I Need A Plastic Bag

I was just thinking that that first line from Katy Perry's "Firework"--"Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?"-- had to be an allusion to American Beauty, right?

Here's an old Salon article where Alan Ball talks about how he came up with the plastic bag scene. He encountered the wayward plastic bag in New York in the early '90s, when he was a television writer by day and writing plays for a doomed theater company at night. It sounded like a midlife crisis, when you think about it. That plastic bag circling around him felt like a moment of grace, and it came at a time when he was feeling lost and needed direction. Just like Lester in the movie, Ball felt like he had written himself into a corner, and all he felt was "anger at having to write television characters over and over who did nothing more than 'trade insults.'" 

The moment with the plastic bag stewed in his mind for years, and it was only in the late '90s that he came to write "American Beauty," which the article describes as something of a "minor miracle." Ball sold the script eight days after putting it up for sale, the director Sam Mendes allowed him to be on the set during filming, and eighteen months later, it was in the theaters. 

So I suppose one could say that plastic bag sort of saved Alan Ball's drowning soul in that moment. Of course, after getting accolades for "American Beauty," he continued to write for television, i.e., "Six Feet Under" and "True Blood." But perhaps winning that Oscar allowed him to call shots after that. 

The Rom-Com Template

Vulture's Kyle Buchanan cracks down on the romantic comedy template--well, a very particular subset of the genre-- the latest incarnation of which is the Keira Knightley-Steve Carrell starrer Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. 

Briefly, the formula seems to be this: 

Sad-Sack Comedian +  Manic Pixie Dream Girl + Wordy Title = Rom-Com Template. 

They plugged in the formula using several variables, and what do you know, it does fit. My favorite of those name-checked is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I can also live with (500) Days of Summer (with queen of the Manic Pixie Dream Girls Zooey Deschanel) and Lost in Translation (directed by queen of the Manic Pixie Dream Director Sophia Coppola). Bill Murray wins for the largest age discrepancy from love interest--34 years between him and Scarlett Johansson. 

A Pratfall is better than anything.

Preston Sturges, father of the screwball comedy, drew up the following rules for box office appeal:

1. A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.

Hamlet with Lions, or How to Write a Screenplay

How to Write a Screenplay or Tell a Better Story

View more presentations from Victor Pineiro

Victor Pineiro has not written an Oscar-winning screenplay, a summer blockbuster or the Great American Novel, but he does have a few things to say on "How to Write a Screenplay." Most of it is distilled knowledge from several sources (screenwriting books from Robert McKee and Syd Field, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces), but he does supplement it with the experience of having written and produced the documentary Second Skin, which showed at SXSW, and was also a finalist at the Sundance Film Lab.

Pineiro understands the importance of having an idea--that it should be awesome and high concept--but that that idea must be supported by a solid story and plot. You know your idea is solid when you can boil it down to a single sentence, the log line: "A weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again." (He doesn't include the "why", i.e. "until he realizes his need for true love." Or whatever Groundhog Day was about. More on that later.)

Pineiro also finds the "X meets Y" one sentence description useful. I liked "Pocahontas in Space" and "Hamlet with Lions." It also helps that there is a hero going after his needs and wants. Using Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's weatherman wants a future (tomorrow) but needs to appreciate the present (today).

 But most of all, I love that his last slide is this:

Which is one of my most favorite movies as a kid.

I Like Words

After Robert Pirosh quit his job as a copywriter, he went to Europe and spent the year "in study, contemplation and horsing around." Then he decided he wanted to try his luck as a screenwriter in Hollywood and sent out this letter to all the studio executives and producers he could think of.

I haven't gone to Europe (yet, I hope) and I've been gone for much longer. But like Pirosh, "I have just returned and I still like words."

May I have a few with you?

I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script

Josh Olson was cornered at a party by a young man and his girlfriend. The young man recently spent a year of his life writing a screenplay, and was about to submit it to a contest or whatever--but he wants a professional opinion. Is this any good? Who better to ask than someone who's been nominated for an Academny Award for his work on A History of Violence, right?

Olson knew he should have said no. He barely knew the guy but he knew the girlfriend, and so took the 2-page synopsis, read the crap, and tried to thoughtfully put down words on paper. The e-mail took him longer than several movie rewrites, and later, another mutual friend comes up to him. "I heard you pulled a dickmove on Whatshisface."

This is why Josh Olson--and any sane writing professional--will not read your fucking script:

Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter.

