The Worst Script I Ever Read

It had everything you want a bad script to have to be the kind of bad that at least entertains (since you have to read it either way). It was wonderful in its awfulness, and reading it, I could feel the universe opening in front of me with infinite possibilities for badness and goodness since, if someone could think of something this ridiculous, someone out there on the other end of the bad/good spectrum probably has the capacity to think of a peace bomb or a racism vaccine or something else wondrous.  Infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters.  One of them made Shakespeare’s plays and now one of them has made a screenplay with this logline:

Alien monsters (I won’t specify further since, though bad, this is nonetheless someone’s intellectual property, but picture something all big and overblown like you’re supposed to get in creature horror) invade a Nazi concentration camp and the prisoners and guards have to put aside their differences and fight the REAL enemy. 

You realize, of course, that this means that there are people out there who think there’s something scarier than the fucking holocaust.

 

“I can haz Obersturmbannführer?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another Oscar Season, Another White Guy Who Knows a Black Guy

As you may recall, I’m a woman.  If you saw the cover art on the latest Newsweek, you know that this means I’m mainly concerned with boobies and babies and shopping and, occasionally, V.P. and Prez (not Perez, but we girls like him, too!) candidates, so long as they have vaginas.  Amiright, ladies?  (God I wish I had some chocolate right now. For my PMS!!)  But, very occasionally, I also remember that I’m white.  Like when I see previews for surefire Oscar contender The Soloist and am reminded that I’m supposed to need stories of black people to be filtered through the perspective of a white outsider.  Because the alternative just isn’t white enough for me.

This happens in a few ways in movies.  Films like Cry Freedom and The Last King of Scotland are ostensibly about famous black men, yet the protagonists are actually white men who knew them or are created to know them within the film.  Films like Blood Diamond, The Constant Gardener and the abysmal Beyond Borders are all ostensibly about the problems of Africa and Africans, but to greater and lesser extent are really just white love stories set against a black backdrop.  And I’m not even really counting stories like The Green Mile, in which a magical, mystical or otherwise talented black person helps and is marveled at by the whites around them, because those movies deserve their own discussion. And when I googled “movies about magical black people” just now I found out that Spike Lee already started this discussion years ago and I’m way behind the curve in bringing it up now.

Anyway, back to the first two categories, where I have probably read an additional 30-40 scripts that fit the bill of black stories as filtered through white characters or a backdrop for white melodrama. Pretty much every major, non-white leader who is well-known in the United States has a biopic or two floating around. Mandela, Medgar Evers, you name it. And if my experience is at all representative, about 50% of these are told through the eyes of a white dude who knew the person of color, rather than the person him or herself.  Yeah, a lot of these films and scripts are still pretty good.  And yeah, a lot of the real people really did have important relationships with white people –in the case of The Soloist and a few others, that white person wrote the book on which the film is based, making it hard to leave them out.  And yeah, sometimes the outraged perspective of an outsider who has never been the victim of racism or other injustice is a great way to make the struggles of the black character hit home with a white audience.  Yeah. I get it. There are reasons for doing this other than just that the writers want to appeal to me as a (fellow) white person.

What I’m saying is that I don’t care.  No matter how many good reasons there might be for an individual film to be presented through white eyes, it still seems like the proportion of those films to films that are seen primarily through the eyes of the actual black person who is the film’s subject matter (Malcolm X, Ray or Ali, for example) is too high.  It makes me feel like the makers of these films don’t think I will go and see these films if there’s not a white guy up there to translate for me.  It makes me feel like I’m in the jury listening to the last big boy speech Matthew McConaughey ever made in a movie, at the end of A Time To Kill, where he tells me all about the terrible things done to my white daughter and then tells me to imagine that she’s black in order to drive home the point that raping little girls is wrong.  But here’s the problem with that: I’m not a southern, heretofore racist juror,   and while I wanted Samuel L. Jackson to be acquitted enough to believe that desperate times called for desperate, imagine-your-own-daughter-is-black, measures in that movie, outside of that movie, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the local news should only show me stories about black people’s problems if there’s a white person involved to convince me they matter.  Because they do matter. Shove those stories about just black people down my throat, please. If I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to read stories about black people, please don’t pander to me.  Because that just rewards my white narcissism and helps it hang on for another day.

