What Should've Won That Could've Won: 1936

The Year: 1936

What the Nominees Were: Anthony Adverse, Dodsworth, The Great Ziegfeld, Libeled Lady, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Romeo and Juliet, San Francisco, The Story of Louis Pasteur, A Tale of Two Cities, Three Smart Girls

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: My Man Godfrey, Camille, Swing Time, and our winner

What Did Win: The Great Ziegfeld

How It’s Aged: It’s excruciatingly bad, a snail’s-pace three-hour celebration of the life of a sociopathic boob, punctuated by the world’s longest and blandest musical numbers. 

What Should’ve Won: Modern Times

How Hard Was the Decision: I love Dodsworth and Libeled Lady, but it really came down to My Man Godfrey, Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and this. Like the Academy itself, I find myself factoring in that Chaplin and Capra have both already won in my little parallel universe, so I was inclined toward Godfrey, but upon re-watching it, I concluded that it’s a delightful romantic comedy except for the fact that it  doesn’t have enough romance or comedy, preferring instead a bittersweet whimsy that is endearing, but not Best Picture worthy.    

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Writer: Charlie Chaplin

Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard

The Story: The Little Tramp is driven mad by an assembly line, accidentally leads a workers’ parade, goes to prison, accidentally snorts a lot of cocaine, foils a jailbreak, loses a job, then loses many more jobs…but eventually meets a fierce young homeless woman who happily shares his troubles with him.

Any Nominations or Wins: None whatsoever!

Why It Didn’t Win: Not only was Chaplin still clinging to (mostly) silent cinema, but his radical politics and sexual indiscretions were both beginning to catch up to him.  The movie changed the world, but won Chaplin few fans in Hollywood. 

Why It Should Have Won:

1. What was Goddard never a huge star?  Her greatest roles remain this and Chaplin’s next masterpiece The Great Dictator.  Her ’36-‘40 relationship with Hollywood pariah Chaplin no doubt held her back at first, but I don’t know why she failed to get better roles after that, appearing in nothing but good-but-not-great movies throughout the ‘40s.  She’s amazingly good here: pretty, sexy, tough, and irrepressibly fun-loving.
2. Those how haven’t seen silent movies assume that they merely replace a soundtrack with intertitles, but they actually create a magical parallel world with totally different rules: why doesn’t Chaplin hear the marchers behind him?  Why can’t Goddard call out to warn Chaplin that he’s about to skate off a ledge, instead of stumbling over on her own skates to stop him?  Because it’s more fun this way!
3. Chaplin was a communist himself, but the hapless tramp is merely baffled by the workers’ marches and strikes. Chaplin was sure the movement was the long-term answer, but as a filmmaker, his sympathies remained firmly with his apolitical hero, who was going to suffer endless indignities no matter which side was winning.
4. This probably has more reversals in it than any other movie, as our heroes’ fortunes yo-yo up and down at a dizzying pace, but Chaplin hides the heavy hand of the filmmaker by interweaving subtle foreshadowing that plants a tiny hint of the next danger in our minds before it happens: First we see the danger (the In and Out doors for the waiters, the chandelier that will skewer the chicken, the steam press that will flatten the watch), then we get distracted away from it, and only then is the trap sprung. 
5. Chaplin actually wrote a script (you can see pages in the documentary!)  but changed his mind and let the tramp have one more silent farewell to the world. Has there ever been another cinematic image as powerful as the little tramp ground up in the gears of the machine?   Both editions of the DVD have a neat 1967 short doc about a Cuban village that is visited by a traveling projectionist who shows them this as their very first movie.  There’s no better confirmation of the wisdom of Chaplin’s decision than the looks on their faces. 

How Available Is It?: There’s a new Criterion set that looks great, but I own the older mk2 set which is merely okay. 

Ah, 1936: In My Day, We Didn’t Have Your Fancy-Pants iPods!  We Had These! And We Liked It That Way!

How to Re-Write, Part 2: First You Have to Fall Out of Love

Re-Writing is painful.  You’ve already moved heaven and earth to get to page 110.  You’ve avoided a million pitfalls that would have kept you from finishing.  You’ve finally discovered a reasonable, if circuitous, path that gets your hero all the way from A to Z, from innocence to experience, from failure to triumph, and you’re now convinced that this is the only possible path that couldn’t have led there.