Screenwriters never really get the respect they deserve. Olson relates an anecdote about Picasso, who was approached by a guy at a party and asks Picasso to draw on a napkin and he'll pay him. Picasso does it, hands the drawing to the man and asks for a million dollars. "What, but it took you thirty seconds to do that!" Picasso shrugs, "Well, it took me fifty years to learn to do that in thirty seconds."

The anecdote underscores the fact that writers are never really perceived as professionals. Olson compares this with asking a house painter friend to paint your living room on his day off, or asking a surgeon to take out your gall bladder over coffee. Writers get paid to read someone's work and give their professional opinion on it. Nobody really just wakes up and goes to the gym, and suddenly realizes, "But, oh, I can do a triple bypass on someone right now." The same way with writers.

Elsewhere, a really bizarre internet true story by Olson: The Life and Death of Jesse James.

Story and Structure

Architect Bernard Tschumi best sums up why I love reading film scripts: "because of the conciseness of it, and the fact that you can always break a film down into separate parts: sound without image, text without cinematography."

Story and structure. And he was reading Godard's "Breathless" too. Can't get anything better than that.

New books

New books
Originally uploaded by xkg

Lookie at the my new purchases! Haven't bought this many books since the start of the year, effectively repealing my self-imposed book ban. But it's not so bad, as almost all of them are from Booksale. The most expensive of the bunch, Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, came from Powerbooks, and that's already after 60% off.

A lot of the new acquisitions are scriptbooks (4/13): There is the aforementioned Brokeback Mountain, which contains the original Annie Proulx short story which first appeared in The New Yorker, with essays on the transition from page to screen by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All of them are united in the idea that (1) The film did not murder the original material and in fact added to it, (2) short stories, not novels, make for better adaptation materials.

Also got John Hodge's screenplay for The Beach, based on the novel by Alex Garland, Andrew Niccol's script for The Truman Show, and the script for I Heart Huckabees, which I haven't seen yet but will read anyway.

There seems to be a lot of script books floating in Booksale stores. I wasn't able to get the triptych by Mike Figgis. Of the three, only Leaving Las Vegas was familiar to me. But still, I have ended up with a lot of books to read.

Also got books about writing: Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman, The Practical Writer by Therese Eiben and Mary Gannon of Poets & Writers Magazine, and The Elements of Fiction Writing: Plot from the Writer's Digest Books.

Trevor Corson's The Secret Life of Lobsters is the lone nonfiction book not related to the craft of writing. I was hoping to find a copy of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. But hey, this is still about lobsters.

And the last bunch of books are all fiction. Two issues of Story Magazine (Winter 1997 and Spring 1999) cost me Php25 combined. Also got Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and other stories. Then there's Murder on the Menu edited by Peter Haining. This last one contains crime stories by Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie, P.D. James and even Roald Dahl. Enlisted myself in the crime fiction writing class this term, so this will form part of my reading list.

All told, the thirteen books unloaded me of Php800. Not too bad. But then again, will probably impose the book ban again and not buy anything until I've read most of them.

Mostly Nothing Happens

"But mostly nothing happens, except in the sense that novelists and short-story writers understand. For them moving a character from not knowing that he’s unhappy to sort of acknowledging it qualifies as a pretty momentous event."

This comes from a New York Times article about the film "Smart People," which is about a depressed professor of literature who has an affair with a former student (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and lives with his precocious daughter (played by Ellen Page of 'Juno' fame), a good for nothing brother. It was written by Mark Jude Poirier, a fiction writer who now has to reluctantly call himself a "professional screenwriter."

I haven't really seen the movie. Just found the review because I clicked the links related to the reviews of the Sex and the City movie. Apparently, the "depressed academic" is a character that has surfaced in American film in the last few years, with the bar set high by Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Tripp in Wonder Boys and Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. I saw both of these films and they both happen to feature frustrated academics-slash-writers. If these are the models, then maybe Smart People isn't too far off.

But what really got my attention is Poirier's shift from fiction writing to screenwriting, where generally, things have to happen. The article says that Hollywood had always wooed the big name literary writers--Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Truman Capote--but all these writers just go away puzzled. Hollywood asks them to write stories where a lot of things happen. But what about the epiphany? Epiphanies can be so subtle, if you wink you'll miss it. Poirier is from this school of writing: the only visible change is that the main character now recognizes that he *is* depressed, but acknowledging it doesn't make it any easier. No big transformations, no miracle happy endings.

What the article also makes known is that there really aren't too many fiction writers who can hack the writing of screenplays. Oh there's Larry McMurtry (whose script to Brokeback Mountain I have yet to finish reading), but there's just so few of them. Playwrights have a better batting average. So if the fictionists are having a hard time transitioning to the big screen, what about the reverse: do screenwriters make for successful fiction writers?