Proposal for a Script I’d Like to Cover Someday

If you haven’t been following actor Justin Theroux’s bourgeoning screenwriting career, he co-wrote Tropic Thunder and recently signed up to write the Iron Man sequel. While this is good news for Justin Theroux, I think it’s even better news for screenwriters. Because, like, have you guys seen Justin Theroux? He is attractive! He is the hottest John Hancock EVAR. And he can beat up dudes and chicks alike (In movies. Just dudes in real life I bet).

Where am I going with this? Why do I claim that this actor guy taking screenwriting jobs could help other screenwriters? Because I smell an opportunity…to re-brand.

See, if there’s anyone who needs a rewrite, it’s screenwriters. Think about how they’re portrayed in movies and TV. Even the famous, great ones. Barton Fink, Joe Gillis, David Kahane from The Player, whoever Phillip Seymore Hoffman was playing in State and Main, Charlie Kaufman as written by himself –all neurotic wrecks and, with the exception of the ones who go crazy with pent-up, neurotic rage and only wind up hurting themselves, all flaming nerds with no ability to rumble when rumbling’s what’s called for. If the director character is the go-to infant terrible of movies about moviemaking, then the screenwriter is the designated schmuck. And these character traits have been repeated over and over, filtering down through all sorts of media representations, from CSI episodes to TV commercials. I bet there’s even a porn out there with the film-within-a-film gimmick, in which the writer character is a bitter geek even while getting his geek-pole geeked on by “hot” porn chicks.

This isn’t surprising when you realize that being a screenwriter on a film that gets made is stressful in much the same way as might be sitting in coach on a flight to an important meeting in New York and being told after take-off that the flight is really going to Texas because someone in first class had a hankering for some ribs. It could definitely turn an intelligent, sensitive person bitter and/or nuts. But, come on! Not all screenwriters are the same. I have met many of them who don’t even mutter under their breath about how much smarter they are than everyone.  Who aren’t even cloying sell-outs. Who like to get crazy in the fun, party sense. Here’s where The Roux comes in. He can expose the true face of screenwriting. The one Hollywood is afraid to show. Picture this in the coming attractions of a theatre near you:

 

Justin Theroux is Screenwriter-Man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That or “Justin Theroux is The Screenwriter.” I can’t decide. Either way, if he did this movie, playing a fictionalized-yet-largely-factual version of himself (maybe written by someone else so that it wouldn’t all be dismissed as boasting), he could explode the following myths about why screenwriting is boring and screenwriters are bitter:

Myth 1: All screenwriters are nerds – Could a nerd punch you in your stupid face, jerk?

Myth 2: Screenwriters do all their work at a desk by themselves. BO-RING! -Screenwriter man can write anywhere, like on the back of his Harley, fingers moving with lightning speed (secret power) over the iPhone strapped in his forearm cuff.

Myth 3: Screenwriters are neurotic – Have you seen this guy? Relaxed as fuck…that is until a screenwriting nemesis –Devo Disaster, perhaps, or The Greenlighter, responsible for such terrors as Beverly Hills Chihuahua— menaces Los Angeles. Then he has to drink champagne so he can bust down walls! (SUPER power)

Myth 4: Screenwriters have no control over their work once production starts – Um, control-S? The keyboard command that readies screenwriter man’s jet plane for action so that he can fly to the set and speak to the producer in calm-yet-assertive whisper next to the craft service table? HAIR RAISING LEVELS OF CONTROL!

Myth 5: all screenwriters are brunettes, wear glasses, and are or at least seem Jewish –
Umm, hello? Screenwriter man’s hair is BLUE! And he’s a Zen Buddhist…TO THE MAX. And his glasses are only to help him see in the dark. So that he can write after bedtime! (ok, so he is half jewish on his father’s side. DEAL WITH IT).

(Myth 6, that all screenwriters are men will be dealt with in the spinoff film series… Screenwriter-girl: High Heels, High Residuals)

That’s my pitch. I leave it up to some courageous, truth-telling writer out there to write it, and Justin Theroux to play it so that I can cover it and it can get made, thus liberating screenwriters everywhere from the chains of their oppression…which, I guess I should mention, they’ve chained on themselves by writing these characters. Which is messed up. Screenwriters, right? They are so neurotic!!!!1!

