Oscar Night Writer Montage

Here is the collection of classic films clips illustrating the agony and ecstasy of playings with words...

Mamet on the Free Market Film Industry

Stephen Carson on the problems with the central planning of culture:

A fascinating interview with playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet by Charlie Rose (jump to 29:00) features his comments on economics and Hollywood (jump to 36:00). The interview is about his book Bambi Vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business. He says that he has been studying economics and has been fascinated with the film industry as an exemplar of the free market. He explicitly rejects central planning of culture, "the commissar of culture" (state theaters, etc.) and celebrates the entrepreneur who he says must have "arrogance or, to put it differently, self-assurance" as they push for their vision while always keeping an eye on the audience. See Theatre and the State by Hans Frank for a brief overview of central planning of culture in the U.S.

Here is a short interview with Mamet from Kris Warner of Bloomberg News on screenwriters, producers who produce nothing, Curtis vs. Olivier, and a Greek god...

Helpful or Not So Helpful Advice

Joe Eszterhas has some advice for screenwriters. "Steal as much memorabilia from the set as you can," the legend who penned "Flashdance" and "Basic Instinct" tells Stuff magazine. "There seems to be a market for everything on eBay these days. If you are somehow lucky enough to get something iconic, like the ice pick I wrote into my script for 'Basic Instinct,' I would suggest you hang onto it."

As Pablo Picasso stated: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

War Tax Resister as Stranger Than Fiction

A Review from The Free Liberal:

...Pascal goes through a process of transformation herself in seeing the good in the taxman. Although Stranger than Fiction is Crick’s story, she perhaps utters one of the most important lines in the movie from a free liberal point-of-view. When asked how she went from being a Harvard law student to being a radical baker, she explains that she wanted to be a lawyer so she could save the world, but once at school she spent all her time baking for study groups and not attending to her grades. She realized that her true skill for improving the world was in baking cookies. Ana Pascal derives pleasure from making people happy. Although the word “socialist” is bandied about, it is clear she is an entrepreneur of the John Mackey variety.

Essential good comes not from “fighting the system” or undoing injustice brought on by external forces, it comes from our ability to help others achieve their own happiness. Not everyone is an artistic baker who creates amazing delicacies, but everywhere people are working to reduce the cost of happiness for others, doing good for them in ways visible and hidden. We do this on a personal level with our friends, family, and colleagues, and we do it for people whom we will never meet but will nonetheless benefit from the derivative effects of our efforts to build and innovate in our work. In economics we call this the “free market.”

The taxman is unloved because he is precisely the opposite of the entrepreneur. He takes wealth from us to pay for things which don’t help society (or at least we think a good bit is unhelpful). He does not operate on any principle other than that he has been sent to enforce a technical rule against a technical violation. My grandfather, who was an IRS auditor, often remarks that he should have gone into car sales, “because nobody likes to pay taxes, but everyone is happy when they are buying a car.”

Can A Screenwriter Be An Auteur Too?

Doree Shafrir from Slate.com considers the question:

"In last Sunday's New York Times, Terrence Rafferty wrote about the fight between writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu over their new film Babel, which opens today. Rafferty quoted Arriaga as saying, 'When they say it's an auteur film, I say auteurs film. I have always been against the 'film by' credit on a movie. It's a collaborative process and it deserves several authors.' Rafferty went on to write that Arriaga's 'relatively uncombative tone may … disguise a rather more aggressive agenda.'

...It's clear that González Iñárritu, director of highly stylized films Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and now Babel, is making a play for auteur status. (A wide variety of directors have achieved such renown, from Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen to Luis Buñuel, Wong Kar-Wai, and Jean-Luc Godard.) Arriaga's response is, 'Wait one second—I've written all three of those movies. You can't have all the credit.' On the surface, this seems a reasonable request, but it gets to the essence of who, in fact, makes a film. Unlike a book written by one author, a film is worked on by a team of many people. Is only González Iñárritu's vision being communicated in these three films? Or is Arriaga's as well?"

At the end, Shafrir mentions an interesting book by David Kipen: The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, that has elicited quite a few rabid comments on Amazon.com.

