Book or Movies? Part 1

Two nights ago I attempted to write out, in prose form, the screenplay I’ve been (suh-lowly) chipping away at. It was an attempt to know the story a little better, and hopefully help me get a move on, because in fast-paced 2010 a fellow just can’t “chip away” at things, he has to put on the speed. And you know what? I got into it, and started really seeing my story as a novel.

But let me briefly interject. I feel silly writing about writing, because I know that I, personally, am only interested in hearing published, clearly-established-as-functional writers talk about The Process. “Some dude on a blog, gassin’ on about pennin’ his screenplay,” says the imagined voice of an in-your-face Brooklyner who lops off his g’s, “how ‘bout he shuts the hell up and jus’ writes it already, uh?”

Look, dude. I am trying.

Here’s what irks me: I start thinking about the things films can do that books can’t, and I say to myself, well, it’s got to be films for me. But then I start thinking of the things books can do that films can’t, and I get tripped up.

Words. I like stringin’ those things together. Going inside someone’s head. Using words to convey the intricate, often-unknowable human truths that a camera can never capture, no matter how close even a Bergman or a Kiewskewski zooms it toward someone’s face. (and no, I do not fancy myself as a seer of “intricate, often-unknowable human truths” but I do think we all should strive to uncover them to the best of our writing abilities)

“Ah,” you then say, “can’t these words be converted to dialogue in a film?”

Well, usually the character can’t announce these thoughts (if they even are conscious to him) in a speech. First off, no one will buy he can so eloquently and spontaneously be so precise in his assessment of himself, and people rarely deliver long speeches in life anyway. They’re cut off, interup--

“Ultimately, you prefers films,” you say. “It’s obvious. So write screenplays, buddy, cause novels don’t really interest you. Look at your use of italics. No novelist besides Salinger can get away with that, and it betrays your desire to dictate the way words sound coming out of someone’s mouth. And in films, you can control the way dialogue is delivered. In fiction, the words have to speak for themselves, and you don’t like that.”

Wow. That’s interesting. You’re a sharp, observant reader. But let me just try to convince myself anyway.

The film medium, you see, is still in its toddler years, and the bar isn’t sky-high. Writing has been around forever, the novel itself for a few centuries. When you pick up that pen, you’re not just up against the novelists but the poets, playwrights, and philosophers as well. On the prospective writer’s plate is a land already visited by Shakespeare, Milton, Kierkegard, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Woolf, and Proust. Girls and boys who make Kubrick, Scorsese, and Spielberg seem like kiddies splashing around in the shallow end.

When you think of all the developments of film in its brief one-century history, is it possibly only now that the medium can truly blossom? In 1927 we got sound. After that there was the reign of the studio system, the Era of Producer that might cause some to crudely point to the trashing of Welles’ The Magnificant Ambersoms as an example of the artist not being able to thrive. By the 70s there seemed (in America) to be a window for the director to reign, but with disasters such as Heaven’s Gate financiers seemed to favor backing a Jaws over a Raging Bull and so many of the 70s greats fizzed out (Friedkin, Coppola) or couldn’t really rise up again until the 90s (Scorsese, Altman). Also, the Steadicam didn’t come til the 70s, and non-linear editing until the 00s. And digital film is only now starting to become less costly and look good, allowing no-budget filmmakers to not have to shoot with 3:1 ratios.

No, no, but there’s other stuff, more important than all that. Let’s see here . . .

Even though prose is wonderful, and the only game in town if you truly want the inside tract to Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s thoughts on death, there’s just something about seeing a person’s face, its quick glances, its choices of things to look at, and its continual attempts to present itself in a favorable light (attempts that fail in the right setting when we relax and when certain things are said to us). There’s also something about hearing dialogue, the words people grab in their attempts to convince, gain camaraderie, seduce, hurt, and humor, and the way those words come out, quickly or slowly, with conviction or with a knowing of the words’ futility. And then there’s Music, worthy of both capitalization and italics, sometimes in the background, fitting or not fitting the scene, a pop song or something more classical. Then, sound. Rain or thunder rising up outside, televisions purring softly in other rooms. Oh, and what is more thrilling than buckling up and riding along with a moving camera as it zooms and dollies and pans and just plain zips along wherever it pleases, a little bird whose view you never considered but you’re now magically admitted entrance to. These things a novel can’t touch. These things even Count Leo Tolstoy can’t touch. Oh, these things are also rare, and achieved usually only partially, by certain filmmakers.