I hear you saying “films are a  business…box office…bringing in big audiences,” but I don’t care.  I am pretty sure Nelson Mandela is of enough interest to all of us for his story to be told from his perspective, not from the perspectives of two separate white dudes who knew him in two separate scripts I have read.  And no matter how friendly Ali got with Howard Cosell, I’m still quite happy that his story wasn’t told by Cosell in the Michael Mann film.  In that movie and in Malcolm X and in Hotel Rwanda, I get to see black characters wake up in their beds, interact with their families and be real people, rather than the distant, different, usually doomed, christlike figures that I already knew them as before coming to the film. Because no matter how amazing someone like Steve Biko is depicted as being in a movie like Cry Freedom, if his amazingness is always held away from me through the white character in a “look how wonderful this white journalist is for actually setting foot in a black household” way, I’m not really watching Steve Biko’s story.  In other words, in these films the beholder is glorified as much as the beheld.

For all these reasons, the trailers for The Soloist make me cringe.  I see Robert Downey Jr. running around telling unbelieving people how he’s actually best friends with Jamie Foxx’s homeless music prodigy character and then going and *gasp* sitting with that character on an actual dirty street and it doesn’t uplift me.  Because I already think Robert Downey Jr. is wonderful.  I don’t need a friendship with a black person to form invisible jazz hands around his angelic face, highlighting this fact for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Look at me looking at this black guy who is extraordinary.  I look at black guys. Honest to God I do. I am the central figure in this story about a black guy who gets looked at.”

A Meditation on Lazy Writing with a SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER!

Consensus from last week’s blog about using voiceover, flashbacks and phonecalls seems to be that they should be used when they add something that maybe only they can add to the script not just out of laziness because it’s easier to have some voice tell the audience what’s happening than to show it.  Speaking of which, I recently re-watched one of the laziest movies ever…a little film called Legends of the Fall.  So that we might discuss it, I have asked one of the film’s protagonists, the Julia Ormond Character, to recap the plot in case, as it was for me, you haven’t seen it since you were in high school. Take it away, Julia Ormond Character.

 

Hi Guys!! Here goes: I love Henry “Eliot from E.T.” Thomas with a girlishness that comes of never having experienced true, stupid passion.  Now I am meeting his brother, Brad “Tristan Ludlow” Pitt. He is wild and untamed.  I know this because he has long hair.  He is also extremely romantic, passionate and sensitive. I know this because he has long hair.  Oh crap.  Henry Thomas is a naive hothead going to war.  I am so sad.  Hug me, Brad Pitt.  I need to be comforted. Oh god.  I am looking in your eyes and there is a fire burning next to us, so even though we’ve barely spoken two words to each other, obviously there is nothing we can do to keep from almost kissing…Fuuuuuuuck, man, your other brother caught us.  I did NOT see that coming.

 

Off you all go to war. I stay here thinking about Henry Thomas with my head and you with my areas.  Oh shit. Henry Thomas is dead now.  You go crazy with anger and scalp a lot of people in Germany because a wild beast roams your heart and you are untamed and they never made you cut your hair when you enlisted, so that’s still an issue. Now you are back and your older brother, Aidan “i represent the establishment/conformity/civilization in this movie” Quinn, wants to marry me but that’s out of the question, obviously, because he wants to live indoors, get a trim once in a while and be nice to me.  I mean, like, what a turd!!  Meanwhile, you weep for hours next to Henry Thomas’s grave because you are so sensitive that you will NEVER get over what happened to you.  Because it happened to you and your pain and trauma is more valid than anyone else’s, mostly because your hair is longer than anyone else’s.  The other million veterans who are not as deep or sensitive as you are and tried to move past their shell-shock are fucking pussies.  Let me hold you while you blubber like you’re the only one who ever has. Have premarital sex all over me until your hair gets all tangled in my hair.

 

Oh noes! You are still depressed? Sure I will wait for you for ten years while you become a sailor and kill exotic animals, have group sex with ladies of the orient (indicating empty, lonely sex, because that’s what Asian Women stand for, doi), and then cut some hearts out of some shit and rub the hearts on your face and weep while I sit in your dad’s house gathering dust on my vagina. See? I totally, like, get you.  Because of all the long talks we’ve had?  Not so much.  We don’t really say much to each other.  It’s more the hair (see above) and the face and the fact that you won’t ever talk to me about anything (you’re so complicated) and wake up from your nightmares with a knife to my throat (hott!!1!).  Would you like me to send you anything? My youth and vitality? A rubber band to tie your hair back? No? Really? You just like to let it hang free while you hunt and hump and tie bowline knots and it doesn’t get in your way? Mine totally does and all I do is sit around crying and looking pathetic and wondering what kind of accent your father, Anthony “not really from Montana” Hopkins, is doing.  It changes, like, daily.

