The Story Project #4: Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind

Bait and switch time, people: before I get to the current crisis (bumped back to tomorrow), I want to look at another way that writers attempt to save themselves from the embarrassment of telling a story: postmodernism.

European cinema in the ‘60s was the first major flowering of self-aware techniques in movie-making. Both Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were influenced by the playwright Bertoldt Brecht, who explicitly wanted his audience to think instead of feeling, so he used distancing techniques to shut down emotional reactions, but these filmmakers turned that idea on its head: They used distancing techniques that somehow increased emotional involvement. In Berman’s Persona, right at an intense moment, the camera suddenly dollies back to reveal the stage lights and crew, then dollies back into the scene, which continues unabated! Amazingly, we get right back into the story. Basically, Bergman and Godard know that they were so damn good that they could get away with anything. They could remind the viewer that he was watching a made-up story onscreen, which should make the viewer stop caring, but instead it would actually add another dimension of dramatic tension. Since the viewer still cannot stop caring about these compelling characters, his cognitive dissonance merely becomes an additional level of conflict for each scene.

A good postmodern story can seem like the most honest type of moviemaking. “Hey, guys, let’s deal with the fact that you’re sitting in a big dark room and you’re bringing your own expectations to the movie. That’s a pretty big part of the equation here, isn’t it?” I’ve frequently used this blog to praise early American stabs at post-modernism, like Tension and Unfaithfully Yours, which subtly prodded viewers to be aware of their own relationship to the movies.

But postmodernism would later become the law of the land after Quentin Tarantino came along in the ‘90s. He used distancing techniques in clever ways, but I was never sure whether he was simply dazzling us or whether he actually had something to say. Unfortunately, there could be no such doubt about the flood of imitators who followed him, aping his techniques in the crudest possible ways. The problem was that these moviemakers weren’t going for the intellectual effect of Brecht or the cognitive dissonance of the Europeans from the ‘60s. The new guys were winking to the audience for a different reason: because they were too embarrassed to ask the audience to care.

You could see this idea everywhere at the time, from Nirvana albums (“Oh well, whatever, nevermind”) to “Seinfeld”, (“no hugging, no learning”). In each format, the breakthrough originators I’ve named did interesting work, but the copycats used that work as an excuse to jettison emotion entirely. Putting every emotional moment in airquotes, like “Family Guy” does, doesn’t allow the audience to think or feel. In a grave somewhere, Brecht weeps. The problem is that the “too cool to take anything seriously” movement inevitably becomes a self-perpetuating juggernaut. If you’re the only guy at Cannes who wants to stop winking at the camera, you risk looking like a sentimental chump. This contributed to the problem we face today, which I’ll finally get to tomorrow...

The Story Project #3: About What You’d Expect

As long as people have told stories, they have tried to avoid starting a story from scratch. Don’t worry, it’s only an adaptation, or a remake, or a sequel, or at least part of a shared universe or a familiar genre. My story is new but I haven’t cut the material out of whole cloth. I’ve just re-tailored your last year’s coat to fit you better. Let’s look at a few of the tricks people use:

I wrote before about Shakespeare’s preponderance of adaptations and remakes, so let’s move on to sequels: We all know that sequels deserve no respect. Except the “Odyssey”, and “Antigone”, and the “Aeneid”, and “Don Quixote Part 2”, and “Huckleberry Finn”, and “Ulysses”, and Godfather II, and The Empire Strikes Back, and Silence of the Lambs, and… well, okay, I guess there have been a few good sequels. It’s always comforting for a writer to start with characters that people already love, and there’s no reason that you can’t use those characters to create a new artistic statement. Of course, you have to overwhelm the voice of the producers, who often assume that the audience will want the same story too. To succeed, the writer needs to be willing to make something as different as the “Odyssey” was from the “Iliad”.

Shared Universes: One of the hardest things about telling a self-contained story is that it has no consequences. If somebody misses it, so what, it’s not going to affect any other stories. When you accept the benefits of a shared universe, your story gains permanence, but that brings new responsibilities: “Dallas” infamously threw out a whole year’s worth of stories by having a character wake up and discover that the previous season had been a dream, but they had a unexpected problem on their hands: that season had featured a cross-over with its spin-off “Falcon Crest”. Dallas couldn’t say that those stories didn’t really happen unless they were willing to sever their shared continuity with a larger fictional universe, where everything has to “really happen” in a way that simply doesn’t apply to separate stories.

Nowhere does this concept reign more supreme than in superhero comics, but those same superheroes are now bringing the concept over to movie screens. Nobody would call the recent Hulk reboot a sequel to Iron Man, but it’s clearly set in the “same universe.” Of course, this may mean that they’ll soon learn the downside of a shared continuity: If Thor sucks, then Marvel may discover that they’ve devalued other successful franchises along with it.

Genre: This is the simplest way that stories try to put us at ease. “You may not have seen this before, but don’t worry, you’ve seen something like it, and we’re going to play by the same rules.” Strangely, movie rental stores have every movie divided by genre-- but no book store divides the “comedies” from the “dramas” and puts them in separate sections. They might separate out the “crime” or “romance” books, but that’s seen as a judgmental ghetto-ization: they slot books into those sections only if they clearly aren’t trying to be “literature”. Every movie goes into a ghetto automatically, so does that mean that no movie is as good as any piece of unclassifiable “literature”? (Maybe it just means that movies cost a lot more to make and so they can’t afford to just trust the right audience to gradually find them on their own—they have to market themselves very specifically.)