Oh, but there’s another aspect as well in this whole debate. Fiction can be manufactured completely behind the walls of your own home (or coffee shop, if you’re one of those assholes), with nary the help of anyone else besides, say, a proofreader and, later, an editor, if you are good enough to be published. For filmmakers, this is only true of the writing and editing stages. Film requires the “help” of others.

(please note the use of quotations right there, because you may have objected to the notion of actors, producers, and technicians being nothing more than “help” to the wonderful, unique, thrilling vision of the auteur. No, no. “Help” is quoted because those people are much more than just help, they are collaborators and co-creators in the process, and the work of art is as much theirs as the director’s, it’s just that the director (in my opinion) needs to be the guy who has final say on all aesthetic decisions, not because he “knows best” like an Eisenhower-era father but because one person needs to keep in mind an overall vision so that everyone’s differing contributions do not pile up into a big scattered mess.)

Anyways.

But is it really other people that scare me off? No, no, no. I like collaboration. I like working with others. It’s not that.

It may be that the get-out-in-the-real-world-and-interact-with-others aspect of filmmaking scares me off. Yes, I already made a film, but that was at the zero-budget level, and I think I was very much hampered by my reluctance to fully engage in the extroverted side of filmmaking. In other words, the producer side. But, also, the technological side. The let’s-be-MacGyver-and-make-a-makeshift-dolly side. Some people get their hands on a camera, and as their eyes bug out they twist it and turn it and push buttons and play around with it and experiment. But me? It’s like being handed a baby. An “Oh fuck, I’m gonna kill it” feeling. And lights? Boy, do lights scare me. And lenses? Seeing a lens is like seeing someone with a gun. And then all the techno-problems that arise when editing . . .

And that is all bad, bad, bad, because lenses and lights and cameras and dollies and cranes are the equivalent to a painter’s paint, a writer’s words. And I have to learn how to use them.

Which brings me to another annoying thing about films, which the novelist doesn’t have to worry about. The novelist can screw up, write bad sentences, cliched stories, all in the privacy of his own home, with no one knowing, and then junk them. He gets experience and then when he write something good . . . a filmmaker has to get all his practice in front of everyone, and lose his training wheels in front of everyone. But . . . I guess the actors/technicians all have training wheels too.

In the end, I’m a little afraid to get out there and do it, and risk screwing up, sucking, and having everyone see that I’m not a good artist, never will be, and am a fool for thinking so. And that’s why I may be thinking again of fiction. Todd Solondz said in an interview, “Before [Welcome to the Dollhouse] came out I was in agony. I was overwhelmed by the fear that I’d done this awful thing and was about to be exposed and humiliated before the entire universe. Part of the shame has to do with a sense of presumptuousness. Like, who the hell are you to make a movie?”

Ugh. I got a little depressed today, thinking of all this. This is going to need a Part II.

Am I Odd?

Yesterday I saw Inception, and, given its multitude of 10-star imdb.com reviews-- which arrive, one after the other, like broomsticks carrying pails of water-- I don't think I was misguided in expecting (at the very least) a thought-provoking movie-going experience that would justify driving to Cleveland to view it on an IMAX screen.

I walked away more annoyed than disappointed, wondering to myself if I were stupid for not following the plot, insensitive for not caring about the characters, and a shame-worthy film-goer for letting my mind wander throughout the whole thing.

"Ah, but there weren't any good characters!" I said to myself. After all, director Christopher Nolan had given us Heath Ledger as The Joker just two years prior, and my hat went off to the first filmmaker to actually make me like a superhero movie. The Joker was alive, funny, mysterious, demented. But in Inception, there wasn't much to Leonardo DiCaprio's boring character, Dom Cobb (isn't that an awful name?), besides a cliched backstory about a dead wife, and oh Lord, have we ever seen that before. The dead wife! His motivation! For what, though? I'd tell you, but my mind wandered so damn much that I can't remember the plot too well . . .

It may be, here, that you start to discredit me, and maybe you should. If I didn't grasp the story-line, maybe I should hit up a Regal tomorrow night and fill in the blanks.

It's a good point you have there. You consider yourself a fairly-sophisticated film fan, and you'll be damned if a wild-haired kid will sit behind a computer and blast a film he's only seen once and apparently didn't even pay attention to. Not to mention dismissing it on the flimsy grounds of "no good characters."