As a bonus, here is a link to a few screenwriter cartoons.

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman on Eyes Wide Shut

An interesting interview with R. Lee Ermey, the prototypical Sgt. Slaughter, of Full Metal Jacket fame, the 62-year-old former jarhead, host of Discovery Channel's military documentary "Mail Call," originator of an infamous improvised quote about "goddamned common courtesy" that became a classic:

Did you and Kubrick become close while shooting Full Metal Jacket?
Very close. Stanley called me up all the time. He'd call at three o'clock in the morning and say, "Oh, it's 10 o'clock over here." [Laughs] "Yeah, well, it's three o-fucking-clock in the morning here, Stanley. Oh well." He called me about two weeks before he died, as a matter of fact. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him—exactly the words he used.

What did he mean?
He was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn't real forceful. That's why he didn't appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit.

Interesting. But, I don't think you should take any of his views on current foreign policy seriously.

Wait, Wait...What?

Ed Gonzalez at Slant Magazine states that:

Mulholland Drive, possibly the greatest work of American film art since Altman's Nashville, is an impossible act for Lynch to have to follow, but the bug-eyed director—pupils dilated and imagination tripping in almost inconceivable directions—has made the Atlas Shrugged of narrative avant-garde films, compulsively watchable and insanely self-devouring.

UPDATE: Steve Sailer attempts to break it all down for the casual viewer in a way that no other critic has been bold enough to do:

The basic structure of the film is promising, resembling the setup for a complicated Tom Stoppard play. Dern plays a classy Hollywood actress married to a jealous Polish millionaire. She lands a big role in a Southern Gothic film about adulterous lovers and the husband who will kill them if he finds out. Her leading man is a Colin Farrell-type star notorious for sleeping with all his leading ladies, especially the married ones. Not surprisingly, you soon can't tell whether the love scenes depict the characters in the film-within-a-film, or whether the stars are rehearsing a little too realistically in their spare time.

Considerately, Lynch has characters clue the audience in on what will happen, such as a sinister Polish hag who visits Dern in her LA mansion and tells her that her upcoming romance film is actually about murder, or maybe she just forgot, but who can remember, she asks, what comes before what, whether it's today, yesterday, or tomorrow?

The director (Jeremy Irons) reveals that the new movie is actually a remake of a Polish movie, based on a Polish Gypsy folktale, about adulterous lovers that was begun in the 1930s but never finished because the two stars were murdered, presumably by a jealous husband. And there's suppose to be a Gypsy curse on the whole proceedings.

Then, Dern somehow becomes, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, unstuck in time (or maybe she's just crazy) and is soon encountering scenes both from the unfinished Polish movie and from the private lives of the doomed Polish actors.

So far, so good. A half hour into the film, my hopes were high. But then … the story never develops any momentum. And it just goes on and on and on forever and a day. You know the last ten minutes of "2001," where the astronaut keeps walking into strange rooms, staring in puzzlement at different versions of himself? Well, multiply that by 18 and you'll grasp what this three-hour disaster is like: Laura Dern walking into scores of rooms and staring in horror at what she sees. But there isn't much that's all that horrible to look at, so the film doesn't even offer the amusements of a horror film. The soundtrack consists of endless minor key chords and thump-thump heartbeat-like percussion, which is pretty creepy for awhile, but gets old eventually.

Lynch himself seems to get bored with this, and keeps introducing characters that don't fit into his already overstuffed four-level structure. Dern re-emerges as a foul-mouthed skank who apparently lives in Pomona, in the "Inland Empire" east of LA, and is married to a man from Poland (which was an inland country, except for the controversial Danzig corridor, when the original movie was made between the wars -- see how the Pomona-Poland Inland Empire theme all fits together!), who runs off to join a Baltic circus to care for the animals. And then there are scenes from a Polish sitcom starring a stiffly dressed bourgeois family with the heads of rabbits, which I guess is tied into the recurrent theme of being good with animals, which also pops up in the ten minute monologue by a Chinese homeless lady sitting on the star-engraved sidewalk of Hollywood Blvd., who talks at vast length about her friend in Pomona who is retiring from turning tricks to stay home with her pet monkey.