Almost every story finds a way to promise, “Don’t worry, this won’t be entirely new to you,” and that’s fine, to an extent. But artistic, cultural and business trends sometimes conspire to bring things to an extreme, like we have today in the movie business, in which original stories have become almost entirely devalued. How did we get here, and how do we get back? Let’s pick up there tomorrow.

The Story Project #2: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up (Or Can You?)

Let’s say that you’re a homemaker in middle America. Your neighbor has come over seeking to be re-assured because she’s worried about an upcoming event, so you want to put her problems in perspective by telling her an amusing story about people in a similar situation. What do you say to her? You’re not allowed to say this: “Your predicament is a difficult one, so I’m going to tell you an untrue story I heard about two totally made-up people who attempt to solve a similar problem in a humorously bull-headed and/or poignantly mistaken and/or clever and laudable way!”

The problem is that people love good stories but they hate lies. This is a paradox, since the best stories are never exactly true. So how do we get around this problem? If you’re that homemaker, you simply say, “Let me tell you something that happened to a friend of a friend of mine.” You’ve added a lie to a lie and made it all okay. These are the stories that have come to be known as “urban legends.” 

Why do we cloak our urban legends in a flimsy veil of truthiness? It’s not like anybody believes it anymore. We all know that when we hear “I heard this from someone who heard it from someone else”, then that’s code for “this is just a good story.” So why do we still do it?

The “urban legend” format was invented because it’s embarrassing to tell a story. But here’s the crucial thing: the teller is embarrassed that they’re telling a story, but they insist on doing it anyway, even if they have to pretend that it really happened. They’re willing to bluff their way past their embarrassment. Why? Because urban legends are great stories—so great that you have to re-tell them, even if it’s taboo.

In our culture, a housewife doesn’t have permission to create a fictional story, but she does have permission to repeat a true story.  So when she wants to create or repeat a fictional story, she simply pretends that it’s true.  

Okay, now I’d like to show you some short films… Hey, where’d everybody go?? Come back here! All right, I’ll admit it, the short film is one of the most unsuccessful storytelling forms ever derived by humankind. I hate short films. You hate short films. You find yourself wondering, “How come, if this thing is only fifteen minutes long, it seems like the most interminable stretch of time I’ve ever spent in a movie theater?” 

Most short-filmmakers (who are almost all student filmmakers) totally misunderstand the form. They think, “Well, I don’t have time for a story, so I’ll just focus on a poignant character moment.” Ugh. Sure, character is more important than story, but you can’t have one without the other. No matter how short your story is, there still needs to be a story, or nobody cares. People only care about characters if they’re in a story.

When I arrived at film school, we had a Friday seminar where the chairman of the program showed us award-winning short films, hoping to knock some sense into our heads before we went off and made plotless messes. At around that same time, I picked up the book pictured above, a graphic novel adaptation of the 200 best urban legends collected by the great Jan Harold Brunvand. As I read the book, I noticed something... Many of the best short films were just uncredited adaptations of urban legends! Which makes total sense. Let’s look at two legends from the book. This legend... (please click to enlarge, as always)

...became this Oscar-Winning film (ditto):

And this legend...

...became this Oscar-Winning film (It’s in French, and the subtitles are in Spanish, but you can still follow the story):

Why do urban legends make such great short films? Because they’re simple and universal, yes, but more than that: They set up an expectation and then reverse it. That’s the magic. That’s the heart of a great story. That’s the basic unit of storytelling. Most short films don’t create or reverse any expectations. This was a typical short film at my school: “There was the this one time that my stepfather yelled at me and then later I sat on the abandoned railroad tracks and watched a sunset and cried.” That’s a bummer, but it’s not a story. A story has a reversal. Someone attempts something and their action has an unexpected outcome: That’s a story. And if it’s good enough, it might even become an urban legend. People will feel the need to repeat it even if they fear that they have no right to tell a story.

Tomorrow we’ll get back to the idea of how professional storytellers apologize for the stories they’re telling, and why that’s no good.

The Story Project #1: It's Embarrassing To Tell A Story

For this new project, let’s pick up where we left off in a piece I wrote a few months ago about… 

--Wait! Stop! That’s exactly the problem I want to talk about! Did you see what I did there? I invited you all here today to tell you something, but when you showed up, I was too embarrassed to just start from scratch. I didn’t say “I’ve got something to say about storytelling, so boo-ya, here it is…” Instead, I felt the urge to couch my new comments as merely the continuation of an ongoing narrative. Why do I feel the urge to do this?

This is a mild example of something that I have come to realize is the big problem that lies behind so many little problems facing writers: It’s embarrassing to start a story from scratch. I’ve recently become more and more aware of all the ways in which storytellers contextualize their story into a previous framework, or apologize for trying to create meaning, or emotionally distance themselves and the audience from the characters, or explain that this story isn’t really their story at all—it’s just something they found lying around.