Oh and hey, my friend Mike, who is not unlike Screenwriter-man in both build and excitingness, has a company with the same name as my blog. Check it out. He’s not me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a LADY.

Plugging Me, Plugging You

I know everyone is probably still pissy about my The Rottie and The Latte confession of the other day, which was kind of the point…to provoke and self-deprecate in case it seemed like i was judging without allowing myself be judged.  (There were mitigating circumstances with that script, of course, but Imma resist the urge to make excuses that keeps welling up in me since the movie stinks so hard).

Anyway, new blog of my own next week, but today I wanted to post links to two things that were either direct or indirect fruit of this blog in case you hadn’t seen ‘em:

One was the awesome Aliens/Predator synopsis generator that this reader created. I think it is RAD! Thank you, A. Writer of Beercan Films.  (incidentally, if you want to look at my original post you may want to access through this link. this website is only allowing me to keep 6 or so blogs visible on my page at a time so that one’s now only findable with a google search, i think).

The second cool thing is this dispatch from the I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell set.  I especially like the passage about the cast and crew being so good in spite of the material and writer’s behavior, because I often hear people on websites about films and TV saying “how could someone work on X show or Y movie? It’s TERRIBLE.” Even bad movies take a shit-ton of talent to get made, and, unlike me, not everyone’s job is to give their opinion about the script. Most sets that I’ve been on have been pretty cool places to work, with cool people trying to do a good job on whatever part of the production they’re responsible for, regardless of what’s being shot. It’s nice to see that it shows through to a self-described outsider, even on this movie that i may have insinuated is being produced for idiots to consume.

I also like the part of the article where the guy talks about what a dick Tucker is, but why beat a dead horse when that’s already Gawker’s jam.

 

p.s. I watched Predator again (again) the other night and I still find the most disturbing thing in that movie to be the fact that Mac dry-shaves his face with a razor when he goes crazy after his best friend gets predatized.  Fucking OUCH, man.

 

Blog of Shame: Meditations on a Lapse in Judgment

Reading so much about John Edwards in recent weeks has made me realize that he and I have some things in common. For one, we both have awesome hair – I don’t think saying this will compromise either my anonymity or the ability of my detractors to imagine me as an ugly cat-owner…one can be ugly and have long, flowing locks, after all. For another, John Edwards and I both have a secret that threatens to destroy us. His secret was an affair with a woman. Mine is an affair with bad taste in the form of a script I recommended, the revelation of which I fear will shake the foundations of our tenuous, weeks-old blog-lationship.

That’s right, internet. Contrary to the impression I’ve tried to give you in previous blogs, my roses really smell like boo-boo-boo. I have endorsed a total piece of shit and I’ve been very, very wrong in terms of both box office and critical response. And I’m a little freaked out now that I’m sitting down to write this blog, in which I was planning to reveal my deepest shame to you and hope that afterward you’d turn to me like the boss in the end of any movie about young adults in the business world and say “Cecilia, I should fire you but your honesty makes me think you’re an envelope-pushing, straight shooter and I’m going to give you a promotion instead.” Sorry, dear readers of my reader blog, but I don’t trust you to be such total pushovers, so I’m having a hard time pulling the trigger on my confession.

To be honest, seeing the finished version of a script I’ve read is almost always a disappointment. If I liked something in script form (for example, the upcoming, very nutty Hamlet 2), it’s rare that what I see onscreen meets expectations that have been created by my imagination while reading. And if I don’t like something (as was the case with the recently released Swing Vote), well, I already know I don’t like it, plus what’s going to happen, so seeing it feels like watching an old, tired Saved by the Bell rerun (sorry, Everyone Else In My Generation, but I can’t even enjoy that show ironically, though various of you have made me watch practically every episode).

What’s weird is that I’m sure I’ve read fewer of the movies that get made than anyone who works at any agency, or is a successful actor, producer, director, etc. Because I read a sampling of EVERYTHING that anyone even thinks of making and they’re often just reading what’s very likely to get made. So I don’t know if I’m just peculiar and everyone else loves watching movies that they’ve read first, or if people in this business—most of whom got into it because they loved movies—are sacrificing their enjoyment of watching many of the movies that come out in exchange for getting to work on a select few. It’s a good question. I’ll have to ask around.