This isn't as random as it sounds because every damn thing in the movie is foretold earlier. For example, in Dern's second incarnation, as the whore, she delivers a long monologue to a Hollywood private eye (who looks kind of like, rather improbably for a shamus, Matthew Yglesias) in which, in the course of talking about some guy she once knew, she mentions that he had a one-legged sister. About an hour later, as I was walking out early, about 170 minutes into this ordeal, up on the screen -- well, what do you know! -- there's suddenly a one-legged woman.

To be honest, I'm often a big admirer of films constructed in this manner. I imagine that if I sat through "Inland Empire" again, I could explain why, say, "Repo Man" is art while "Inland Empire" is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare / snoozeathon, but no way in hell am I going to subject myself to it another time.

Like Peter Jackson's interminable "King Kong," what's being debuted in the theatres is the three-hour Director's Cut. Hopefully, someday there will be a two-hour Editor's Cut of "Inland Empire."

David Lynch's Inland Empire

Inland Empire: Set in the inland valley outside of Los Angeles, David Lynch's new film is a mystery about a woman in trouble.

Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton, Justin Theroux, Julia Ormond...

"Laura Dern admitted that she was not sure what the film was about. 'My experience on this film was very unique to say the least, even after working with David for a long time,' she said.

'Each day was a different direction, each day was a different idea because we didn’t have a script we were following. The truth is, I didn’t know who I was playing — and I still don’t know. I’m looking forward to seeing the film to learn more.'”

"It appears that the film script has a Machiavellian life of its own. An increasingly hysterical Dern is pursued from one fraught scene to the next by a queue of assorted creeps."

"Lynch always resists attempts at interpretation; here, he defies any kind of narrative description as well. Two and a half years in the making, this is seat-of-the-pants filmmaking at its most baffling. There was never a complete script, so thesps turned up each day with a new set of lines and no idea where they were going, making Dern's central turn even more remarkable for its coherence."

"David Lynch's latest opus is a Russian doll of a film with stories inside stories inside stories. But coming in at three hours long, made in Poland and Hollywood, the digitally-shot film is inspired and incomprehensible by turns."

"It’s almost impossible to summarise the plot of a film that doesn’t really have one; by the end of the three hours, we have little to add to Lynch’s laconic press-book statement that INLAND EMPIRE is about 'a woman in love and in trouble.'"

"David Lynch took time out to defend his hallucinatory new picture at the Venice film festival yesterday, insisting that it makes 'perfect sense' - to him at least.

'It's supposed to make perfect sense,' he said. 'Every film is like going into a new world, going into the unknown. But you should be not afraid of using your intuition, and feel and think your way through.'"

A quick glimpse at his short flicks.

Hmmmmmm...

A First Look At 2007

Sure, it is a little early for the casual viewer, too late for the studio exec, but just about right for the cinephile.

Firstshowing.net gives you a taste of what to look forward to in 2007. They may be a little too enthusiastic for some tastes, but after all that is their job.

Here are a few highlights:

Next

Release Date: 2007
Director: Lee Tamahori
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore, Jessica Biel
Synopsis: A man who can see into his own future has to avoid capture by a government organization and win the love of a woman who will be the mother of his child.
The Hype: Another Philip K. Dick adaptation (also A Scanner Darkly) that looks to be an incredibly interesting film with Nicolas Cage as the star.

300

Release Date: March 16, 2007
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West, Vincent Regan
Synopsis: Based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel, “300″ concerns the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, where the King of Sparta led his army against the advancing Persians.
The Hype: Thanks to a special preview shown at Comic-Con, everyone is abuzz about just how intense and epic this ancient Spartan adventure will be, complete with comic-book stylized imagery.

American Gangster

Release Date: 2007
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington
Synopsis: A drug lord smuggles heroin into Harlem during the 1970s by hiding the stash inside the coffins of American soldiers returning from Vietnam.
The Hype: Russell Crowe is going to be fightin’ it up - this time as a gangster! No wait, he’s a detective, damn, our dreams haven’t come true… Either way, this movie, supposedly directed by the legendary Ridley Scott, may rattle some cages during 2007.