This is nothing new. The history of storytelling is the history of apologizing for storytelling. Three thousand years ago, if you wanted to make up a story, you had to pretend that it was a foundation myth. A foundation myth is a story with four big caveats attached. The reader must understand a few things:

1. This really happened
2. This is part of the origin of why the world is the way it is, not just a metaphor for how the world is. You will see relationships you recognize and can identify with, but this is the first time those relationships were established. You are the way you are because they were the way they were.
3. These are our ancestors. In the end, they or their direct descendants become the founders of this very city. Our current ruling family is descended from those founders, who were themselves partially descended from the gods. This story explains why we treat our rulers like gods.
4. Because this is part of our foundation myth, everything that happens in this story has consequences in your daily life. If these events had turned out a different way, your life would be different. These events aren’t just metaphors for our beliefs, these were the actual events that were the source of our beliefs.

Modern-day authors would kill to have that sort of p.r. work supporting their own launches. But today’s authors have their own ways of announcing, “this is not just a story—this is authentic!”. First and foremost, they announce: “I am not an author. This novel is not a product of the time I spent in graduate school learning the art of fiction. No, this novel is a result of the time I spent in prison, or growing up on a ranch, or doing odds jobs around the country, or slumming in Prague.” 

Doctors and lawyers boast about where they got their degrees, but writers hide their degrees in shame, at least for the jacket copy or magazine interview. Writers live or die on their “authenticity”, which is the degree to which they are not really “writers”, deep down.

And of course, if professional writers are too embarrassed to admit that they’re making all this up from scratch, just imagine how embarrassed everyday people get when they have to tell a fictional story. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the one distancing technique we’re all most familiar with: “This happened to a friend of a friend of mine.” What can urban legends tell us about where stories come from?

Storyteller’s Rulebook #58: From Zero To Caring In Sixty Seconds Flat?

Since the start and end times of TV shows have gotten slippery recently, I always set my DVR to start a minute early and end a minute late. The result is that, in addition to the 5 shows I actually watch, I also find myself watching the last minute or first minute of 10 other shows, which can provide a fascinating study of the art of storytelling. I always ask myself the question: How well do they hook me in that first minute? Do I regret it when the screen freezes and the DVR tells me I’ve reached the end of my recording?

I’ve admitted before that my current guilty pleasure is NBC’s new event-show, called “The Event”, after which my DVR always records the first minute of NBC’s new chase-show, called “Chase”, about America’s most attractive federal marshals. The minute I saw last week showcased a certain sort of dirty trick that every author needs to know how to pull off, for better or worse.

A cute white teen girl is driving along a remote stretch of highway when she gets a call from her dad, who has big news: an envelope has arrived from Princeton. Her heart leaps up in her throat as she asks if it’s a thin envelope or a thick envelope, but she can already tell from the sound of his voice what the answer will be: a thick envelope. She’s overjoyed. Just then, she sees that a black SUV has turned on its hidden police lights behind. She tells her dad she’s being pulled over and hangs up. Looking worried, she rolls down her window and a sinister-looking man flashes a fake badge, telling her she’s under arrest for reckless driving. Just then, the screen freezes, and the DVR tells me I’ve reached the end of my recording. It’s just as well, I know that the girl is due to meet a grisly fate before the opening credits roll.

So did you see what the writer did there? This, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known in the business as a cheap trick. We meet someone whose sole purpose, in our narrative, is to get killed off. We have one minute to get to know her before she dies. This becomes a little game for the writer, a lightning-round version of what the writer does all day: make the audience care. But how can you make them care about this victim in just one minute? Simple: we find out that this girl wants something very badly (always important), then we see her get what she wants, then it all comes to naught. Four emotions: Boredom, anxiety, hope, joy, terror, all in rapid succession.

(Of course, there’s a certain cold calculus underlying these decisions as well. Supposedly, the audience doesn’t want anybody to be killed, but let’s face it, when push comes to shove, the writer knows that the average audience member will value some lives more than others. That’s why, as I’ve pointed out before, the victims on these shows are almost always cute young white women. For whatever reason, those are the people that our society has chosen to value the most. The simplest reason is that they’re the ones with the brightest future—the most to look forward to, so when they’re killed we have the sense that more value is being taken away. Alas, that’s why you’ll never see an episode of “Criminal Minds” where the killer targets old black postal workers.)

When you have time, you can build a character from scratch. You can dare the audience to like them, warts and all. But sometimes you need the viewer to go from zero-to-caring in sixty seconds flat. And you do it the same way you always do, have them want something. Anybody can make the audience say, “Don’t kill that person!” But your goal is to get them to say “Don’t kill that person!”, no matter how cheap you feel about the tricks you use to do it.

Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #10

Long-time fans might remember our friend Dan McCoy from his piece way back in March. Now he comes along and swipes two movies I’d been meaning to do myself: (Can you guess which two? I’ll bet you can…)

California Split (1974)

Robert Altman is one of my favorite American directors, and this is in the upper tier of his work, but it’s under-seen and (as a result) under-loved, probably because it wasn’t available on DVD until 2004—and even that DVD is now out of print.

There’s not much in the way of traditional plot here – Elliott Gould plays a compulsive gambler who falls into an enabling/co-dependent friendship with George Segal, who is well on his way to a gambling problem of his own, and the film simply follows them on their relentless quest for more action. The screenplay (which writer Joseph Walsh originally developed with Steven Spielberg) somehow manages to be about the depressing subject of compulsive behavior, without being depressing itself. This is a comedy – albeit a cagey, bittersweet one – that drifts along on Altman’s overlapping dialogue (Wikipedia notes this was the first non-Cinerama movie to use 8-track stereo) and Elliott Gould’s charm (I think that cineastes sometimes overstate the quality of 1970s American film, but I love any time period that would allow Gould to be a movie star).

