks and victims and in-between. On Election Day 1934, a gun moll kidnaps the governor’s wife, hoping that the governor will use his influence to get her husband freed from the clutches of a jazz-loving black gangster (with lots of other little storylines snaking in and out, of course)

How it Came to be Underrated: Altman made movies steadily for forty years. He would go through periods of popularity and periods of total obscurity, but it never seemed to affect his process much. I was baffled that this wasn’t a bigger hit. He was in the middle of resurgence of popularity at the time, but this one still misfired with the public—it even got mixed reactions from critics, but I thought it was another masterpiece. What do I know?

Why It’s Great:

1. Whenever a veteran filmmaker makes a movie set in the city of their youth, you know that they’ve started thinking about what really matters to them. Altman’s Kansas City is the ultimate American No Man’s Land, straddling the border between two states, between East and West, between North and South, modern and backward. They fought on both sides of the Civil War, except they started fighting early and then kept fighting afterwards. For Leigh’s character, a brunette named “Blondie”, the two competing gods of Kansas City are Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford: One light, one dark, one genuine, one phony... A lady who played tramps and a tramp who played ladies. Both were local girls who had found unfulfilling success in Hollywood.
   
2. So it’s fitting that this works as both a drama and a comedy. The tragic elements are paired with lots of droll laughs... especially from the laudanum-crazed non-sequiters of Richardson’s society wife and the ultra-cynical musings of Belafonte’s ruthless gangster. You’ll laugh until you choke on it.
   
3. Cinephiles ignored this movie, but music fans treasured it, since Altman gathered many jazz greats of the ‘90s to play jazz greats of the ‘30s and let them go and go though a marathon jam session that lasts the whole length of the film. This culminates in a rousing re-creation of a famous sax battle between Coleman Hawkins (Craig Handy) and Lester Young (Joshua Redman).
   
4. The rigged election unfolds chaotically in the background, never really affecting the goings on but giving everything a tragic sense of futility. Then as now, it doesn’t matter what anybody does, the cops are crooks, the crooks police themselves, and the fix is in. It all finally comes together at the very end, after the tragic conclusion, when one character, after murdering another, suddenly remembers something: “You know what I didn’t do today? I didn’t vote.”
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Other underrated Altman films include Brewster McCloud and California Split.

How Available Is It?: It just disappeared off of Watch Instantly, but it’s still on DVD.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Nee-xon!

Storyteller’s Rulebook #51: Nothing's Wrong Until You Make It Wrong

It’s day two of Election Week, doncha know. (And for our neither-American-nor-Brazilian readers, you’ll just have to play along.)

Here’s the all-time funniest note I’ve ever received: I was in school, I had written a very earnest script about a cop who gets ordered to stop investigating the disappearance of a black girl once a richer white girl disappears across town. The cop gets fed up with the racism of the system and takes drastic action. It wasn’t a great script by any means, and I was happy to let my fellow students try to fix it. As I was trying to justify some aspect of the script, one of my fellow students, a well-to-do young man, suddenly interjected—“wait, so is your main character white or black?” Had I not been clear about that? “Uh, white.” He looked confused, then he finally asked: “Soooo… why does he care about racism?” (Naturally, this is the only student from our class who has gotten a TV staff-writer job so far)

But he had a point. When I wrote that script, I was assuming that I could tap into strong moral feelings that people would bring with them into the theater, but that doesn’t work. For the most part, people don’t bring their moral feelings into the theater. Because the movie isn’t set on their world, it’s set on your world. You created it, and they’re happy to put themselves in your hands. Things only become bad if you show the audience that they’re bad. Or, if you’d rather, you can show them that they’re good. You can make an anti-war movie or a pro-war movie. And, yes, you can make an anti-racism movie or a pro-racism movie. That’s a little scary, but you have to own up to that power, especially if you want to send a message.

It’s very hard to write political movies. Generally, they only work if nobody onscreen shares the writer’s political point-of-view. There is no pro-reform activist in The Great McGinty. It’s virtually impossible to make a good movie about an activist you agree with, because there’s no journey for that character to go on. They’re right and everything that happens only confirms that they’re right. That movie is morally inert. “Issue” movies only work if the heroes start out on the opposite side of the issue from the screenwriter, then make their way over to the side of the angels by the last reel.

If The China Syndrome had been about the heroic activists trying to shut down nuclear power, it probably would have been earnest and dull. Ironically, the heroes of an anti-nuclear power story have to be a gung-ho plant worker and an ill-informed local newscaster. These are the characters who have a terrifying journey of discovery to go on. Only at the end do they accept the horrible truth about the industry.

