the word player 2.0

This past weekend, a friend said "So, I see you don't post very often on the blog anymore."

This is true. I feel like I'm lacking enough subject matter to post with any regularity, and waiting for inspiration to strike only provides me with sporadic bits and pieces to chew on.

"Inspiration is for amateurs," someone once said about writing. I agree to the extent that you can't rely on it on a day-to-day basis. It is, however, invaluable in creating a keystone around which other pieces of the puzzle can coalesce.

I can't bring myself to write movie or record or book reviews due to the sheer glut of material already out there on the subject. Besides, I want to continue progressing as a professional writer, and the paid critic is a dying breed.

When I started this blog, more than anything it was a new channel for me to funnel and explore my creative impulses after hanging up my screenwriting boots. For over five years straight I'd been constantly working on one script or another, often taking more than a year to "complete" one. I really, really enjoyed the immediacy of completing something short and sweet in one sitting. Blogging not only flexed new writing muscles, but I quickly discovered that it kept me limber in other valuable areas as well.

After a year or so, however, I got the feeling that I was writing only for myself and a small handful of friends. If you'll permit me to speak frankly, I'm at a stage in my writing development where I need to either be writing for an audience or writing for money. Writing for neither is simply unsatisfying (sorry amigos), and gives me the unshakable sensation that my time would be better spent elsewhere.



So here's the crossroads where I find myself today, the fifth Wednesday of 2009. In the four years I've been seriously pursuing copywriting, it has become the first career path in my life where I can genuinely see an intersection of ability, confidence, earning potential and job satisfaction. I love doing the work, I just can't seem to find enough of it on a consistent basis. In the last 10 days, I've had three jobs that I thought were in the bag fall through. Two of them were because the client decided to call in favors with friends of theirs who are writers and try to get the work done for free.

I can't compete with free.

I am promoting myself as a copywriter as best I can using other more traditional channels, but as of this morning (hell, as of this hour) I am determined to exploit this forum more vigorously and inventively. I need to draw more attention to myself in order to reach the pivotal demographic of people who have money to pay writers to write. This is not an easy pill for a mellow introvert to swallow, but them's the breaks.

Now, I realize that blogging about the internal workings of my mind (what I've essentially been doing since the end of the "Bend Me, Shape Me" series) is never going to draw a crowd (and is probably boring as shit to most of you). I also know that I have now reached the end of this post without inspiration striking me with a swell solution to my dilemma (damn).

So, over the next week or two I will brainstorm here "live" for an hour every day I can. I'll see if I can come up with a new central conceit for this blog that will not only engage me creatively, but also have a realistic chance to draw a much larger audience to the site than the one I currently enjoy (an average of 45 page visits/64 page views per day).

I encourage you to chime in. If you've never been here before, a quick glance at the Labels running down the right-hand side should give you an idea of what sort of subject matter I respond to historically.

I market myself as a concept-driven copywriter, so I should damn well be able to come up with a marketable concept for myself.

Right?

We'll see what the process creates. Lacking inspiration (so far), it's time to turn to perspiration.

Broadway Joe and His Super Biopic

OK, imagine Jake "Donnie Darko" Gyllenhall re-enacting this memorable scene from December, 2003...

That's right, the feature film version of "Broadway" Joe Namath's life will be coming soonish to a theater near you starring Jake Gyllenhaal. As I read the news today on ESPN.com, I started thinking about the two Joe Namath scripts I read for work a few years back, both titled "Broadway Joe." Neither one really made a convincing case that Joe's life was worthy of a made-for-cable movie then, and I'm even less convinced that his story is compelling enough for the big screen today.

Let's look at the numbers:

On the plus side, he was QB for Alabama's 1964 National Championship team, as well as the only QB ever to lead the New York Jets to a title, winning Super Bowl III in 1968. He was very, very famous sex symbol and sports hero then, and is still a household name today.

