UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Oldies and Newbies, Take Your Pick

Oh, Hey, Let’s Start with An Oldie.

Crossroads (2002. Written by Shonda Rhimes. 93 minutes)

Crossroads is the first and only feature film Britney Spears starred in. As a teenager, she appeared in The All New Mickey Mouse Club on television, and since Crossroads she has occasionally appeared in television shows, mostly as herself.

When she appeared in Crossroads, she was already beautiful, talented, famous, and successful. Well, as Taylor Swift can tell us, if you are all of the above you are going to bring out the misogynist trolls. The trolls, and to be fair to the trolls, which I hate to do, the critics agreed. The picture was nominated for five Razzie awards and Spears won for worst actress. The attitudes towards this movie have not changed, as you can tell from the viewer comments on IMDb, which you can read here.

I saw the movie when it came out in 2002 and thought it was not that bad. It is the story of three girls who have just graduated from high school and decide to drive from Georgia to Los Angeles. One of the girls, Mimi (played by Taryn Manning, who has appeared in a lot of film and television since), wants to audition for a television show. Lucy (Spears) wants to see her mother, who left her years ago. Kit (Zoe Saldaña, and if you read last month’s column, you know what she is up to now) goes along for the ride.

What I particularly liked by the script (yes, you read that right above; the screenwriter is exactly who you think she is; this was only her second feature but the signs are there) is that it focuses on the girls. Several of the trolls insist that the guy they pick up, Ben (Anson Mount), should be featured more, but the point of the script and Tamra Davis’s direction is that this is about the girls.

Lucy falls for Ben, and late in the picture they are kissing passionately and we assume they are going to bed together.

WHAT? I do not know if it was in the contract for teenage girls doing Disney shows at the time that they had to proclaim in public that they were virgins, but many of them seemed to. Britney Spears especially. Now here is where the film gets tricky. We fade out on their kissing and then fade in on them together in bed. Sleeping. Well, we have seen Ben share a bed just for sleeping with the other girls. But he has not been kissing them beforehand.

Then Lucy gets up and there are plot changes involving the other girls. And Lucy and Ben never have a scene in which they talk about what actually went on in the bed.

I suspect what happened is that the people making the film thought they could leave the kissing scene in and then if Britney’s fans hated, hated, hated the idea she was deflowered when they had sneak previews, they could cut the kissing and we would not be any the wiser. I have seen that sort of thing in other movies. I do think that when they decided to keep the suggestion that Ben and Lucy have done the nasty, they could have shot an additional short scene in which the sex was mentioned.

But that would not have been the way I would have done it. My idea is that we fade in on Lucy in the bed. Ben is not there. She wakes up, sees he is not there. She begins to feel sad and is about to cry when she hears Ben singing in the shower. We then cut to a medium close up of Britney Spears. She pulls the sheets up around her knees and looks directly into the camera. She gets a Cheshire cat smile. She looks directly into the camera and says, “Virginity is soooo overrated.”

You can see why they never let me near the making of real movies.

There is a postscript. Tamra Davis was a student of mine at Los Angeles City College before she got into the business. Years after Crossroads came out Tamra and I were at an event at LACC. We got to talking and I told her what I thought the scene should have been. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

And she said that if she ran into Britney she would tell her that. I have not heard from Tamra if she ever told Britney.

Not What We Thought We Might Be Getting.
Blitz (2024. Written by Steve McQueen. 120 minutes)

Previous films about the British civilian population dealing with World War II have shown why the Brits thought of it as their finest hour. That starts early with films, such as Humphrey Jennings’s wonderfully poetic 1942 documentary Listen to Britain, in which we watch the civilians go about their daily business as if nothing was going on. In it we see women working at a factory, singing along with the radio. By the time John Boorman made his 1987 Hope and Glory, he added the nostalgia of looking back at his own childhood during the Blitz.

The year after Humphrey Jennings made Listen to Britain he made Fires Were Started, a documentary about the brave men who fought the fires created by the German bombing of London. The emphasis again was on the heroism of the men.

Steve McQueen (the Black British director, not the motorcycle rider, in case you did not know) starts his film (he directed as well as wrote it) with what at first looks like a striking recreation of the fires in Fires Were Started. But very soon the tone changes. A large fire hose gets away from the firemen and they try desperately to get it under control. It is not played for laughs or the nobility of the firefighters, but for action and suspense. We are not in Humphrey Jennings’s World War II.

We soon pick up on our main characters. Rita, a white woman, works at an ammunition plant. She lives with her father Gerald and her mixed-race son George. We see the father of the boy only briefly.

After a bombing attack near their house, Gerald convinces Rita that they need to send George out of London, as many parents did. She takes him to the train, but we do not get a tearful, David Lean-ish farewell (see Lean’s Brief Encounter [1945] for how to tear the audience’s hearts out). George runs down the platform and gets on the train, then feels guilty for not saying goodbye to his mum.

George jumps off the train once it gets out into the countryside, and we begin a series of adventures with George with a group of boys on another train, a variety of other people, and a gang of thieves straight out of Chuckie (hey, I have been told that’s what his American agent calls him) Dickens and David Lean’s 1948 Oliver Twist, although the Fagin here is not Jewish but a white psychopath.

One thing that McQueen has said in interviews he wanted to do was to get into areas, particularly about race, that previous films have not done. We begin to get hints of that as we see kids make fun of George because he is partly Black. Then we get a scene of Black people singing and dancing in ways you do not expect British people to do. If you have not been caught up in the film so far, you might be bothered by what seems to be a shift in focus, which you can tell from reading some of the viewers’ comments on the IMDb here. I think McQueen has prepared you for that, and it may be that the people who are uncomfortable with the shift are not used to something so different from Listen to Britain and Hope and Glory.

I for one was caught up in the film from the very beginning. Having taught a course on documentary films for decades, my mind was immediately connecting it with the documentaries I had shown in class. It was more than that. McQueen has written the characters in great detail, and he has brilliantly directed his cast. He uses Saoirse Ronan’s ability to show emotion with very little expression beautifully. Elliott Heffernan is not quite up to her standard, but he is young yet. I was particularly struck with Paul Weller as Gerald. He looks and acts like one of those great British actors you have been watching for decades. This is his first dramatic role; he is best known in England as a pop singer with a long career. Well, as I always say, you write good parts, you get good actors, or people who can turn into good actors.

I do not know the budget for this film, but it looks like every pound, shilling, and pence is up there on the screen. I mentioned the Black dance scene earlier. It is followed later in the film by a lavish nightclub scene with all white patrons but an all-Black band and singer. Comparing and contrasting those two scenes can tell us a lot in subtle and not-so-subtle ways about race in England.

In the nightclub scene, McQueen has a lot of fun with his camera, but I thought he was overdoing it. No, he was not, because a bomb hits the night club and we see the aftermath as George/Oliver Twist and his gang go through the rubble stealing from the dead. You have to have the first scene to make the second scene pay off emotionally the way it does.

Balance, people, balance. And, no, I am not going to tell you the ending.

A Remake of a Remake…

Gladiator Il (2024. Screenplay by David Scarpa, story by Peter Craig & David Scarpa, characters created by David Franzoni. 148 minutes)

When the first Gladiator was getting ready to be released in 2000, I thought, do we really need a remake of Spartacus (1960)? After all, the gladiator scenes in Spartacus are not too shabby.

Then I saw Gladiator and realized it was not a remake of Spartacus but of producer Samuel Bronston’s 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire (which almost destroyed Bronston’s own empire), which was written by blacklisted writer Ben Barzman, Basilio Franchina, and Philip Yordan. Yordan is one of the great mystery men in the history of screenwriting. His name shows up on a lot of movies, some of which he actually had something to do with. We think. Unofficially, Fall is based on Edward Gibbon’s classic book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes from 1776 to 1789.

Needless to say, there is a lot of fiction in the film The Fall of the Roman Empire, but the film centers on the death of Marcus Aurelius (played by Alec Guinness) and the taking of the empire by Commodus (played by Christopher Plummer), both of whom show up in Gladiator. General Livius ultimately leads a revolt against Commodus, but after a strong start, the picture just falls apart, running off in all directions. The look, and the physical production is spectacular, and there are a lot of good actors passing through on their way to collect unemployment insurance, but the picture was deservedly a flop.

The story for Gladiator was by David Franzoni and the screenplay was by Franzoni and John Logan and William Nicholson. The script is much tighter than Fall, which is not that hard. The general here is Maximus and it is Commodus who sends him into slavery. Maximus works his way up through the ranks as a gladiator until he can face Commodus. So we have a revenge story with two very strong leading characters. We spend a fair amount of time with Maximus learning how to be a gladiator and working his way up the chain of command, which gives the film its forward momentum.

Maximus also marries Lucilla and has a son by her, convenient enough for setting up the sequel.

Gladiator II opens in Numidia with Maximus and Lucilla’s son Lucius leading his city against a Roman fleet that is invading. As an old Navy man, I appreciated how much CGI has improved since Titanic (1997), where the water looked completely phony. The water and the Roman ships look great in CGI. The invasion of Humidia is the latest variation of the fall of Babylon in D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance. If you have seen that film, you will recognize some of the shots in the new film. It is an impressive opening.

Lucius is captured by Roman General Acacius and taken back to Rome along with other prisoners. Lucius is a gladiator. And here is where the problems start. We get no gladiator training sequences. Well, we had that, a lot, with Maximus in Gladiator and before that in Spartacus, so I suppose we do not have to see it again, but it means we just jump right into the Colosseum scenes. And we get a LOT of them. And they are very repetitive. The one original scene is a naval battle in a flooded Colosseum, which apparently happened in real life. The gang here has added sharks to the water to make it more interesting, at least when the first couple of bodies land in the water. Then, yes, it gets repetitious.

Instead of Commodus, we have two twin brothers, Geta and Caracalla. They are portrayed as obviously gay, in the style of Jay Robinson in The Robe (1963) and the Romans in Monty Python’s the Life of Brian (1979). Been there, done that, don’t need to see it again. Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus set a new standard in Gladiator.

A crucial flaw in the film is that Lucius is not as well-written as Maximus was in the first film. And Paul Mescal, who plays Lucius, simply does not have the star power on the screen that Russell Crowe had. If you are going to make a movie this visually spectacular, you need a star who can hold his own.

Some of the other actors do better. Pedro Pascal brings a variety of emotions to General Acacius. Connie Nielsen is back as Lucilla and while she does a certain amount of over-emoting, she is great in the scene in the Colosseum where she slowly realizes that yes, that man in the arena is her long-lost son. You can see why she has mixed emotions, since she is now married to General Acacius.

Denzel Washington has what amounts to a large supporting role as the owner of slaves, including Lucius. He is constantly making deals, and director Ridley Scott gives him several close-ups in which you can see his mind working. We do not know what he is thinking, but we can see that he is. Scott has so many of these shots that I get the feeling he is using them as what I called in last month’s column “cat in the window” shots, which you use when you need to smooth over a cut.

I loved seeing Washington in those shots, but a picture is in trouble if you have to use Denzel Washington in your “cat in the window” shots.

An OK. Idea, Not As Well Done As It Could Be.

Day of the Fight (2023. Written by Jack Huston. 108 minutes)

A friend of mine recommended this to me. I trust her judgment. The picture however was a disappointment.

The set-up is simple. A professional boxer who has been out of the ring for ten years (some of which was spent in prison for killing a young boy in a car crash), gets a chance to fight again, in an under card bout in Madison Square Garden. An under card bout is like the B picture in a double feature: not the top fighters, but not terrible ones.

In this case, the fighter is Mike Flannigan, played by Michael Pitt, whose credits include Dawson’s Creek (1999), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), and Boardwalk Empire (2020-2011). He played a sensitive youth in his younger days, but age has toughened him up, which makes him a good choice for the part. You believe him as a boxer.

As the title tells you, it follows him on the day of the fight in the Garden. We see him talk to his family (his uncle is played by Steve Buscemi, his father by a virtually unrecognizable Joe Pesci) and friends (his trainer is played by Ron Perlman in one of his better performances).

The writer and director is Jack Huston, grandson of John Huston and a relative of all those other Hustons. He is primarily an actor and this is his first writing and directing credit. The problem with the script is that it is mostly two-person dialogue scenes, and the dialogue is rather flat. If you are going to write a film with primarily dialogue scenes, your writing had better go deeper than Huston does here. The conversations are pretty much what we would expect when Mike talks to his family and friends. There is very little richness to the dialogue.

As a director, he does not help himself as a writer. Too many of the scenes are just Mike and one other person sitting around talking, and Huston shoots all of them in a straight forward way. The location work, especially on the docks in New Jersey (you half expect Terry Malloy to walk through with a hook on his shoulder) is good, although Peter Simonite’s black and white cinematography is not up to Boris Kaufman’s work on the same docks in Terry Malloy’s On the Waterfront (1954).

When Mike gets around to talking to his ex-wife Jessica, the flatness of the dialogue is particularly glaring. The scenes are sentimental in the worst way. Huston and Nicolette Robinson, who plays Jessica, suggest how much deeper the film should have gone with a better script.

No, I am not going to tell you the ending of this one either, for obvious reasons.

I am still speaking to my friend who recommended this one to me.

A Terrible Idea, Truly Badly Developed.

Here (2024. Screenplay by Eric Roth & Robert Zemeckis, Based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire. 104 minutes)

I have not seen McGuire’s book, but I gather it, like the movie, is set in one place, and we see different groups of families who live there over a long, and I mean LONG period of time, from prehistoric times to the present. I assume McGuire gets into his characters a lot more than the film can.

Here are the ways the script and the film goes wrong. At some point Zemeckis, who also directed, decided to shoot almost everything from one stationary angle. I don’t know if McGuire got away with that in the novel, but it denies you a lot of what you can do on film. It means you are shooting the film almost entirely in long shots, so we are watching the movie, which seems like a filmed stage play. For that to work, the script has to be incredibly vivid, which this script is not. Aside from a few shots in which someone runs up to the camera, all the actors are seen in long or medium shots. That may work to some degree if you see the film in a theatre on a big screen, but since it only played a day and a half in theatres you are probably going to see it on your TV screen. I have a fairly large screen TV, but I was having a hard time reading what the actors were doing. Sometimes I had a hard time telling who was who, and who some of the actors were.

One of characters who pops up occasionally is played by Michelle Dockery, Lady Mary herself from Downton Abbey. The part is very much of a nothing part, especially compared to Lady Mary, but watching in long shots I cannot tell if Dockery is doing anything interesting with it. One of the wives is played by Kelly Reilly, Beth Dutton in Yellowstone, but what she seems to be doing is nothing compared to what she does as Beth.

I am not sure if the film would have worked if Zemeckis had moved his camera around, since the writing of the scenes is not compelling enough to carry a regular film. The historical scenes up through the Revolutionary War are simply not that watchable. We spend more time with the family that moves in at the end of World War II, but even they are not involving.

One scene that sort of, and only sort of, works is the end. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright play a couple who live in the house for a long period of time. She eventually leaves him, but in the final scene he brings her back to the house. She is suffering from dementia and does not remember much of the house. As the scene progresses, Zemeckis moves his camera into a moderately close medium shot, and we get more of the expression on Wright’s and Hanks’ faces. The sort of thing movies can do really well.

How to Write a Screenplay Based on an Unfilmable Novel.

Doctor Zhivago (1965. Screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak. 198 minutes)

Since I was seeing several not-so-good movies (see above), I availed myself of the opportunity to see Doctor Zhivago on the big theatre screen. The Culver Theater in Culver City, which was for years the home of MGM, ran a series of classic MGM films on Monday nights this past fall. There are certain films one should see on the biggest screen you can find and Zhivago is one of them.

Pasternak was a Russian writer who wrote his novel in the mid-fifties at the height of the Cold War. Since it tells the story of Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and a poet, who tries to avoid politics in Russia during World War I and in the Communist takeover after the war, nobody in Russia would publish it. It was not a positive view of Communism in Russia, to put it politely

A copy of the manuscript was smuggled out of Russia and was published in Italy, then later in other countries in the west. It was a best seller and Italian producer Carlo Ponti bought the film rights. He made a deal with MGM, which had recently had a huge, money-losing flop with their 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty. The studio needed a big hit.

Everybody connected with the project wanted David Lean to direct it. He was coming off two Academy Award winners for Best Picture, Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), both of which won Lean Oscars as Best Director. MGM was so desperate to get him, they paid him the highest salary they had ever paid for a director and gave him a hefty percentage of the profits. (The information on the making of the film is from Kevin Brownlow’s epic 1996 biography David Lean.)

Lean insisted that Robert Bolt write the screenplay. Bolt had written the final drafts of Lawrence. Both men loved the novel, but realized it would be incredibly difficult to do as a film. There are large sections about the politics in Russian and Pasternak’s philosophical ideas. Bolt wanted to keep the politics, but Lean rightly pointed out that movie audiences in 1965, when the film came out, would not really care about politics in Russia in the early days of the Communist rule. (Lean was right. Several years later Warren Beatty made Reds [1981] covering the same period, and the political scenes are a drag on the picture.)

Lean said they should focus on the love stories. Yuri is married to the lovely and charming Tonya, but falls in love with Lara, a beautiful and sexy woman. One of Lean’s most acclaimed earlier movies was the great romantic drama Brief Encounter.

The biggest problem Bolt and Lean had was that Pasternak had written the novel without the narrative flow needed for a film. For example, The Girl, who may or may not be Yuri and Lara’s daughter, does not appear until one of the final chapters in the novel, after the story of Yuri, Tonya, and Lara is finished. What Bolt did is start with a scene of Yuri’s half-brother Yevgraf who, years after Yuri and Lara have died, tracks down the Girl. She does not know who her mother was. Yevgraf mentions some names to her, which she does not know. He mentions some places, which she also does not know. What this does for the audience is make us aware of the names so we will recognize them when we hear them later in the film.

It also establishes Yevgraf as the narrator of the film. He is a much more shadowy character in the book. Bolt uses his narration sparingly, but in an interesting way in one scene. Yuri has come back to Moscow after World War I and the Revolution, and finds that the house his in-laws, the Gromykos, owned is now given by the Party to several other people as well. Wood for the fireplace is scarce, so one night Yuri goes on and tears off wood from the fence. He is spotted by Yegraf, who goes back to the house with him. Bolt has written the scene with a lot of narration by Yevgraf about what he and the others are thinking and what they talk about. It is an interesting idea, but I have always thought it was awkward.

Lean and Bolt were constantly in touch either by letter or in person. At one point they went for three days sitting in a room together with neither one of them talking.

Many reviews of the film commented on Lean’s use of scenes similar to those in the great Russian films of the Twenties, but Lean had never seen them. It may be that Bolt had seen them at least while he was doing research for the script.

The film was released in reserved seat engagements in December 1965. The critics’ reviews were mixed, to say the least. Judith Crist hated it, Richard Schickel loved it.

During the first week, the theatre in New York was virtually empty. The head of MGM, Robert O’Brien, insisted on keeping it in the theatre. A few more people showed up the second week, and even more the 3^rd week. By the fourth week, the show was selling out. Lean thought this came from O’Brien’s push for word-of-mouth publicity, which may have had something to do with it.

There was another reason. MGM had been promoting the film as an art film, mentioning the Oscars for Bridge and Lawrence. People may have thought it was too high-toned for them. But early in the release of the film, a single record was released of “Lara’s Theme” from Maurice Jarre’s score for the film. It convinced many moviegoers, particularly women, that this was a big romantic love story. They dragged their husbands to see it.

And the men loved it. Guys love the film because of what they took to be its message: you can be married to a wonderful, charming, delightful Geraldine Chaplin, then have a passionate affair with the hot, sweaty Julie Christie and…here is the crucial message…Geraldine Chapin will not kill you.

Also, many men have a Lara in their lives. Not necessarily a woman they have cheated on their wives with, but who was a love of their life that did not work out. Don’t believe me? Ask some older men you know.

Because of his salary and his percentage of the profits, David Lean made more off Doctor Zhivago than he did any other movie he made.

Yellowstone: A Post Script.

Yellowstone (2024. The final, maybe, episodes)

In the last column, I made a brief mention of the first of what is to be the final episodes of Yellowstone. You can read that here.

I got into trouble with one of my overseas readers, since I mentioned what I (who keep up with a lot of writing about stuff in L.A.) did not realize people overseas may not have gotten. My apologies to Elaine and anyone else who was upset.

So now I am going to write, very carefully, about what appear to be the last episodes of the series. I am cautious about definitely calling them the last of the series because, while they have been promoted, and listed in TV Guide, as such, onscreen the notice is that they are only the season, not the series, finales. So there are also rumors floating around that there may be more episodes, even a sixth season. There are also rumors that under consideration is a spin-off series of the characters of Rip and Beth. I am not betting either way on either of those.

What impressed me about the last episodes of the season/series is that Taylor Sheridan has given a lot of his actors, especially those in smaller parts in the series, strong plotlines of their own. It gives the actors, who often have not had a lot to do, stories and scenes that show the actors’ skill sets, which are considerable.

Very often the makers of a series get the word of the series cancellation at the latest possible time, which does not give them time to properly end the series. I am sure you have seen series finales that do just that. Sheridan has taken the time he was given and used it very, very wisely. I won’t go into details, because I do not want to piss people off yet again, but if you catch the maybe end of the series, you will enjoy what I am talking about.

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