Stall, stall, stall. Back to that script got a “weak consider” recommendation from me, then got made, then sucked.

It would be some consolation if the script in question had made money. Though I generally base recommendations on the material itself, with secondary consideration given to what kind of business I think a script could do, occasionally there’s stuff out there that I don’t think is very good but do think could work and be profitable within its genre, and that I recommend for those reasons alone. For example, I gave a similar recommendation (weak consider) to the remake of Porky’s, which people may find hard to believe since, in comments on my Tucker Max post, it seemed to be assumed that I would have passed on that script if I passed on Tucker’s. But Porky’s was pre-sold on a few levels and on a larger scale (built-in audience due to Howard Stern’s involvement, plus fans of/nostalgia for the original Porky’s and its sequels). And it had some semblance of structure on which to hang its jokes, which I deemed a little stale, but also raunchy and plentiful enough to satisfy a teen audience. Also, Porky’s was far, far less mean-spirited than that other script and therefore more appealing to a larger cross-section of the population. So I thought it might turn a nice profit and, even though I’d like more teen comedies to be like Superbad, I stand by that recommendation as serving my company, if not my own tastes. Not so in the case of My Terrible Secret, the filmed version of which seems to be both unappealing and unprofitable on a major level.

Possible explanations I have come up with for the undue consideration that I recommended be given this script:

1.) I’m a terrible person who is ruining movies because reading scripts ruins moviegoing for me.

2.) I was in a loopy mood or had just had something happen to me that made something resonate with me.

3.) My boss was pretty into it and I was unduly influenced by him.

4.) I have genuinely bad taste and all of my other coverage should get thrown out like they do with the convictions of a D.A. who is caught cheating on one case.

But who really who cares why? I should be revealing what and instead I’m still stalling. I know, how about I do it in quiz form? Here are some very hard clues that, if you’re very clever, will yield up the name of the movie.

1.) One of the people in this film was also one of the people who has accidentally flashed her vagina in the last few years while going to a fancy nightclub.

2.) The film somehow doesn’t star a female reporter writing a magazine story, but should, based on its genre.

3.) Title rhymes with that of the late-New Wave, Francois Truffaut masterpiece about a large dog and caffeine-induced malaise: The Rottie and the Latte.

I bet you fools are stumped!

(don’t hate me. it was 6 years ago. i was young and stupid.)

Amazing Plan to Revolutionize our Industry and Save Movies!

Psych! Totally used hyperbole to draw you in just now! This plan is mediocre at best!

I’ve been following news about the City Council moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South L.A., which sought to limit fast food options and encourage residents toward food that was better for them. I don’t know that I agree with this policy unless some healthy, affordable fare is going to be offered in place of the stifled Carl’s Jr.’s, but I do think that forcing people to consider new options by limiting their most convenient, existing ones is an intriguing –though admittedly anti-capitalist- notion. And possibly a film industry-applicable one, since I have noticed a few things that pop up really frequently in scripts that aren’t necessarily bad, but that at this late stage in the development of movie storytelling, are basically the filmic equivalent of the MacDonald’s Dollar Menu: easy, convenient, even cheap ways out.

I’m wondering, if we disallowed certain of these screenwriting Dollar Menu items for a year or two, whether other, fresher ideas might rise up and present themselves –like in crop rotation when you switch one crop for another in order to refresh the soil’s nutrients. Might be worth a try. Might even make those worn-out items seem fresh again a few years later. Possible places to start:

1) Main Characters Named Jack: I’m not the first to remark on this by any means, but from Lost to 24 to Tom Clancy movies to every script I seem to read these days, it is f-ing New Jack City out there. I know and love a lot of these fictional Jacks but personally know zero actual people named Jack, indicating the name may be taking up disproportionate fictional space and a Jack off-period might be a good thing (<– I didn’t just say what you think I said). Besides, too many Jacks kind of dilute the power of Jack, don’t they? All Jack and no Not Jack makes Jack a Dull Boy, Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that.