You start to ask yourself some self-destructive questions:

• Why should I have to revise this?
• What about all the work I’ve already put into it, shouldn’t that count for something?
• Isn’t this already better than some of those terrible scripts that have sold for big money?  Isn’t it already better than Evan Almighty? 

Needless to say, these are not productive questions.  Here are some better questions to ask yourself:

• Would I be proud to see this on the screen exactly the way it is?  If not, why not?
• How many different ways can I make this better? 
• What’s the weakest scene?  How can I transform it into the strongest scene?
• Have I ever read a screenplay that’s even better than this one?  How can I surpass that one? 
• If a friend sent me this screenplay, would I tell him not to change a thing and send it out immediately, or would I point out a dozen ways to make it better? 

As with any job, the hope is not just to impress your boss, but your boss’s boss.  Not just to play by their rules, but to beat them at their own game.  You’ve written a script that’s good enough to send out to trusted friends, which is already a huge achievement, but now you have to write one that’s great enough to win over strangers, which is a whole lot harder.

When the guys who made Anchorman finished the first cut of the movie, they thought, “Gee, this is pretty good…but we can do a lot better”  They ended up cutting out and replacing so much material that they were able to release both versions on DVD as separate movies! 

You’ve just finished your slick, shiny, pretty new script.  You’re in love with it and you’re in love with yourself.  You’re open to making a few changes, of course…you’ll get out your chrome-polish and buff it to an even-brighter shine, if you need to, but it’s hard to mess with perfection…. 

Wait.  Stop yourself.  Instead, put your script in a drawer for a week.  Better yet, leave it out in the backyard, exposed to the elements, to get dusty, rusty and musty.  Strip the polish off of it and then, a week later, look at it for what it really is: an unvarnished mess.  Now you can strip it, sand it, and rebuild it from scratch.  But in order to do that, you’re going to need lots and lots of notes.  We’ll pick up there tomorrow...

How to Re-Write Part 1: Don’t Revise, Re-Write!

Bah!  Enough TV for now, on to the next series...  

This series was originally going to be titled “How to Revise”, but let’s face it: revision is bullshit.  You can tinker around the edges all you want, but you won’t really improve your story until you tear it apart and rebuild it.  You hope that you can just tweak a few plot points or sweeten some dialogue without affecting any other scenes, but that’s not going to get you anywhere.  In fact, it’ll just piss everybody off.

The screenwriting world is filled with unwritten rules and I’m still discovering new ones everyday.  Here’s a big one:  If someone reads your whole screenplay and is thoughtful enough to give you a ton of notes as to how you can improve it, then don’t you dare ask them to read it again unless you’ve massively re-written it. 

There’s nothing more annoying than re-reading a screenplay that’s only been slightly revised since the first draft.  That’s true even when friends read each others’ scripts, so imagine how infuriating it is when producers or reps devote more time to their re-read than you did to your re-write. 

Don’t be precious.  Don’t be resistant to change.  Don’t defend your script against notes.  Follow the Back to the Future rule.  On the DVD commentary, screenwriter Bob Gale says “If we got a note only once, we could tell ourselves that only one person felt that way, but as soon as we got the same note from two different people, we knew that millions of people would feel that way.”

Indeed, they describe years of re-writes both before and after it sold.  Let’s start with the most basic: what does a time machine look like?  Well, it’s big metal booth that you climb into, right?  So if you needed to re-charge it back in the ‘50s, what would you do?  You’d hoist it up onto the back of a truck, throw a tarp over it, and drive out to New Mexico to steal some nuclear material.  And in the first twenty versions of this script, that’s exactly what happened...

Finally, after years of beating their head up against the wall, one of them thought to ask, “Hey, what if we invented a time machine on wheels…Wouldn’t that be more convenient?  And what if he could stay in town and re-energize the time machine with lightning?  But how would he know the exact moment that a lightning bolt would strike.  Wait, that gives me an idea…”  

That’s hardcore, ground-floor re-writing right there.  Let’s figure out how to do that in this series…

Seeds of Greatness #2: The Honeymooners

Show Title: “The Honeymooners”

Years: 1955-1956
Creators: Jack Philbin, Marvin Marx, Walter Stone 
Stars: Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, Joyce Randolph

Background: This had already been a recurring skit for five years on two different variety shows hosted by Gleason, “Cavalcade of Stars” on DuMont and then “The Jackie Gleason Show” on CBS.  