Activists have the answers from the beginning, but movie characters should learn the answers onscreen the hard way. That’s more dramatic, and you have to be dramatic if you want to make a strong point. The China Syndrome is a whip-smart thriller, but, far more importantly, it helped to turn the tide of public opinion against the nuclear power industry in this country for at least a generation. Now that’s powerful movie-making.

Underrated Movie #94: The Great McGinty

It’s “Hold Your Nose” week for our American readers, so let’s wallow into the mire…

Title: The Great McGinty

Year: 1940

Director: Preston Sturges

Writers: Preston Sturges

Stars: Brian Donlevy, Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff, William Demarest

The Story: Donlevy is a two-fisted bum who gets offered two bucks to vote for a corrupt mayor, so he votes 37 times, under 37 different names. This so impresses the political machine that they make him a bagman, then an alderman, then mayor, then governor. Soon he has enough power to do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn’t want to do the right thing.

How it Came to be Underrated: This is now considered a classic by cinephiles, but it deserves to have the same reputation as other political perennials like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Sturges’s extremely jaundiced view gave America a look at itself that it didn’t really want to see, but it rings more and more true every year.

Why It’s Great:

1. A patrician politician runs such a slimy political machine that the public finally turns on him. His bosses in the business community decide that they need to anoint their own “reform” candidate to run in the next election. They find a small cog in the Chicago machine whose primary value is that nobody has heard of him. This up-from-poverty plain-talker soon takes off on a meteoric rise to the top, but there’s just one catch: his backers require him to continue all the corruption of the crook he’s replacing. What a crazy story! I guess that’s what it was like way back when in the bad old days.
   
2. In the silent era, it wasn’t uncommon to have one major talent write and direct a picture, but with the coming of sound, the studios forcibly separated the two jobs. Finally, at the height of the studio era, three of the most popular screenwriters simultaneously put their feet down and demanded a chance to direct their own scripts. The result was three daring movies that re-launched the auteur era: this, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, and Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor. They’re all great.
3. How does Sturges manage to be so big-hearted and black-hearted at the same time? He does it by keeping a bemused ear cocked for how people really talk when they get in over their head. Now matter how farcical each scene gets, Sturges shows an unswerving dedication to portraying the way the world really works.
   
4. Sturges hadn’t quite gathered his stock company yet (though William Demarest is already on hand, plus a brief glimpse of Jimmy Conlin). Without the circus-like atmosphere of Sturges’s later movies, this one gets carried almost entirely on Donlevy’s beefy shoulders. He proves to be such a wonderful leading man: comedic and dramatic, subtle and broad, that it drives me crazy when I see that he went right back to character parts after this.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Sturges follow-up film Christmas in July is also underrated. Donlevy briefly re-appeared as Governor McGinty in one of Stugres’s best movies, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.

How Available Is It?: The DVD is bare-bones but it looks beautiful.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Calling Stardust!

Storyteller's Rulebook #50: The Tyranny of Purity

As I was saying yesterday: once someone makes it big, the danger is that they will think that this proves that everyone who ever gave them a note must have been wrong. “See? You questioned my instincts, but now I’ve been proven right!” It doesn’t always occur to them that they might have made it big because all those note-givers set them straight. This is why so many second albums and second movies and second novels are so terrible. “I don’t have to listen to the haters anymore! I can make the thing I really wanted to make!” Watch out for that guy.

The presumption that bad art could never become good art because of someone else’s notes pervades our whole culture. There is a misperception that art becomes better only if it’s been purified, boiled down to its essence, restored to the artist’s true vision. All sides conspire against admitting that art is sometimes made great by collaboration.

These days, between DVD and legal downloads and bit torrent, almost every movie ever made is finally available for home viewing, even obscure old films from the ‘30s that were never on DVD. But even on the pirate sites, there’s one category of film that is excruciatingly hard to find: the theatrical cuts of movies that subsequently had director’s cuts.

One movie that I actually found underrated when I saw it in the theater was Wolfgang Petersen’s much-maligned Troy. I was going to write it up for this blog, but I discovered that the already overlong movie had swelled up another 40 minutes on DVD, which is just too much Troy, even for me. No problem, I thought, I can still find the original, even if they don’t want me to. In these lawless days, nothing can be suppressed anymore… Oh, but it can! I could download true samizdat like the Star Wars Holiday Special in mere seconds, but the theatrical cut of a recent Brad Pitt film has already been lost to history, due to our obsession with purity of vision.

In fact, almost every movie for which I own a “director's cut” DVD (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, JFK, etc...), I now wish that I just owned the original. Those scenes were cut for a reason.