My Suggestion for an Interim Replacement: Well, how about Fred? I have met many dashing, handsome Freds in my lifetime who would gladly throw their coat over a puddle or punch a terrorist right in his or her face. Yet where are the swashbuckling, Handsome Fred Sparrows stealing pirate ships or the dreamy, dashing Fred Dawsons making out with Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic? They don’t exist. Because Jack does.

Or maybe Hal? Highly Jack-like in it’s playfully shortened, King of England nameishness, yet highly underused except as name of homicidal computers. Or Perhaps Harpo? Or Bullwinkle? Those names are silly, you say? Well maybe that’s because the Harpos and the Bullwinkles of this world have been locked in silly boxes because Jack, that testosterone-pumping a-hole, is always stealing the spotlight, booking all the gigs and killing their dreams. Jack, man. Who does that guy think he is?

2) Romantic Comedy Characters Who Work at Magazines: Ohma Goodness. So many. In fact, this character job/plot device is practically the only thing anymore that brings two opposites together and then forces them apart and then brings them back together again, usually in front of a whole cheering baseball field or governor’s ball, thus sanctioning the reconciliation.

My Suggestion for an Interim Replacement: Forestry rangers who are just romancing each other because they want a different kind of trees to get planted on each other’s part of the forest due to their competing, wiz kid theories of soil erosion. They get swept away by their passion, so that when the one forestry ranger finds out about the play the other one has made for *gasp* white pine instead of balsam, their seemingly evergreen love goes all deciduous-in-fall—that is until the one forester begs the other forester’s forgiveness at the big forester’s convention in front of all 8 other foresters in their field. What’s the soil erosion theorem for ADORABLE? I think we just found it.

3) The Minority Couple On the Trip That Turns Horrifying: Horror 101 says that when you are going to isolate people to be terrorized, you should isolate a group of them so that you can kill a few off as you go, and one way to isolate a group is to have them all be on some sort of trip or vacation together and get stuck in a house, a wooded area, or, most spine-chillingly, a foreign country. Lately when this happens in scripts and movies I see, it seems like there’s always a minority couple mixed in with three lily-white couples. It also seems like this black or Latino couple is always put in charge of (a) all the attitudinal “diversity” for the entire story in the form of the foxy latinoness or sassy blackness forced into their every interaction, and (b) getting killed first and oftentimes humorously (this is where your “¡Ay, dios mio!” or your “Aw HELL naw” comes in), which doesn’t seem at all fair.

My Suggestion for Interim Replacement: Actually, I could do without this completely and forever and just see people of color be treated like everyone else in horror films (equal opportunity evisceration), sometimes dying first and sometimes dying last and not having to say “aw HELL” anything unless they’re actually being played by Will Smith, whose contract stipulates that this dialog be included in all his film appearances.

But it might also be interesting to see different nationalities get in there and take the places of the go-to races. And so I nominate a Swedish couple or a Finnish couple to be killer fodder since, (a) Scandinavians can drink like fish and as such would help with important group cohesion in act one and (b) as our popular representations of these peoples clearly demonstrate, they are unflaggingly funny and colorful. Come to think of it, we should probably just simplify further and cast the Muppets’ Swedish Chef in all of these roles. He would be colorful, hilarious and very easy to kill. Picture it: “Ev HELL Nev, Dun’t Keell Me-aBork Bork!!” Magical.

4) Hip Grannies: By this I mean scripts where someone’s Nana raps or says stuff like “strap-on” all the time. These grannies can be funny, I think. In theory. But I don’t know they can be funny in practice because I now expect nearly every grandmother I run into in a comedy to be going to spin classes and playing her G-Love and the Special Sauce album and it all just washes over me so that I can’t distinguish between funny hip grannies and unfunny hip grannies enough to decide if there really is a difference. But after a break, who knows?