Beowulf

Release Date: November 16, 2007
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson
Synopsis: The Scandinavian warrior Beowulf must fight and defeat the monster Grendel who is terrorizing towns, and later, Grendel’s mother, who begins killing out of revenge.
The Hype: Zemeckis will bring this epic tale from ancient history to life; it’s been yearning for a film adaption for years.

There Will Be Blood

Release Date: 2007
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano
Synopsis: A story about family, greed, religion, and oil, centered around a turn-of-the-century Texas prospector in the early days of the business.
The Hype: An adaptation of a novel by Upton Sinclair and directed by the guy behind Boogie Nights and Magnolia comes this film about family, greed, religion, and oil. May be an epic drama worth its penny when it comes out next year.

Transformers

Release Date: July 4, 2007
Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight, Bernie Mac, Tyrese Gibson
Synopsis: Dueling alien races, the Autobots and the Decepticons, bring their battle to Earth, leaving the future of humankind hanging in the balance.
The Hype: Many of our childhood memories are brightened by the mention of Transformers. And it’s now come time for a live action Transformers movie that will spend nearly a year in CGI development to tweak and perfect the transformations and robot elements; on top of being directed by Michael Bay and being released on our nation’s day of celebration - July 4th. Another film that may top the list in 2007 - at least in the “totally badass” category.

Robert A. Heinlein "On Writing"

Robert A. Heinlein had five iron-clad rules for writing that translate well from the science fiction world into the world of screenwriting. Sci-fi writer, Robert J. Sawyer adds his own sixth rule to the mix that is a prerequisite.

"Heinlein used to say he had no qualms about giving away these rules, even though they explained how you could become his direct competitor, because he knew that almost no one would follow their advice."

"...if you start off with a hundred people who say they want to be writers, you lose half of the remaining total after each rule — fully half the people who hear each rule will fail to follow it."

Rule One: You Must Write

You can't just talk about wanting to be a writer. You can't simply take courses, or read up on the process of writing, or daydream about someday getting around to it. The only way to become a writer is to plant yourself in front of your keyboard and go to work.

Rule Two: Finish What Your Start

You cannot learn how to write without seeing a piece through to its conclusion...Once you have an overall draft, with a beginning, middle, and end, you'll be surprised at how easy it is to see what works and what doesn't. And you'll never master such things as plot, suspense, or character growth unless you actually construct an entire piece.

Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order

This is the one that got Heinlein in trouble with creative-writing teachers. Perhaps a more appropriate wording would have been, "Don't tinker endlessly with your story." You can spend forever modifying, revising, and polishing. There's an old saying that stories are never finished, only abandoned — learn to abandon yours.

Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market

Send your story out. You can live the fantasy that you're a "professional writer," but one day you'll have to see if that fantasy has any grounding in reality.

Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

Work gets rejected all the time... If the rejection note contains advice you think is good, revise the story and send it out again. If not, then simply turn the story around: pop it in the mail, sending it to another market.

Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else

As soon as you've finished one piece, start on another. Don't wait for the first story to come back from the editor you've submitted it to; get to work on your next project.

Of the original hundred wannabe writers, only one or two will follow all six rules.

The question is: will you be one of them?

Linklater: The Enigma

Richard Linklater: writer-director of Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

Richard Linklater: the director of The School of Rock, the remake of Bad News Bears, but who turned down directing a Harry Potter sequel.

Richard Linklater is an enigma and this Toronto Star interview does a good job of trying to get to the bottom of it all while discussing his new film, A Scanner Darkly, another adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel.

Here is an early Linklater interview by Alice Hicks of MovieMaker Magazine.

Here is a more academic look at Linklater's oeuvre via Senses of Cinema.

Quote of the Day

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscious and his sense of duty. - A. Chekhov

Kubrick's First Film Online

Day of the Fight is a 1951 short (16 minute) documentary based on an earlier photo feature Stanley Kubrick had done for Look (Prizefighter, published January 18, 1949), which featured Irish middleweight boxer Walter Cartier, during the height of his career.