 

Wait, what now?  You don’t want to stop fucking and hunting and come back and marry me? Ok. I said I would wait forever but I guess I will go and marry your brother (who has been waiting for me for like eight years because there are NO OTHER WOMEN in Montana –it’s like some last man, post-apocalypse movie up in here) and live in a big house with servants. It’s not like it’s is a fate worse than death, right?  Oh, you’re back now and you have learned to tie your hair back in a ponytail (indicating demons conquered yet sensitivity intact)?  I guess it is a fate worse than death. I’m going to blow my brains out to give you some fresh shit to cry about.

Cecilia here. I forgot Julia Ormond Character is not around for end of this film. Here’s an epilogue: Brad Pitt lives almost forever with his long hair and his ability get to the truth of a scene thanks to Stella Adler and a belief that he’s actually Marlon Brando. But then a bear kills him, which he apparently thinks is an awesome end to an awesome life of taking shit too seriously. An old Native American Guy who should have way better stuff to remember, like what happened to all the other Native American Guys, saves all his letters and talks about him all day every day around his campfire to no one in particular. I guess he just likes to run his mouth. The End.

Still can’t believe this is the film that made women weep from their vaginas for like six hours.  My friend wanted to name her teenage pregnancy after Tristan “Brad Pitt” Ludlow, never realizing that Fabio from the cover of a romance novel is still Fabio no matter how much dramatic music James Horner puts behind him.  When wardrobe and music stand in for actually showing something interesting and original or even a coherent explanation of why people are doing what they’re doing, that’s lazy. When hair=character, that’s lazy.  When sex in Asia is a signifier for meaninglessness in the 1990’s, 50 years after it should be? LAY-ZEEE! Oh, and there’s a lazy voiceover, too. Fuck this movie.  That’s right, I’m saying it.  13 years after anyone cares.

 

 

 

“Leave me alone. I am writing you a letter about all of the brooding i have been doing. Why yes, I do use Pantene.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Awesome Script I’m Reading/A Question to You, Rudy-

OMG, you guys! I’m reading the best screenplay right now. It started out where this old guy hired a young woman as his right hand lady in an all-male company, thinking it would show him to be the maverick he claimed to be rather than a capricious old coot. And then almost immediately after he hires her, she’s all, “oh crap. I forgot to tell you some stuff,” and proceeds to unload on him in the middle of the board of director’s meeting that she’s got all this family scandal following her around. And then it comes out in the papers that she’s even more of a lifetime movie than she’s admitted to him and may have faked a pregnancy to protect previously mentioned teen daughter and that she is crazy backwoods scandal lightning rod, with a bunch of investigation pending. And the guy who hired her is like “holyfuckingshit!” and totes doesn’t know what to do. I can’t wait to see what happens next in this movie!

Oh wait, i guess it’s not a screenplay. It’s the New York Times on the GOP’s first woman V.P. I sure am glad the woman who is making history for them is going to be mainly discussed in terms of what is happening in her vagina/her Gossip Girl-like personal life. Because that’s what we ladies are all about! I hope she takes time in her speech on Wednesday to talk about shipping and her period. Who’s with me, girls?? Let’s go get some cosmos and watch!

End off-the-cuff, short blog part one. Begin part 2.

I’m swamped with scripts and other projects, so no eight page blogs that take 7.5 pages to get to the point today. Sorry. I know you were looking forward to that. But I did have a question that I want to consider for next week and I was hoping for some input:

A friend asked me to read his script, which used a little voice over in the first few scenes. He wanted to know if it was obnoxious or not. I was told in screenwriting class back in college that it is a sin to use voice over, flashbacks, or phone conversations unless it’s absolutely necessary. Because the first one can seem pretentious, the second one stops the forward momentum of the script, and the third one is pretty static and dull to look at. Additionally, all three are kind of lazy. Yet all three have been used to great effect in lots of movies. I would hate it if there were no voiceover in Raising Arizona, for example. And i notice i’ve become less aware of these elements in scripts i read and movies i see lately, because they’re so often used and I kind of enjoy a little hand-holding to tell me EXACTLY what is going on. Because I’m kind of lazy, apparently.

Thoughts? Are these rules too stuffy or rigid? Do these elements bother you when you see them? Under what circumstances should they be used?

Any discussion welcome. Or else I will just form my opinion and write 8 pages on it next week.