My Suggestion for Interim Replacement: Intergenerational interaction that’s funny even if the olds in question don’t watch The Shield. My friend’s grandfather didn’t know who Perez Hilton was, but he used to take out his dentures and make them into a hand puppet that said “hello!” in a low, gravelly voice – a bit that, to my mind, would play in any room. My own grandfather, though actually hip in many ways, will still, when left to his own devices, eat sardines and buttermilk all afternoon while yelling “how about that, sports fans?” at the golf game on the TV, all of which even he would agree is pretty funny old guy business.

5) Emile Hirsch (aka The Man of Zero Faces): I don’t really have a leg to stand on with this one. He’s not attached to all that many scripts or in that many movies, so I guess it’s personal. Okay, I know it’s personal. Sorry Emile Hirsch, but I don’t want to watch or imagine you in any more movies. I find your acting to be undetectable to the naked eye and am slightly suspicious that you are actually not a live, human being at all, but a Real Doll who keeps getting cast in movies I’d otherwise be excited to see.

My Suggestion for Interim Replacement: Oh, Anyone else, really. I would even settle for a slightly more lifelike model of Real Doll. Change that shiz up, film industry!

Voila, le plan. You’re welcome, Hollywood.

Fear and Loathing in My Pants: Freudian Stab (pun intended!) at Screenwriting Trends

Hello fellows.  No need today to directly discuss the douchebag who launched a thousand comments, but skimming some of the discussion this morning got me to thinking about male anxiety in general. I don’t know why. (SARCASM, check it!) In the related piece that I found most interesting from an industry perspective David S. Cohen, from Variety, discussed the impulse on the part of some screenwriters to craft in-jokey descriptions within their scripts in an attempt to impress their readers rather than convey what’s on the screen. Judging from the scripts I’ve been reading (which is in no way scientific) this kind of writing has increased in frequency in recent years, and so I guess I’d call it a trend.  That put me in mind of some patterns I’ve noticed in scripts that point, in similar fashion, to male anxiety as a possible screenwriting trend all its own.

Note: Almost everything I read, bad or good, betrays none of the anxiety I’m gonna describe, so I’m not ripping on all screenwriters.  I’m also not saying that the screenplays that display this particular trend are not good.  Some of them aren’t, but some of every kind of screenplay aren’t good, or every movie would be Some Like It Hot or Larry Arabia and I’d live in the Arclight Hollywood.  So this isn’t really a judgement or pronouncement of quality.  All I’m interested in here is what these patterns say and whether I can draw any conclusions from them.

What do I mean by male anxiety?  Just a certain feeling I get when I read a script that treats women or the feminine in a way that makes my ovaries sit up and say “whaaa?”, where said treatment seems to stem from some sort of fear or anxiety about either how to write about women, or perhaps about women’s place in contemporary movie making (i.e. as the people developing, producing and greenlighting scripts).  If, like me, you’re into Hitchcock, you may have heard about the male gaze (and I don’t mean Kathy Griffin’s fanbase/the majority of Project Runway contestants) that has characterized how a lot of American cinema depicted women for a long time: as the object of male desires and the subject of the male look.  And hey, there’s nothing I like better than watching Cary Grant watch Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, so I’m not complaining.  But I do think things are changing in terms of what’s on film and who’s making film and I think that’s reflected in screenplays.  So to give you some idea of what I mean, what follows are 3 mini-“trends” that I’ve seen in scripts read in the last few years that seem male-anxious to me.  I will list the number of scripts I’ve seen it in, starting with the most frequent trend so that you can judge for yourself whether it means anything.

1.)    The Stab-hump (seen in at least 20 recent scripts I’ve been handed recently).  This is an oldie but a goodie that I’m kind of throwing in to give you an idea of what we’re talking about.  You may have seen it in some slasher films in the last few decades: A lady gets naked and then bumps into the movie’s killer, who stabs her in the stomach or chest, often causing her body to move in a way that, if you came into the scene midway and didn’t know what was going on, would look like the couple was doing something else.  I’ve been seeing it more since Hostel (Or is it Hostile?  I always forget which one it is…) came out.  Sometimes when I read these scenes they make me feel like the writer was turned-on while writing them, which creeps me out.  What do stab-humps mean? A little anger?  A little release of anxiety?  Not sure but it doesn’t seem like unadulterated woman love to me.  So, there you go, Male Anxiety.