Lastly—and I’ll try not to offer spoilers—the movie finds a way to avoid the “compulsive gambler story” cliché of ending with the characters losing everything. The film plays the much more interesting, and realistic, trick of turning a traditionally “happy” ending into a sad one. Rumor has it that the film is out of print to clear the way for a new DVD release that will restore scenes that had to be altered or cut in the first version, due to music rights issues. Let’s hope it’s back in circulation soon.

Road Games (1981)

I rented this movie after seeing Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary about “Ozsploitation” films—exploitation movies that poured out of Australia in the 1970s and 80s. This is a much more restrained film than some of the gonzo visions catalogued in that doc, but it carries some of the disreputable charge that the best thrillers tend to pack.

Speaking of thrillers: why were they so great in the late 70s and early 80s, and are so terrible now? I can’t answer that question, but it may be because those films still followed the lessons of Hitchcock’s “ordinary man” thrillers (with an added dose of sex and violence courtesy of the MPAA ratings system), whereas modern thrillers prefer nonsensical twist endings.

Richard Franklin, the director of Road Games, certainly took his cues from Hitchcock (in fact, after this film he directed Psycho II, which—I’ll give it this—is just about as good as an unnecessary sequel to a masterpiece could hope to be). Road Games is essentially Rear Window made as a trucker film. Instead of a laid-up photographer watching neighbors through their apartment windows, our hero is a long-haul truck driver who spends his days talking to himself, or his pet dingo (like I said: Australian). As he drives, he spies on his fellow travelers, in their cars, and becomes convinced that one of them is the serial murderer who’s been terrorizing women along his route. Things get more complex when an attractive young hitchhiker he picked up goes missing, and the police become convinced he’s the one behind the killings.

With a charming (and young!) Stacy Keach as our hero, a fresh-faced Jamie Lee Curtis as the hitchhiker, stylish cinematography, a great sick joke ending, and the best Bolero-knock-off score in the world, Road Games is the Rear-Window-meets-Duel ozsploitstravaganza you didn’t know you needed.

The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

The Coen Brothers have such a devoted cult that it seems silly to proclaim any of their films underrated (unless you’re a contrarian championing Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers, in which case: you’re wrong). However, The Man Who Wasn’t There had the bad luck to come after O Brother, Where Art Thou? which was a bona fide phenomenon (albeit as much for its soundtrack as anything). It seems to have slipped through the cracks, even with Coen aficionados.

The outlines of the story are pure James M. Cain—Ed Crane, a barber, blackmails his wife’s lover to get funds to start his own business. (That the funds are to enter the newfangled field of “dry” cleaning just points up how small his dreams are.) When confronted, he ends up killing his rival, and gets away with it… except his wife is accused of the crime. However, while the outlines might be noir, the side touches—references to existential philosophy, war paranoia, and sci-fi/UFO imagery—create a larger tapestry of 1950’s cultural influences that build on one another, to distinct but ineffable effect. While it may be an ironic joke when Ed’s lawyer refers to him as the “modern man,” it’s also no more than the truth.

The film is beautifully acted—Billy Bob Thorton is amazing in his ability to be funnier the less he does. Listen to his hilariously uninflected reading of “I’m gonna take his hair and throw it out in the dirt. I wanna mingle it with common house dirt.” Frances McDormand’s unlovable traits somehow manage to make her all the more lovable. And Tony Shalhoub as the lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider makes you curse the film performances we’ve lost due to eighty seasons of “Monk”.

The Coens get a bad rap for being diagrammatic in their scripts and cold and unfeeling toward their characters. I don’t find either criticisms to be valid. The inclusion of the UFO theme in The Man Who Wasn’t There is the sort of touch that comes from screenwriters going with their gut, rather than what makes “sense,” and the film’s transcendent ending is almost as moving as Hi’s final monologue in Raising Arizona —albeit in a much sadder way.

Doomsday (2008)

Here’s where I lose my credibility… but who gives a damn about credibility anyway? Credibility is what happens when you stick to recommending stuff everyone agrees is “good.” If you’re an interesting person, you’re going to have some idiosyncratic tastes, and you should be willing to defend them. Doomsday got a bad rap for two reasons (1.) it was director Neil Marshall’s follow-up to The Descent, which was a remarkably disciplined horror film that built to the best monster freak-out this side of Aliens—an instant classic with genre fans, and (2.) critics and audiences complained that it was derivative of other films—most notably early John Carpenter and the Mad Max films.

To that I say (1.) I loved The Descent too, but this is a whole ‘nother thing. That was a claustrophobic slow-burn thriller and this is an everything-and-the-kitchen sink action extravaganza. (2.) The director has expressly stated this is an homage to those films. To criticize it for being derivative is missing the point. Yes, there’s been a deluge of recent movies referencing yesterday’s cheap thrills, and—at worst—those films can be curdled in irony. But Doomsday takes great joy in its derivativeness, borrowing but not winking, and always moving like a cannonball.

