Reboot Angle #2 > The Expert

This is part of my blog reboot process. For the origin of the thought of the motivation of the why and the why now, please click back here.

"Suddenly, everybody's an expert."

Even though I heard this sarcastic comeback plenty growing up (often preceded by a long sigh), it appears to be truer than ever in the blogosphere.

Wouldn't you like to be an expert too?

Many blogs provide hard, demonstrable expertise in gadgetry, computers, cars, knitting etc. Many more are written by people who have positioned themselves as gurus of, how shall I put it, less verifiable topics such as fashion or love.

Then there are blogs that put a satirical twist on expertise, like the juggernaut Stuff White People Like.

What, if anything, would I be qualified to write about from the perspective of an Expert? I think there is a wide gap between an "expert" and an "enthusiast", in much the same way there is between a "genius" and the merely brilliant (which I touched on in this old post.) If I had to call myself an expert in anything, it would probably be screenplay structure.

it was fun to Google-image search "Screenplay Structure"

I was instructed in covering scripts the studio way at Sony/Tri-Star, studied screenwriting at UNC-Chapel Hill, UCLA Extension and Writers Boot Camp, and tinkered with the script for B. MONKEY with Oscar-nominated director Michael Radford as his Development Assistant. On top of that, I've read and written coverage on at least 2000 scripts for numerous Film and TV production companies and written five of my own, one of which I developed intensely with Emmy-nominated screenwriter (and my then-manager) Jim Thompson.

Despite all that, I'm still uncomfortable calling myself an "expert." Besides, the last thing in the world I want to blog about for any stretch of time is screenplay structure. After almost a dozen years as a development guy, it's a miracle I don't need glasses and/or a lobotomy.

I could probably stretch my thoughts on just this record to two posts.

What else? Well, this is even further down the ladder from "expert" to "enthusiast," but I'm passionate about music, particularly funk, soundtracks and house. I'm an avid music collector, music mag reader and have some experience as a deejay... but aren't there enough record reviewers out there?

I've been married for almost nine years- does that make me an expert on marriage (wait, don't answer that).

What topics could I write about expertly from a satirical viewpoint?

Jerks?
Facebook?
Bloggers?

If this was easy, I guess everyone would be doing it. Wait a minute, everyone IS doing it! There are almost 27 million bloggers in the U.S. alone, and I'd be willing to bet that at least 10% of them pass themselves off as experts. Could we have almost 3 million experts living in this fair land of ours? Who knows, you may even be friends with one and not even know it (although most experts like to announce their expert status pretty early on...).

My expert opinion is that I need to mull this angle over for a while and see if I have the chutzpah to call myself an expert even once more.

Say It's All So, Joe!

Mythology has always floated my boat. Growing up, I loved reading the myths of the Greeks and Romans, as well as mythology from other countries around the world as provided by books like the pivotal (for me anyway) The Crimson Fairy Book. In college, I excitedly read the Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces after I was tipped off by one of my film professors that Campbell was THE literary influence for George Lucas when he was creating the STAR WARS universe.

Better than CLASH OF THE TITANS!

Confident that I was now familiar enough with Campbell to get by, I didn't touch him again for almost fifteen years until I pulled Hero with a Thousand Faces off the bookshelf when Mrs. Word Player and I were housesitting in Laurel Canyon a while back. Reading him again, especially after focusing so much of my life as a development guy on dissecting the Hero's Journey and three-act narrative structure in screenplays, was eye-opening.

His writing and thinking was far more valuable than merely a guideline for understanding the past and creating fictional narratives, they were critical insights about how to interpret and experience your life's narrative.

Over the past several months we've watched the four-DVD set THE POWER OF MYTH, a series of interviews conducted by journalist (and former White House Press Secretary) Bill Moyers with Joseph Campbell in the last years of Campbell's life. Produced by PBS and originally aired in 1988, MYTH is an awe-inspiring portrait of one man's wisdom, drawn from a lifetime of studying the primal, archetypal stories told by and about our planet known as mythology.

"Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it."

Campbell, who was in his mid-80s as MYTH was filmed, is a surprisingly mesmerizing screen presence. Shot entirely in medium shots and close-ups, he has such an expressive face and an incredible gift for recall and oratory that you never think for a moment that you're just watching a talking head for an hour. Avuncular, charming, and powerful, Campbell has a similar quality as the Dalai Lama does in interviews I've seen: you simply want to know what they know so you can be the way they are.

His worthy foil is Moyers, no slouch himself in the brains or conversation department. Campbell was an agnostic and Moyers a practicing Christian, and the interplay as they take stabs at interpreting the wonder and meaning of life and death is an amazing thought provoker.

Can you believe it's taken me almost a year to reference STAR WARS in this blog?

I have grown comfortable knowing that I have far more questions than I do answers about why we're here and what (if anything) happens next, and Campbell's quote from the final minutes of the final episode of MYTH is one I can safely adopt as part of my personal philosophy:

“He who says he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows he doesn’t know, knows.”

The DVDs have gone out of print and now list on Amazon for $80 and up, so if you're interested I'd recommend Netflixing them. MYTH is not only a wild ride through history, religion, philosophy, poetry and more, but it's also one of the extremely rare examples of something truly and purely life-affirming. Dig it.