On the minus side, his career numbers fall between ordinary and below average. His career Quarterback Rating is an eye-poppingly bad 65.5 (good for #131 on the list of the 148 QBs with at least 1500 Pass Attempts). His touchdown to interception ratio is 173-220. Although he is in the Hall of Fame, his career passing yardage of 27,663 ranks 43rd all time, just 61 yards ahead of Jeff George.

George led the league in MR (Mullet Rating) for six consecutive years

I guess you can throw those numbers out for two reasons:

1. He played in NYC
2. He had star power.

But is that enough to get moviegoers under 40, who weren't even born when his star burned the brightest, to pay $11 to see his story? If the movie takes the clichéd "celebrity is bad for your health" tack, my prediction is no.

sadly, this was a Dewars ad

I dug in my archives to see what I'd thought of the two other Namath scripts (I would instantly forget what I wrote when I was writing coverage for a living). I'll spare you the plot summaries and redact the names of the guilty (though I can tell you that neither were hired to write the Gyllenhaal film) while pasting in the coverage sections of both.

"Broadway Joe" by XXXX, written 2005

Joe Namath is indeed still famous, but XXXX’s BROADWAY JOE is unable to convincingly justify the biopic treatment for a man best known for backing up his guarantee that the New York Jets would win the Super Bowl 36 years ago. XXXX gives the material a slick, glossy feel but the resulting narrative is a fast-fading illusion of drama, not the real thing. Framing device of a look at the Namath of today backfires. If we open on the drunken mess of a man who embarrassed himself on ESPN and flashback to the past only to find that Namath was a drunken mess of a man then too (but happened to get his act together long enough one season to win a Super Bowl), what have we learned? Script stirs together a father complex, bad knees, the mafia, celebrity pop-ins by Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor, the friction between Pete Rozelle and Sonny Werblin (!!!) and plenty of sex and profanity, but cannot cobble together a central character strong enough to transcend. The description of the on-the-field action is gritty, but Namath’s sudden ability to diagram superior plays during the Super Bowl run comes from nowhere. XXXX loses more credibility when Namath, fresh off a second knee surgery and barely able to walk, dunks a basketball to impress an African-American teammate that he’s no fancy rich boy (p84). BROADWAY JOE tries strenuously, but is ultimately unable to convey that “the Joe Namath story” is somehow meaningful beyond his ability years ago to pass the football.

and

"Broadway Joe" by YYYY, written 2004

YYYY has undeniable skill in the craft of screenwriting, but shows little grasp of the art of it with BROADWAY JOE. Title is a bit of a misnomer, as the story is far more focused on Jets founder Sonny Werblin. When the titular character of a biopic comes off as a wooden prop, a certain degree of failure is inevitable. Sonny talks a big game about how he’s got Joe’s best interest at heart, thinks of him as a son, etc. but we never get a sense of why he does- Joe isn’t particularly infatuated with Sonny and he’s terrible in the field the first few years, too busy chasing skirt and getting loaded. Joe the character comes off as a bit of a dim bulb, except when convenient for the plot. The season they win the Super Bowl Joe is referred to as “the professor” on p70, yet when Sonny gives him a thematically-relevant book Joe looks through it and complains “No pictures?” (p85). Dialogue is very linear and uses heavy profanity as a spice to flavor otherwise bland interchanges. Very little football action. Script doesn’t cater to existing fans (his infamous guarantee that the Jets would beat the heavily favored Colts in the Super Bowl is only mentioned in passing after the fact), nor is it likely to convert any new ones with dull subplots centered on Joe’s gambler friends and Sonny’s rivalry with Pete Rozelle. BROADWAY JOE reads briskly but the journey is meandering and, at the end of the day, the character work is just not that compelling.

I guess time will tell whether or not my warnings not to walk down "Joe Willie's" cinematic path are borne out. I have a feeling that the deeper into the Deep Fried Media Age a subject lived in/found stardom in, the less likely people are going to be to plunk down money to see a dramatization of things they've already seen unfold in real time. No one can deny that the O.J. Simpson murders and trial were dramatic, but can you imagine anyone who lived through it wanting to see a two hour version of the story on the big screen?