Type of Show: 1/2 hour three-camera episodic network sitcom

Structure: Three acts (all in the same room in most episodes!)  No teaster, no tag.

Irreconcilable Hero: Ralph is discontent with his small but steady wage, craving quick wealth, but is too guile-less to make any of his schemes work.

Polarized Ensemble: Ralph denies his wife anything nice until the day he can get rich quick, Norton lives on credit without a care in the world, Alice wants the find a sustainable middle ground between the two. 

Point of View: As is often the case, we begin with Alice.  The entire show is almost always set in her kitchen domain, and we never even see him at work.  He’s the main character, but we see him primarily through her eyes, with both exasperation and affection. 

Pilot Title: “TV or Not TV”
First Aired: October 1^st. 1955
Type of Pilot: Center cut.

The Storylines: There’s only one “A” story with no subplots. 

1. Act 1: Starts with Alice plunging the sink. 
2. Upstairs neighbor Trixie visits and says that she and her husband Norton are replacing their broken television.  Alice wants Ralph to get her a TV, so Trixie suggests the “pipe and slipper” routine.  Ralph comes home and Trixie leaves. 
3. Alice fawns over Ralph, but she overdoes it.  Ralph is dubious: “Who’s ‘Sweetums’?”  She drops the act and demands a TV.  They fight. (When Alice finally forces Ralph to come up with a reason why they can’t have a TV, he stubbornly declares: “I’m waiting for 3-D television!”)
4. She storms out, Norton comes in, he can’t afford a new TV either.  Ralph decides that they should share a TV.  To determine where it will go, they flip a coin, and Ralph proposes “Heads I win, Tails you lose”  He wins. 
5. Act 2: Ralph comes home and arranges a smorgasbord of snacks to eat while watching the new TV, then leaves to talk to Alice. 
6. While he’s gone, Norton slips in to eat the snacks and watch a kiddie-sci-fi TV show, complete with his own props.
7. Ralph comes in and balls him out, then insists on watching the fights, but the reception is bad, so Norton sends Ralph out into the hall with the antenna to find better reception.  As sooon as Ralph’s out there, Norton locks him out and goes back to his kid’s show
8. Act 3: Ralph watches TV late at night as Alice begs him to come to bed.  When he finally does, Norton sneaks in to watch a crime movie, which wakes them up.  Ralph comes out to yell at him, then gets sucked back in himself. Alice finds them asleep and drapes blankets on them, admitting that they never should have gotten a TV.     

Statement of Philosophy/Theme: Not really. Since they were picking up from the already popular skits, they didn’t really sell the premise very hard here (there’s not even a get-rich-quick scene for once). 
Twist: None

Why We Fall in Love with Each of Them:

1. First with Alice when we watch her plunge the sink.
2. Then we get a scene of her trying to trick him and he outwits her, which makes them both seem appealing.  Audiences love scenes in which both characters are engaged in tricks and traps.
3. Nobody could suffer embarrassment and humiliation with more exasperation than Gleason, using just his eyes alone.  He could be hilariously pathetic.

Does The Pilot Predict the Greatness of the Show?: Yes, in that it’s hilarious, but it’s not a very typical episode.

What Followed: After only one long season as an independent show (39 episodes) CBS and Gleason both agreed that they were already worn out.  It went back to being a recurring skit on various other shows for many more years, going as late as 1970. 

How Available Is It?:  Nice-looking but features-free DVDs collect the “classic 39” episodes as well as all the skits, which are referred to “the lost episodes”.

Storyteller's Rulebook #137: Entrepreneur + Employee + Artist = You?

Whenever the topic of screenwriting gurus comes up, you always get some heckler who asks, “If this guy is so good at writing screenplays, why isn’t he a big-time screenwriter?” (as seen in the fifth comment here).

This seems like a reasonable question, but it doesn’t take into account that you can’t have a screenwriting career unless you have lots of skills over and above the ability to write.  The craft is actually only about a third of the job:

You must be a talented artist...

• Invent interesting stories
• Create compelling characters
• Find meaningful themes
• Have an ear for dialogue
• Spend hour after hour, year after year practicing without payment

…and be an ambitious entrepreneur…

• Generate new projects all the time
• Constantly network and maintain business associations.
• Be able to make a sale in a pitch meeting
• Keep track of market trends
• Pay close attention to contracts and handle you own financial planning

…and be an enthusiastic employee.