Storyteller's Rulebook #49: The Writer and the Naysayer Should Be Friends

There was a story that made the rounds of the writing blogs recently, thanks to some eager press agent, about a new novelist named James King. The hook was the “inspirational story” of how King was rejected by 54 agents before he found a publisher. Naturally, I’m happy for the guy, and more power to him, but these sorts of press releases always leave out one itsy-bitsy teensy-weensy impossibly-huge detail: Was he revising his manuscript the whole time or not?

It’s no accident that they neglect to ask that question. These stories seek to feed our fantasies that we, too, might be an undiscovered genius. The last thing they want to do is give the impression that art-making is a humbling, collaborative process.
 

Especially in stories that focus on great authors and their rejection slips, the implication is always that the rejecters were abject fools who failed to see the author’s inherent brilliance, but the author “stuck to his guns” and “refused to listen to the naysayers.” Finally, one brave agent and/or publisher saw the value that everybody else missed, proving that the author had been right all along. 

 

But isn’t there another possibility? I know that if I had a novel rejected by 10 agents, much less 54, I would start listening eagerly to the naysayers, pumping them for notes and rewriting my text to fit what they had to say. And I assume that that’s just what Mr. King did. Isn’t it possible that agent number 55 didn’t prove the previous 54 wrong? What if he proved them right? I’d bet that their rejections were the kick in the pants that King needed to fix his manuscript. 

 

Of course, you can’t listen to every note, but they quickly form a critical concensus. As Bob Gale says on the Back to the Future commentary: “If we got a note from only one person, we would assure each other that that was the only person who felt that way. But as soon as we got the same note from two people, we knew that there would be millions who felt that way.”

 

Updated: A year after I ran this piece, we got this excellent article by Kathryn Stockett about her many attempts to sell “The Help”, which was far more honest about the relationship between rejection and revision:

•  “By rejection number 45, I was truly neurotic. It was all I could think about—revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed The End.”

Beyond Good vs. Sucky, Epilogue

I just broke down some of the hidden reasoning people may have when they say they like or dislike your screenplay. Well, once upon a time, things were simpler. Regular reader Hans noticed this artifact that recently turned up on Boing Boing. Essanay was the short-lived silent film studio where Chaplin made his best shorts. It seems that they were very upfront about what they liked and disliked in a submission. A lot of their checkboxes aren't that dissimilar from my modern version...

Beyond Good vs. Sucky, the Conclusion: Theme

Okay, so now we’ve arrived at the last and least. No one is ever going to say “I hated your script because I hated the theme.” They might complain about the tone, which isn’t the same thing, but the best way to maintain a consistent tone is to know your theme.

I addressed theme recently and mentioned that the best summation of a movie’s theme should take the form of a question, not a statement. A theme is a sphere of discussion. It’s an organizing principle. Is this vague enough for you? Well, that’s fine, because your theme, unlike everything else we’ve covered, is allowed to be vague. Theme is a feeling, not a fact. When they criticize you by saying, “I didn’t know why I should care about anything that happened”, you may have a theme problem.

So what is theme anyway?:

1. Something to say: Pretty simple. Why did you write it? Why did you choose characters with these problems? Why did you choose this setting? Are these people and places and problems you know something about? Do you have a healthy respect for the complexities of this problem? Is the problem just an obstacle or is it a real conflict? Does the hero have to confront himself or merely confront someone else? Is there a nut buried deep inside your story that you yourself don’t know how to crack? There should be. Shakespeare was the all-time master of theme. He only wrote tragedies about problems that he had no idea how to solve, and we love him for it.
2. Morally coherent: Not the same thing as “a moral”. Now, obviously, if you read the latest spec screenplays that sell these days (most of which are helpfully posted as pdfs over at ScriptShadow), you’ll notice that this one has pretty much gone out the window. I don’t mean to sound like a crotchety old man, but you don’t need to be a Calvinist to be concerned about the current trend towards nihilism in big-money screenplays. Producers are betting big on an endless torrent of gung-ho hitman movies, despite the fact that America has shown little interest in this trend at the box office. Of course, you can make a great movie about anybody, even a hitman—just ask the French poet laureate of hitmanship, Jean-Pierre Melville. But Melville was not himself a nihilist. He was making movies about nihilism. There’s a wee difference. You need to have a coherent moral position in relation to whatever subject you’re writing about.
3. The way the world works: Or another way to put it: sophistication. This one is tricky. Obviously if everybody acted the way real people act, then nothing very exciting would happen. You’re allowed to push that line, but your story becomes much stronger if it still somehow reflects the realities of fate and fortune and human nature. This is why they don’t like to hire writers who have undergraduate and graduate degrees in filmmaking: The fear is that they’ll have no sense of how the outside world works.

So that’s a round up of nineteen different qualities that your readers may have in mind when they tell you your script either rocks or sucks. Remember back when you thought this would be an easy job? At this rate, you might as well work.