The plot is typical post-apocalyptic claptrap: a deadly virus has decimated Scotland, and the British government has walled off the entire country. When the virus resurfaces in London, decades later, Major Eden Sinclair is tasked with venturing into the land north of the wall where she must dodge lawless survivors and locate the one doctor who may have a cure for the disease.

The fun is in the way the film shifts from being a gloss on Escape From New York into a medieval bloodbath a la Excalibur, all before ending with a thrilling chase straight out of The Road Warrior. Some might call this “uneven” or “crazy” or even “crazy bananas.” Me, I like the way the film leaps from genre from genre, never getting dull—like any film that has a group of plague-survivor punks doing a choreographed dance number to The Fine Young Cannibals’ “Good Thing” ever risks being dull. Plus it has Rhona Mitra (best known for replacing Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld series and for being nude in Hollow Man) actually turning in a very credible (and sexy) action hero performance while strutting around in leather pants. Sometimes it’s the simple pleasures, y’know?

Dan McCoy has been going strong since his last appearance... His animated web series 9am Meeting got him a gig animating promos for Cinemax in his inimitable style, and it also won big at the New York Television Festival. Meanwhile, his funny podcast about the worst recent cinema, The Flophouse, is still going strong and he had a popular piece about zombies in Slate. The man is on fire.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #57: ...And The Bad Advice Solution

Last time I talked about the problem with smothering your hero in good advice, especially if you don’t show that such advice is always somewhat dubious. But if you really want your hero to change in a dynamic way, don’t give him good advice until he finally says, “okay!” Give him bad advice until he says, “no!” Doesn’t that sound more dramatic? Don’t believe me? As proof, I present… …my favorite scene of all time!

Heroes needs special skills but they also need flaws, flaws that they can struggle heroically to overcome. This means that it’s always tempting to give a hero, especially the hero of a workplace TV drama, the most struggle-riffic flaw of all: alcoholism. Everyday is a struggle for a recovering alcoholic. Nobody trusts them entirely. They’re surrounded by temptation. Their self-denial, even if it succeeds, can push them to do other bad things in frustration. It’s dramatic gold!

But it can also be a dramatic pothole. The big problem with the recovering alcoholic character is that it’s ultimately an either/or situation. We all know that if they have one more drink, then they’ll have a hundred, so there’s no gray area for the writer to play around in. If you want to keep them straight, your choices are narrow.

It used to be a no-brainer to say that “Hill Street Blues” was the greatest TV drama of all time. There have been a lot of challengers to that throne in the last decade or so, so I won’t start that debate now, but it’s still a contender. Throughout the first season, the chief, played by Daniel J. Travanti, got very tough on an alcoholic cop played by Kiel Martin, insisting that he join AA or quit the force. We followed Martin’s descent until he hit rock bottom. Finally, in the final scene of the first season, he drags himself to an AA meeting. There, he’s surprised to see Travanti himself, who tells his own harrowing story of beating the bottle.

From that point on, we knew that Travanti had the danger of relapse hanging over his head, along with all of the other threats he had to avert. Finally in the fourth season, it all came crashing down. He was under investigation, his career seemed over, his wife had left him… would he finally crack? He sniffs an open bottle, but in desperation he calls his 12-step sponsor, whom he hasn’t spoken to in forever. The man’s secretary tells Travanti that he’s at lunch and then he’ll be out for the day. Travanti insists that it’s an emergency and gets the name of the restaurant...

Let’s pause here and point out that this is going to be a very tricky scene to write. We’ve been building up to this moment for four years. We know that Travanti probably won’t fall off the wagon, because we’ve already been through that storyline more than once with the other cop. But what can the sponsor possibly say that would be powerful enough to turn him around at this point?

Travanti finds the startled man in the restaurant and sits down across from him, begging him for reasons not to drink. They’ve obviously been through a lot together, but rather than speak from the heart, the sponsor can only give Travanti half-hearted platitudes about hanging in there. Travanti notices that his sponsor is panicky and trying to get him to leave as soon as possible. He soon finds out why as the waitress brings the man the scotch he ordered. Travanti is heartbroken to see that he’s fallen off the wagon, but the sponsor doesn’t appreciate his scorn—he launches into a bitter denunciation of the program, saying that it’s not actually a big deal—he’s still in control. It sounds pitiful. That’s all Travanti needs to hear. He leaves so that his former sponsor can have the drink he so badly needs. We know that Travanti’s not going to become a drunk again.

Positive examples and good advice are never as powerful as negative exa mples and bad advice. Saying no is always a stronger dramatic choice than saying yes.

Underrated Movie #98: Alice's Restaurant

Warning! Do NOT clean up after Thanksgiving until you’ve seen...
Title: Alice’s Restaurant
Year: 1969
Director: Arthur Penn
Writers: Venable Herndon and Arthur Penn, based on a song by Arlo Guthrie
Stars: Arlo Guthrie, Pat Quinn, James Broderick, Geoff Outlaw, Micheal McClanathan, and Officer Obie as himself

The Story: Arlo Guthrie plays himself: bouncing around the country, trying to stay out of the army, getting picked on for his long hair, occasionally visiting his dying father, and eventually coming together with his hippie brethren to form a makeshift commune in a deconsecrated church in Stockbridge, Mass. There we get a complex portrait of the ups and downs of the countercultural life. Happier incidents like the one you may know of as the “Alice’s Restaurant Thanksgiving Massacree” are interwoven with sadder tales of those that don’t survive the journey.