• Be eager to please whoever is paying you
• Happily work to the exact specifications of a demanding boss
• Pay strict attention to details and deadlines
• Work swiftly and steadily every day until the job is done
• Surrender copyright and allow others to totally redo all of your work

It’s the last category that is the crucial difference between screenwriters and most other fiction writers: we are employees: 

• We work or get fired at the pleasure of our bosses, who own and control our work. 
• But these days, they get to control our work even if they don’t own it: it has become standard for studios and production companies to demand that you completely re-write your work for free, over and over again, according to their whims, before they even decide whether or not they are going to buy it. 
• No, wait, it gets even worse: Even agents and managers now routinely insist that you totally rewrite it over and over to their whims before they even decide whether or not they’ll represent it! 

Obviously, this requires that you be an utterly egoless individual. That’s a rare trait, but it’s extremely rare for an egoless employee to also be an ambitious entrepreneur…And it’s astronomically rare for someone to have both of those qualities and also know how to write a screenplay.  Artists, entrepreneurs and dutiful employees are usually mutually exclusive groups. 

Recently, we’ve had two sources of wisdom from big-money screenwriters, Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s excellent-but-sobering book “Writing Movies for Fun and Profit” and John August and Craig Mazin’s previously-discussed podcast ScriptNotes.  If you look at both of these together, one thing that becomes clear is that none of these four have what you might call artistic personalities, and they don’t pretend otherwise.  They present themselves as entrepreneurs first, dutiful employees second, and artists a very distant third. 

In this episode of ScriptNotes, John and Craig fantasize about what they would do if they got to take charge of a studio.  Would they make fewer sequels? Develop better stories? Treat writers more fairly? Nope, they spend the whole time dreaming up way to cut costs, eliminate divisions and squeeze more profits out of everybody that’s left. 

It’s pretty chilling…and it’s no coincidence that these guys have found so much success.   Moviemaking is a mercenary business, and the screenwriting division is, alas, no exception. 

Seeds of Greatness #1: I Love Lucy

Beginning: an occasional series where we examine pilots...
Show Title: “I Love Lucy”

Years: 1951

Creators: Jess Oppenheimer, Madelyn Pugh, Bob Carroll Jr. 

Stars: Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Jr., Vivian Vance, William Frawley

Background: Lucy had starred in a similar radio program with a different actor.  CBS wanted to transfer it over to TV, but Lucy insisted that they re-conceive the show to star her real Cuban husband.  The network was talked into it and the rest was history. 

Type of Show: ½ hour three-camera episodic network sitcom

Structure: No teaser, two long acts and a tag. 

Irreconcilable Hero: Lucy is the ultimate example of the unfairly cloistered housewife: She married an exciting nightclub bandleader because she was looking for fun, but he expects her to do nothing but cook and clean, content to never leave the house.  They love each other too much to break up, but they have totally irreconcilable temperaments. 

Polarized Ensemble: Lucy and Ethel are pretty similar, but Ricky and Fred very much are mirror opposites: the loving newlywed and the bitter henpecked grouch.  Compare this to the rejected pilot without Fred, where Ricky comes off as too much of a jerk.  By splitting the character in two, we get to admire Ricky, while still getting to hear Fred’s complaints, suspecting that Ricky secretly feels the same way.

Point of View: Each week, we start with Lucy getting frustrated, then follow her daffy attempts to alleviate her frustration.

Pilot Title: “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub”

First Aired: October 15^th, 1951

Type of Pilot: Center Cut, but it’s not so much a typical episode as an archetypical episode.  Few episodes would state the show’s central irony so explicitly.

The Storylines: We start out with two, but they interact from the third scene on, so it’s really just one. 