A final note- biopics as a genre are fast becoming as tedious and uninspired as the remake. There will always be a place for the Illumination (an obscure-but-compelling life is brought to the forefront, à la John Nash in A BEAUTIFUL MIND) and the Revelation (what really made a mysterious figure tick, à la Ian Curtis in CONTROL), but the Demythologization approach (see ALI or THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS) is a dicey gamble.

Who wants to see their heroes taken down a peg? Aren't there too few as it is?

I see Evangeline Lilly as Jett.

You know that a genre is reaching the tipping point when it's getting directly satirized (the 12/21 release WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY), but that doesn't mean there still aren't worthy subjects and films to come. Out of the following list of upcoming/planned musical biopics (taken from the pages of Vogue's Fall 2007 Supplement "Movies Rock"), I wonder which subject seems the most promising to you? (Actors listed are rumored or attached)

Miles Davis (Don Cheadle)
Joan Jett (TBD)
Otis Redding (TBD)
Rick James (Terrence Howard)
Muddy Waters (Terrence Howard)
Janis Joplin (Zooey Deschanel)
Iggy Pop (Elijah Wood)
Mötley Crüe (TBD)
Debbie Harry/Blondie (Kirsten Dunst)

In closing, a spot-on quote from Roger Ebert (discussing the Rubin Carter biopic THE HURRICANE):

Those who seek the truth about a man from the film of his life might as well seek it from his loving grandmother.

Promises of the Flesh

Something I've shied away from in this forum is the straight-up review. Reviews are a dime a dozen (probably cheaper than that in this age of blog-bling), and until the dawn of consensus critical sources like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, there was no way of telling whether a review was "right" or "wrong".

Which brings up the question of whether or not a review can be right or wrong for more than one individual at a time. If so, perhaps only in the cases where the review reader sought out the subject of a review and compared notes.. which we don't often do for things reviewed in a harsh negative light.

Viggo knows how to deliver a message.

A while back I came up with a gimmicky approach to the movie review that I thought might be fun. The idea is that one man's trash is another man's treasure, so why not write reviews from the pseudonymous personality of someone hardwired to love the movie in question. Every review would more or less be a rave, but regular readers of the column would get an insight into what they could expect from the movie by which personality was reviewing it and how it rated for the kind of reviewer who, in theory, is predisposed to loving it.

Isn't it unfair to the moviegoer to have the same guy reviewing MR. WOODCOCK and EASTERN PROMISES?

Ultimately it sounded like too much work for a lark, but maybe one day...

My aside aside, I just returned home from director David Cronenberg's latest film EASTERN PROMISES, which is hands down the best movie I've seen all year. Rather than write review-type stuff about it I wanted to jot down some comparisons of my experience today to the one I had watching Cronenberg's last film, also starring Viggo Mortensen, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

As great a time at the movies as I had today, I had the opposite watching HISTORY. I thought then that Cronenberg had officially lost his touch (SPIDER was thoroughly unwatchable) after a two-decade run as one of the most exciting directors in the business.

Twins... how many of us have them?

As sure-handed as PROMISES felt, HISTORY felt scatterbrained. As sharply-directed and "in the pocket" as the actors felt today, they felt attention-starved and mismatched in HISTORY. William Hurt was Oscar-nominated for his laughable, scenery-gorging, late-period Brandoesque supporting role in HISTORY: Mortensen will be nominated for his elite, coiled, hypnotic leading work in PROMISES.

As piecemeal and wildly uneven in tone as HISTORY felt, PROMISES felt like a seamless fabric of writer, director and cast working in unison.

I haven't felt that good watching a movie in the theater in a long, long time. How you feel about a movie doesn't necessarily say that much about the movie itself, even if you're a top flight film critic, but nonetheless what I felt as I was watching EASTERN PROMISES (including the relief of seeing a cinematic hero return to form) was so good I felt compelled to share it.

This still from Cronenberg's RABID has always freaked me out.

"You need language for thought. And you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language. And no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible."
- David Cronenberg

"My dentist said to me the other day: I've enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?"
- David Cronenberg