How it Came to be Underrated: Because it was based on a funny song, and the cast mixed actors with amateurs playing themselves, many people falsely assume that this is a mere novelty, rather than the profound and heartbreaking tale of life in the ‘60s that it is. It’s a much stronger portrait of that year than Easy Rider or, god forbid, Zabreski Point.

Why It’s Great:

1. Americans like to claim that the World War II gang were the “Greatest Generation”, and that’s true, if you consider a bloodbath the greatest thing that our country can accomplish. Of course, it seems more likely to me that an even greater generation were the kids that stopped a war, impeached a crooked president, started the environmental movement, and got more rights for women, blacks, gays and everybody else than anybody thought possible. Call me crazy. This is a warts-and-all portrait of the kids caught up in all those acts of liberation. Like their fathers at Anzio, they’re too busy trying to survive to realize that they’re collectively making a difference.
   
2. By 1967, many great directors were waiting in the wings, hoping to finally bring the intellectual and spiritual vitality of the French New Wave over to American movie screens. Penn was an unlikely visionary: his style is scruffy, loose and downbeat, but he turned out to be the one that finally ignited American’s own artistic explosion with Bonnie and Clyde. Nevertheless, he’s rarely mentioned today as one of the great filmmakers of that era, but that’s fine: His movies have more in common with each other than they do with any others. He was a one-of-a-kind weirdo genius.
3. It’s an odd little sub-genre and they’re usually terrible: the film-as-memoir where a non-actor plays himself, but Arlo actually does a great job. Of course, as with any memoir, there’s always the danger of being a little self-serving… Watching this movie, I realized that every man has one ultimate sexual fantasy: to one day turn down the offer of sex. Arlo turns down quite a few here: too young, too old, too married… You begin to suspect that the man doth protest too much. Maybe these are all the offers that he later wished he’d turned down.
4. Hearing the song (which I love) you would think that it would never work if Obie was turned into a sympathetic character—his blind antagonism is the whole driving force of the narrative! But your first clue that they’re doing something different here is that Penn got the actual Officer Obie to play himself. Why on earth would he agree to do that? Well, it’s because he’s kind of the hero in this version! He’s a good friend of Alice and he attends the opening of the hippie restaurant with his family –where he even cuts the “Eat Me” cake and serves it! Yes, he does later overreact to the littering, but that actually looks like a pretty crummy crime when you see it onscreen, and so you actually feel for Obie when you see that the judge is literally blind to his evidence! It’s an amazing act of literary transformation: turning a great one-sided ballad into an even greater two-sided movie.
   
5. Like Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, the theme here is the slippery relationship between warmth and cold as we grow older. Moments of great joy keep sliding down into sadness. As Arlo asks the last time he sees his father: “Now that they’re finally not after me to do what I don’t wanna do, what do I wanna do?” Or, put another way: “Can you get everything you want at Alice’s Restaurant?” Only an existential storyteller like Penn could find so much meaning in such an innocent question.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Penn made a lot of underrated movies, including 1965’s Mickey One and 1975’s The Missouri Breaks. It’s a fine thing to say of any artist: every movie he made (except for Bonnie and Clyde) is still the subject of broad critical disagreement. Nobody ever knows quite what to make of this guy.

How Available Is It?: It’s available to watch instantly but I reccomend the DVD with a folksy commentary by Arlo himself, where he complains good-naturedly about how Penn managed to make such a sad little movie out of his funny song.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: It Was Their Town!

Storyteller’s Rulebook #56: The Good Advice Problem...

If a hero has three close friends, they need to have different personalities and they should represent different things to the hero—different paths he could take. Don’t give him a bunch of interchangeable best friends who all want the same things out of life and out of him. If they’re realistic, they’re going to give the hero conflicting advice, and each will seem dubious in their own way. The 40 Year Old Virgin did this especially well. At first glance, the four guys egging Steve Carrell on all seem to be giving him the same advice—get yourself laid. But as the movie goes on, we realize that each is pulling him in different directions based on their own baggage.

This rule also applies when you’re creating contrast between a best friend and a love interest-- the hero should never get the same advice from both. They should each want him to be a different person. You, as the writer, have already decided what’s wrong with your hero, so your tendency will be to have everybody in his life give him that same advice over and over, but in real life, anytime anybody gives you advice it’s colored by their own wants and needs— a love interest and a best friend want different things from you and for you.

But wait, you might ask, won’t their self-interested advice make them unsympathetic? Not really-- giving a character a limited perspective will just as often make a character more likable. Believable weaknesses, ones that we recognize from our own life, are forgiveable. After all, it’s an example of a character going after what they want, which is what the audience always wants to see.

And ultimately, the audience loves that moment when they realize that, by seeing many different sides of the same situation, they now have more perspective than any individual character has. This is a big part of what fiction can do for us: give us the feeling of wisdom that comes from the ability to understand multiple points of view, not just the limited perspective we’re stuck with in real life.

Good advice isn’t always all that it’s cracked up to be, but next time we’ll talk about the most valuable advice of all, bad advice...