Like I said, it's a good point. And I'm not dismissing it. Oh, I understand there was an intelligence in this film, and that Nolan took eight years to write it. I may give it another shot, but for now I'm miffed. I know that I was uncomfortable in the theatre. I know that, despite moments of awe at some of the film's technical achievements, I was mostly fighting off the thoughts that came into my head.

"Where's this film's heart?"

"Remember Ellen Page in Juno? When she pulled her car to the side of the road and cried?"

"And how about Leo in Catch Me If You Can, when he walked out of that bathroom and cleverly fooled Tom Hanks into thinking he was a CIA agent, handing him his wallet stuffed with food labels."

Oh, I tried to fight these off. "Watch the movie, you idiot!" another thought said. "This is an intelligent thriller."

And maybe it is. Oh, it certainly is. Yet still I feel as though I have been treated to nothing more than a silly dish of Violence, Guns, and Shit Getting Blown Up aimed at the "Fuck yeah, dude!" crowd.

There were so many people shot, so many people punched in the face, so many people getting guns wrestled from them and being tackled to the ground, that I wondered, perhaps for the first time ever, "What's with all the violence, violence, violence in movies?" It all bounced off me. Okay, so a car flips, fire erupts, a bigger gun than the last is yanked out, someone dives, rolls, gets up, shoots. Who cares? I felt nothing. What was going through my head was, "How is Leo 40 years old and still unable to grow complete facial hair?"

It's not even a glorification of violence that bothers me (though that's a different discussion); if anything, I feel like the excess of violence in movies is . . . pathetic. Little boys who want to see two hours of fighting.

But maybe I'm getting preachy. Alright, I'm almost done bashing, just a little bit more . . .

Oh. There was also an agonizing Hans Zimmer score that was akin to the composer standing behind you in the theatre and using your head for his drum.

And poor old Michael Caine even appeared for seemingly no other reason than for us to suddenly buy into the presence of a wise man. Oh, it's Michael Caine! He must be wise, I'd better listen up.

And then, perhaps most of all (I swear I'm almost finished), I objected to the depiction of dream-land. Inception seems to be the work of someone who knows nothing about dreams, what they stand for, and how they feel. First off, it didn't look like one. In a dream, the landscape is constantly in flux, nothing is stationary. Okay, so the film knows this, but it didn't successfully depict that transientness (yes, that's actually a word).

Waking Life found a way to express this through its animation. Luis Bunuel knew how to do it. So did Andrei Tarkovsky and Bergman. They knew that, to make dream-land work, small things had to be off. But I can't help but think that Nolan doesn't really care about this. To him, dreams are an excuse to create a sci-fi alternate reality. They're a MacGuffin.

Is the joke on him? Since dreams are not logical, if you try to hang a plot onto them, it won't work. Dreams are the domain of nonlinearity. Right? Therefore, they can't really factor into a plot-driven movie. I think. (I said in my first post I was going to keep an open mind about things)

Whew. I feel like I totally (and possibly (no, definitely) unfairly) bashed this movie. I mean, I really went on and on. I'm surprised you're still here. But . . . maybe it's no big deal. Christopher Nolan isn't going to find his way to the tiny corner of the Internet that my blog is hidden.

So where am I getting at with all this? Inception is obviously not my kind of movie, so why can't I just let it be? I mean, I admit it, I don't like thrillers or action movies.

The truth is . . . this movie just triggered a little depression, because I almost never like the same stuff that other people like. I feel odd. And it's further depressing, because I feel exhilarated when walking out of a movie such as Greenberg, but barely anyone seems to know that movie exists.

Am I a snob? Maybe.

"Oh, he's too good for popular movies," you're saying to yourself right now, arms perhaps folding or head perhaps shaking. "He drops names like Bergman and Tarkovsky, throws around terms like MacGuffin. And the creep didn't even give the movie a second viewing! And his hair is just too crazy. He's not 19 anymore, he should just cut it already."

Yes, yes, this is all valid. But here I am, sitting before my laptop, thinking about movies. And I'm drawn to the Noah Baumbachs, the P. T. Andersons, the Todd Solondz's, the Ingmar Bergmans, the Luis Bunuels. And I'm largely baffled by the Christopher Nolans, George Lucases, and James Camerons.

Oh, I'm a snob! Drawing a line through the dirt, arbitrarily separating the "artistic" directors from the "commercial" directors, proclaiming my side "right" and the other side "wrong."