Dog Ears #8: Backstory 4

There was a time not too long ago when even the thought of reading anything in the Backstory series made me feel all icky inside. The four installments of Backstory are collections of interviews with screenwriters of different eras (1 is "The Golden Age", 2 is 1940s and 1950s, 3 is 1960s, and 4 is 1970s and 1980s) compiled and edited by Marquette film professor Patrick McGilligan. Thanks to my own efforts and the gift-giving prowess of Mrs. Word Player, I now have all four books in the excellent but largely out-of-print series, but after a really rough time writing my fifth screenplay Blood is Thicker (still unfinished after working on it for 11 months of '06 and early '07) I couldn't stomach reading all these success stories for a while.

You can't make this stuff up

Thankfully, time heals wounds of this sort pretty efficiently, so when I peeked into the one volume I hadn't read yet a few weeks ago I was happy to discover that my appetite for intimate conversations with working writers had returned. It's funny how the same words can be exasperating one day and inspiring the next...

The following are anecdotes, insights, self-recriminations and new lingo taken from Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s.

ROBERT BENTON
p. 29 "The banalities of married life are, for me, far more interesting and more poignant than the intensity of romance. There's something I find deeply moving about ordinary life."
re: his script for NADINE (1987)

p. 35 "There are two models (of screenplay structure). In one, plot grows out of character. This is the (Howard) Hawks model. In the other, character grows out of plot. This is the [Otto] Preminger model. When I do the architecture on a script of my own, I follow the Hawks approach. I do it so that characters become more complex, and they don't tell you where they're going until they get there."

LARRY COHEN
(Cohen's script for PHONE BOOTH, ultimately made in 2002 with Joel Schumacher at the helm, was once considered by Alfred Hitchcock.)

p. 77 "(Hitchcock) seemed very, very intimidated by Lew Wasserman and the Universal executives, who had more or less undermined his confidence in himself. While making him a very rich man, they'd also destroyed him as an artist. Hitch had severed his ties with [composer] Bernard Herrmann, for example, who had been a close friend and great collaborator, and mainly it was the Universal executives who poisoned his mind against Herrmann and convinced him he needed somebody like Henry Mancini to write songs and a hipper musical score. Which he never got, by the way."

BLAKE EDWARDS
p. 91 tsuris: |ˈtsoŏris; ˈtsər| noun, informal
trouble or woe; aggravation.
ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from Hebrew.

p. 95 "Therefore I consider that slapstick–literally slapstick–is not entirely what I do. Only some of it turns out to be slapstick. Slapstick comes from vaudeville–it comes from what they called "the slap stick" (slapping sound as he demonstrates), which made that sound."

WALTER HILL
p. 106 roustabout: noun
an unskilled or casual laborer.
• a laborer on an oil rig.
• a dock laborer or deckhand.
• a circus laborer.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from the verb roust

"All of this taught me one important thing that carried over to writing. If you are capable of making a living out of your talent and imagination, you are a privileged soul. As to the actual writing, you learn about writing by reading. And then you learn to make use of your own particular attitudes, gifts, and skills by–writing, writing, writing."

p. 113 "I don't pretend to be a scholar about the history and evolution of screenwriting, and I think you have to approach it as a craft rather than an art. But it's the old story; if the craft gets good enough, it is an art."

p. 116 "My clearest impression is that (Michael) Eisner wanted movies to be a kind of pleasantly flavored chewing gum and was almost physically uncomfortable in dealing with anything about the dark side of the human heart."

Remind me to tell you my Harry Dean Stanton story some day

p. 122 (re ALIEN) "I named her "Ripley" (after "Believe It or Not"); later, when she had to have a first name for ID cards, I added "Ellen" (my mother's middle name). I called the ship Nostromo (from Conrad: no particular metaphoric idea, I just thought it sounded good). Some of the characters are named after athletes: Brett was for George Brett, Parker was for Dave Parker of the Pirates, and Lambert was Jack Lambert of the Steelers."

p. 128 "My favorite description of the dilemma of screenwriting comes from David Giler, "Your work is only read by the people who will destroy it."

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA
p. 151 "What I do realize is that I mustn't have a single word that's not absolutely necessary, no "Oh yes, I see," nothing like that. You have to compress and compress and just give them the essence."

LAWRENCE KASDAN
p. 170 "That's what the STAR WARS saga is about–it's about following those things which are strongest in you and imposing them on the world. Making a career in Hollywood is like that if you want to do your own work. If you want to do what they want you to do, it's easy. You just say yes. But if you want to do what you want to do, you're constantly manipulating the chaos of the system."

p. 176 "That's what all great tragedies are about for me–that in this adherence to a single idea, we sometimes sacrifice everything."
re: his script for BODY HEAT (1981)

ELMORE LEONARD
p. 217 "What's amazing to me when I think about it, is that while Hollywood in general prefers plot-driven stories (they ask, "What's it about?"), thirty-three of my thirty-five books, all character-driven and talky, have either been optioned or bought outright for film."