Fortunately, A Lake of Nice Springy Cranberry Sauce Received Him

Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #9

Hello? Anybody still in town? At least I know that the Canadians have no excuses—your Thanksgiving was weeks ago! If you can hear me, here’s a Special Guest Column from Matt Carman. I recently had a piece in the ‘zine run by Matt and his significant other Kseniya, so they’re returning the favor with their underrated picks. This week it’s Matt’s turn:

Streets of Fire (1984)
Directed by: Walter Hill
Written by: Larry Gross and Walter Hill

Streets of Fire is what would happen if the Max Fischer Players adapted director Walter Hill’s The Warriors into a musical. The sets are repetitive and simple (apparently every block in Hill’s dream city sits under an elevated train track with a diner on the corner), shootouts come with cartoonishly large explosions, and pretty much everyone is white.

But it’s also the closest we’ve got to a Han Solo rock opera, if you’d be into that sort of thing. Gunny drifter Michael Paré reluctantly signs up to save smooth-cheeked rock star Diane Lane from shirtless-in-rubber-fireman’s-pants Willem Dafoe. Along the way Paré will rescue a lost doo-wop group, get into a crunchy sledgehammer duel, and shoot first in every cantina in town. This is an unbridled story about young passion, young adventure, and young Dafoe, whose facial crags have apparently not changed since 1984.

If the songs behind Lane’s lip-synched performances sound like those of a Lady Meatloaf, it’s because they are; Jim Steinman, writer of most Loaf hits, penned and arranged many of the tunes for the film. These songs are incredibly, infectiously good, and the concert scenes showcasing them are big, over-the-top productions. For evidence, check out the clips of “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight is What it Means to be Young.” Then try to keep from playing them again.

TiMER (2009)
Written and Directed by: Jac Schaeffer

As author Kevin Wilson once said of his short stories, many of which bend reality in tiny ways, “When you present something strange and perhaps not possible, if you don’t blink, if you simply incorporate it into the story without making too much of a show about it, it will have a better chance of being accepted by the reader.”

TiMER writer-director Jac Schaeffer seems to agree with this principle. At the heart of the story is an implant device, a magical technology which counts down to the moment at which you will (and it is a definite, infallible will) meet your soul mate. The setup seems ripe for explanations and arguments, but Schaeffer smartly avoids any potential sci-fi navel-gazing to focus on the effects this technology has on Oona and her small, perfect-match-minded circle. It’s not about how, but what then.

The film’s neutral color palette and soft, even lighting can sometimes feel like a toothpaste ad. But underneath the gauzy visuals are smart performances and naturally witty dialogue, and a relieving refusal to slide in to the usual boy-meets-girl tropes. Without driving it in too much, the characters’ unease with the device reflects our increasingly complicated struggle to decide how much knowledge is too much. When Oona’s teenage brother’s alarm sounds, his disappointment is clear; he won’t get to meet girls, make mistakes, and eventually find the right one (or not). His road to “happiness” is standing five feet away, and the device is pushing him to take the sure thing over the exciting unknown. TiMER eliminates the need to question compatibility, and in doing so, shows how much faith it can take for two people to commit to each other in the real world.

Two Documentaries “About” The Past:
Billy the Kid (2007) Directed by: Jennifer Venditti
Stevie (2002) Directed by: Steve James

It’s easy for a documentary to manufacture nostalgia – who doesn’t love feeling warm and fuzzy about the past? – but it’s rare to see an honest depiction of all the halting uneasiness between the memories. Billy is a 15-year-old karate student and heavy metal fan stumbling through a year of high school in rural Maine. He’s a cracked genius with an accidental knack for brilliant one-liners (“Years of loneliness have been murder,” he says to a group of men clapping outside a diner after they witness his first kiss). Adults and younger kids are generally impressed and a little confused by his unfiltered honesty and forwardness, while his peers unfailingly refuse to understand him.

Director Jennifer Venditti first met Billy while casting teenage extras for a short film. Unable to forget him, she later came back to chronicle his ups and downs and frank philosophies. It’s easy to see why he stuck in her head. Billy somehow manages to make every moment feel simultaneously uncomfortable and charming. Even his most mundane exchanges seem to say something about the ways we all relate to each other. Drama may be life with the dull bits cut out, but in Billy the Kid the “dull” bits are the most dramatic.

In Stevie, director Steve James decides to revisit his past following the release of his hugely successful Hoop Dreams. He returns to rural Illinois to check in on the titular Stevie, to whom James had been a Big Brother in his college years. But the warm reunion fades as we learn about adult Stevie’s emotional, mental, and criminal problems, and witness his tense moments with everyone who tries to reach out to him.

James remains involved even as Stevie’s troubles become darker and more disturbing, and the tone of Stevie changes along with them. James struggles, often on screen, to justify his desire to help someone whom he once loved but no longer likes. At times, Stevie comes off as a real-life (though much less sexually charged) version of Oz’s Chris Keller – in spite of his awfulness, we want him to win, and then we feel guilty for wanting that. Though it begins as an experiment in rekindling relationships and revisiting the good times, Stevie ends up making a case for leaving the past alone.

Step Up 3D (2010)
Directed by: Jon Chu
Written by: Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer

Even (or especially) if you aren’t into dance, the choreography in Step Up 3D is often mind-blowing. This film also makes the strongest case I’ve seen for the recent wave of 3D films – while the technique is clumsily shoehorned into most movies, here it’s essential. 3D requires that we clearly see objects on various planes, so director Jon Chu eschews the usual close-up/quit-cut style for wide angles and long takes, allowing us to actually see the dancers’ every impossible movement.