1. Act 1: Breakfast scene: The wives want to go to a nightclub.  They vow to sweet-talk the husbands.
2. Living room: The husbands want to go to a boxing match.  
3. The wives arrive and all four try to sweet-talk each other, to no avail.  The men leave, but the wives threaten to find dates so they can go by themselves.
4. Dining room: the husbands worry about their wives’ dates, and vow to find their own dates.  Ricky makes a call.
5. Back in the living room, the wives discover that all of their old dates have kids now.  Lucy calls the same mutual friend that Ricky just called and finds out that the guys are lining up their own dates.  The girls decide that they will take the place of those dates: ACT OUT 
6. Act 2: Living room: the husbands anxiously wait in their tuxes to meet their dates.  When the doorbell rings, they fail to recognize that their hideous man-crazy dates are their own wives.
7. After being chased around the living room, the guys flee to the kitchen and figure it out. 
8. The guys come back and chase the girls right back until they fess up.  To make up for teasing them, the guys agree to take them out after all… 
9. Tag: …but they take them to the fights. 

Statement of Theme: “Ever since I said ‘I do’ there are so many things we don’t.”

Twist: none

Why We Fall in Love with Lucy:

1. Moment of Humanity right away: Lucy insists the spot on a plate is part of the pattern until it comes off on her hand.
2. The unfair irony of her situation. 
3. Extremely active (aka scheming).  A big fan of tricks and traps. 
4. She’s an amazing physical comedienne, so the more she more she gets up and moves, the more we love her. 

Does The Pilot Predict the Greatness of the Show?: Yes.  It’s hysterically funny and the characters are fully formed.  

What Followed: Six wildly-popular regular seasons followed by three more years of occasional specials.  The day after the last episode wrapped, the real-life Lucy and Dezi filed for divorce. 

How Available Is It?: Every episode is on DVD, four to a disk.  The first disk also has the original, rejected pilot. 

What's the Matter With Hollywood, Part 13: Who's Afraid of DVDs?

I explored one way stock prices are killing Hollywood here, now here’s a ridiculous update: 

If you’ve read any public pronouncement from Netflix or the studios recently about discs (DVDs and Blu-Rays), you’ve probably noticed a mounting frustration.  They keep lecturing us about how discs are a dead business model and we shouldn’t like them anymore.  There’s just one problem: we do.  We want to pay them our money for their physical product, no matter how much that upsets them. 

Netflix and the studios, like most American businesses, don’t really want to sell goods or services to consumers anymore—they’d much rather sell their expanding value to investors. The DVD problem illustrates the difference.  If they have a big chunk of their business (such as selling or renting discs) that will continue to make them a lot of profit for a very long time but will make slightly less profit every year, then they see that as a liability, not an asset.  This is insane. 

Why would they want to walk away from the millions of dollars that are still to be made in the disc business?  Because they’re terrified that stock analysts will yell at them for putting effort into a “dying” business model.  They would much rather latch onto tiny NEW revenue streams that are getting slightly bigger.  Even if they know these streams will never them make as much money as they could make by continuing to rent or sell discs, they can at least tell Wall Street that they’ve got an expanding business model that could conceivably be the next big thing, rather than a (slightly) contracting business model. 

Our unregulated stock market makes lots of money off businesses that are going up, and almost as much off businesses that are going down, but it can’t make much money off those in between—business that are slowly and steadily providing consistent value to their customers, so it tries to force them to change their business model: throwing away actual value in favor of potential value, and pissing off actual customers in favor of theoretical customers.   Either this will pay off and the business will shoot up in value, or, it will fail and the business will die.  Wall Street will make money either way.

And either way, America will suffer.  Our national economy needs businesses that slowly and steadily provide consistent value to their customers, so we can’t afford to have predatory forces that intentionally attack and destroy those companies.  Clearly, we have find some way to bring companies’ interests more in line with their customers than with their investors.

In the meantime, Netflix and the studios need to admit to themselves that their customers still want DVDs.  Sorry, guys, just hold your nose and take our money.  

How to Create a TV Show, Conclusion: End With A Twist

We talked before about the difference between a premise pilot, which launches the basic situation of the show, and a center cut pilot, which begins with the situation already established.

Even a center-cut pilot, however, has some license to add some dramatic twist that makes it more shocking than a typical episode of that show, even if it’s just revealing information that everybody on the show already knows. For instance, one classic pilot ending is to reveal an unexpected connection between the characters, even if this is only a surprise to the audience at home:

• At the end of the “Modern Family” pilot, we suddenly realize that three separate families we’ve been watching are really one big extended family.
• On “Mad Men”, we’re shocked to find out that Don is married, even though everybody in the show knew all along. 