Day Of The Fight shows a day in his life, in particular the day of his fight with black middleweight Bobby James, on April 17th, 1950. The film opens with a short section on boxing's history. We then follow Cartier through his day, as he prepares for the 10:00 P.M. bout. He eats breakfast, then goes to early mass and next eats lunch. At 4:00 P.M., he starts preparing for the fight, and by 8:00, he is waiting in his dressing room.

There he sets himself to become the fighter the occasion demands. We then see the fight itself, where he comes out victorious in a short match. (The fight features a noted knock-out scene, which was not filmed by Kubrick himself, as he was reloading a negative cartridge in his camera at the time of the blow.)

Although the original planned buyer of the picture went out of business, Kubrick was able to sell Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for the $4,000, making the small profit of $100 on his $3,900 cost to make it.

Filmbrain wonders "if the film had any influence on Scorsese and Raging Bull -- there are a few moments, particularly a through-the-stool-legs shot of the other fighter that seemed very familiar."

the mutiny company offers the film for your viewing pleasure here.

My thanks to GreenCine Daily for the pointer.

UPDATE: Stanley Kubrick's early short Flying Padre is available here. It is the story of "two days in the life of priest Father Fred Stadtmuller whose New Mexico parish is so large he can only spread goodness and light among his flock with the aid of a mono-plane."

The Movie I've Seen the Most

Spike Lee, Paul Schrader, Laura Ziskin, Peter Farrelly, Judd Apatow, Liev Shreiber, Kathleen Kennedy, Stacy Peralta, Paul Hirsch, Neil LaBute, among others, weigh in on their most-watched movie.

While I am not one prone to multiple viewings, I would have to say Joe Versus the Volcano is one that I will not change the channel when I come across it. Maria Full of Grace is another one I have seen quite a few times lately thanks to HBO.

Wings of Desire is the film I continue to enjoy over and over and over again. It is a masterpiece of modern filmmaking.

For movies on the movies, you can't go wrong with Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. On the other side of the spectrum, Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels is always worth another look.

Postscript: Of course, almost any Capra film is good for a second, third, or fourth viewing.

RomCom Writers Must Pay Attention

Cracked presents: The 7 Best 80's Movie Girlfriends.

Is Being Rich And Famous All It Is Cracked Up To Be?

Jacob Weisberg reports on The Death Styles of the Rich and Famous (via LewRockwell.com):

John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and wife's sister died when the single-engine plane Kennedy was piloting plunged into waters off Martha's Vineyard. Though the crash was apparently caused by spatial disorientation on the part of an inexperienced pilot, there was speculation that Kennedy might also have been impaired by a foot injury from an earlier paragliding accident. If true, that would make the tragedy doubly wealth-and-fame-related. Of course, the Kennedy family is in a risk category all its own. One wonders if the surviving members are insurable at all, given the family history of driving off bridges (Teddy), smashing into trees while playing football on skis (Michael), death by drugs (David, Christina Onassis), plane crashes (Joseph Jr., Kathleen, Alexander Onassis, and, very nearly, Teddy), and assassination (JFK and RFK). These are terrible fates, but ones that members of the struggling middle class do not have to worry much about.

If you survive paycheck-to-paycheck, you can also rest easy about dying while fleeing paparazzi (Princess Diana); at the hand of a servant jealous of your other servants (Edmund Safra); at the hand of the president of your fan club (Selena); at the hand of a lunatic stalker (John Lennon); at the hand of an impatient heir (the royal family of Nepal); from a face lift (Olivia Goldsmith); in your Porsche, while drag racing (basketball player Bobby Phills); in pursuit of a speed-boat record (Stefano Casiraghi, husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco); while diving off your yacht (Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys); after fighting with Christopher Walken (Natalie Wood); while trying to buzz Ozzy Osbourne's tour bus (Randy Rhoads); from injuries sustained in a cross-country riding event* (Christopher Reeve); in staged violence on a film set (Brandon Lee); as a former vice president, atop your mistress (Nelson Rockefeller); or of a disease that subsequently gets named after you (Lou Gehrig).

What happens if our culture's greatest reward of money and fame turn out to be not quite so rewarding?