The centerpiece of the movie is a single-take routine in which the awkward Moose (Adam G. Sevani) and his lady friend goofily interact with everything and everyone on a New York City street, set to a remix of Fred Astaire’s “I Won’t Dance.” It’s one of many grin-inducing sequences in this celebration of collaboration, and the moment at which Step Up 3D transcends its sappy genre to become a surprising love letter to performance.

Matt Carman is a writer/photo-blogger/etc. living in Brooklyn. He and Kseniya Yarosh co-edit the biyearly essay collection “I Love Bad Movies” which you can get here. His secret is that he scours the VHS-for-sale shelves of every video and thrift store he can find looking for buried treasure, which usually mean anything with Ryan O'Neal or James Remar (who luckily is in almost everything).

Storyteller’s Rulebook #55: Angry Minds Don't Think Alike

When a husband and wife are extremely like-minded, we say that they “finish each other’s sentences”. Why is this such a remarkable trait? Because it’s hard to do. But you wouldn’t know that from watching bad movies, where people do it all the time.

I’ve talked before about the quest to create pithy dialogue that’s good enough to provide a “trailer moment”. Of course, it’s possible that the movie only has six good lines, and we’ll end up complaining that “All the good lines were in the trailer,” knowing that we’ll never get our $12 back.

This is why it baffles me when even the trailer has terrible dialogue in it. There’s a trailer now for a revenge thriller called Faster. It’s got two very talented stars and you know I love my action movies, but this smells rotten, sight unseen. The trailer, which, as per usual, gives away everything, ends with a moment that’s clearly from the end of the movie, when revenge-seeker Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has caught up to slimy villain Billy Bob Thornton. Looking beat, Thornton laments: “I created my own hell.” Johnson looms over him, growling back: “And I’m the demon that crawled up out of it.”

How many things are wrong with this exchange? We’ll overlook the first one --people don’t actually tend to converse while beating each other up-- because that’s a well-established convention of the genre. But I still can’t accept it when one character extends another character’s metaphor. Sure, I’ll buy that these characters may shout angry things at each other, but they’re not going to listen closely to the other’s figure of speech, accept that metaphor as a good way to sum up the situation, think of a way to twist that metaphor to address their own concerns, and then continue the other person’s sentence, using the same general language and tone.

When you’re confronting someone about something, and they sum up the situation metaphorically, you’re more likely to respond, “No, it’s not like that at all, asshole.” If they’re speaking figuratively, at a time like that, you’ll be all the more tempted to respond in a more literal fashion, or, perhaps, non-verbally. Alas, there’s only one language that we all speak, and that’s chin music.

You only have one brain, so it’s natural to write each line as a continuation of the previous one, using the same language and continuing the same train of thought. But your characters all have different brains, and they have no interest in finishing each other’s sentences.

Underrated TV on DVD #19: Police Squad!

As promised, here's an epilogue to last week. Tomorrow, we move on, I promise!

Series: Police Squad!
Years: 1982, six half-hour episodes
Creators: Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker
Stars: Leslie Nielson and Alan North

The Concept: An absolutely absurd goof on cop TV shows like “Dragnet”, and storytelling conventions in general.

How it Came to be Underrated: The creators had sold it based on nothing but the opening credit sequence, but ABC got cold feet when they realized how bizarre the actual show was going to be. (ABC complained that you actually had to watch the TV set to get the visual jokes.) It was cancelled after six unheralded episodes, only to be reborn five years later as the “Naked Gun” movie series.

Sample Episode: 1.1, “A Substantial Gift” or possibly “The Broken Promise” (the narrator doesn’t agree with the onscreen title)
Writer: Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker
The Story: Nielson and North investigate a stenographer who killed her boss and framed another man for the murder. They get their gal (but first they kill off half the city.)

Why It’s Great:

1. The creators made this between making Airplane and Top Secret for the big screen and they brought over their trademark lightning-fast pun-heavy wordplay. “We think we know how he did it.” “Oh Howie couldn’t have done it, he hasn’t been in for weeks.”
2. Every episode, Frank would get stumped and bribe a shoeshine-guy-turned-stoolie who always had an inside line on every case.
   
   After Frank paid him off and left, someone from another profession would discover that the stoolie was equally knowledgeable about other topics… In the first episode, a priest slips him a twenty and asks “What do you know about life after death?” Here’s a visit from a later episode:
   
3. I hadn’t seen this show since I fell in love with early “Dragnet”, which just makes it funnier. As always, Nielson’s trademark deadpan delivery is flawless: “We’re sorry to bother you at a time like this, Ma’am. We would have come earlier but your husband wasn’t dead yet.”
4. Every episode respected the cop-show tradition at the time of ending the episode with a laugh and a freeze frame, but the actors just faked the freeze frame, even if it meant having to endure scalding coffee cascading down their hands:
   

How Available Is It?: It’s got a nice DVD with lively commentaries on half the episodes

What the Remake Did Wrong: All of the other examples of “The Original was Better” Week have been foreign shows that were unwisely adapted for US TV. This one is an American show that lost a lot of its charm when it made the jump to the movies. The movies were mildly funny but they don’t prepare you for the absurd pleasures of this show. It didn’t help that they replaced the very funny North with America’s sweetheart, O. J. Simpson.

But Don’t Take My Word For It: