UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: It’s Awards Groveling Season Again, and Here Are a Few of the Grovelers and Some Other Stuff

…And in the Joan Crawford Part…

Emilia Pérez (2024. Written by Jacques Audiard, scenario collaboration by Thomas Bidegain, collaboration by Léa Mysius & Nicholas Livecchi, based on the novel by Boris Razon. 132 minutes)

If you have read this column more than a few times, you know I pay particular attention to the openings of films. Screenwriter John Sayles once said, “You can get away with anything in the first ten minutes because you are setting up the world of the film.”

Emilia Pérez is a perfect example of what Sayles was talking about. We start out with Rita, a woman lawyer who is preparing a closing statement in a case she is involved with. How do we know she is not rich? She is not wearing very stylish clothes, but the real giveaway is that Zoe Saldaña, who is playing her, is NOT WEARING ANY MAKEUP.

Rita is joined by a group of singers and dancers who perform around her as she is writing, so we now know we are at least in a partial musical. The musical numbers, with one great exception, are not played as big numbers, but just as part of the world of the film.

We then go to the courtroom and see that what Rita wrote is not being read by her, but by her rich male boss. The speech gets their client acquitted.

If you have read the reviews, you know that Rita will get involved with a gangster, Manitas, who wants a sex change. So you assume it is the gangster she and her boss just off. But here is the subtle detail that tells you, if the musical numbers have not already warned you, that you are going to have to pay attention and not assume things will happen the way they usually do in movies.

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It is not the acquitted gangster, but another one. He has a lot of money, which means Rita is now better dressed and wearing makeup and looking like the Zoe Saldaña we all know and love.

Manitas is played by Karla Sofia Gascón, who is a convincing man in their makeup and costuming, and even more convincing when she has the assorted operations and becomes the transgendered Emilia Pérez. Manitas/Emilia leaves Rita in charge of handling his finances, particularly providing for his wife Jessi. Jessi is played by Selena Gomez, who is a big, itchy change from her wonderful deadpan comedy work in Only Murders in the Building. If Emilia is the Joan Crawford part, then Jessi is the Ida Lupino part.

So, Manitas is now Emilia and we are only a third of the way, if that, into the film. Now we jump ahead four years and Emilia returns to Mexico City. And what do you think a former gangster now a striking woman would do? Well of course she sets up a charity for abused women. There is a scene of a big charity ball, like most other big scenes of that kind, except for one small detail. In the middle of the dinner, Rita gets up and does an astonishing dance number. Who knew Zoe Saldaña was a combination of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor? If you are not already thinking about seeing this movie, let this be the deciding factor. You have to see this number.

The plot thickens. Emilia becomes friends with Jessi, but Emilia falls in love with another woman. There is a kidnapping and the final twenty minutes turns into a 1940s Warner Brothers melodrama, complete with a car crashing over a cliff and burning. You can see why I thought Joan Crawford could have played Emilia back in her Mildred Pierce (1945) days. Although, I doubt if Jack Warner would have loved this story as much as a lot of us now do.

On a Slightly More Conventional Note.

Juror #2 (2024. Written by Jonathan A. Abrams. 114 minutes)

Zoe Saldaña does not show up to dance in this one.

In filmmaking style, this is about as different as you can get. There are no musical numbers and no sex change operations. Well, it is the 45^th film Clint Eastwood has directed and he has no need to show off his filmmaking skills.

The situation is simple and dramatic. Justin Kemp is a married man in his thirties and gets called for jury duty. He is reluctant to go because his wife is about to give birth. But he goes and ends up on the jury. As the case unfolds, he realizes that he may have been involved.

The trial is of a man accused of murdering his wife by running her over on a highway on a rainy night after they had an argument in a roadside tavern. Kemp remembers that he stopped at the tavern and saw them…and later he was on the same highway and ran over…something. He got out and could not find anything. He assumed he had hit a deer. But he begins to think he may have hit the man’s wife.

I had a bit of a problem here. I have served on several juries and know that if you have any connection to the case you should ask the bailiff to give a note to the judge to let you off the case. Kemp does not do that.

Eventually, Abrams takes care of my objection. He has Kemp talk to his AA sponsor, who happens to be his lawyer. He tells the lawyer what may have happened. The lawyer, thinking like a lawyer, lays out all the reasons Kemp should not come forward. They are reasonably convincing.

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Kemp begins retracing his steps that night. One of the other jurors, Harold, is an ex-cop and he notices Kemp’s actions. When the judge asks Harold why he did not say anything about having been a cop in voir dire (the questioning of the jurors by the lawyers), Harold replies, “Nobody asked me.” Harold gets kicked off the jury, and rightly so.

Harold, by the way, is played by the great character actor J.K. Simmons. When the script was sent to Simmons’s agent, the agent told Simmons not to take the part since it was too small. Simmons decided he did not want to pass up working with Eastwood. It is a small part and he is wonderful in it.

Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney begin to have their doubts, but the jury convicts the accused. I have written before about how movies and television often get details of the jury room discussions wrong (and sometimes how they get it right, as you can see in an item I wrote on an episode of The Good Wife here. The jury room scenes in Juror #2 are reasonably accurate, only a touch overly dramatic.

After the conviction we have a brief scene with the prosecutor and Kemp, but with no conclusion. The prosecutor figures out Kemp might have been involved and goes to his house. She rings the doorbell and he answers the door, fade out. No, if you are not going to leave it with the previous brief scene, then you will need to show what happens after he opens the door. The way it ends now it really leaves…hanging.

Here is a challenge for you. I was astonished when the final credits rolled and there were credits for several different special effects companies. I defy you to tell me what scenes were special effects.

This One Would Have Been Better Shorter.

Anora (2024. Written by Sean Baker. 139 minutes)

Like a lot of people, I loved Baker’s 2015 film Tangerine, which was about two transgendered hookers. You can read my review here. You will notice at the top of the review that it runs 88 minutes.

Then at the top of this review, you will see this one runs 139 minutes.

You may then remember one of my many mantras about screenwriting: longer is not necessarily better. Anora is a classic demonstration of why this is so.

Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called, is a lap dancer in a club in New York. Her boss pairs her off with Vanya, a customer who wants to be called Ivan. Her boss figures that she knows a little Russian and Ivan speaks mostly Russian.

Ani and Ivan really hit off, and he offers $15,000 to spend the week with him. What’s a girl to do? Well, hang out with Ivan, who has a lot of money and access to a gorgeous house. The two kids, beautifully played by Mikey Madison (Ani) and Mark Eydelshteyn (Ivan), are a delight to watch as they dance around the house and have a lot of sex (this is not a film for Puritans).

They are having so much fun that Ivan takes her and some friends to Las Vegas, where they all have a lot more fun. And a lot more. And even more. Here’s is where the problems begin. We do not need all, and I mean all, of their carrying on. The picture comes to a dead stop. Baker could have cut a lot of the Vegas stuff and made the picture move better.

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And then Ivan proposes to Ani. Well, what is a girl to do? She marries him in a Vegas wedding chapel (not, alas, the one with the Elvis impersonator performing the service). What could go wrong? Well, we are only halfway through the movie, so a lot.

We have only had hints that Ivan is the son of a Russian gangster. A very rich Russian gangster, who is appalled his son has gotten married without his permission, although we may think, when we meet his wife, that she is more upset than he is.

The father notifies his American connection Toros to take care of this. Baker has a nice scene in which Toros gets the word and has to leave his regular line of work. Toros sends two of his associates to take care of the matter. The lead of the two is Garnick, who is sort of a klutz and his assistant is Igor. Well, two thugs like that should take care of Ani.

But Ani is a tough little cookie and is not about to give up being married to a rich guy. I particularly admired the closing scene of Tangerine, where Baker pulled off an eight-character scene (see the review for details). Here he has a great four-character scene, at least until Ivan runs away, leaving her to deal with Garnick and Igor, and a great three-character scene. Eventually, Toros shows up and the four of them go looking for Ivan.

Like the high jinks in Vegas, the search for Ivan goes on and on and on. The picture would have been a lot better if the Vegas and search for Ivan scenes had been condensed. Or, you could just watch the movie as it is and go out for popcorn during the early Vegas scenes and then out to the bathroom during the search for Ivan.

This One Might Have Been Better as A Book.

Megalopolis (2024. Written by Francis Ford Coppola. 138 minutes)

Coppola has said he has been thinking about doing this film for years. He may have overthought it. Or rather he was not thinking about it in cinematic terms.

I am not sure I can accurately describe either the characters or the plot. Coppola’s concept is to combine politicians of Ancient Rome with a more or less modern version of New York City. Cesar Catalina is a, well, what exactly? He claims to be, or people claim him to be, an artist. But he is more of an architect, or developer, or city planner. He wants to tear down some old buildings and build a new development called Megalopolis. The mayor, Cicero, is opposed.

That is about as far as the plot goes in the first hour. Then we get more plot-like substances an hour in during a lavish affair that seems to be a charity event. That leads to some violence and we are now in the form of a gangster movie. Yes, there are one or two scenes that may remind you of some of Coppola’s earlier films, but they tend to stick out like sore thumbs in this film.

What I meant by Coppola not thinking in cinematic terms may sound odd, given the elaborate and expensive scenes in the film. (Coppola says he had to sell some of his wineries to finance the film. I hope he did not sell the one that makes his Cabernet Sauvignon. It is a really good wine.) The plotting is murky from the beginning and even more so in the last half hour.

Even worse, the dialogue is very flat and literal all the way through the film. The dialogue is mostly statements of ideas, which gives the actors nothing to play. That kind of dialogue can work in prose, but here it leaves the actors stranded with no emotional subtext to play. Adam Driver, who has shown his acting chops in every other film he has ever done, is Cesar, but here he mostly screws up his face to show he is thinking. Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei in Game of Thrones and Ramsey, the computer geek in several of the Fast and Furious movies) comes off better because she has fewer lines to say, and Coppola shoots and cuts in a lot, and I mean a LOT, of close-ups of her saying nothing. I don’t know if Coppola was just enchanted by her, or he was using her for “cat in the window” shots, which are shots not part of the story but used when editing to connect shots that do not otherwise connect.

If we are down to talking about using “cat in the window” shots to save your picture, you need to go back to Screenwriting 101.

Westerns!!!

Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024. Screenplay by Jon Baird & Kevin Costner, story by Jon Baird & Kevin Costner and Mark Kasdan. 181 minutes); Belle Starr’s Daughter (1948. Written by W.R. Burnett. 86 minutes); and Yellowstone (2024, Season 5, Episode 9: “Desire is All You Need” Written by Taylor Sheridan. Approximately 60 minutes)

Kevin Costner left Yellowstone for this?!

Yes, he did.

He wanted to make his own western (he has a pretty good track record in the genre), and/or maybe he just got tired of hearing people give all the credit to Taylor Sheridan, the co-creator of Yellowstone and the writer of most of its episodes.

What Costner has set out to do is a four-film series about the settling of the West. “Chapter 1” is the first of the four films. It was released to theatres this year and was slaughtered by both audiences and critics alike. Since Costner did the financing himself, we can only hope he did sell any of his wineries.

The problem is, well, you guessed it, the script. None, and I mean NONE of the characters are drawn in any interesting way. We start out with a stoutly built many staking out some land near a river. And then he is killed by the Indians before we learn any more about him. Then more settlers come to the same place and a lot of them are killed.

The ones who are not killed are taken by soldiers to a fort, but we do not get characterizations for the remaining settlers or the cavalry. Most of the men have beards and long hair and are difficult to tell apart because the script gives them no specific personalities.

We get a scene in which the clichéd young Indian brave tells his father/chief he is going off to fight the white settlers. If you watch as many Westerns as I have you will have seen this scene a lot and always better. To take two examples, look at the scripts for Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) by Frank S. Nugent. 

Watch the scene in Apache where Henry Fonda’s Colonel Owen Thursday behaves like a real asshole towards the Indians, or my favorite, John Wayne’s Captain Nathan Brittles goes to see his old friend Chief Pony That Walks to try to get him to talk the young braves out of going to war in Ribbon, and the Chief cannot do anything and tells Nathan they should go and get drunk and hunt buffalo. Nugent was great at writing characters, including the Indians.

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Costner, who also directed Horizon, shows up after a while as a roving cowboy who rides off with a hooker, which is not as interesting as it sounds.

You would have thought that Costner would have learned something about writing and creating characters from Sheridan when they were both involved in Yellowstone.

I watched Horizon over two nights, and in the day between I watched the 1948 B western Belle Starr’s Daughter, which I had not only never seen but never even heard of. In 1942, 20^th Century-Fox had made a western called Belle Starr, about the famous female western outlaw. Daughter was made by an independent producer and released by Fox, but it was definitely a B western. The production did not have access to the western streets on the Fox lot, but used the traditional B picture western town set in Corriganville in the San Fernando Valley.

The writer, however, was definitely an A writer. Burnett is most noted for High Sierra (1941) and Asphalt Jungle (1950), but he also wrote several westerns. You can see his IMDb page here. Daughter is not one of his best, but it is head and shoulders above Horizon.

The characters are sharply drawn, as they usually are in Burnett’s work. The script gives the actors interesting stuff to say and do. Rod Cameron usually played heroes in B westerns. Here he is a villain and enjoying it very much. The daughter is played by Ruth Roman in her first starring role. She went on to much better pictures.

The one problem I had with the picture is there is not as much action as you usually get in B Westerns. Characters are nice, but you want a little action. Unlike Horizon, where you get a lot of action, but no characterizations.

So while Costner was hanging out near Moab, Utah (great locations, but they tend to look the same), Sheridan and the Yellowstone gang went back to work on the first show of the last half of season 5. Just to make sure Costner never came back, they killed off John Dutton. Ordinarily, you do not kill off your major star, but there may have been some bad blood there.

Fortunately, Sheridan has built up a great set of characters over the first four and a half seasons, and in the first episode, we see them all reacting to Dutton’s death. He has written great reactions for his cast to play. But he also has quiet moments as well.

Rip Wheeler has taken their cows and several cowhands down to Texas to avoid the cattle getting infected. So before Rip gets the word about Dutton’s death, we get some lovely scenes of the cowboys at work. The scenes are lyrical rather than dramatic and play off the dramatic scenes. Costner has nothing the equivalent in Horizon, although he has some pretty shots of the scenery, but they are not scenes.

The landscape around Moab looks similar to John Ford’s Monument Valley, which is farther south in Utah. Ford understood the valley, both visually and emotionally, as other directors who shot there did not. Costner has a similar problem a little farther north. The way he has his cinematographers photograph the areas he is shooting in makes them all look the same, so at any point in the film, we are never quite sure where we are. That can hurt and maybe even kill your picture.

Not Up to the Original.

The Old Man (2024, Season Two. Created and developed by Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg. Multiple writers. Based on the novel by Thomas Perry. Eight one-hour episodes)

I loved, LOVED I tell you, the first Old Man miniseries in 2022. You can see that from my review of it here.

Unfortunately, everything that went right with the original goes wrong here. The first one followed retired spook Dan Chase from the time an assassin fumbles killing him through to finding out who is gunning for him and why. Dan is brilliantly written and played by Jeff Bridges. In keeping with the title, he is the main character and the one who is mostly on screen. He contacts Harold Harper, whom he knew in the CIA and is now in the FBI. One of Harold’s assistants is Angela, who unbeknownst to Harold, is Dan’s daughter.

Except she is not his blood relation. Her father was Faraz Hamzad, the leader of a village in Afghanistan, where Dan was involved in, let’s say, a lot of activities.

By the end of season one, Angela has run off to Afghanistan to find her real father. And Dan and Harold are on her trail.

OK, so now we get Dan and Harold in Afghanistan, where they are captured by villagers and kept in a cave. It looks at the end of Episode One that they may be shot.

Then we never see them in Episode Two. We switch to following Angela, now using her real name, Emily. In the first season, we are constantly with Dan, but now he disappears. Emily is played, very well, by Alia Shawkat, but Dan is a more interesting character and the one we are most connected with. Focusing so much on Emily takes us out of what we were watching the show for, i.e., Jeff Bridges.

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The situation in the village is that the villagers are working in a large mine in the area. The Russians want to take it over, and a lot of blood is spilled, but we do not care as much about the Russians and the Afghans as we should to make this work.

Meanwhile, Dan and Harold get back to the US and Dan finds his girlfriend Zoe hanging out with arch-villain Morgan Bote. Huh? When we first met Zoe, she was an innocent caught up in all this because she was hanging out with Dan. In the first season, she was a wonderful supporting character, played by Amy Brenneman in one of her best performances. Here the script keeps changing her situation and Brenneman, who has several good scenes, simply cannot overcome the inconsistencies of the script.

We also do not get as many great scenes between Bridges and John Lithgow as we did in the first season. The last episode of the first season is simply Bridges and Lithgow together in a car on their way to find Emily. And it is wonderful. There is nothing to the equivalent in this season.

By the end, Emily resurfaces in the United States and sets up a meeting with Dan and Zoe. Emily is now the head of the village and wants Dan to set up meetings with the Chinese, who want to take over Russia’s interest in the mine.

Well, that sounds like a setup for a third season, but as much as I loved the first season, if the third season is as much of a mess as the second, I will probably pass.

Although, I don’t know…Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Alia Shawkat, and Amy Brenneman…

Required Reading for Women Screenwriters.

Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter (2024. Book by J.E. Smyth. 286 pages)

If the name J.E. Smyth rings a bell for you, it may be that you have read several of her books, or if not her books then my reviews of them. Here is one about her book on Edna Ferber and her relationships with Hollywood.

From the beginning of her career as a film historian Jennifer (she uses J.E. for her writing because she feels more comfortable in the 18^th and 19^th century when they did things like that) has been drawn to writers because they are the ones who have the most interest in the subject matter of the films.

She got interested in Mary McCall when she did her last book, Nobody’s Girl Friday (you can read my review of that one here) about the women who had power in Hollywood in the Thirties. She rightly figured that McCall was worth a full biography, and the current book is.

McCall is not as famous as other women screenwriters. Her most interesting set of credits were on a series of films in the late Thirties and early Forties about a woman named Maisie. Maisie was a working-class woman who found herself in various situations that she was smart enough to get out of. If you have never seen any of them, check out Turner Classic Movies, which usually runs a bunch once a year. They are just as fresh now as they were then.

By the time you read this, unfortunately, you have missed the run of them TCM did in November. Look for them next November.

McCall was also involved with the Writers Guild, serving three terms as president, and was acting in various capacities with the Motion Picture Academy, as well as working for various charitable organizations during World War II. With her work for the Guild, she was caught up in the horrors of the blacklist era. She was a moderate, which ticked off extremists on both sides of the fight.

Related: Continuing to Support the Writers Strike with a Look at the First Female President of the Screen Writers Guild: Mary C. McCall Jr.

What Smyth’s thoroughly researched and well-written book does is give you a great sense of what it was (and still is) like to be a woman screenwriter in Hollywood. I could list a lot of details about that, but you ought to read the book to find them in their original context.

The book, unlike many about Hollywood, is funny because McCall was funny. Here is McCall on one of the directors of the Maisie films: “This man shot whatever you wrote, including the typographical errors.” Now don’t you want to hang out with a person who says stuff like that?

As further proof of McCall’s wit, look at the photograph of her on the cover. It will not make any sense to you until you read what she was going for.

One quibble: the publisher, Columbia University Press, has made the print so small you will need either a magnifying glass or an over-the-counter pair of enlarging reading glasses to read it comfortably. It is worth the effort.

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