Sometimes, the connection would be a shock to some of the characters, but not all of them:

• Throughout the pilot for “Hill Street Blues”, police chief Furillo clashes with public defender Davenport, while his fellow cops try in vain to hit on her.  At the end of pilot, we find out that Furillo and Davenport are secretly lovers, despite their workplace disagreements.
• At the end of the pilot for “Homeland” an cryptic flashback implies that Brody lied about not knowing Abu Nasir.
• At the end of the pilot miniseries for “Battlestar: Galactica”, we find out that one our heroes is secretly a cylon, which even she doesn’t suspect yet.

Another type of twist is the shocking character escalation.  If the pilot is about an anti-hero, it will usually end with them doing something that is (presumably) worse than anything they’ve ever done before:

• At the end of the “Shield” pilot, Vic killed a fellow cop.
• Walt on Breaking Bad killed some drug rivals on his first day on the job. 
• Glenn Close on “Damages” killed her client’s dog and framed it on the other side!

Sometimes life gets worst worse for one character, forcing them to commit to the world of the show:

• At the end of the “Cheers” pilot, Diane realizes that her fiancé has permanently ditched her at the bar.
• At the end of the “Supernatural” pilot (pictured above), the demon kills the girlfriend of the reluctant brother. 

For some reason, what every pilot writer really wants to do is kill off one of the main characters at the end of the pilot, but the network usually intervenes.  The “Hill Street Blues” and “ER” pilots both end with major characters seemingly dying, but they were all miraculously revived in the OR in the 2^nd episode.  The “Lost” pilot was supposed to end with Jack dying (that was originally Jack’s body that Kate was looking up at) before they shot new footage of him surviving.  As I’ve pointed out before, “CSI” was the only show to ever pull this off successfully.

And that’s it!  Oh, and you should also apply all of the 200+ other rules we’ve already covered on this blog.  But then you’re all set: Go create a TV show.

How to Create a TV Show, Part 15: Establish the Philosophy And/Or Theme

We talked last time about how TV heroes can’t just do their jobs the way that anybody would, but rather they need to represent a certain philosophy of how to do that job, and there needs to be a competing philosophy that helps define them. This means that one of jobs of a pilot is to state that philosophy.  Or…if your show is more about unintentional rather than intentional effects, then you need to state the overall theme. 

Two examples I’ve already talked, both last time and here, are the pilots of “CSI” and “House” wherein the heroes make nearly identical statements along the lines of “The suspect/patient will just lie to the me, but the science won’t”.  That’s their philosophy and they’re sticking to it.  Every week this philosophy will be challenged by both villains and sympathetic characters, but most of the time it will prove to be the right choice. 

Even though both of these shows had some darkness and ambiguity to them in their early seasons, both have always primarily aimed to be entertaining, rather than literary, in their appeal in that they deal primarily with intentional effects: the hero sets out to make an change on the world and succeeds. 

Shows that are more literary in their appeal, on the other hand, are shows that are primarily about unintentional effects.  The heroes on these shows may have philosophies, and they may get what they want at the end of some of the episodes, but the real reason we’re watching to empathize with the tragic irony of their situation.  In pilots of this type of show, you may or may not have a statement of philosophy, but it’s more important that you have a statement of theme. 

• Perhaps the greatest statement of theme of all time was the first scene of “The Wire”.  In this stand-alone scene, which has nothing to do with the rest of the series, McNulty is at the scene of a backroom craps game turned deadly.  The victim had tried to steal the pot from the game every week, until he finally got shot.  McNulty is confused: If he kept stealing the pot, why’d they let him back into the game?  The witness responds, “Got to, man, this is America.” 
• Series theme: The American dream has become a fun-house-mirror mockery of itself. 

• Don Draper does have a statement of philosophy on “Mad Men”, but it strikes us as merely self-destructive: “You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”
• More compelling for the audience is the implied statement of theme, which once again is found in the first scene: Don strikes up a conversation with a waiter and tries to convince him to switch to Lucky Strike.  When the waiter politely refuses, Don asks what he would do if his own brand ceased to exist.  The waiter can only respond, “That’s a sad story.” 
• Series theme: People refuse to change even when the whole world changes around them.

As with the last rule, this one came to me while watching the failed pilot for “NYC 22”.  The show begins with everybody getting on the subway and going to work, looking all steely-eyed and committed, while a hip-hop song tries in vain to set the mood.  No statement of philosophy or theme.  The show isn’t about anything. 

I guess we need to go back to the list of basic questions we asked at the beginning of this process and add one more: Is your show primarily aiming to be entertaining or literary, which is to say, will it be primarily about intentional or unintentional effects?  If it’s the former, you’d better give your heroes a statement of philosophy.  If it’s the latter, you’d better at least give the show a statement of theme.     

Okay, this series finally ends tomorrow with the final of the three rules I tacked on after watching “NYC 22”.

Storyteller's Rulebook #136: Burn Through All Your Good Ideas

I can’t recommend highly enough this tribute that Louis C.K. gave to the late, great George Carlin, which basically describes the moment you realize that you’re nowhere near good enough to make it, but it’s too late to go back:  “I’d been doing this fifteen years but nobody gave a shit who I was and I didn’t either.  But what could I do?  After fifteen years, it would be like getting out of prison! How could you re-enter the workforce?”

The solution that he heard from Carlin turned his career around: Use up all of your “best” material as fast as you can and never think about it again. Take all those ideas that you’re cherishing and holding tight to your breast, the ones that might make you big someday, and just use them all up. Write them and send them out and forget about them.

Whenever I find myself saying “I can’t write that one yet, I’m not good enough,” I always try to remind myself that, If I’m not good enough, then my ideas probably aren’t good enough either, so it’s the always the perfect time to write whatever ideas I have.  And even if I do find that I’m tackling something overly ambitious, that’s great, because it will force me to get better quickly. 

The worst thing you can do is to slowly polish some idea for years and years, convinced that it will one day make you rich.  That will keep you looking backwards, not forward...and it will ruin the idea.  You don’t want to add any polish to your ideas, you want to do just the opposite: strip them down to their essence.  The more polish you apply, the more you’ll have to scrape off later. 

Precious material is death.  The only way to get better is to generate new material, and the only way to do that is to find out what’s buried underneath every old idea that you’re still hoarding.  What you’ll find is raw, uncomfortable, specific, personal, honest material.

What Should've Won That Could've Won: 1935

“Hey, Matt, what’s going on here??  You’re just agreeing with the Academy as often as not!”  Yeah, I’m surprised at that, too.  The unexpected upshot has been that I’ve rediscovered  some great winners I hadn’t seen since high school.  But don’t worry, I suspect that this run of non-dissent is pretty much over with this one.

The Year: 1935

What the Nominees Were: Alice Adams, Broadway Melody of 1936, Captain Blood, David Copperfield, The Informer, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Les Miserables, Mutiny on the Bounty, Naughty Marietta, Ruggles of Red Gap, Top Hat

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: A Night at the Opera!

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Mutiny on the Bounty

How Hard Was the Decision: Somewhat. I re-watched The Informer, which is wonderfully atmospheric and subversively dark, in every meaning of the word, but it’s also hopelessly overwrought and Victor McLaglen, so appealing in supporting parts, proves to be too one-note for this complex role.

Director: Frank Lloyd

Writers: Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, and Carey Wilson, based on the book by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Stars: Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone

The Story: In 1789, unfortunate sailors are forced against their will to join a two-year expedition to Tahiti to bring back fruit trees, which might prove to be a cheaper way to feed the slaves in Jamaica.  The captain is a petty little dictator, flogging the men mercilessly, stealing their food for himself, and hounding more than one to death.  His right hand man defends him… until he can take no more.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: Gable, Laughton and Tone all competed against each other for Best Actor, meaning that McLaglen got it by default. (There still was no Best Supporting Oscar.  They added that category the next year in response to this problem). 

How It Won: As with Grand Hotel, this was a no-brainer: the biggest studio, biggest budget, biggest stars and biggest grosses all lined up.  The reviewers were split between this and The Informer, (and for the first time, they started giving out their own awards) but at the Academy, it just couldn’t compete.  I’m siding with the Academy on this one. 

Why It Won:

1. This is our first big-budget epic and the verisimilitude and epic scale are simply stunning.  Even better, Lloyd, usually a workman-like director, rose to the occasion, crafting exhilarating, almost Soviet-style montages out of hoisting sales and weighing anchor.  
2. No matter how bad things get, Fletcher Christian stands behind his venal captain—until he finds himself in love with an island girl, and has to leave her behind.  It’s a good lesson in motivation: a weak man only needs something to rebel against, but in order to motivate a strong-minded hero, you must give also give him something to rebel for. 
3. The emotional impact of this movie is momentous: we seethe with indignation at Bligh’s abuses, melt with longing at the simple justice of island life, roar in sympathy with the revolt, then something funny happens… Bligh’s heroic survival tale complicates everything. Similar to Michael Scott on “The Office”, the tragedy of Bligh’s life is that he’s a spectacular sailor who was disastrously promoted to become a terrible leader of men, resorting to tyranny to avoid facing his own insecurities. 
4. This is not a good vs. good movie, it’s an evil vs. evil: choosing between tyranny and revolution is the most bitter choice anyone can make, because there are no good outcomes either way, and the worst fate awaits those who try to find a middle path. 
5. The ending of this movie is astoundingly brave: We await the final battle, which will settle for us how to feel about everything.  Instead, each man evades the others’ final wrath, forcing each to make a separate peace, diminished in circumstances by their choices but denied a final cathartic confrontation that would tell them whether or not they made the right choice. 
6. Hollywood was far too skittish to make a true slave-revolt movie, but this is a clever way to tackle the same basic material.  Not only are the men themselves explicitly enslaved onto the ship, they overthrow a mission to make slavery cheaper for the empire.  What we don’t see in the movie is that Bligh took on another two-year trip and finally delivered the breadfruits  to Jamaica, but it was all for nothing: the slaves refused to eat them. 

How Available Is It?: Once again, it has a nice looking DVD with few features..

Ah, 1935: Presented Without Comment.

Rulebook Casefile: The Downside of Polarized Protagonists on “Girls”

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 The great “Girls” controversy continues to rage its way across the internet, so I’ll go ahead and add my voice to the “not a big fan” camp.  I would sum the show up as “If you loved ‘Sex and the City’ but didn’t think the heroines were spoiled or shallow enough, then have we got a show for you!” 

But what I really want to address is one of the sub-controversies: Why are all the “Girls” white?  Lots of people have complained about this, and obviously this taps into the larger “show about privileged people made entirely by privileged people” issue, but it also drifts into very tricky territory... 

One argument against diversity on this show that some have put forward is that these characters simply wouldn’t have any non-white friends.  I find that argument somewhat compelling but ultimately it just brings us around again to the bigger problem: Most people simply don’t want to watch a show about people this small-minded.  If they had a more multicultural group, that might have killed two birds with one stone. 
But there’s another, thornier issue here as well: The real reason that these four are all white is that they really represent one person who has been polarized into four.  In fact, they’re polarized in exactly the same way that the “Sex and the City” heroines are:

1. The promiscuous, rude, crude one. (Kim Catrall / Jemima Kirke)
2. The naïve, easily-blushes one (Kristin Davis / Zosia Mamet)
3. The sensible-but-unhappy one who resents the nice guys she gets stuck with. (Cynthia Nixon / Allison Williams)
4. The thoughtful-essayist one (Sarah Jessica Parker/ Lena Dunham)

It may sound like I’m condemning the show for polarizing its ensemble, but I’m not.  I’ve said many times that it’s equally valid to explore a realistic external reality or an extrapolated version of internal reality, with different characters representing our competing internal voices. 

But polarization can pose a problem: if you’re writing about four complex, well-rounded personalities, then sure, you can make them multi-racial without worry, but if you’re writing about polarized extremes, and you assign different races to those poles, then you run the risk of seeming to associate certain races with certain flaws. 

That said, there are other solutions besides going uni-racial: Some writers try to tackle this problem by carefully dividing up races against stereotype: the black one is the nerd!  The Asian is the slacker! But this is still stereotype-driven thinking, done in reverse.

Other shows go the other way and accept the risk of giving in to stereotype: On “Desperate Housewives” the Latina is unapologetically the sexiest one.  At first there was some outrage, but it calmed down over time and Latinas soon became big fans of Eva Longoria’s well-written and well-acted character. 

In the screenplay I’m writing now, I’ve certainly asked myself: “It’s New York, shouldn’t one of these guys be non-white?” But the answer seems to be: “Well, they each represent a different type of corruption, so I wouldn’t really be doing any minorities any favors by diversifying this cast...”