Am I doing this? Oh no, I am. I am. And I don't like it. But gee, isn't there some saving grace? Do I feel hostility to those commercial directors not because they're bad in any way (and they definitely aren't; and I like them at certain times) but because I know there are other kinds of art that are equally touching, that have affected me in a great way and have provided something in my life I desperately needed?

It's 2 a.m. At 2 a.m., words get lofty. Sentimentality creeps in. Exclamation points get used, and you feel like what you're typing is so deep, so profound . . . it's not dissimilar to something I call The Phantom 4 a.m. Facebook Status.

A definition of The Phantom 4 a.m. Facebook Status (of which I've had maybe 5 in my life): at some wee hour of the morning (not necessarily 4 a.m. but close enough) a dramatic, sentimental, over-bearing, possibly alcohol-induced facebook status appears on the page of some youth, 16-28 years old. The following day, the status is miraculously missing, presumably erased by the now-sober youth.

In a sense . . . this journal entry. So I end it here, hoping I don't regret it in the morning, having arrived at nothing close to the point I wanted to arrive at when I first started typing, and thankful I haven't yet given this blog's link to anyone.

Goodnight for now.

First Entry! (which all first entries should be named)

Henry Miller wrote, "I have no money, I have no resources, I have no hope . . . I am the happiest man alive." (1)

Well . . . I don't get that. I envy it, and I (maybe?) want it, but I don't get it. I don't get his book either, Tropic of Cancer, which I attempted reading recently to perhaps put me in the proper mindset for a period of my life in which I attempt to, uhh, I don't know . . . take some risks, live on the edge, hop a boxcar with a small sackful of possessions attached to a stick. (2)

Here's the truth: I have a little bit of money, I have a little bit of resources, I have a lot of hope . . . and I have no idea where I grade out on the scale of Happiest to Unhappiest people alive. It might be nice to see that scale . . . of course, what if I'm closer to the Unhappy? It might be best to remain ignorant on that matter.

Henry's going back on the shelf. Frankly, I don't know what the fuck he's talking about. I've always had in mind some kind of vague life that I would randomly and suddenly embark on, some kind of Jack Keroauc/Henry Miller/Hunter S. Thompson life, but the truth is I've never had one ounce of anything in common with them, and I've never really even liked them as writers, which makes it even more confusing why'd I want to emulate the life of people I don't like.

The edge. Ah, fuck it.

I just want to say one thing: I don't know shit. I really don't. Sometimes I think I do, and that's a very dangerous moment. But I want to learn, and I want to become a better writer, so I'm gonna watch and re-watch a lot of films, read and re-read a lot of books, and put down some ideas. Here. In a blog. I'm gonna keep an open mind, and most of all, I'm gonna (hopefully) discover what it is I truly like and dislike about art.

So here we go: I'm a novice. A newbie. A know-nothing. It may be in my future to be a good film-maker, and it may be in my future to never make any films again.(3) I don't really know.

Whew, that felt good! Admissions of ignorance/newbiness . . .

Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . the world of blogging has called me back.

I don't know why, but . . . it has.

You see, I did keep another blog around the callow, now-inconceivable age of 21, a time when my hair was a good four inches longer and I was continually wondering how in hell I was going to put my stamp on the wacky world I was suddenly feeling pressured to join. But I didn't write about books/films, though, and didn't much write about anything interesting, which was probably why the blog sputtered out. (4)

So yeah. This is going to be a blog about film and books. And if you're not excited to hear that . . . good! You shouldn't be. Most blogs like that are not good. I really don't know if mine will be any good. I'd like to try, though.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Miller almost assuredly wrote this line in an eclectic coffee shop, down to his last franc, sweeping one hand through his hair and everything about the situation brimming with romantic uniqueness.

(2) Somehow I always picture a cartoon fox with a red polka-dotted sack of goodies tied to a stick, hopping a boxcar. Did this fox actually exist on some long-forgotten faux-Disney VHS tape purchased at a dollar store? Lord knows.

(3) I made a movie last year. Got a lot of experience. I might talk about it at some point.

(4) Or maybe it was because I just didn't like blogs. "Most of them are boring, whiney or pretentious," I often say to myself. Aren't those really the only three categories? Oh, wait, there's a fourth one: awful poetry. Oh, and people who post picture after picture of their kids or pets, as if we want to see your damned tyke with cake on his face or the cat curled up on your bed . . .