PAUL MAZURSKY
p. 229 "I'm very sympathetic to those characters. I feel that the middle class is not treated in terms of tragedy. You have to be very rich or very poor to be thought of as a tragic figure."

Thulsa-Thulsa Doom y'all

JOHN MILIUS
p. 296 colloquy: |ˈkäləkwē| noun ( pl. -quies)
1 formal: a conversation : they broke off their colloquy at once | an evening of sophisticated colloquy. See note at conversation .
2 a gathering for discussion of theological questions.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin colloquium ‘conversation.’

p. 299

PM: Was Robert Shaw really as drunk as they say, shooting the scene?
JM: He was totally drunk.

(Shaw had just been busted screwing the nanny by his wife, and kept interjecting his drunken thoughts about the situation into the Indianapolis scene from JAWS, a scene that Milius wrote as a favor to Spielberg. What we see in the final product, of course, has all the nanny bits cut out.)

FREDERIC RAPHAEL
p. 328 (this next bit speaks to questions I had after viewing TWO FOR THE ROAD (1967), written by Raphael)

PM: What was the genesis of the film you did make next, TWO FOR THE ROAD?
FR: (My wife and I) used always to just pack up and travel together. While we were driving down to the south of France from London on one of these trips, I said, "Imagine if we met ourselves as we were ten years ago," and of course the idea revealed itself as a movie.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

p. 381 confrere: noun
a fellow member of a profession; a colleague : executives from the four broadcast television networks, along with their cable confreres.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent. : French, from medieval Latin confrater, from con- ‘together with’ + frater ‘brother.’

"The difference between a movie and a novel is that a movie is just the surface of things, and the meanings and emotions can only be implicit."

The Colossus of Rhoda

For a long time, my job entailed reading screenplays that had been submitted to various film and TV production entities. During that decade I began paying a different kind of attention to the movies and TV shows I saw for pleasure and for work, trying to keep track of successful and unsuccessful screenplay structural trends. I continued studying structure (among other things) during a two year screenwriting program in NYC, where I applied what I'd learned from the thousands of scripts I'd read and tens of thousands of films and shows I'd seen to scripts I was now writing.

During this process, one of, if not the most important aspects of dynamic storytelling that was elevated from instinctual and/or unspoken to conscious, front-of-the-brain awareness was the pivotal role of the primary supporting character as it relates to the lead or "hero" character.

no word yet on whether the Bronx has a Rhoda statue in the works

I figured out that every good hero's journey requires a best friend or sidekick. Unlike novels, film and TV characters have little or no "internal" life (barring the novelistic cheat of constant voice-over narration), so for the audience to understand what the hero character is experiencing we need a character to stand in for us and listen to/experience along with the trials and tribulations of the lead as they attempt to conquer the villain/opposing force that stand in their way.

In other words, Mary Richards needs Rhoda Morgenstern to succeed. Speaking strictly for TV and excluding movie characters, I'm pretty sure that Rhoda was the best "best friend" character in television history.

I grew up watching THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW because it was one of my mom's favorites and at that time there was only one set in the house so the kids watched whatever was on. I hadn't thought of MTM much since my 1970s childhood until a recent foray into EVERYONE LOVES RAYMOND. During its first run, I avoided RAYMOND, believing it to be just another lowbrow comedian huckstering "isn't middle class American hilarious?" schtick. By the time it settled into reruns, Mrs. Word Player and I had heard enough positives about it to give it a try so we dutifully set the DVR to "record series" and were pleasantly surprised.

Although we both HATED Chris Elliot's "Peter MacDougall" character (the brother of Ray's brother Robert's girlfriend/wife Amy), we loved Amy's parents, played by Fred Willard and Georgia Engal. Despite the nearly 30 year gap since watching my last MTM episode, the first time Georgia Engal's "Pat MacDougall" appeared onscreen I blurted out "That's Ted Baxter's girlfriend!"

Long story short, Mrs. Word Player hadn't seen a single MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, so we harnessed the awesome power of Netflix and began watching them in chronological order, starting with the first episode of Season 1, first broadcast September 19, 1970.

And we laughed and had ourselves a "new" show just like that.

will Netflixing RHODA be wonderful or sad???

We're now approaching the end of Season 3, and in two recent episodes it's been teased that Rhoda might be leaving Minneapolis. Thankfully the third act of each had Rhoda firmly back in her bachelorette apartment above Mary's, but the specter of Valerie Harper's Rhoda character being spun-off into her own show (we know it happens, but not exactly when) has me pondering just how important she is to the show.

The answer, or course, is very. MTM has aged remarkably well, thanks in large part to the incredible ensemble cast of character actors assembled by co-creator and legend James "Hell" Brooks. Judge Smails and Captain Steubing in the same show? Oh HELL yeah.

it's no coincidence that his dog was named "Baxter"

Thanks to terrific writing and acting the character of Rhoda, Mary's best friend and confidante, is the one that holds Mary's hilarious and quite frequently touching single-gal odyssey through the 70s together.

And for that, I salute you. People often argue about who's "the Mary" and who's "the Rhoda" in a friendship, each one usually believing that they are the Mary. I personally am more comfortable as a Rhoda.