2.)    Mr. Lady (have seen this15-20 scripts, many of which were in the last year).  This is a personal favorite that I love/hate and that I would interpret as a ham-fisted response to the demand for better women’s roles and a sense of equality on the screen.  To prove that a woman can be man’s equal in these scripts, the writers seem to basically just write a male character (toughest, cigar-smokingest, refer-to-his-dickiest guy around) and then slap a pair of boobs on him, stick him in some six inch stilettos and say he’s the prettiest chick on the force.  I think there have been some great, tough female characters in films in the last 10-20 years, from Sarah Connor to J-Lo’s character in Out of Sight to a number of female detectives on TV now, and it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what those characters’ writers are doing that the creators of Mr. Lady aren’t, other than that those women, no matter how tough, always seem to bring something of their sex to the character.  The way Mr. Lady is described physically is also a big clue that she’s a Mr. Lady and not Ms. Lady, the nuanced, 21st century character we’ve all been waiting for, since Mr. Lady’s cup size and other physical attributes are lovingly detailed (“supermodel looks,” “pillowey, blowjob lips”) while her dialog reads like a send-up of macho, male characters in other films and stories.  In other words, Mr. Lady, is basically David Caruso’s character in CSI Miami…only with the nicest rack west of the Missisissipi.  Dr. Frued says?  Heck, I don’t know. Maybe these writers are trying to do right by women and clumsily adapting the GI Jane model. Or maybe the homoeroticism in all those old buddy movies is materializing. All I really know is that when I see a character like this in a script, I instantly recognize her and giggle “It’s Mr. Lady!”  When I’m reading scripts at the gym, this can be awkward. Mike Tyson used be a member and I’m glad I never ran into a Mr. Lady when he was working out on the bikes in front of me.  Anyway, Mr. Lady is always fun in the manner of those creeky, laughable, reefer smoking beatnik characters that popped up in 60s studio films in an attempt to speak to the youth audience before they figured out they should just hire Dennis Hopper to do it for them.

3.)    The Vag Monster (a mere 4 scripts, but crossing my fingers for more).  Least common but my absolute favorite. It’s when a monster or an alien in a horror or sci-fi movie is described in an attempt to inspire terror in the reader, as having a mouth or even a whole body that is scarily “vaginal,” “vagina-like” or even “clitoral.”  As you may recall, I am not religious but I swear to Total Recall, these scripts exist.  Slimy mollusks with gaping, ladypart maws, emerge from sewers and holes and space ships in these scripts to devour horrified humans.  And 3 out of 4 were submitted by agencies and production companies, not Beercan Films.  Dr. Freud says?  Well, I don’t know. If you read my blog on Aliens and Predator  you know that I think a lot of this stuff can be traced to those films. But I also have to think that, if this is the scariest thing some writer can think of, said writer is maybe just a little scared of vaginas, which if I remember correctly, are pretty harmless. So I call male anxiety here.

Listen, don’t get me wrong, I love men.  I cherish men. Men are beautiful.  But, if you’re familiar with a little automotive innovation known as The Hummer, you know that like women, some men can sometimes be silly.  And when I get a vag-monster or a Mr. Lady, I think, “man, that’s silly.” And then I wonder if it means something.  Like that maybe women really are getting to a place in society in general and in our industry in specific where it’s not just possible-yet-rare for them to reach positions of great power and authority, but where they’re fucking nailing that shit to the wall like it’s Carter Burke.  My dissertation is on women in the studio era, and I’ve interviewed many women in the industry today who have reached positions of great power, but who have felt that their sex was always there as something they’re seen as becoming successful either in spite of or because of, with “woman” as the headline in their story and the lead of “good at job” lost below the fold.  I don’t think that this is a big male conspiracy or even necessarily anything conscious on anyone’s part.  And I think that most people in Hollywood, male and female, are generally interested in fairness and progress.  Still, the repeated occurrence of these screenplay elements that seem to telegraph male anxiety, mixed with other recent events, make me think that, yes, their sex is always there, and that women aren’t the only ones who have noticed.

Or maybe clitorii are really more frightening than I think.  Thoughts? Where my man-eating vagina-having girls at?